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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A quite splendid editorial in the Telegraph from George Trefgarne:
If Mr Blair signs the European constitution – which he seems determined to do – it will, as far as I can see, be the end of Britain as a serious independent power. It will also lead to the gradual redesigning of our institutional framework.
The euro beckons. Taxation and regulation would increase as we tilted towards the European social democratic model. Judging by the woes of Germany and France, economic growth would be lower and unemployment higher.
I can add little except a recommendation that the whole article be read in order to fully appreciate the monumental folly that Tony Blair seems determined to commit.
Every so often (and it doesn’t happen often enough for my liking) the British public remind us of the yawning gap between received wisdom and wisdom.
Ever since the 1940’s it has been a core article of faith among the left (and more than a few Conservatives I might add) that services like healthcare and education can only be provided for the masses by central government and funded by general taxation. They even have the gall to denounce alternative models as ‘unworkable’.
Well, if the results of this survey are anything to go by, that canard may be reaching the end of its shelf-life:
Voters are prepared to pay for health insurance if it guarantees them better and faster care, according to a ground-breaking new poll that suggests the public is far more open to radical ideas than politicians realise.
The survey finds strong support among taxpayers for a range of controversial policy alternatives, including giving parents the right to choose private schools for their children and American-style “zero tolerance” policing.
I wonder if there is still ‘strong support’ for British-style “zero tolerance” for self-defence?
The poll appears to contradict the Prime Minister’s claim that voters are opposed to health and education solutions that allow individuals to decide where their money is spent.
And it would also appear to contradict my long-held belief that the British public would never relinquish their single-minded devotion to the National Health Service. The day when consumer expectation finally outstrips the ability of the state to keep up with it may be closer than I had imagined.
[EU for Britain has] been more like getting mixed up with the mafia. First it’s an innocent poker game, then some girls show up, then you need to borrow some money, next thing you know a beefy fellow in a string t-shirt is giving your kneecaps a non-therapeutic massage, and you’re wondering, “Hey, I just wanted to play a little poker. Where did these concrete overshoes come from?”
– T. Hartin’s comment on a Samizdata post
Home Secretary, David Blunkett, has gained Cabinet approval to push forward his plans, for compulsory ‘Magic Eye’ ID cards, for all British citizens.
Ladies and Gentlemen, we are entering the abyss.
Clare Short, who resigned as international development secretary in the aftermath of the Iraq war, said Mr Blair should pass on the leadership before things got “even nastier”.
Christopher Lee must have died and gone to heaven, when Peter Jackson offered him the role of Saruman, in Jackson’s stupendous Lord of the Rings film trilogy. Having read the book, many times, Lee will have appreciated every single nuance, every single eyebrow movement, and every single evil grin, of the grotesque Saruman character, as this Maian angel descended into a Sauronian hell, within the mortal clutches of Middle-Earth.
Like many other sad people, sexually unfulfilled in the desperate years of teenage, I also wade through the pages of the masterly Lord of the Rings, every year, to try to cure myself from the terrible memories of all those laughing girls, who walked away from the spot-ridden boy. Or at least, every other year; I now alternate it with the Silmarillion. → Continue reading: Clare gets nasty
Our Glorious Leader has been setting out his vision for the future:
Tony Blair told middle Britain yesterday that it would face a series of new charges for pensions, university education and transport if Labour won a third term in power.
He said new ways had to be found to pay for parts of the welfare state that had traditionally been provided free from general taxation.
Even Mr.Blair now has to admit that the fabian socialist dream of services being free at point of supply is now unsustainable and new arrangements have to be made. In future, people have are going to have the buy the services and commodities that, hitherto, they believed were going to be supplied by the ‘gubbament’.
Well good. That is as it should be. Provided, of course, it is matched by a commensurate and hefty decrease in taxation. But it won’t be and that is the big catch. Instead taxation levels will continue to rise in order to fund a ballooning state bureaucracy. In other words, everybody (but especially the middle classes) is going to be forced to pay twice.
The British keep voting for politics and now they are going to have to pay the bill.
It is Friday evening and blogging about British politics and the Conservative Party was the last thing on my mind. However, this post appearing on Samizdata.net below cannot be left without a calm, measured and reasoned response it deserves. What the f***?! Conservatives?! Libertarian?! A viable alternative?!
