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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Philip Chaston is a regular contributor to the Airstrip One blog. He believes that the current political climate in Britain presents an exciting and unique opportunity.
Last Monday I went to the University of London Union to watch a concert given by the band British Sea Power. With me were a couple of friends, a carpenter and a handyman from South London. Just prior to the gig, I had been assailed by their voluble and bitter complaints while we downed some pre-concert alocohol in the Toucan Bar which is just around the corner from Soho Square in Central London.
The level of dissatisfaction with the government and the public services in London and the South East has risen over the last few years as people have seen their taxes rise without any perceived improvement in public services. This has been linked to increasing concern over levels of immigration. As my friend said, “I’m going to vote BNP in protest. Who else can I vote for?” → Continue reading: The Protest Vote
Is this a case of ‘hiding in plain sight’?
A detective responsible for investigating racially motivated crime lives in a home filled with Nazi SS uniforms and tributes to Hitler, The Telegraph can reveal.
Det Con Linda Daniels, who is married to a known racist and BNP member who believes the Holocaust was “exaggerated”, works in the community safety unit at the police station in Notting Hill, one of the most ethnically diverse areas of London.
The unit, one of many set up across the city as a result of the inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, investigates “hate crimes”, including “racist crime, domestic violence, homophobic crime and hate mail”.
Her home, however, which she shares with her 52-year-old husband Keith Beaumont, contains a life-size mannequin of a Nazi SS soldier, with swastikas on its helmet and belt, in the hallway.
Or perhaps its more case of ‘poacher turned gamekeeper’? Do you think Detective Constable Daniels suspects her hubby at all? Surely the swastikas are just a bit of a giveaway?
Nick Timms recounts a new yet sadly familiar tale of how the state just sees us as things to be managed for its convenience. The state is not your friend.
My friend Ron, a semi-retired gentlemen, who after a working life fairly high on the corporate greasy pole, now pursues several different activities including taking his pedigree dogs to shows and sitting as a magistrate, told me today about a visit he had recently from an employee of his local planning office.
I should explain that first he had a visit from the local environmental health department because a lady neighbour of his had complained about the smell of his kennels.
Ron has kept fairly rare pedigree dogs for showing for the last fifteen years and he is meticulous about hygiene and cleanliness. His home is in a semi-rural area backing onto some woods and running behind his house is a pathway used by some of the locals as a shortcut. This area is also frequented by foxes and the dog foxes mark their territory with a particularly pungent urine. Apparently when Ron’s bitches are in season the dog foxes make a special effort and spray the whole area thus causing the offending stink.
Ron showed the environmental health officer around his kennels and the officer was apparently satisfied that he kept his dogs in a good and healthy manner.
However, very shortly after this he was visited by the local planning department. His visitor told him that as he kept more than six dogs at his home he had to apply for change of usage. Ron asked for what usage he should apply and was told he should apply as a breeder. Ron explained that he was not a breeder as he only occasionally had litters and he kept the pick and sold the rest only to what he considered would be good homes. He did not do this as a commercial venture so he was not a breeder.
He was told he would still have to apply for change of usage because case law indicated that local town planners could decide for what purpose he used his home and they had decided that having more than six dogs was one of their criteria. (Apparently all homes are granted rights of usage when they are registered and the local planning office can withdraw or alter these rights.)
Ron asked how much this application cost and was informed that it was around £250 [note: about $400]. Ron then asked would his application be approved and was told “No” because the local planning office wanted him to appeal so that they could have a test case. The appeal application would cost Ron another £200-£300. And he could still lose the case.
Ron resorted in the end to telling his officious visitor that he was a local magistrate and that under the Human Rights Act – and he made up some paragraph – the local planning office was unlikely to win the argument.
This seems to have silenced the secret police for the moment, although they may just have decided to pick a softer target. Ron is anxiously awaiting further developments but as he commiserated to me, his council tax went up by nearly 20% this year which is probably paying for more little führers who cannot get a real job.
Nick Timms
George Galloway has been expelled from the Labour Party. Well, well, well. I wonder on whose toes he trodded. Perhaps Tony’s? He must have seriously pissed off the NuLabour powers to be since expulsions from the party are extremely rare.
