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I am quite sure that I am not alone in having regrets about something I should have done but didn’t. There must be loads of people who once fancied a dabble on some dark-horse penny-share but decided not to take the risk and then watched it go stratospheric. Or perhaps they once thought of a great product -idea but couldn’t be bothered to pursue it only to see that same product in the shops five years and later selling like hot-cakes.
For me, it was the hit-stage play that I envisaged but never wrote. It was about a young couple who met at University in the sixties while they were both throwing themselves headlong into the counter-culture revolution as a means of rejecting the stuffy, conservative values of their staid, suburban parents.
Fast forward three decades and they are now both pillars of the Nulabour establishment. He is a journalist and she is a human rights lawyer. Their Islington home is a shrine to their innumerable cherished causes. Life is a series of earnest campaigns fuelled by a diet of polenta with rockett salad, washed down by ‘fairtrade’ Nicaraguan coffee. They are comfortable, happy cadres of the metropolitan elite blessed with an unshakeable moral certainty.
Until, that is, their teenage daughter returns home from University where she has discovered Ayn Rand and become a fiery devotee of free-market capitalism.
Then the comedy begins.
At the time I was jobbing as a scriptwriter churning out formulaic boilerplate for cable television and being quite handsomely rewarded for doing so. I had the basic characters and the outline plot but I suppose I was too addicted to the money stream to take the time off that actually writing the damn thing would have necessitated. So it never got written.
And now, it’s too late. What would have been groundbreaking comedy has been overtaken by reality: [From UK Times so no link]
Seventeen years after Huey Lewis and The News sang Hip to be Square, young people are joining the Tory party as a way of rebelling against their Labour-voting parents.
The Times interviewed new recruits and found many from a staunch Labour or Liberal Democrat background who relished the fact that being a Tory marked them out from the rest of their family and sometimes from the area they grew up in, too.
Looks like I was ahead of the curve.
One new recruit to the Tories, Caroline Hunt, 18, said: “In a way the role of opposition is to be the rebel, so yes it is a bit rebellious. Our lecturers at college are very left wing and they couldn’t believe how many of us were Tories all of a sudden. Out of a small class, eight of us put our hands up and said we were strong Conservatives”.
The ’68 generation may just be about to learn that what goes around, comes around.
And, by the way, a note to all readers: if you have a good idea, act on it immediately. The world will not wait for you.
The Telegraph reports that Britain is to reopen attempts to change key sections of the proposed European constitution despite warnings by its chief author that this risks undoing months of painstaking negotiations.
The Government will issue a White Paper in early September setting out its ‘red lines’ – the issues that it will not compromise on – in the final round of bargaining for the constitution that will be launched by European Union leaders in October. Senior officials said the issues include a determination to remove a mutual defence pact that would undermine Nato, clauses regarded as a backdoor attempt to harmonise taxation, and proposals for an EU public prosecutor.
For once the Conserative opposition sounds almost reasonable. Bernard Jenkin, the Conservative defence spokesman, said:
They said the constitution was just a tidying-up exercise. They have realised late in the day that it’s much more than that. Even if they win on their red lines, they have already given much more away, not least the principle of having a constitution in the first place.
Mr Jenkin maintains that, despite phrases ostensibly respecting countries’ obligations to Nato, the draft constitution would give the EU primacy over the transatlantic alliance. It is not yet clear how far Britain will resist the proposals to create a common defence policy.
Valery Giscard d’Estaing, the former French president who presided over 16 months of debate at the European Convention, has warned all sides that tampering with the text risks creating a free-for-all.
And we wouldn’t want that, right?
The BBC is to show a series of documentaries exploring the gun and gang culture among Britain’s urban underclass, it said yesterday. The Guns & Gangs Season on BBC2 will look at the rise of gun crime and whether groups such as So Solid Crew contribute to the culture of violence.
For the uninitiated So Solid Crew are at the centre of a debate over rap music and gun crime after a government minister said the increase in violence was down to “idiots like the So Solid Crew glorifying gun culture and violence”. Culture minister Kim Howells was speaking about the shooting of four girls in Birmingham at a New Year party – two of them were killed. Gun crime has doubled in the last five years, and he reckons the music industry is part of the problem:
For years I’ve been very worried about the hateful lyrics that these boasting macho idiots come out with from these rappers and so on, it is a big cultural problem.
