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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I can’t wait to see their election manifesto:
Anti-war activists including the Guardian columnist George Monbiot are planning to form a coalition to challenge the Labour party in the European and local elections in June.
The attempt to unite socialist parties, anti-globalisation campaigners, peace activists, and faith groups, including Muslims, has already aroused the hostility of the Green party, which is branding the electoral project as “unhelpful”.
The Green hostility is understandable. They can’t very well be expected to just sit back and do nothing in the face of this open challenge to their monopoly on crackpot drivel.
The GATSO killers must be starting to give the state a serious headache.
From the UK Times:
THE police have come up with a new way to catch irate motorists who vandalise speed cameras: set up other cameras to film them in the act.
And then other cameras to film those cameras and still more cameras to film those cameras and……
A closed-circuit television system would be installed beside the speed traps under plans being considered to curb a spate of attacks in which 700 cameras have been burnt, pulled down or had their lenses spray painted.
Of course this means that the closed-circuit security cameras will become targets as well. It seems that the campaign of the GATSO killers is moving beyond the sporadic outbursts of pique and onto a low-grade insurrection.
Could there be such a thing a ‘Legal Laffer Curve’? What I mean is, a point where there are so many laws that the State cannot possibly enforce them and their agents start to wilt under the pressure of trying to do so. From then on the whole thing starts to go downhill and the lawlessness begins to grow uncontrollably.
Has that point been reached?
A chief Constable admitted yesterday that his officers are being forced to ignore thousands of burglaries, thefts and car crimes because they are swamped by increasing drug and gun violence.
The public’s perception that the police were not interested in low-level and non-violent crime was underlined when Steve Green, Chief Constable of Nottinghamshire police, said there was not enough money or officers available to investigate all crime.
The emergence of Britain’s drug and gun culture had impacted on his force to such an extent that “something had to give”.
A very telling admission from a man who is clearly under pressure. However my sympathy-meter is stuck at nought. The police have spent decades campaigning vigourously to abolish just about every right of the citizens to preserve their own security and, of course, the means to do so. The natural consequence is that they have arrogated that burden onto themselves and it is a burden the can neither cope with nor discharge. Truly that is a zero-sum game.
Yes, I think something will have to ‘give’ but knowing this country as I do, I doubt very much that it will be the pathology of total control that has caused the problem in the first place.
I honestly think I have grossly underestimated the entrepreunerial skills of the social-working class. It must take a certain talent to keep inventing new make-work schemes and then successfully sell them to the government.
I cannot imagine how I would begin to pitch this one:
The Government is losing its war against flab after spending £9.6 billion on projects to tackle obesity across all departments.
I just love the idea of porcine civil servants being sent to huff and puff their way around an army assault course but I rather think they are not the intended target of this new ‘war’.
Anyway, it seems the government is losing the war. They cannot make fat people slim again by bureaucratic means. I am shocked, SHOCKED I tell you.
The fat epidemic shows no sign of abating.
‘Epidemic’! Now there’s a panic-inducing trigger-word if ever there was one. I bet that was the deal-closer. ‘Minister, unless you write out a blank cheque there’s going to be an epidemic!’.
Obesity is serious.
At £9.6 billion, yeah I would say that’s bloody serious.
It kills 34,000 people a year in Britain…
And HMG is going to keep spending money until the target of Zero deaths from all causes is reached.
…and costs the economy in England £2.6 billion a year, estimated to rise to £3.6 billion by 2010.
How can they possibly know that?
It cannot, however, be tackled by the Department of Health alone.
Well, it might be helped by fat people going on a diet but we wouldn’t want them taking the law into their own hands, would we.
Strategies to deal with obesity in children and adults now involve four Government departments with support at Cabinet level.
The Department of Health and the Health Development Agency, the Department for Education and Skills, the Department of Environment Food and Rural Affairs, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport are all players in the anti-fat campaign.
Defeating the Third Reich didn’t require this many people.
And, therein lies the rub because even this public admission of failure will do nothing to stop the flab-fighting government juggernaut now that it has been sent rumbling forth onto the highway of national life. The conspicuous failure of fat children to shrink to normal size will merely prompt demands for ‘more resources’ to fight yet another phoney war. Problems are not meant to be solved because careers aren’t built that way. Problems are to be fabricated and then carefully nurtured and maintained until…well, ever.
