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My article yesterday about the Aidan Rankin piece in the Spectator, and some of the feedback in the comments section, got me thinking about the state of that magazine these days.
Frankly, it is a much diminished force, even though in raw terms it has a larger circulation than 20 years ago. I recall first reading this weekly back in the middle of the 1980s, when it had writers of elegance and dagger-sharp wit, such as the late and much missed Auberon Waugh (son of Evelyn Waugh), ex Daily Telegraph editorial writer Colin Welch (a great student of Hayek and other classical liberal writers), Ferdinand Mount and much more. There was even dear old drunken Jeffrey Bernard musing at the back of the mag about his slow vodka-assisted march towards the Grim Reaper, love of horseracing and racy women.
Alas, with the exception of the incomparable Mark Steyn and the odd individual firecracker of an article, there is more to annoy than charm about this publication today. It reached its high point, I think, when Charles Moore was editor more than 10 years ago. It has never really managed to hit the heights consistently since. It is all too often snobbish, cliched (like the Rankin article quoted above), and inexplicably still gives a perch for that old bigot, Taki.
The Spectator used to be a great sounding board for some of the more challenging ideas coming from conservative/libertarian circles. But today the magazine has lost much of its intellectual espri de corps. Instead we the likes of Matthew Parris bemoaning the demise of Saddam Hussein, for goodness sake.
I think change is needed. The current editor, Boris Johnson, is obviously too busy working as an MP and working on his role as the Young Fogey for the 21st Century to spend a lot of time improving the magazine. Something needs to be done.
I am of course far too modest to suggest a possible replacement.
We have received a number of e-mails from our readers in the past couple of days asking for our views on the decision (or, at least, attempt) by Tony Blair to abolish the office of the Lord Chancellor which he announced as a part of his cabinet reshuffle at the end of last week.
The Office of Lord Chancellor has been around for some 1400 years. He is the head and the overseer of the Judiciary and he is responsible for appointing Judges and running the Courts. But, he is also a member of the Executive as he sits in the Cabinet. He is, if you will, the interface between the Executive and the Judiciary. Some have suggested that this is a less than ideal method for ensuring judicial independence but, in fact, rigourous observance of custom has served to maintain judicial independence very effectively for a very long time.
Blair intends to abolish the Chancellor and replace him with a independent committee to appoint Judges and an ‘Office of the Constitution’ to advice the government on constitutional matters. This has all presented (to the extent that it has been explained at all) as merely the latest stage of the Blair ‘modernisation’ agenda which is intended to provide us with more accountable, responsive government…yadda, yadda, yadda.
What is not being said (but which, fortunately, is not being overlooked) is that Blair is trying to eradicate Britain’s remaining constitutional arrangements so as to render us more EU-compatible. Not to mention, of course, that the new offices are highly likely to be staffed with manipulable Blairite cronies.
However, this is not quite all going to plan. There is a hubbub from senior Judges and much of the press and Blair has been forced to give a statement explaining his actions in the House of Commons on Wednesday. Added to which, there is the possibility of a legal challenge because nobody seems quite sure whether the Prime Minister actually has the power to abolish the Lord Chancellor. As best as I can tell, the power may exist but, by custom, it has never been exercised so nobody is entirely sure if it does, in fact, exist and, if so, under what circumstances it may be exercised.
Oh it’s all a big mess and it is for that reason that we have not yet (as some or our readers inquired) plunged in with our usual robust denunciations and insights. This is just one of a whole batch of country-altering measures that the executive seems to be rushing into enactment with unseemly haste. In fact, the hits are coming so thick and so fast that it is difficult to keep up to date with it all, even for a group effort like this blog.
My take, for what it’s worth, is that all this chaos is the result of Blair’s fawning promises to Brussels. Suddenly, he has realised that we are not ‘Europeanised’ enough to be swallowed whole and hence the frantic, sweaty haste to disassemble our constitutional arrangements and render us fit to be served up to new masters. A fitting metaphor I reckon for Blair and his minsters seem as nothing more than harrassed waiters working frenetically to prepare the banquet table prior to the imminent swarm of hungry VIPs.
The day soon cometh, methinks.
The UK government has been announcing a number of changes to the membership of its Cabinet recently. Topping the news billing was the resignation of Alan Milburn, the Health Secretary. He is a key Blair ally and who had fought tooth and nail to set up “foundation hospitals”, which were a very tentative step towards making the health service more flexible. (I stress the word tentative. The change is a zillion miles from what I would like – total privatisation).