There you have it. It is obviously not the fact that you are not allowed to defend yourself but rap music that makes criminals bolder. And the BBC just adds to the blunder. Other programmes in the season include a documentary examining the alleged links between the gun culture and rap music, another about the source of illicit arms and Sons And Guns, about the mothers of men murdered in gang-related killings in Manchester. In the new £97 million BBC2 autumn season, the corporation promises to focus on “the harsh realities of the modern world”.
Oh dear. So off the mark, you can’t even see the target…
I think it safe to say that all those people in the British political and media classes who want this country to be ‘more European’ have good cause to feel quietly satisfied today because parts of Britain are, indeed, starting to resemble East Germany:
The image of hundreds of people queuing to register with an NHS dentist provided a stark reminder of the problems people encounter in finding an NHS dentist, experts say.
They need ‘experts’ to tell them this?
The queue was prompted by the announcement that a practice in Carmarthen, Wales, could take on 300 more patients – but many more were hoping to register.
The TV news has now picked up on this story and are reporting that over 600 people turned up in the hope of getting state dental treatment. They lined up along the street and had to be issued with lottery tickets in order to prevent disputes breaking out. Over half of them were turned away.
Dr John Renshaw of the British Dental Association told BBC News Online: “That picture evoked a Third World country, where you have to queue to access what ought to be part of NHS care.”
No, that picture evoked life behind the Iron Curtain where people queued up all day to get a meal. And for the same reasons!
I used to be a Mr Angry of Henley-On-Thames, whenever I listened to Radio Pravda’s Today program, but now I listen strictly for laughs, particularly since the New Labour machine and the BBC started sniping at each other, in their bloody marxist schism. And today did we have a humdinger.
Their reporter, Nicola Stanbridge, went out with some Environment Agency rubbish inspectors (no, I’m afraid I’m not kidding), to find out what they’ve been getting up to, out there in the real world, on their taxpayer-funded salaries. It turns out that organised crime is now running massive fly-tipping operations, in the UK, as it gets rid of waste for cash-strapped companies more cheaply than “proper” waste disposal agencies. I can’t remember the text, word for word, but it went something like this:
Reporter: So here we are in Birmingham, standing on a pile of smelly fly-tipped rubbish. What are we looking for?
Rubbish Inspector: Any refuse with names and addresses on it, like water bills.
Reporter: What do you do with it?
Rubbish Inspector: We bag it, and tag it, and then invite those named to an interview, under caution, where we investigate why their names and addresses have been found in illegally fly-tipped rubbish. If they cannot provide a satisfactory explanation, we prosecute them.
Okay, so far, it wasn’t too bad, at least, not for a draconian state like the UK with civil “servants” who love threatening people, and a country mired in increasing petty regulation, with 1 in 4 of the working population engaged in “services” for the government. And I’ve no love for organised criminals, particularly those who dump hazardous waste onto private property. But then it got really interesting, as back in the studio, they interviewed the chief executive of the Environment Agency (I bet that’s a nice salary). The Today programme wanted to know why this had only become a problem in the last few years. This was the gist of the reply: → Continue reading: Terminator IV: Rise of the rubbish inspectors
‘The British police are the best in the world’.
Believe it or not, that was a phrase I heard all the time when I was growing up. It was repeated so often and with such unshakeable conviction that it practically entered the folklore. The police were seen as the very embodiment of the British belief in ‘firmness but fairness’ and their stewardship of a remarkably pacific country was as much a given feature of life as clement weather or fertile topsoil.
I do not know whether or not it has ever been true but I can understand the reasons why it was so widely believed. There was a time when the British police were charged with enforcing reasonable laws (in what was equally widely assumed to be the ‘freest country in the world’) and they managed to do so with reasonable efficiency while maintaining a public image of politeness and deference. British ‘bobbies’ were seen as less ‘trigger-happy’ and ‘gung-ho’ than their US counterparts and less corrupt and brutal than their European ones.
Does this axiom hold water today? Someone should ask the staff of Huntingdon Life Sciences:
Staff who work for HLS, the animal laboratory, have been under attack for four years. But the violence is about to become a lot worse, reports Andrew Alderson
On Thursday, 1,200 company employees will be sent a short, factual e-mail by their management. It will warn them that animal rights activists are planning a 48-hour weekend of action from midnight on August 1 and staff should take extra care over their safety at home.
