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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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!
The Liberal Democratic party has voted, in its annual conference, to continue with its long standing policy of introducing a local income tax in Britain as a source of money for local councils.
The media has treated this as some sort of new thing (which shows how much they know about policy matters), but I am more interested in the classic missing-the-point the whole idea shows.
The point is not whether a local income tax is a better or worse thing than the present ‘Council Tax’ (although an obvious problem is that in some areas most voters are below the income threshold for income tax – so under a local income tax councils might become even more out of control than they are now), the point is council spending.
I am old enough to remember the hatred the old system of ‘rates” (property tax) generated, especially after the ‘revaluation’ of properties in Scotland.
For all the talk of details of local government finance, what most people really objected to was the level of the rates – and the increase in this tax burden was generated by the increase in local government spending.
The Conservative government of the day got rid of the rates and introduced the ‘Community Charge’ (the so called Poll Tax). However, opposition to the tax burden continued and indeed got worse. Again for all the talk about the structure of the tax (“it is wrong for the poor to pay as much as the rich” – although the poor did not pay as much as the rich), what most people really objected to was the level of the new tax.
I rather doubt that many people would have rioted if, say, the level of the tax had been ten pounds per person.
Local government spending went up, but people blamed the tax burden on the new tax (rather than on the increase in council spending).
Today people say (quite correctly) that the Council Tax is a terrible burden. However, (absurdly) many people are still missing the point that the tax is a terrible burden because of local government spending and introducing a new tax will not help reduce this spending.
In Britain most people talk about this or that form of local government taxation and they also talk about whether or not central government grants to local councils are fair (the Conservative party is convinced that the Labour government favours Labour councils at the expense of Conservative ones).
But, as far as I can make out, nobody talks about the level of local government spending – and it is the spending that is the root of the problem.
‘Petrol Price Rise Announced’ blares the BBC Headline:
Fuel duty will rise by 1.28p a litre from 1 October, the Treasury has confirmed.
The increase, which will add five pence a gallon to petrol and diesel prices, is in line with inflation, it said.
So it isn’t a ‘price rise’ at all. It’s a tax increase
I think the public has a right to be told in less ambivalent terms.
Patrick Crozier has a modest plan for the rejuvenation of London…
With the mayoral election less than a year away I feel it time that I declared my hand. OK, so this is not entirely serious. Any candidacy would need funds, an organisation, assembly candidates and all those involved would have to realise that it wouldn’t have a prayer and that the only purpose of the exercise would be to secure publicity. But if we did have all those things this would be my manifesto. That’s the great thing about manifestos: they’re cheap.
Some Observations and Some Basic Principles
London is a great city – after all, it’s home to most of Samizdata’s writers. Millions of people would seem to agree with them coming here from all over the world to find a better life for themselves. But London seems to be getting worse when it could be getting a lot better. In particular it suffers from three major problems: crime, transport and property prices. My aim, if elected, would be to: reduce crime by 90%, reduce property prices by 50% and to make getting around the city a simple and predictable (if not necessarily cheap) business.
I believe that civilisation is at its best when people are free. It is freedom which promotes prosperity, innovation and responsibility. And yet for 100 years we have been chipping away at freedom, progressively heaping taxation and regulation upon a once free people with results that are all too plain to see. If London is to be better then first it must be free.
Housing
Property is too expensive. With a three-bedroom house costing six or seven times the average wage, millions are postponing and even abandoning the idea of having children. This is hardly a sustainable state of affairs. Prices are high because demand is high and supply is low. The answer is to increase the supply.
If elected I would abolish all planning laws and all building regulations. Immediately, people would start to build. Up mainly. And why not? We shouldn’t be scared of living in flats. Many people around the world enjoy good quality high-rise living where raising a family is as easy and as pleasant as living in a semi-detached. All that we have to do is to allow it to happen. I believe that by scrapping the regulations we will see the development of all sorts of new ideas in architecture as well as a massive increase in capacity. We might well see the development of self-build (people designing their own houses) as is seen in places like France and Spain.
