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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It is about time that some mainstream voices were prepared to challenge the absurd and iniquitous eco-fascist-inspired war against the motorist and, much to my surprise, that voice is emanating from the Conservative Party:
The Tories promised yesterday to raise the motorway speed limit from 70 to 80mph as part of a “fair deal for drivers”.
Tim Collins, the shadow transport secretary, said this was part of a set of reforms to be unveiled later this month.
They will include the removal of the bus and taxi lane on the M4 between Heathrow and London and speed cameras that trap motorists “unfairly”.
Unnecessary road humps and road tolls will be abolished. Some speed limits, through villages, for example, may be tightened.
Its a funny old world when the Conservatives are starting to make anti-establishment noises but that is what they are doing. I suppose it is symptomatic of having spent so long in the political wilderness that even they realise there is nothing to be lost by saying boo to a goose.
It is still a long way from the kind of radicalism that we need and it is not enough to cause me to review my poor opinion of them as an institution but I am prepared to give them credit where a little bit of credit is due.
I think that Hermann Rorschach was really onto something with that little inkblot test of his. If two different but apparently sane people can look at the same picture and see two entirely different things then perhaps that goes at least some way explaining ideology as well as psychology.
A perfect illustration of this lies in the response of British socialist bloggers to the plans for the regionalisation of England. This is the plan to divide England up into nine entirely artifical ‘sectors’ and give each its own assembly with regulatory functions. The details of this project are currently being thrashed out by the Office of Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott.
Over on the left, this is an eagerly awaited development. One of the new kids on the left-block, Farringdon Street, waxes lyrical:
The northwest is going to have a referendum on a regional assembly. This is a development that should be greeted with alacrity. While its chief protagonist in central government John Prescott hardly has a reputation as a constitutional iconoclast, devolution is vital to the reconstruction of British politics.
Power is to concentrated, the agenda to London centric. The regions especially those furthest from the capital need their own champions. We must increase the sheer amount of political muscle deployable in London and Brussels to advance the regional interest.
And he is far from alone in his enthusiasm. It is sincerely shared by the rest of British left all of whom appear to be getting moist-knickered and dewey-eyed over what they are trying to present as ‘decentralisation’.
Now, if this really was a process of decentralisation it might have some merit. At the very least it would be worthy of further discussion. But this is not a process of decentralisation. Not even to the smallest degree. → Continue reading: Top down and down and down
Andy Duncan decries the bigotry of Members of Parliament in persecuting a minority.
Backbench Labour MPs have voted for a total ban on hunting with dogs. What remains very unclear, however, is what happened to the government’s murky ‘compromise’ option, to allow licensed hunting to continue.
This disappeared due to a mysterious House of Commons drafting error, and a warning to Labour whips, that the Parliament Act could not be used with a total ban. But for a government of control freaks, this seems a mere fig-leaf covering over the traces of some kind of deal between the backbench and the executive of the “You support us, when we need you, and we’ll give you the Ban” type.
Or does it? Could it be even more labyrinthine than this simple conspiracy theory? You may remember last week Mr Peter Hain, our friend from Wales, attempting a complex manoeuvre to kick the Hunting Ban into the long grass. The last thing New Labour needs, with the Tories moving into a fragile lead in the polls, is to cement this lead with a class-war move highly unpopular within Middle England. With the Countryside Alliance able to get 400,000 people to march down Whitehall any time of their choosing, my guess is Tony Blair would rather this problem went away, until he is at least dealt with Iraqgate.
Time will tell what this über-manipulative government is up to, but my guess is that the ban will fail again, in this session of Parliament, due to some “technical error”, and we will be back to where we started, next year, for the whole sorry mess to begin again. You would think they had a majority of ten, the way New Labour carry on, rather than over one hundred. It must be terrible being a socialist back-bencher lion, being led by such donkeys. Excellent.
Last week, Connex became the first private rail operator to be stripped of its franchise after being accused of financial mismanagement and poor service. The company, which carries 300,000 commuters a day, has become a byword for crowded, dirty and late-running trains.
What caught my eye was the fact that Connex is a French-owned company and the main reason for its demise is its contant pleas for funds. Connex has lost its franchise mainly because of its financial management. The SRA (Strategic Rail Authority) decided the extra £200 million of public subsidy demanded by the company would not be wisely spent (after it has already spent £58 million of public money received last December).