For two days and nights, employees of Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS) will face an even greater likelihood of having bricks thrown through their windows, their cars covered in paint-stripper, incendiary devices put through their letter boxes and hooded men attacking them as they walk from the car to the front door.
→ Continue reading: Left twisting in the wind
All governments love boasting about their achievements and HMG is no exception. A particular favourite boast for the current lot is how many jobs they have created since they came to power. Sounds good, doesn’t it.
But there is a whole world of difference between job creation and wealth creation. In fact, the two things can be mutually exclusive:
Labour has hired 344,000 extra people to work for the Government since it took office, with the state now employing 5.3m people, or one in five of the workforce, according to figures released yesterday.
Until Labour was elected, the government payroll had fallen for 15 years, mostly thanks to the privatisations of the 1980s, but that is now being reversed by a massive public spending spree funded from tax rises.
Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are overseeing a hiring bonanza. Hundreds of thousands are joining the public sector, especially in the National Health Service, where 160,000 more staff have been taken on. The NHS now employs about 1.3m people, reputed to be more than any other civilian organisation in the world apart from the Indian railway.
If those people working in the shrinking private sector want to know exactly why they have to hand over more of their income and savings every year to their government, I suggest that they look here for an answer.
Tony Martin, a farmer jailed five years for the “crime” of shooting two burglars – but only managing to kill one – has been set free.
His case is so notorious even the present government is considering changes in the law. On tonight’s news there was intimation of a new law to ban nonsense suits by criminals against defending homeowners. There may even be a broadening of the UK legal definition of self-defense.
Under current standards in the UK, self-defense is almost non-existent, so anything is a vast improvement.
Lift a jar or three to the heroic farmer Martin tonight! Later, when you visit the bog and return them from whence they came, do so in remembrance of the unmanned and unfortuneately surviving second thief.
Our Revered Leader Perry de Havilland has been telling us in conversation that our postings here are better than they were in the early days of this blog. I’m sure I hope so, and I believe that something similar may also apply to David Farrer over at Freedom and Whisky.
His latest posting is a particularly choice item, based on an equally choice story in the Sunday Herald, about a potential collision between ramblers in Scotland and trains in Scotland, caused by an actual collision between “Right to Roam” legislation and the decision to bring charges of Corporate Manslaughter against six of Britain’s railway ex-bosses for an earlier prang.
The railway infrastructure has been taken out of the hands of shareholders and into the safekeeping of selfless (sic) public servants. Surely this kind of mix-up shouldn’t occur. Don’t tell me that there’s something wrong with socialism! In the meantime the local council is forcing open the gates over the tracks and Network Rail is locking them up again.
The folk at Network Rail are – wisely – looking out for number one:
“If people are serious about crossing live railways, the safest way is by underpass or bridge and somebody has to fund that – and it’s not going to be the railway because it’s not our responsibility. The responsibility must either rest with councils or central government.”
Dave Fordwych, the Sunday Herald man, thinks both policies are foolishness, but David has the answer to the problem:
I think that a solution may be found if the Secretary of State for Transport, Alistair Darling, has a quiet word with the Secretary of State for Scotland who is, er, Alistair Darling.
And I thought that Rod Liddle, in his recent Spectator piece about the Kelly Affair had been joking about …
… the day that Tony Blair announced his embarrassing and botched Cabinet reshuffle, the one where people suddenly found out that they were simultaneously Secretary of State for Transport and Scotland.
David adds a personal recollection to the effect that Darling seems inclined already towards talking to himself.
Funnily enough, the only time I have ever seen Mr Darling, my own MP, was on an aeroplane flying from London to Edinburgh and, yes, he was talking to himself.
“Joined up government” is what David calls his posting. You can’t get much more joined up than this. But, it doesn’t seem to be working very well.
Interesting news emerges from the crumbling Blair regime, of Downing Street’s education supremo, Andrew Adonis. Charged with the task of persuading Britain’s higher earning tax serfs to abandon the private education sector, to throw their children into the mind-numbing morass of the Guardian-reader dominated state “education” sector — I prefer the term “serf-provision” sector — it appears Mr Adonis is himself considering the hideous evils of going private.
In a plausibly deniable way, he’s thinking of sending his son to the fee-paying, and German government subsidised, Deutsche Schule. The words self-deluding and fraudster spring to mind. But coming from a government already boasting the services of Lord Falconer, the crony who failed to become a Labour MP because of his honest refusal to stop using private schools, and who reached the heady heights of ministerial office despite the wretched idleness of several hundred elected Labour backbenchers, it may instead reveal the often hidden mental pattern of the rest of our lords and masters.
