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I was struck by two contrasting emotions upon reading this editorial in the Telegraph. First, pleasant surprise that views of such obvious common sense have found their expression in a major British news organ but, secondly, dismay that this fact should come as a pleasant surprise at all.
“Since the Government’s “total ban” five years ago, there are more and more guns being used by more and more criminals in more and more crimes. Now, in the wake of Birmingham’s New Year bloodbath, there are calls for the total ban to be made even more total: if the gangs refuse to obey the existing laws, we’ll just pass more laws for them not to obey. According to a UN survey from last month, England and Wales now have the highest crime rate of the world’s 20 leading nations. One can query the methodology of the survey while still recognising the peculiar genius by which British crime policy has wound up with every indicator going haywire – draconian gun control plus vastly increased gun violence plus stratospheric property crime.”
For those of us who knew only too well that this was going to be the result of the absurd and destructive war on self-defence there is a certain amount of satisfaction to be had from having been proved right. But, equally, a mounting despair at the seemingly wilful refusal of most Britons to learn from, or even acknowledge, the evidence that is staring them smack, bang in the face.
Even now, the straightforward truths expressed in this leader would be totally absent from the thoughts of any British journalist and even if that were not so, I suspect none would dare put them into print. We have Mark Steyn to thank for this serice.
“After Dunblane, the police and politicians lapsed into their default position: it’s your fault. We couldn’t do anything about him, so we’ll do something about you. You had your mobile nicked? You must be mad taking it out. Why not just keep it inside nice and safe on the telephone table? Had your car radio pinched? You shouldn’t have left it in the car. House burgled? You should have had laser alarms and window bars installed. You did have laser alarms and window bars but they waited till you were home, kicked the door in and beat you up? You should have an armour-plated door and digital retinal-scan technology. It’s your fault, always. The monumentally useless British police, with greater manpower per capita on higher rates of pay and with far more lavish resources than the Americans, haven’t had an original idea in decades, so they cling ever more fiercely to their core ideology: the best way to deal with criminals is to impose ever greater restrictions and inconveniences on the law-abiding.”
It may seem bizarre these days, but I grew up believing and parrotting the lockstep axiom that the British police ‘are the best in the world’. It is an assertion that may appear obnoxiously arrogant but, considering how things used to be, may be understandable. There was a time when the British police were charged with enforcing laws that were, for the most part, sensible and it was a task to which they devoted their energies with commendable vigour all whilst remaining routinely unarmed and fostering a public perception that they were both honourable and decent. → Continue reading: The sleep of reason
Theodore Dalrymple is a pseudonym used by British psychiatric doctor-cum-commentator, Anthony Daniels. A man with a tangibly Burkean Conservative mind, he wades hip-deep through the detritus of inner-city Britain, surveying a wasteland that stretches as far as his eyes can see.
Not surprisingly he has a rather jaundiced view of this country. Indeed, so relentlessly pessimistic are his columns and books that one wonders whether a majority of readers end up by being his patients.
However, being gloomy does not necessarily mean the same as being wrong. While other talking heads, both of the left and of the right, mount their various hobbyhorses and gallop off furiously to nowhere in particular, Dalrymple has hit the big nail resolutely on the head with a dire warning about the Nazification of Britain:
“I grew up believing that it couldn’t happen here; that the intrinsic decency, good sense and ironical detachment of the British would have precluded Nazism or anything like it from taking root in our sceptred isle. Now I am not so sure. Utter vileness does not need a numerical majority to become predominant in a society. The Nazis never had an electoral majority in Germany, yet Germany offered very little resistance to their barbarism. Of course, it is highly unlikely that history would repeat itself in anything approximating the same form; but evil, unlike good, is infinitely multiform. We can invent our own totalitarian evil. There is little doubt that we have prepared the ground very well for evil’s triumph.”