After checking the post for any undercurrents of sarcasm, I am still confused. This is due to the words Conservatives and libertarian appearing in the same context. The Tory party is a bunch of stale, narrow-minded and arrogant statists who believe that if everyone was a good chap…there, there…things would go just swimmingly and they would not have to try too hard and use their brains.
Libertarianism is a dirty word to them, diversity means more illegal immigrants, freedom is predicated on the fact that everyone just comes round to their point of view and their confidence is based on arrogance. In case you missed it, I do not rate the Tory party highly. There is very little difference between them and the New Labour, apart from the latter being much better at public relations and spin.
Philosophically, the Tories are as libertarian and exciting as a schoolmaster on valium. Their position on Europe is still confused, their views about taxation not very inspiring, what with NHS and education still being considered bottomless pits for taxpayers’ money, the BBC would be untouchable if it was not biased against them and individualism is something that does not happen to most people.
Unfortunately, there is no such thing as fixed political competency, i.e. if one political party goes bad, the other improves. And so, as the Labour party is stumbling into a disaster of its own making, the Tories are certainly not meeting them on the way up. I do not know what the alternative to Labour is in the current political layout, but the Conservatives are certainly not it.
And for all those concerned, Samizdata.net shall never be a slave to any adjectives.
Update: BBC to replace Tories as “official opposition” .
Brian Micklethwait is right to say that the government is falling apart. It has faced revolts from its own party on foxhunting, Iraq and foundation hospitals. It is seen by many as having misled the people about the reasons for the Iraq war. Hospitals and schools are in crisis despite having more money than ever. National Rail is a bottomless pit. The payment of Tax Credits has been a disaster. Now the government is lurching even more to the Left, introducing draconian employment laws to appease its backbenchers. As for Europe, the government has completely failed to get a grip: it keeps on saying that it will not give in on items in European treaties, but each time it does exactly that.
The reality is that government is not just incompetent, it is a walking disaster. John Major’s Conservative Party might have had its problems, but it was never this bad. The Third Way is rarely heard of these days. Like a drunk, Labour’s Way involves stumbling all over the road.
Yet there is an alternative. There is one major party that broadly promotes libertarian ideas. It vocally states that we are overtaxed and over-regulated; that the European Constitution and Euro are wrong for Britain; that government-control of healthcare and education does not work; that the BBC’s business model needs “examining”; and that individuals should be free to make their own choices about their lives.
What is the name of this libertarian party?
Conservative.
With his surname partially derived from the Gods, and his standing as an Englishman of Scottish descent, you may already know I love Iain Duncan Smith, beyond the edge of reason. But yesterday, in Prague, he ripped open his long silence, on the European issue, and moved to lead the Europe-wide revolt against the long-planned socialist super state. Which, for those of us in the “Get out of Here” Euro-nexus, within the Tory party, is excellent news; it confirms our faith, in why we voted him in, as leader.
As the Maastricht rebel leader strutted his stuff, he even picked up a favourable review from Alastair Campbell’s scoop-favoured creatures on The Sun. Trevor Kavanagh, their maverick political commentator, feared by the Downing Street lie machine, and a man, by order of Rupert, beyond the reach of Labour-supporting editor Rebekah Wade, also said about Duncan Smith:
Europe will hear him and Britain will agree
In my opinion, IDS is the bravest man, in British politics, from the entire period of the last 30 years. Can you imagine having woken up, every morning, for the last two years, and then been forced to view the world through his semi-oriental eyes? He has been vilified, pilloried, and humiliated, in every newspaper, on every Channel 4 news programme, and on every BBC web page — virtually every single day — for being a charisma-less, hopeless, and witless fool. But he has come through this burning fire, to nudge ahead of Phoney Tony in the polls, much to the incredulous bafflement of the New Labour-Guardian-BBC aristocracy, which rules this once glorious, and sceptred isle.
It’s a fragile lead, admittedly, and there’s still a lot more work for IDS to finish, to cement it in; even assuming it’s not Gordon Brown who ends up as the initial beneficiary, from Tony’s fall; and yes, it’s a shame about that bovine statism, inherent within the general Tory Party; and yes, I would prefer a straight decision to just get out of the EU Dodge City, right now. But on the topic of Iain Duncan Smith, army officer and gentleman; I am a believer.