For in their world, they are our noble shepherds, and we are their humble sheep. They lead and we follow. And do not the sheep need corrals, or comprehensives, to pen them in, to teach them how to eat grass, grow wool, and be sheared? And do not the leaders, and their offspring our future leaders, need the marble Platonic academy at the top of the hill, to teach them the ways of their glorious guardianship of our otherwise free-market wolf-infested lives? They deserve it, for all the christian sacrifices they’ve made, taking from our backs all of our painful burdens of choice and freedom, and bearing them on our behalf, as Jesus did with his cross. Does not the word “Adonis” itself mean “Lord”, in biblical Greek?
And what better an academy than a German-speaking school, to prepare the new aristocracy’s new baby aristocrats with a correct language specification for the century ahead, in an EU world based upon the magnificent Rhineland economic model? A private education subsidised by the taxpayers of Britain, who toil to pay your inflated wages, and the taxpayers of Germany, who your son will one day rule over as part of the expansive rentier establishment? Marvellous. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer hypocrite.
Samizdata hasn’t done all that much reporting of or commentary on the Kelly Affair and related matters, so the least we can do is nod humbly towards those who have done more, such as these persons in interesting posts like this, and this guy, David Steven. I’ve no time for more now as I am soon to be out socialising, but this piece, about Andrew Gilligan‘s track record during the Iraq War, is a classic example of the power of the blogosphere, first because the material which David Steven is analysing itself first appeared on a BBC Blog, and second, because of how good an influential this particular piece has been.
Did the BBC realise quite what a hostage to fortune it would be to allow their foreign correspondents to just say whatever they liked, and have it all up there permanently on the record? They already know that if they tamper retrospectively with more stuff, that only gets them into more trouble.
(Someone recently blogged about a case of the BBC surreptitiously adding some distancing quotes to some outrageous piece of Stalinoid nonsense which it had presented as straight fact, after a blogger had already quoted it as an example of their bias, but I can’t remember who tells this story. Helpful comment please.)
We’ve been, as I say, a bit behind the story here, but I think I can feel a feeding frenzy beginning to develop about the BBC, not unlike the one that did such serious things not so long ago to the New York Times.
I think the vital change has not been the complaining that’s long been going on here. What has changed is the American attitude. 9/11 did so many things, and one of them was to cause Americans to pay more attention not just to the big wide world out there, but also to the most influential organisations, theirs and other peoples’, that have for decades been reporting it.
And I wonder if the BBC saw that one coming on 9/12.
It would not surprise me in the least if an internal memo had been circulated around all departments of HMG reminding staff to spend at least some part of their day rummaging down the backs of sofas and armchairs and remitting all and any recovered coinage to the Treasury. I honestly think they must be getting that desperate for money.
From the UK Times (so no link):
THE home secretary wants to add a £35 surcharge to fixed penalty notices, such as parking tickets and speeding fines, to boost the state compensation fund for victims of crime, leaked cabinet papers reveal.
The controversial move, approved by Gordon Brown, the chancellor, will be seen as another Labour stealth tax.
The “victims’ surcharge” would apply to a range of misdemeanours, including motoring offences, littering, dog fouling and graffiti as well as yobbish or drunken behaviour. The extra £35 would be added to the fixed penalty.
It won’t be ‘seen’ as another ‘stealth tax, it is another bloody stealth tax and one that will, as per usual, fall almost entirely onto the shoulders of the middle-classes, the property owning, the business-running and the law-abiding. But they are precisely the people HMG wants to target because, simply, they are the people who actually have something to take. The threat to exact the ‘surcharge’ from petty criminals is pure fantasy as such people seldom pay the fines that are already imposed on them and typically do not have the means to do so.
The promise to use this money for ‘victims of crime’ is, I’m afraid, yet another howler. Just as with the Road Fund Licence (which was introduced on the promise that the collected revenue was going to go solely to road construction and maintenance) the extra revenue will quickly get swept into the general tax take where it is urgently needed to prop up the failing public sector.
However there is something apposite about calling this a ‘victims of crime’ fund because, in a way, it is chillingly accurate. The ‘victims’ being anybody in this country with something to lose and the criminals being their own government.
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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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