In the last couple of weeks we have had some interesting exchanges among commenters attacking and defending France. The trains were held as an example of French superiority in matters of public policy and generally as the evidence of higher civilisation in France. Ross Clark points out in yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph:
If there is one good thing to come out of Connex’s humiliation, it will be that it should stop British railway passengers whining: “Why can’t we run our trains like the French do?” Connex, of course, is a French company, which brought with it to Britain experience of running commuter services in Paris.
The superiority of French trains is hugely overstated. TGV trains may be rapid and relatively inexpensive to use, but that is an inter-city service with few stops and it operates thanks only to state subsidies which would make a British taxpayer squeal. Most other French trains run on slack and infrequent timetables which ensure punctuality but at the cost of providing little amenity for the passenger. On holiday in Brittany two years ago I took my family on a 15-mile train ride from Paimpol to Guincamp. The journey took well over half an hour, excluding the 10 minutes that it took to buy a ticket. It cost £17 for two adults and two children; and there were only three trains a day.
The problem with travelling by train in London and the South-East is the millions of passengers being transported over an increasingly large urban area. The rail network is far from efficient but comparing it to the French equivalent is misleading at best. I am sure the guys from the Transport blog could supply all the relevant comparative statistics but even without them one can see that conveying commuters in London is, at least when it comes to size, a slightly different proposition to doing that in Paris, Rome or other European capitals.
According to the Adam Smith Institute, public sector jobs such as “walking officers”, “anti-social co-ordinators”, “diversity co-ordinators” and an army of other such appointments are costing the British taxpayer more than £1 billion a year.
The job section of the Society Guardian supplement has been monitored by the researchers at the ASI for a month. They calculated that public sector jobs whose purpose it at best vague, at worst utterly non-sensical amount to around £1bn a year.
How did this come about? Dr Madsen Pirie, the president of the institute, explains that one enters “the twilight zone of political correctness translated into situations vacant“.
In some issues the Society supplement consists of over 100 pages. Each page features several jobs. The sheer volume of them is immense. It is like entering into another country. One leaves behind the world of productive activity, of goods and services for which people are willing to pay. One leaves the wealth-creating process which sustains our present and future livelihood and Britain’s economic position in the world. One enters instead into a world of public sector services, some of which seem to be of dubious, if any, economic value. The pages take the reader into a world inhabited by anti-social behaviour co-ordinators, of racial equality officers, of social inclusion officers and community liaison officers.
Indeed, job descriptions sound all pretty barmy, here are some of my favourite ones:
Durham County Council – Young People’s Substance Misuse Tier 3 Service Manager (£30k)
Chorley Borough Council – Anti-Social Behaviour co-ordinator
East Kent Coastal Care Trust – Smoking Cessation Specialist: Inequalities (£20k)
Herefordshire Council – Public Rights of Way Developments Officer (£14.8-20.5k)
With the exception of the judgement by the Supreme Court to overturn the Texas anti-sodomy law, the last few days have seen some bad judgements in both the United States and Britain.
Indeed even the sodomy case was dodgy – in that a good result was achieved by, I suspect, bad methods.
True I have not been able to bring myself to read the judgements (reading the words of modern judges tends to make very depressed), but unless they used the elastic Ninth Amendment (which, perhaps, could be used to stop the Federal, State of local governments doing just about anything – which might be no bad thing) it is hard to see how the six judges found anything in the Constitution to prevent the State of Texas banning sodomy. I suspect that the judges tended to waffle on about freedom – i.e. expressed their political opinions (which I happen to agree with this time) rather than actually based the judgement on the text of the Constitution (as they should have done).
As for the other cases that have caught my eye.
Well the University of Michigan has been told that it is okay to practice racial discrimination – as long as it is not open and honest about doing so (diversity waffle rather than an overt quota). This would seem to be the worst of both worlds. Of course there is an easy way to solve the problem of who goes to State Universities – close them down and have no one go to them. However, whilst they exist, it would seem reasonable that such places do not make skin colour a factor in admissions (but five of the Supremes think differently). Oh well, who reads the 14th Amendment anyway – ‘equal protection of the laws’? No, let us have ‘diversity’ instead (although the Constitution does not mention the word diversity anywhere).
Then there was the Nike case. The Supreme Court decided that if a company decided to argue back against attacks made on it, the company may be taken to Court under California’s wonderfully biased statutes. In short the First Amendment applies to ‘activists’ (individuals or groups) attacking a company, but not to the business itself.