But to be fair he was accused of inciting Arabs to fight coalition troops during the Iraq war and encouraging British troops to disobey what he called “illegal orders”. Although the official reason for giving the flamboyant Mr Galloway MP a boot was his denouncement of U.S. President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair as “wolves” during the Iraq war, there were other charges, most of stemming from an interview the left-wing firebrand gave to Abu Dhabi Television in March 2003.
The charges faced by Mr Galloway before the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party were understood to be that:
- He incited Arabs to fight British troops
- He incited British troops to defy orders
- He incited Plymouth voters to reject Labour MPs
- He threatened to stand against Labour
- He backed an anti-war candidate in Preston
He was found guilty of all but the third charge.
His supporters praised him for speaking his mind while his critics accused him of being an apologist for former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, whom he visited in 2002, and mockingly labelled him “MP for Baghdad Central”. He was defiant to the end, telling reporters:
This was a politically motivated kangaroo court whose verdict had been written in advance in the best tradition of political show trials.
I want to apologise to the wolf. Mr Bush and Mr Blair are a jackal and a jackass. I will ensure Mr Blair regrets this day.
Unfortunately, Mr Galloway has supporters and the anti-war movement will now turn him into their very own martyr. Let’s just sit back and watch the garbage percolate through the British political system.
Adam Nicholson, writing in the Daily Telegraph, tells what presumably are its predominantly middle class readers that it is entirely fit and proper for Britain’s finance minister, Gordon Brown, to take a big grab at the wealth locked up in our homes through a new tax .
I suppose Nicholson is one of those writers the Telegraph occasionally hires to annoy its usual readers. I was inclined to dismiss the piece as usual class-warfare nonsense until, after various paragraphs of tortuous logic and barely disguised dislike of Middle England, our scribe hit on a fair point. That point being that the construction of new housing in the south of England, the most prosperous bit of it, has fallen off dramatically in recent years.
I agree. Nicholson may be a jackass in his support for a swingeing tax assault on millions of people, who have already seen their pensions looted by the government, but he is right on the money in his understanding that unless supply of housing comes close to matching demand, the only way folks like me will be able to afford anything decent will be by winning the National Lottery.
Such a rise in supply will, of course, annoy a lot of people, particular those who’s homes have been made artificially expensive due to our planning and zoning laws. But Nicholson deserves some praise for grasping this point.
Of course, there is always the option of emigration. I have been thinking rather a lot about it lately.
Another day, another public enemy.
The campaign to add so-called ‘junk food’ to the tobacco-alcohol ‘axis of evil’ has been fulminating for quite a while. There is nothing on the Statute books yet but I think we all know that it is only a matter of time.
In the not-too-distant future, the Samizdata will be reporting the police raids on clandestine onion-ring factories and publishing underground recipes for ‘academic and research purposes only’. By that time, I sincerely hope that there will be a wider understading of the social-working class mentality that has led to that woeful state of affairs. Nothing could illustrate that mentality more starkly than this article from the UK Times:
People are incapable of saying no to junk food and other health risks, and it is the duty of the State to influence them, according to a senior public health official.
In defence of the “nanny state”, Professor Dr John Ashton, regional director of public health in the North West, said yesterday that government intervention was needed to protect those incapable of protecting themselves. “Individuals cannot protect themselves from bioterrorism, epidemics of Sars, the concerted efforts of the junk food industry, drug dealers and promoters of tobacco and alcohol,” he said.
Thus lumping together consumer choice, forces of nature and murderous aggression into one misleading and grossly stupid soundbite.
He said that it was the job of the State, not of the individual alone, to resist health problems brought about by drink, food or drugs. The State had a duty to protect and influence young people, many of whom were building up problems by adopting sedentary lifestyles and eating junk food.
“It is in no one’s interest to have an obese generation, riddled with diabetes and degenerative heart disease and a burden on the taxpayer,” he said. “The Government has a duty to take action about it.
It is in no-one’s interest to have a power-obsessed generation, riddled with this kind of contemptuous paternalism.
The State is the guardian of the weak and underprivileged. It should intervene to encourage people to eat healthily and take exercise.