Would we lose all our nice old buildings? Some, for sure, but do we really need all of them, especially as there is a chance we might get some nice, new ones in exchange? → Continue reading: Crozier for Mayor
The Conservative Party has been blessed with a ringing endorsement from none other than Polly Toynbee:
A remarkable document has emerged from the Conservative frontbench. Search it from cover to cover and few would guess its provenance. Its deceptively dull title hides a radical departure: Old Europe? Demographic change and pension reform, by David Willetts, the shadow secretary for work and pensions, transforms Conservative family policy.
Not even his economics smells of Conservatism. The pensions problem does not, Willetts declares, need more saving by today’s workers. “Europe needs more consumption, more spending and more borrowing. Keynes warned in the 30s that ageing societies with high levels of savings and not many investment opportunities face a deflationary nightmare.”
So, is this just a devlishly cunning bit of cognitive jiu-jitsu to throw their opponents? I don’t believe they are anywhere near clever enough for that.
I think the end is nigh.
The senior political commentator and Guardian newspaper columnist Hugo Young died at home last night, aged 64, after a long illness.
I used to worship Mr Young’s Mount Olympus of a column, many years ago, turning to it even before the daily Steve Bell cartoon, and have retained a soft spot for him to this day. I suppose that may have been because one dark evening Mr Young had to endure the lefty ravings of some drunken young student from Sheffield University, at some Guardian/NUS bash or other, as this young acolyte tried to suck out some of the greatness from the Great Man of the Left. But being from Sheffield himself, Mr Young tolerated this intoxicated idiot for quite some time, before breaking away to escape into the night.
That conversation taught me two things. One was to try to listen, and the other was to try to think. Hugo Young may have been one of our main political opponents, but he was also one of our best political opponents because he thought about what it was he wanted to say, before he then said it. He was also one of the few men on the Guardian unafraid of calling any situation how he saw it. For example, he recently said of David Blunkett:
At the apex of anti-liberalism, bragging his contempt, sits the most dangerous home secretary this country has ever known.
Well said, sir. The Left is seriously weakened by Hugo Young’s departure from this mortal coil, and shall not see his like again.
And although this post may seem strange, I felt compelled to write it. For although Hugo Young was a Titan standing in our way, from initial stirrings raised in that long ago conversation I must thank him for helping me to escape from the clutches of this self-same Left, and especially from men like David Blunkett. Hugo Young truly was a Great Man. May his soul Rest in Peace.
In my statist youth I was a firm believer in compulsory voting. “We should be like Australia,” I used to say, “and make people vote.” Of course, I would never subscribe to such a draconian policy these days, having indoctrinated myself with the works of Popper, Rand, and Murray N. Rothbard. But until swayed by the wise words of Mr Carr, I used to think it unfortunate that so many British people had become addicted to this growing habit of electoral abstention.
Some British politicians even cry the odd crocodile tear about it, on late-night political programmes. Not that it stops Tony Blair from strutting across the political landscape, like Godzilla, despite wielding only a quarter of the votes of the British electorate, from the 2001 General Election. What people in the ruling class like Mr Blair truly fear, of course, is the growing de-legitimisation of the British state, including all of its political parties, which this increase in non-voting represents. However, despite these fears, non-voting is generally becoming a rational and respectable thing to do.
At least that’s according to one of my favourite Telegraph writers, Tom Utley.
I realise that I am preaching the most dreadful heresy. I know that we are all supposed to pull pious faces and say that the vote is our most precious possession, that men and women have died for it and that to abstain in an election is a grave dereliction of a civic duty. But that has always struck me as a silly argument. If we do not honestly care which of the assorted bores, cranks and exhibitionists on a ballot paper should win an election, then why should we pretend that we do?
Now where I increasingly differ from Mr Utley, after repeatedly failing to hear Oliver Letwin’s outright condemnation of David Blunkett’s plans for a national ID card, is in his proposed solution to the crisis:
People don’t think voting matters, and it is the politicians’ job to persuade them that it does…Elections must be made to matter again. What I am really saying, I suppose, is Vote Tory.
Aside from this hesitant political plug, it’s an interesting article, especially as it’s the first time, as an admittedly irregular reader of the Telegraph, that I’ve seen the rationality of non-voting discussed with any kind of seriousness within its hallowed pages. It seems Mr Carr’s message is getting through.
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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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