He has gone, supposedly to “spend more time with his family”, to use the hackneyed expression, according to this report by Reuters. And yet that report by Reuters does not mention the significance of Milburn’s departure at all. Why not? Blair is in trouble at the moment for the shambolic state of our public services – sure to be a future election issue – and allegedly exaggerating the WMD threat in Iraq. A key ally of his has gone. You would have thought this fact would have been noted. It surely suggests that Chancellor Gordon Brown, who was at loggerheads with Milburn, has seen off a key rival.
Be interested to see what the estimable Stephen Pollard, who has been following this issue with customary rigour, makes of all this.
British troops injured in war are being forced to pay for private medical treatment or join the long patient lists waiting for operations on the National Health Service. A staffing crisis in the Defence Medical Services (DMS) means that more than 10,000 soldiers – the equivalent of 15 infantry battalions – are currently not fit for frontline duty.
Large sections of the Army will be declared un-operational because of the number of troops waiting for surgery unless there is an emergency injection of cash. Commanding officers have been rationing the private treatment but the amount of money available to each unit for private healthcare is not enough to reduce the number of servicemen and women waiting for operations.
The Telegraph reports:
One soldier, who was injured on active duty in Afghanistan, has now been told that he faces a 12-month wait for a knee operation unless he is prepared to pay £2,000 for private treatment.
Another soldier who recently returned from Afghanistan after serving with the International Stabilisation and Assistance Force (Isaf) has been told that he will have to wait six months before he can see a specialist about his damaged ankle. He may then face a further year’s wait for an operation. He has, however, been advised that if he were to go private, he could see a specialist immediately and have the operation within three weeks.
In addition to the pain and inconvenience caused by the injuries, service personnel are “medically downgraded”, if the injury prevents them from carrying out their duties. They are unlikely to be able to undertake courses which are physically demanding and cannot be deployed on military operations. Their pay can decrease and they may be passed over for promotion until fully fit.
This is just one example of how Blair’s government is treating the armed forces. The undermining of the British military is a result of a profound distrust of it by the New Labour establishment, despite the fact that the armed forces are the only state entity that has consistently bailed the government out of its botched policies (foot and mouth crisis) and allowed Tony to play a world statesman (Afghanistan, Iraq).
Blair achieved a measure of uncritical popularity with the American public, due to his support of Bush’s determination to depose Saddam. He risked his job and support of his voters at home in order to do that. It may be commendable and we wholeheartedly supported his efforts that resulted in the liberation of Iraq. We did so without any delusions as to his statist convictions, in which near messianic zeal mixes with autocratic tendencies.
However, those on the other side of the Atlantic harbouring inflated opinions about Blair, and occassionally making preposterous comparisons of Blair to Winston Churchill or other great British statesmen, should examine the way their pet foreign leader behaves on the domestic scene. Let the Telegraph article be an eye opener to the true nature of the valiant Prime Minister Blair and his tightly led pack of ministers.
We at Samizdata.net do not trust the man further than we can throw him. So watch this space, we will be reporting on the latest development in Blair’s successful dismantling of other worthwhile British institutions.
 
Churchill Not Churchill
Here are extracts from a letter by Geoff Bean, an English dairy farmer, addressed to Steve Williamson, a “Special Enforcement Officer” of the agency in York. The York farmer bought builder’s rubble to make repairs round his farm, but received a letter stating that since his land did not have the benefit of a Waste Management Licence, this depositing of “waste” was in clear breach of the law and requesting that Mr Bean submit to a formal interview under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) to “establish” his involvement in this unlicensed waste management operation.
I am in receipt of your pompous and ill-informed letter. How dare you write to me in such terms, as if you were addressing a common criminal.
The “waste” for which he had paid good money was about to be put to valuable use replacing the floor of a barn and resurfacing his farm tracks.
Were I a one-legged homosexual Afghan refugee/terrorist living on the welfare state, you and your ilk would not dare write in such a manner for fear of having all the human rights lawyers in creation round your necks, but as you are speaking to an honest, hard-working and overstressed Englishman, you appear to think you can behave like all too many of the vast and ever-increasing army of totally useless, non-productive, arrogant and bloody-minded officialdom, who are now only too successfully doing more damage to this once great and free nation than was ever achieved by Adolf Hitler.