“Furthermore, it has a duty to ensure that those less well-off in society have safe, warm, low-cost housing, convenient transport links to shops and amenities, and the protection of police on the streets. The State is our protector and we must defend its right to fulfil that function.”
There are no citizens, only ‘clients’.
He has three grown-up sons, but recently became a father again with his partner Maggi Morris, 47, a director of public health in Preston. Their baby has been named Fabian Che Jed, after the Fabian Society, Che Guevara and the Old Testament prophet Jedediah.
And doesn’t that say it all.
There are lots of dark forces at play here but the oft-overlooked one is the element of kulturkampf. What these people mean by ‘junk food’ is hamburgers, hot-dogs and milk-shakes. For people like Dr.Ashton the hamburger has become a symbol of what they consider to be American cultural imperialism and that is the real basis of their animus.
Quite aside from the fact that the fashionable demonisation of ‘fatty food’ is ill-founded (which it is), an Indian or Chinese meal contains more fat and calories than McDonalds could ever dish up. As does the homegrown popular delicacy of ‘Fish and Chips’ (all deep fried). Nonetheless when these people speak it is ‘burgers’ that they invariably identify as the alleged enemies of public health.
The ‘War against Junk Food’ has been carefully crafted to fulfil both the practical and ideological needs of the social-working class. Not only will its successful prosecution provide them with more wealth and status but it also opens another front in the cultural and political war against America.
[My thanks to Nigel Meek who posted this article to the Libertarian Alliance Forum]
Independent TV news has just reported that Tony Blair has been admitted to hospital with a suspected heart irregularity.
No updates yet.
These must surely be salad days for our Labour government. Free of any concerns about an effective opposition, they can roll up their sleeves, spit on their hands and get down to some really serious looting:
Gordon Brown is considering imposing capital gains tax on the sale of all houses in an attempt to plug the widening gulf between his spending plans and public finances.
The Telegraph has learnt that Treasury officials have held confidential discussions with private sector tax consultants on extending the levy to domestic properties.
The reform would mean homeowners facing a tax of up to 40 per cent on any profits made from the sale of their home, which for many people is their principal asset. The levy would, however, raise £11 billion a year, equivalent to 4p on the basic rate of income tax, according to government figures.
I think some clarification is required because the opening paragraph is not entirely correct. Currently a tax of 40% is charged on all capital gains which includes the capital gain made on the sale of property or land. However, one’s principal dwelling home has always been exempt from this charge. Now HMG is proposing to abolish this exemption (although the effect is the same as imposing the tax on ordinary homeowners).
The Chancellor has already indicated, however, that he believes that homeowners are “lightly taxed” and is looking for additional methods to control the buoyant housing market.
‘Lightly taxed’?!! The guy has got some nerve. And it’s abject drivel that this is about controlling the ‘bouyant housing market. This has been on the cards for a while. Gordon Brown has already plundered private pension funds and I knew that it was only a matter of time before he turned his avarice on the last stores of privately owned wealth. There was no way he could leave all that booty untouched with a ballooning public sector into which money must be shovelled like coal into a roaring furnace.
It’s a no-brainer for the government. A general election is still as much as three years away and they are going to win it handsomely anyway. In the meantime they can placate their opponents on the left and reward their supporters in the state sector.
The way things are now, there is nothing to stop the state from growing until the bones of the last taxpayer have been picked clean and left to bleach in the sun.
Each passing day seems to herald a further deterioration in the state of the British Conservative Party. [From the UK Times]
THE Conservatives have had to raise £4 million in emergency loans to keep the party afloat until the end of the year after suffering a huge drop in income from wealthy donors.
Many of its biggest benefactors are understood to have become disillusioned with the party’s direction under Iain Duncan Smith, while others are dismayed by the feuding over the leadership.
So, they are languishing in the opinion polls, their leader is seen as ineffective by most of his own Party and most of the public; he is also under a Parliamentary investigation for alleged impropriety; the Party is shot through with factional in-fighting and now their financial backers are beginning to walk away from them.
If the entire Party succumbed to an outbreak of leprosy it could hardly make matters any worse.
Some people are just so selfish. Rather than queue patiently for their state ration of bread and cabbage, they’ll conjour up all sorts of ruses to get an unfair advantage: [from the UK Times]
A GRANDMOTHER at the end of her tether after waiting seven months for an operation mixed cranberry juice with crumbled biscuits to simulate her own blood and dialled 999 for an ambulance.