Back in Britain we have just had the long predicted outcome to the mobile phone (cell phone) farce. Some time ago the government manipulated some mobile phone companies into paying vast sums (billions of pounds) for mobile phone licences – this put these companies into financial difficulty. Fast forwards a few years later and the government declared that companies must cut their call rates.
In short the companies had paid through the nose and then got hit on the nose. They sued – and have just lost.
The old saying is proved right yet again – never trust the government.
And remember, the courts are part of the state.
Due to the high risk of an embarrassing misunderstanding here, I think it behoves me to start off by advising our American readers that, in Britain, the word ‘fags’ is a slang term for ‘cigarettes’. It is not generally perceived as having anything to do with homosexual men.
And this is important because cigarettes are no longer just ‘fags’ or even ‘smokes’. Now, they are symbols of defiance as well.
For the past two decades or so, tobacco manufacturers have been forced to print hectoring health warnings on cigarette packets. But now, due to a directive from Brussels (where else?) manufacturers are required cover at least half the space on both the front and rear of the packet with even more lurid warnings. It is the kind of useless, paternalistic gesture that enables the European political classes to posture self-righteously at someone else’s expense.
At last, though, someone is fighting back in the form of a website called ‘Fake Fags’ through which you can purchase waggishly irreverent stickers to cover up the politically-mandated health warnings on your cigarette pack.
It is a delicious act of subversion and, predictably, it has sent the reactionary health fascists into a blue funk:
Deborah Arnott of anti-smoking group ASH criticised the labels.
“These labels do not strike me as being funny,” she told BBC News Online.
Well they strike me as hilarious and I am very heartened that at least some of my compatriots are not prepared to throw in the towel just yet.
Purely for the benefit of people who get excited about this kind of thing, a tantalising tidbit to whet your appetites:
The Conservatives have moved into the lead in the opinion polls, bringing to an end the record dominance that Labour has enjoyed for more than a decade.
So is NuLabour on the way out? Are the Tories on the way back? I don’t much care to be honest. For people like me the British Conservative Party promises more of the same, business as usual, social democracy by other means.
And so to bed.
Sir Denis Thatcher, husband of Baroness Thatcher has died peacefully this morning in a hospital in London. He was 88.
You know what they say, behind every great man, there is a great woman. Well, behind the great woman of the British politics in the 80s was this great man…
Update: Here is obituary published in the Guardian.
Children are always a bit of a knotty problem for libertarians (yes, I am still using that word until a better one comes along). I have almost lost count of the number of arguments I have engaged in concerning their rights or absence thereof and I have still not reached any (or very many) satisfactory conclusions.
So it is with the question of physical punishment. Every instinct I possess and every principle to which I subscribe tells me that hitting children (albeit a moderate smack to the posterior) is wrong. You can camouflage it in as many codes of discipline or doctrines of necessity as you wish but the bald fact remains that it is an assault. If assaulting somebody is wrong (and I should hope that most sane people will agree that it is) then surely it remains wrong notwithstanding that it is administered by someone who otherwise loves and cares for you and is intended to provide some sort of memorable object lesson. If I strike out at my wife, co-worker, best friend or next-door neighbour I run the risk of prosecution and a lawsuit. But not so if I strike my child.
I find it extremely difficult to justify this distinction. In fact, if anything, a child should have an even stronger presumption of physical integrity because they are incapable of mounting anything like a plausible self-defence.
So, while my mind is not closed on the issue, that is where I currently stand and that is what I currently think. But, however starkly I may oppose the physical punishment of children, I am even more stridently opposed to the idea of appointing the state as guardian:
Spanking children can lead to more severe abuse, two parliamentary committees said Monday, and urged the government to pass a law barring parents from hitting their children.
The government has already outlawed corporal punishment in day care centers and schools. But parents and guardians are still permitted to use spanking as “reasonable chastisement,” putting Britain out of step with several European countries where all physical punishment of children is illegal.
Heavens to Betsy! We’re ‘out of step’. Quick, somebody crank up that metronome.
Actually this is not a fresh hell. There is a dedicated coterie of toweringly self-righteous do-gooders who have been campaigning for years for a ban on all physical punishment to be enforced by the state and every couple of years or so they manage to force their agenda on to the front pages. I am implacably opposed to them. Quite aside from the fact that these people are so obnoxiously condescending, there is no way I want to hand an excuse to the ‘Social Working Classes’ to drive the thin end of what is sure to prove a very fat wedge in between children and their parents. It will provide further justification for them to go trampling all over people’s private lives and accelerate the process of family nationalisation and resulting social disintegration. A few red rumps are by far the lesser of those two evils.