The £9.6 billion wasted thus far was merely the appetiser. Small change. Petty cash. Mere peanuts already swallowed up with a forest’s worth of reports, initiatives, projections, surveys, committee minutes and action plans. This is Britain where the new national ethos is to throw good money after bad into the bottomless sinkhole of guilt and paranoia.
If any reader is tempted to laugh out loud at the Swiftian absurdity of it all then I can hardly blame them. But really it isn’t funny, it’s pathetic and it is only a matter of time before it moves beyond the sad to the downright nasty:
One is the Food and Health Action Plan which aims to promote healthy eating in all age groups.
An aspect of this is the schools fruit programme, now being implemented, which aims to give all primary school children in their first three years, a portion of fruit a day.
The second is the Game Plan, a strategy for promoting physical activity with the somewhat vague target of ensuring that 70 per cent of the population is “reasonably active” by 2020.
This is what they call a ‘consciousness raising exercise’, a customary pre-cursor to new expansions of state power. ‘The voluntary approach hasn’t worked’, they will cry. ‘What we need is tough legislation’. And they will most likely get it too and disapproved products will start to be pulled from supermarket shelves and nobody will be allowed to open a bank account until they can produce a ‘Physical Fitness Certificate’. This may sound alarmist but the one thing I have never underestimated is the vanity and ambition of our political classes.
Britain isn’t obese, it’s anaemic. It’s life-blood is being drained from it by an army of worthless, self-propogating parasites.
It may be silly that sport affects politics, but it does. In 1966, England won the soccer World Cup, and it definitely did rub off on the Labour Government then in power and on Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson. British proles can do it, who needs the bloody toffs?, etc. etc. Wilson certainly milked that win all he could for his political team.
So when, in the quarter-finals of the next World Cup in 1970, the England soccer team was gut-wrenchingly beaten 3-2 (after being 2-0 up) by the very same opponents they’d beaten in the 1966 final, West Germany, they were widely debited/credited with tipping the balance in favour of the Conservatives at the general election held very soon afterwards. The proles weren’t so cool after all, you see.
The England soccer team has never since scaled the heights of 1966, but the infusion of television money and foreign stars nevertheless gave English soccer in the 1990s a glamour and a cultural clout that it had probably never had before. Soccer now completely dominates the sports pages, having utterly routed the now very forlorn cricket as England’s “national game”. And (“New”) Labour has once again made use of all that in its propaganda about rebranding and modernising and generally being Cool Britannia.
There is now another World Cup approaching which may have a similar, although more muted, political effect, in the form of the Rugby Word Cup, which kicks off next Friday when host nation Australia plays Argentina in Sydney. England are strongly fancied to win this, although the truth is that any one of about half a dozen closely matched teams could win, of whom England are just one. If England do win or at least do very well (by winning through to the final in grand style and then being heroically and narrowly beaten, say), this could have party political vibes back here in Britain. If England disappoint, ditto, in the sense that the dog I am about to describe won’t have barked after all.
Basically, it would suit the Conservatives if the England rugby team were to triumph, while many Labour supporters would probably prefer England to make a humiliatingly early exit. → Continue reading: How the Rugby World Cup might influence British party politics
There has been much amusement lately at the promises made by the Conservatives here in Britain – higher government pensions and lower taxes. Although Arnold S. in California has been making similar promises (indeed he actually got a new spending program passed in California as recently as last November – the after school thing).
Whilst I would agree that the Conservative Party does look very silly with the headline “Conservatives promise higher pensions and lower taxes” (whatever the details about getting the money by abolishing certain means tested benefits for the old and getting rid of a lot of the “New Deal” – “welfare to work” programs), I think that the all the amusement does miss an important point.
There seems to be no great support among the voters for the reduction in the size and scope of government. Now I can remember when there was such support – the late 1970s, then very many people (perhaps most people) supported the reduction of government spending, but this is simply not true now (in spite of government spending on the Welfare State being vastly higher now than it was then).
To abolish the Conservative Party and create a new party of the ‘centre right’ would solve nothing if there is no market for such a party.
To be fair some of the enemies of the Conservative Party seem to understand this. For example Peter Hitchins (of the Mail on Sunday) wishes to get rid of the Conservative Party, but he does not wish to replace it with a free market party. No, he fully supports government railways (in fact he still bangs on about the foolishness of the private ownership of the railways even though the structure was re-nationalized some time ago), and he supports anti-Americanism, the B.B.C. ‘Licence Fee’ (TV tax) and lots of other nasty things.