Just as the Germans had prepared the ground by the construction of the top-down Bismarckian state. Both citizens and civil servants obeyed the orders of their political masters without question because that is what they had become used to doing. The nature of the orders, or the consequences of their execution, were not subject to any meaningful moral analysis or challenge.
“Whenever I have dealings with British bureaucrats, an insistent question is at the back of my mind: is there any order you would refuse to obey? From my observations of their conduct, my guess is that, in general, there isn’t; that they would prefer mass slaughter to the loss of their jobs and that, in the event of a post facto trial, all of them would fall back on the old excuse, I was only obeying orders.”
From my own career as a practising lawyer, I can only concur. No regulation is too ridiculous or damaging not to be zealously enforced or robotically obeyed. In this. much of Britain’s professional class collaborate. It is simply too dangerous and career-damaging not too. The consequences of dissent are financial ruin, so there is no dissent.
“Recently, I received a circular headed New Ethnic Categories that began with the words, ‘As you may know, we are required to monitor the ethnic origins of our staff.’ Who was this ‘we’ of whom the circular spoke: no names, only ‘The Human Resources Unit’ (Orwell could have done no better). And no decent reason for this fascistic practice was given; the ‘we are required’ being the final and irrefutable argument in its favour. Again it is a fair bet that not a single peep of protest was uttered in the office of the ‘Human Resources Unit’ when this circular was sent round.”
→ Continue reading: The Nazification of Britain
Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott plans to restrict the right of council tenants to buy their homes. This is very encouraging to me as it is a policy calculated to remind the large ‘new bourgeoise’ of former ‘working class’ people with aspirations to become property owners just how out of sync a socialist meta-context is with their real lives.
The problem is now that some tenants have bought their homes at big discounts, and then sold them on to property companies, who in turn sell them on at a profit.
Yes, shocking. When ‘working class’ people (a largely empty term when in reality the majority of British society is utterly bourgeois) make too much money, they start getting strange notions that they should be allowed to keep it and that is clearly something the Labour Party needs to stamp on! The notion of poor people turning a big fat profit by engaging in capitalist activities like selling their own property is anathema to a party which exists to dole out other people’s stolen money to a supplicant class.
In a manner which is actually technically more in tune with the fascist variant of socialism, they are happy for people to ‘own’ private property’ (e.g. such as allowing a person to purchase their council house), but if they then dispose of that ‘private’ property for their personal benefit in a manner not in accordance with ‘national objectives’, that is seen as an ‘abuse’. Which is to say, Labour shares the fascist view that private property is just fine, particularly the bit in which the former council tenant pays the council for the property… provided it does not actually then mean the new ‘owner’ in reality controls the thing he has just paid for.
Economically at least, modern regulatory statism has a large streak of fascist thinking at its core and this is an good example of that sensibility at work.
Gun crime continues to rise in Britain, with two young girls shot dead
at a party last night.
Perhaps Britain should ban all handguns. Oh, that’s right… they already are banned. So let’s ban… I dunno… let’s ban something else… toy guns, just like they are in Sweden! That will do the trick!
It has just gone midnight here in the UK and so I will begin by extending my very best wishes to all our readers for a happy, healthy and prosperous New year. Sadly, I suspect it will not be peaceful.
However, there is some good news to be had. The BBC TV teletext news service (no link, sorry) is reporting the result of a nationwide survey of parents the result of which is that a relatively whopping thirty one percent are considering home-schooling. The reason given was the growing disillusionment with the current education system.
Since this is not the kind of news the BBC would wish to propogandise about, it may just be an accurate reflection on the way Britain is moving on this issue.
For about the last six or seven years I have been reminding whoever would listen that there is nothing pre-ordained about the survival as a serious force in Britain’s affairs of the Conservative Party. It could disappear without trace. Now I find myself making the equally (now) controversial point that it might not disappear. That isn’t pre-ordained either.
I have a theory about the Conservative predicament. It’s basically guesswork and could prove entirely wrong, but here goes.