Fortunately, I can cast aside my customary pessimism because there appears to be no chance whatsoever of this law getting onto the Statute Books. At least not yet. I allowed myself a cheer of relief upon hearing a government minister on the radio news this morning give it the unequivocal thumbs-down. I don’t believe there has been any great examination of ethics involved; more likely their minds are concentrated by the fact that (for a change) the overwhelming majority of public opinion is against any state intervention in this area. I think HMG might be tempted if they knew they weren’t going to face such stiff public opposition.
And I am with the British public on this one. Well, sort of. I do think that assaulting a child is wrong regardless of the intentions behind it but I am equally sure that legislation is a cure that will prove worse than the disease. Parents should raise their children, not the state and I hope sufficient numbers of parents share my sentiments. That is far from a perfect solution but maybe it is the least worst solution and, in any event, it is the best I can do.
Andy Duncan has heard the voice of Metatron Peter Hain and he is pretty sure it may have been Hain’s lips that were moving but it was Tony Blair’s voice we were hearing
On the BBC Today program this morning, Labour Party Leader of the House of Commons, and Secretary of State for Wales, Peter Hain floated the idea of increased income taxes. As he’s the semi-official Voice on Earth, for the internal workings of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s mind, his attempt to start this ‘debate’ can be assumed to have been cleared by Downing Street.
Is this the last desperate throw, by an increasingly desperate Prime Minister?
In the interview, the BBC Radio 4 Presenter, John Humphrys, tried to press Mr Hain on this ‘debate’, but didn’t get the minister further than saying the rich would be ‘asked’ to contribute more, for the common good of the public services.
Mr Hain refused to define what is ‘rich’, and refused to define how much income tax would be going up by, except to say it wouldn’t be “punitive”.
Mr Humphrys put forward the figures of £50,000 pounds a year as being the Labour Party’s definition of rich, and 60% per cent income tax, as being a ‘fair’ contribution. Mr Hain did not refute these figures, merely avoided answering the questions in his self-styled ‘debate’.
Given that Tony Blair hinted at more tax increases, earlier in the week in his Fabian Society speech, it seems he is ready to formally break his 1997 ‘pledge’ to not increase income tax.
But does this really signal it’s time up for Tony Blair?
Andy Duncan
As a lot of people are aware, the new Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix goes on sale at midnight tonight. In the UK, the recommended retail price of the book is £16.99, which is fairly typical for a new hardback novel (although expensive for a children’s book). However, Britain’s booksellers are using it as a loss leader, and it is thus going to be available for much less than this. Amazon is selling it for £8.49, and the cheapest I have seen it advertised in a shop with physical premises is £9.99.
Judging by the prices of the other books in the Harry Potter series, the paperback edition of the new book is likely to sell for £7.99 (when it comes), so the effect of all this discounting is that the hardcover of the new book is selling for close to the price of a paperback. Obviously this is good. Consumers will be saving money. Poor people (or cheap people) who normally wait for the paperback in order to save money will be able to buy the hardcover, thus saving their children from social death. There will be happiness and light in the world. Capitalism is a fine thing.
Remarkably, as recently as 1995 this discounting would have been illegal. Believe it or not, book prices in the UK were fixed. Under something called the Net Book Agreement, it was actually illegal for a bookseller to sell a recently published book at any price other than the one set by the publisher. Supposedly, this was so that publishers could make money from popular books and thus subsidise more “worthy” books, or something. (In reality, it protected specialist bookstores from supermarkets and other stores that merely stocked a few bestsellers). When the price fixing was abolished, various literary establishment figures came out of the woodword and said how terrible this was. I remember some famous author (Harold Pinter?) saying something like that removing price fixing on books would “Lead to a decline in the number and quality of books published in the UK. In fact, we will end up will a lowest common denominator publishing industry like the one we have in America”.
And my goodness, we couldn’t have that, could we. What fate could possibly be worse than being like America?
In any event, British bookbuyers (many of them children) over the next couple of days will save a total of something like £25 million due to the demise of the net book agreement. Politicians often favour indirect subsidies over direct ones because indirect ones (although always actually more expensive) are often hard to quantify. It’s always interesting when an event like this gives you some actual numbers for an indirect subsidy. £25 million is a lot of money. You could buy David Beckham for that.
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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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