It would not be fair to say that Hitchins and his ilk favour “Social Democracy plus black leather and goose-stepping” (Peter Hitchins is not a Nazi), but he and his friends are certainly not free market folk, and have nothing but contempt for the old free market ‘ideology’ of Britain. They are rather like the old ‘socio-imperial’ crowd of paternalists that surrounded Joseph Chamberlain.
Whether the Conservative Party continues to exist or not the problem (for free market people) remains the same – the vast majority of voters do not support cutting back the Welfare State and the believe that every economic and social problem should be met by new government laws or better enforcement of old laws (this, again, was certainly not true in the late 1970’s – when most people supported deregulation).
Why has public opinion in Britain changed so much? This is a question too long and complicated for me to answer here (if I can answer this question at all), but I do know that until public opinion changes or can be made to change, no political party favourable to liberty will prosper in Britain.
The time has come for the government to take firm action.
Yesterday:
A shopkeeper who was shot dead in a robbery stepped in front of her killers to save her daughter, said her husband.
Thieves killed Marion Bates, 64, in front of her daughter Xanthe in an attack at their family-run jewellery store in Arnold, Nottingham, on Tuesday.
Today:
A man has died and another has been injured after a drive-by shooting in Hertfordshire.
Police say the two men came under fire – possibly from an automatic weapon – outside the Physical Limit Health and Fitness Club in Brewery Road gym in Hoddesdon.
This must never be allowed to happen again. How many more lives are going to be sacrificed to the cowboy, wild-west gun culture that has gripped this country? How many more families are going to be destroyed? When is this government going to do something to make our streets safe again?
We must get guns out of private hands. All handguns and automatic weapons must be banned completely. We must have strict laws against possessing these kind of deadly weapons backed up by draconian sentences. If it saves even one life its worth it.
Enough is enough. Britain needs gun control now!
Update: I have just been advised by my eagle-eyed team of researchers that, in fact, Britain has the strictest anti-gun laws in the developed world and that handguns and automatic weapons were banned years ago! I told them that this cannot possibly be true but they assure me that it is. Well, back to the drawing-board to find a new campaign. Any suggestions?
The Adam Smith Institute has assembled a group of economic forecasters to prognosticate about the British Economy. Their findings aren’t yet up at the ASI site, but the latest ASI email Bulletin helpfully sums up their findings, thus:
Gordon Brown has sown the seeds of his own destruction. At this rate he’ll soon have to put the economy in his wife’s name.
There are bad times just around the corner. Will there be better times around the corner after that corner? I live in hope.
Two nights ago, Channel 4 screened a 90-minute drama called ‘The Deal’ the broadcast of which has sent the British press into something of a tizzy.
I watched it and found it quite gripping. Even those with little time for the jungle warfare of the Westminster village could not fail to have been impressed by the consumate performances and razor-sharp direction. Nor was the enjoyment dependent upon any sort of plot twist or surprise ending. Everyone knew in advance what is was going to be about and how it was going to end. I suppose it was a voyeuresque appetite for power-play and intrigue that had so many (including me) tuning in.
‘The Deal’ dramatised the close friendship between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown throughout the many years that the Labour Party languished in hopeless opposition. Both men (allegedly) knew that the Party had to be reformed in order to become electable and, with equal conviction, both reckoned that Gordon Brown was the man who was born to lead Labour to that new dawn. Or so it seemed. As Blair’s ambition and self-confidence grew, so Brown found himself outflanked. The climax (‘The Deal’) has Brown agreeing to step aside and let Blair stand for the leadership provided Blair would step down in his second term and hand the mantle over to Brown.
Tony Blair has publicly denied that any such ‘deal’ was agreed but few appear to believe him. Or, perhaps more accurately, they (and by ‘they’ I refer to Labour Party members) don’t care if there was or was not a ‘deal’: they want Blair out. → Continue reading: Closing the deal
Islamic culture gets bashed quite enough in the blogosphere without me sticking my oar in, but I wonder what the kumbayah singing disciples of multiculturalism think of this?
A strict Kurdish Muslim who slit his daughter’s throat after she started seeing a Christian boy has been jailed for life. Abdalla Yones, 48, tried to commit suicide after murdering 16-year-old Heshu and pleaded with the Old Bailey to pass a death sentence on him. Heshu was beaten for months before the “honour killing” and had planned to run away from home, begging her father to leave her alone.