The plight of the Conservatives is basically punitive. People hated their nastiness and then their nastiness and their incompetence (a particularly lethal combination) and decided to make the bastards suffer. For as long as arrogant, careerist bastard idiots continued to regard the Conservatives as an appropriate focus of their pathetic careerist fantasies, the voters would go on humiliating them. It would feature them as pathetic villains in girlie fiction who would in due course have to make way for PC wildlife photographers in the affections of the heroines. It would sneer at them relentlessly on the BBC. It would regard Conservatives as worse than motorbike freak drug addicts as potential boyfriends for their daughters in old-fashioned suburban TV sitcoms. It would trash them so mercilessly that even they, the Conservatives, would realise that something was seriously and probably permanently wrong, public affectionwise, with their social situation.
→ Continue reading: Happy new year to everyone… and maybe even to the Conservatives!
I can’t imagine that HMG enacts legislation with a view to spawning a whole new line of British pulp fiction novels and crime thrillers but it certainly sounds like it:
“New powers allowing police and customs officers to seize criminals’ assets come into force on Monday.
The Proceeds of Crime Act will mean that money can be confiscated from all types of criminals and not just drug dealers, as previous laws allowed.”
‘All types of criminals’?. Only the financially successful ones surely?
The Proceeds of Crime Act referred to in the article has established the Civil Assets Recovery Agency (CARA) as a branch of the police force empowered to confiscate assets from those ‘suspected’ of criminal activity.
“The new act will enable police and customs officers to search for cash anywhere in the UK and not just at the country’s borders as was previously allowed.
From now on they’ll be able to crash into your home and root around the sofa looking for lost coins. Don’t laugh, you can pick up quite a lot of money like that.
“Even when there is no criminal prosecution a new assets recovery agency can now step in.”
Which is to say, they can target anyone they want whenever they like and for reasons they will never have to prove and whilst that all sounds (and is) scary enough, I have every reason to believe that it is HMG that will regret this in the long run.
Most nominally law-abiding, work-a-day citizens will not be targeted and, consequently, will bask in blissful ignorance. No so the drug-runners and gangsters, who will be only too aware of it (they are always far better versed in the law than most citizens and quite a few lawyers) and the smart ones will regard CARA as a corruption charter. For relatively low-paid public officials, the lure of easy cash, cars or luxury goods is something to which they can all too easily become addicted. Processing law-breakers through the justice system is difficult and time-consuming. Surely much more tempting to let the gangsters get on with doing whatever it is they do and live off the earnings.
This isn’t about the government stopping criminals; this is about the government getting into bed with criminals. It’s a scriptwriters dream.
I am back in the warm embrace of the West – the weather being considerably warmer in London than in Bratislava.  I shall write more about my ‘adventures’ abroad, suffice to say that towards the end of my trip I was genuinely looking forward to coming back home.
The politics and the public life in Eastern European countries usually make me appreciate the subtlety(!) of British politics, but my first encounter with the news in Britain quickly dispelled any reluctant appreciation of developed western democracy. The most upsetting development is the tax rises awaiting the British taxpayers in 2003 or as Francis Elliott of the Sunday Telegraph calls it, a ‘triple whammy’, which could add up to as much as £1,200 per family:
- A one per cent rise in National Insurance
- An average seven per cent rise in council tax
- Congestion charges in major cities
According to the same article, taxes are rising more steeply in Britain than in any other European country, while in America, the tax burden has fallen in recent years by 0.7 percent to 29.8 percent.
As Maurice Fitzpatrick of Tenon, a national accountancy firm puts it:
“This is the year that Labour will break cover as tax-raisers. People will feel a direct impact for the first time. In the past, the Government has been chipping away at the margins. This time, it will be a straightforward assault.”
I suppose Labour has no need to fear the opposition anymore, as the Tories oscillate between moribund and ridiculous. Their feeble and seriously confused proposals to reduce public spending by ‘saving’ money confirm just how clueless the Conservatives in Britain are:
“It’s too early to say how much [public spending can be reduced], but it could be up to 20 per cent. There is waste going on all over the place. It’s completely ridiculous. Everywhere there is a massive spraying of money, without it actually delivering anything.”