From the Samizdata last week on the English regional assemblies:
This is not a devolution of power and decision-making, this is a retrenchment of power at the top; a mere administrative reshuffle to create yet another fantastically expensive tier of labyrinthine bureaucracy in what amounts to nothing more than giant job-creation scheme for technocrats, busybodies and form-fillers. Nobody is going to gain more control over their own lives and no community is going to have any more local power bestowed upon it. It is just another greasy pole for the social-working class to climb up.
To the Spectator this week on the English regional assemblies:
In theory, stronger regional government might seem like a good idea, serving to counter the centralising instincts of Whitehall and the parochialism of town halls. But in practice it does not work out like that. All that happens is that we end up having to fork out for another lot of party careerists and pointless bureaucrats, while the Civil Service and municipalities carry on as before. And so, with no real role to perform, the new regional bodies create endless work for themselves to justify their own existences, desperately hyping up every one of their unwanted initiatives and reports.
And from Samizdata on the role of Brussels:
The regional assemblies are being created as civilian Gauleiters in order to ensure that the laws and directives of the EU Commission are administered and enforced at local level and to jockey with each for the chunks of redistributed largesse handed out by the various arms of the Euro-state. Their job is not to represent the will of the people to those in power, it is to ensure that the will of those in power is applied to the people.
To the Spectator on the role of Brussels:
Regionalism is part of an insidious agenda to end the nation state, so Britain can more easily slot into the new United States of Europe. Brussels, hope Euro-enthusiasts, will be able to bypass national governments and instead work directly with the regional assemblies. Indeed, one of the favourite phrases of the European Commission is ‘a Europe of the regions’.
This could be the start of a consensus.
In this posting I want to pull together all the reasons for thinking that the “New Labour” project may now be unravelling, and unravelling so seriously that there is a real possibility that they might even lose the next general election. There is no one cause of this phenomenon, just lots of things coming together.
My first because deals head-on with the – I presume – widespread American belief that … well, how could we not love Tony Blair? But there are many other becauses now assembling themselves, and the list that follows is surely not exhaustive:
Because being popular in the USA doesn’t necessarily make you popular in your own country. Like Thatcher and Gorbachev before him, Tony Blair is now revered by many Americans, but this doesn’t make him any more liked here. If anything, probably rather less so. Being thought of as a Prime Minister who is more concerned to play the world statesman than to grapple with the actual problems on your own desk is not a plus. Prime Minister Callaghan never recovered from the public perception (“Crisis? What crisis?”) of him as a man who didn’t care about his own country’s problems because they were too boring and too intractable. Blair is flirting with the same stuff now.
Because now fewer and fewer people are Labour or are Conservative, they merely vote Labour or Conservative. Party membership of all parties is now tiny. When there’s a shift of voter mood, such shifts can be bigger than they used to be, because more people are willing to switch. Even majorities like the current Labour one can vanish, as quickly as they arrived. → Continue reading: Labour could lose the next general election because …
The BBC’s political editor Andrew Marr has reported that “senior Government sources” believed that weapons of mass destruction would never be found in Iraq.
Oh dear.
Now let me state my position. I was all for the war against Iraq, and still believe the UK took the right decision to go in, with our US allies, to remove its disgraceful socialist dictatorship. But spare a thought for poor old Tony. He had to convince all of those Guardian readers, and all of those who marched against his policy, as well as those of us who’d already decided the rules changed, when two hijacked planes flew into the twin towers.
So Tony spiced things up, a bit. And thereby hoisted himself on the petard of WMD. And now he’s beginning to twist on it, ever so slightly, in the wind. In the last two days, in a subtle, nay, almost undetectable, change of emphasis, he’s abandoned the line of saying the weapons will be found. He is now saying, quite categorically, that evidence of the weapons will be found.
Now weapons of mass destruction are one thing — a bit of plutonium here, a bit of uranium centrifuge there — but evidence? What constitutes evidence? An old copy of the Cairo Times, with a handwritten Arabic scrawl on the back, saying ‘The Fist of God is in place, Sire’. Will that do? I suppose that depends on either how many people in GCHQ can write Arabic, or whether you’re a fan of Frederik Forsyth.
But the interesting thing is this. Did you spot the change of emphasis, when Blair switched to it on Tuesday? I must fess up, and say I didn’t. He’s a slippery devil.
But those nice kind clever people, at the BBC, did, bless them. Isn’t self-inflicted fratricide, between lefties, simply excellent entertainment.
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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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