The court heard Yones was “disgusted and distressed” by her relationship with an 18-year-old Lebanese student and launched a frenzied attack at their family home in Acton, west London. Heshu was stabbed 11 times and bled to death from her throat being cut.
Sentencing Yones, Judge Neil Denison said: “This is, on any view, a tragic story arising out of irreconcilable cultural differences between traditional Kurdish values and the values of western society.”
Or more correctly, a tragic story arising out of an Islamic Kurdish culture with no real notion of objective moral truth beyond what they have been told is written in some book and a Western one which at least imperfectly aspires to find such a thing.
All cultures have problems, flaws and idiocies but that does not therefore mean all cultures are equal. When Islamic culture is not tempered by secular influences, it is particularly prone to produce monstrous crimes like this one. Not that irrational secular creeds cannot produce evils aplenty (such as fascism and other forms of socialism), but at least most strains of Western Christianity and Judaism have had their more demented fundamentalist edges worn off by centuries of secularism.
Brave individuals can use reason to transcend the confines of their culture, but all cultures are not the same and I do so wish some people would stop pretending otherwise.
David Carr got the general gist of news today in his post on Goodfellas government and their audacity to charge your for wanting to do things as well as for not wanting to do them anymore because the government made them too expensive. Apart from drafting regulations in the style ‘damned if you do, damn if you don’t’, the anal bureaucratic busybodies have been, well, busy putting the local council taxes up.
The council tax is the amount local governments are allowed to raise on top of the ‘grants’ (i.e. taxpayers money) they receive from the central government. The modern and fair NuLabour government has for the last five years increased the council tax by between 3 and 4 percent above the rate of inflation. It has also ‘redistributed wealth’ away from the South of England to the North, where most Labour supporters reside. The South may be richer than the North but its local governments are no less greedy and are making up the ‘shortfall’ by increasing taxed by about 15 percent.
This is leaving many pensioners on the verge of poverty and they are getting angry. Tony Fowle does not look much like a revolutionary, more like the kind of grandfather that he actually is: a retired finance manager with a love of steam railways, an ex-National Serviceman who proudly wears his RAF tie. Yet this week he is organising a march in Bornemouth where the Labour Party’s annual conference is taking place:
If the Government doesn’t listen, there’s going to be a mass rebellion. In 1994 my council tax bill was £507.50. Now it’s £1,166.30. I’ve had enough. Every pensioner has had enough. Yes, I might withhold payment. Yes, I’m prepared to go to court. I’m fighting for those applying for benefits because they can’t afford these council tax hikes. I am a law-abiding citizen. I have never disobeyed anybody in my life. It is really upsetting me that these kind of actions are needed now.
Leaving aside our views on government taxation and its distribution, local or otherwise, this is portentous. The British are not a protesting people and the fact that large number of pensioners across the country are willing to engage in civil disobedience is verging on absurd. Imagine your favourite auntie dragging herself away from her tea doilies in order to march in protest to the government…
Nevertheless, this is the generation that remembers the times when collective effort meant something and I just hope they will mobilise with the same determination they had some 50 years ago.
“Business bad? fuck you, pay me. Oh, you had a fire? fuck you, pay me. Place got hit by lightning, huh? fuck you, pay me!”
Some of our officials have become so self-important that they not only charge through the nose for imposing their regulations upon us, they even want to charge those who can no longer afford their attentions. Last year I reported on the Scottish care home which, when it was forced to close by the cost of regulations imposed by social services, then received a bill for £510 from the same department for giving the owner permission to go out of business.
A similar problem has been presented to John Swain, whose metal finishing firm Anopol employs 30 people in Birmingham. Some years ago, as a service to other metal finishing companies who used his chemicals, he offered to accept their used chemicals back for storage in holding tanks and safe, environmentally-responsible disposal. Under EC directive 91/156, however, he then had to acquire a waste management licence, for which he had to pay the Environment Agency £3,897 a year.
This helped to make Mr Swain’s service uneconomical, so he told the agency that he wished to surrender his licence. He would continue to use the tanks for his own waste chemicals, but could no longer assist his customers. The agency sent him an eight-page questionnaire and a bill for £2,427 as a “surrender fee”.
This isn’t ‘government’, it’s Goodfellas!
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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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