Shock, horror, Mr Flight. And you are going to sort it out how exactly? By setting up commitees of advisors to find ways of simplifying the tax system, and by providing government support for company directors who set up employee share schemes as a way of promoting ‘democractic capitalism’!?
Oh, and first let your comrades know, because they were very surprised to hear about this.
“We had a memo about this in November but since then, nothing. When I heard about it on the radio you could say I was more than a little surprised.”
Watching the Labour government unmask itself and the Conservative Party to hasten its demise, I wonder how much longer it will take for a decent opposition to emerge. Not that I put much hope into any opposition arising within the existing political meta-context or know what would make an opposition ‘decent’ under the circumstances. Any ideas?
Prompted, no doubt, by the hugely successful prohibition on the private ownership of handguns, UK police chiefs are planning a gun amnesty:
“A firearms amnesty is being planned for early in the New Year to try to reduce levels of gun crime.”
An inspired idea! I am quite sure that Britain’s urban desperados will be rushing, RUSHING down to their local police station to meekly surrender their Browning Autos and AK-47s.
“A ban on ownership of handguns was introduced in 1997 as a result of the Dunblane massacre, when Thomas Hamilton opened fire at a primary school leaving 16 children and their teacher dead.
But even since the ban, gun-related crimes have soared, with one study suggesting handgun usage had gone up by as much as 40 percent two years after the ban.”
The truly galling thing about this is conspicuous absence from the media of the various anti-gun campaigners who were infesting the airwaves barely five years ago assuring us that a complete ban on private gun ownership would reduce crime, make us all a lot safer and eradicate what they referred to as ‘gun-culture’ from Britain. Not a single one of these people have been brought back on air to be challenged or asked to explain themselves. I doubt that they ever will not least because many of them are still in government.
“The Home Office is considering a minimum five year sentence for anyone caught possessing a gun and setting up a national database and a new agency to trace illegally held weapons.”
In that paragraph, the future lies mapped out. The ‘amnesty’ will prove useless and the criminal use of guns will continue to spiral. Faced with mounting pressure to ‘do something’ the Home Office will impose minimum sentences for handgun possession of five years (or, possibly, ten years as some are arguing for). The result will be that heat-packing gangsters will be far more likely to shoot it out with the cops rather than surrender as well as more likely to ‘silence’ anyone they believe might snitch on them. I see dead people.
Because there is no foreseeable prospect of a policy re-think, I suppose that this whole horrid panoply of unintended consequences will simply have to play out. The British have a penchant for learning things the hard way.
The story so far: The Labour government which promised to nationalize the railways in 1996 has regulated (with massive public support) the private railway companies to the verge of bankrupcy. History repeating itself in other words, as this is exactly what happened between the 1880s and 1945.
What is new is the Conservative Party’s reaction? If I understand this correctly, the Conservatives believe the following:
- The government may have acted illegally in bankrupting Railtrack and in the accounting rules which allow the debt of the new company to remain outside the national debt.
- Costs are spiralling out of control in the absence of any shareholder value or accountability.
- Therefore the Conservative Party promises to leave things as they are for the foreseeable future.
I note that the world’s best railway is privately owned (Japan) and that the French government is likely to move towards privatisation soon. Having pioneered privatisation the Conservative loss of nerve means that we could soon live in the only country in the developed world without a capitalist railway system. Unless of course that the Labour government decides to re-privatise, as it is doing with the Channel Rail link.
Conservative ‘spokesperson’ Tim Collins also has this dire threat for the government:
“When there were future accidents, he would not be calling automatically for a public inquiry or saying it was the fault of the government.”
The government must be quaking in its boots with mirth. The railway fiasco of its own making will not be challenged by the opposition. The Tories are committed to matching Labour’s wasted billions.