After claiming to have been vomiting blood, Trizka Litton, 62, was taken to Walsgrave Hospital in Coventry. The mother of three got rid of her fake blood, which she was carrying in a plastic container, before it could be tested and underwent surgery to remedy a serious hiatus hernia.
Obviously an extreme right-winger and an enemy of the people.
“I carried a heavy burden of guilt and shame at being forced to cheat and lie,” Mrs Litton said, “but that vanished when doctors told me just how near death I had been.”
Well, in the circumstances I suppose this indiscretion can be overlooked. But anymore tricks like that and it’s re-education for her.
It is probably going to be rather difficult for our non-UK readers to believe this but there was a time when the Church of England was known to campaigners on the old left as ‘the Tory Party at prayer’. It was not meant as a compliment but then neither was it entirely unjustified. As the official Church of the State its function was to bolster the moral underpinnings of the old ruling class. In its ethos and operation it was every bit as conservative as the political party that represented the secular interests of the same old order.
But not any more:
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, yesterday urged America to recognise that terrorists can “have serious moral goals”.
Dr.Williams omits to tell us precisely what those ‘goals’ are and why they are ‘moral’. A mere oversight, I’m sure.
He said that while terrorism must always be condemned, it was wrong to assume its perpetrators were devoid of political rationality.
‘Of course, I condemn terrorism BUT…..’
He said that in ignoring this, in its criticism of al-Qa’eda, America “loses the power of self-criticism and becomes trapped in a self-referential morality.”
Excuse me but isn’t that the precisely the wrong way around?
If this was a one-off, a weak moment or an aberration that would be grounds enough for criticism. But it isn’t. Ever since his inauguration as the Head of the Established Church of England, Rowan Williams has been busily establishing his own profile as a political campaigner. From his regular public denouncements of ‘consumerism’ and ‘greed’ to his ringing endorsements of bigger government and more state spending, Dr.Williams has mapped out his unimpeachable credentials as a shill for just about every green/marxoid canard in existence.
Under his stewardship the, the Church of England has finally completed its transformation into the Church of Post-Modernist Pieties, ever-ready to provide spiritual edification for the new ruling class. It is inaccurate to label this as an about-face because in many respects it reflects the traditional function of that institution. Like most other branches of the British state, it has been co-opted by the Gramschian project and set to work as impeccable disseminator of a new governing ethos.
The best we can hope for is disestablishment.
I went out for a drink this evening and had two, which given my (in)ability to function under the influence of alcohol is the equivalent of more like four or five. So this posting may be erratic and won’t have any links. But it’s been a slow day here, so every bit helps.
I picked up a nice political anecdote while imbibing. It seems that not long ago, Blair’s media enforcer Alastair Campbell wanted the political editor of the Sun, Trevor Kavanagh fired. Kavanagh is the sort of bloke we like and who would like us, and may actually like us for all I know.
So anyway, Campbell invited himself to the office of Kavanagh’s boss, a man called … can’t remember but it may come to me. But this Boss, the editor I assume it must have been, was not as easily intimidated as Campbell would have liked. Because, as soon as Campbell started in on his usual effing and blinding and threatening and carrying on, the Boss pressed a button on his desk, which had the effect of broadcasting all this Campbellising all over the Sun offices. Everyone could hear it, and they were both appalled at its barbarity and amused by its presumption.
The usual description of Alastair Campbell is that he is, or was, a “Spin Doctor”, a job description which implies nuance, subtlety, finesse, and also mental stability and poise. None of that is true. “Attack Dog” would be nearer the mark, and it says a hell of a lot about Tony Blair’s true character that he should have such a bizarre and unbalanced individual as his Number Two, and for so long. Campbell in full flood is apparently a remarkable sound, but this time, it hurt him more than it hurt his victim.
Trevor Kavanagh kept his job. I still can’t remember the Boss’s name for sure, but it may have been Yelland. David Yelland, I think. Commenters feel free to correct me.
As I say, this wasn’t that long ago. Politically, in Britain now, the times they are a-changing.
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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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