And this is the first transport policy of that new leader with the nervous cough the Tories elected a year ago… what compromises would they make if they actually won? (aargh!)
The dependably insightful Melanie McDonagh has a refreshingly clear view of one of the two ‘Home Alone’ items currently clogging up the British media until some domestic or foreign disaster provides some real news.
In case you are unfamiliar with the story, a middle class mother in London somewhat deranged by depression walked out of her house, abandoning Rufus, her 12 year old child, leaving him to fend for himself. He managed to do so for two weeks before someone noticed and reported him to Social Services, in spite of his attempts to hide the fact of his mother’s absence. It was the fact that Rufus tried to conceal his mother’s dereliction which caught Melanie’s eye.
There is one further element of this story that stands out. It’s the villain. It’s the thing that Rufus does everything to avoid, that looms in his imagination like some sort of nightmare.
That is the fear that he will end up in the hands of Wandsworth social services. And I can’t have been alone in feeling my spirits sink at the news that Rufus ends his adventure in the hands of social workers, to whom he’s been turned in by the police, even though they pass him on to family friends rather than to an institution.
It wasn’t irrational fear that made him do anything to keep himself out of their hands. He’d been in care before – another thing that sets him apart from the other pupils at Emanuel School – for some months after his father died and his mother succumbed to depression.
Melanie McDonagh is always good at spotting the ‘off message’ angles to stories such as these. I have followed her career with interest ever since she wrote about the war in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina that was a head and a half better than most of the dreck which passed for reporting there. It has always puzzled me why she is not a better known journalist than many of the blowhard Idiotarians that infest the British media with one tenth her talent.
I’ve been busy doing normal life for the last couple of days. On Sunday I gave a Christmas party to as many of my friends as I could remember the names of and had the phone numbers of, and could round up. Sorry if you reckon you’re a friend and you weren’t invited. You probably are still, that’s if you still want to be. Anyway, first I had to get it ready, then I had to have it, then I had to recover from it, and while doing that latter thing I had also to sort out a Christmas present for my goddaughter in time for her mother to take it with her tomorrow morning to France, me having forgotten about it until now. Lucky escape there.
So this is a very quicky posting, really just to make sure that, what with Perry still being techno-blighted, David Carr knows he’s not being totally relied upon, like the mug who does all the washing up in a shared student lodging because he has the most team spirit and responsibility.
The posting consists, basically, of the most remarkable single sentence I have read on the web during the last few days of trying to find something quick to comment on here, but mostly failing, until I realised that this thing had really stuck in my head and wouldn’t go away. It first surfaced towards the end of a piece in Scotland on Sunday by Richard Northedge as long ago as Sunday 15th of this month, and it was immediately noticed and reproduced by David Farrer. Here it is:
“The Inland Revenue deals with the widest customer base in the UK. This makes us to all intends and purposes the UK’s number-one service brand.”
Customer base? Service brand? Who and what the hell do these people think they are?
What this most reminds me of is the firing squad sent to execute Captain Blackadder in the First World War manifestation of that great comedy personage enacted on British TV in recent years by Rowan Atkinson. (Blackadder Goes Forth is the generic title, and the episode is called “Private Plane”. Blackadder has been sentenced to death for killing a army message-delivering pigeon.) The firing squad are played nice. They drop by the night before to introduce themselves and to pay their respects. Their leader speaks ingratiatingly of the “terminatory service” which they supply to their “customers”.
But that was a comedy show. This creep really seems to believe that the people of Britain are “customers” for the “service” he and his pals are oh-so-sportingly providing for them. No doubt he imagines that we are all oozing with “brand loyalty” towards him and his partners in state administered robbery.
This quote captures an awful (and I do mean awful) lot about the atmosphere in Britain now, where all manner of institutions boom forth with the language of business, that is to say the language of freedom, while not in fact doing business, that is to say while actually buggering us around in ways we would never consent to if we had any choice about it.
Does this kind of crap get talked in the USA?
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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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