Mr Williamson repeated that Mr Bean must submit to interview “under caution”. Mr Bean agreed to spare some of his valuable time to assist Mr Williamson in his “futile attempt” to justify his “bureaucratic red tape”, but reminded him that, since slavery in this country had been abolished, he would expect reimbursement at “£150 an hour or part thereof, plus VAT”.
That’s the spirit!
But rejoice ye not, since whether Mr Bean will face criminal charges for his breach of EU law, the agency cannot yet comment…
From Sunday Telegraph’s Christopher Booker’s Notebook
Update: If you think this is outrageous, you might want to share your thoughts with Mr Steve Williamson himself. And while you are at it, why not to cc his boss, the regional director Mr Andrew Wood. We have done a bit of research and think these email addresses will work, given the format of the Environmental Agency emails.
When I happened upon this website campaign, my first reaction was to dismiss it as a hoax. After all, in an age when political and civil discourse has been so debased by post-modern neurosis, the art of parody must respond by vaulting the high water-mark of absurdity in order to be at all effective.
But, because we live in such strange and discordant times, I have, upon further reflection, decided that the people behind reFlag are probably deadly serious. In their opinion, our Union Jack is too arcane, vulgar and embarrassing to be tolerated:
A number of countries around the globe have black in their flags to represent the colour of their people. It makes sense for the UK to have black and white in our flag, to represent the different races and cultures which make up the country at the beginning of the third millennium.
We haven’t conquered racism, nor many other forms of prejudice, but by changing the nation’s main emblem, we can reclaim the union flag from those who have hijacked it for their own ends, so that our flag reflects the diversity of the people of the UK.
So it’s out with the racist, old standard and in with the new symbol of ‘diversity’:
I don’t like it. And it certainly is not a flag to which I am going to rally any time soon or at all. Of course, one might argue that flag design is not an issue that should matter to any libertarian and that all national flags are constructs which can, and indeed do, change from time to time.
But that is to miss the point. The cause of my revulsion lies not in the symbol but in the creepy deconstructionist impulse that lies behind it (much of which is dressed up in corporate ‘re-branding’ jargon). The depths of this psychosis can perhaps best be judged by the breath-takingly hypocritical claim that the Union Jack has been ‘hijacked’ and they need to take it back. Take it back from whom, I wonder? From various obnoxious national socialists? From football hooligans? Or from the increasing numbers of quite reasonable and decent Britons who defiantly fly the flag in response to the sordid and sustained attempts of much of the establishment left to demonise it?
It is that latter group who are really taking the flag back and perhaps that is what the people behind ‘reFlag’ really fear the most. Maybe the trend they are so clearly desperate to stem is the growing general contempt for the dangerously balkanising agenda of the cultural marxists and an increased willingness to resist the tools of manipulation and social engineering through which it operates.
I cannot say for sure because there appears to be no indication on their website as to who these people are, who or what is behind them or how they are funded. So maybe it is a hoax and an elaborate one at that. Right now there may be some gang of wags guffawing in ‘ha ha gotcha’ hoots of laughter. But if it is not a hoax then perhaps these people should be flushed out into the open so that we can tell them, face-to-face, that what they are trying to do is not just silly it is dangerous. I think we should leave them in no doubt that they are vigourously fanning the very flames of conflagration that they purport to be seeking to avoid.
Or, maybe, they know full well what they are doing and conflagration is precisely what they want. Who can say?
Well, that didn’t last too long. Hot on the heels of yesterday’s moderately good news comes today’s customary bad news.
Again, I was sort of expecting this to happen and now that it has happened it proves that my ‘Glumness Meter’ is actually quite reliable:
Burglar Brendon Fearon who was shot and injured by Tony Martin has won the right to sue the jailed farmer for damages.
A judge at Nottingham County Court on Friday overturned an earlier decision which threw out his claim.
Fearon, 33, hopes to sue Martin for a reported £15,000 following his wounding during a break-in at the farmer’s home in Emneth Hungate, Norfolk, in August 1999.
Which goes to prove I suppose that you just can’t keep a bad man down and that the word ‘absurd’ is fast becoming redundant in this corner of the world.
An earlier hearing was told that Fearon, of Newark, Nottinghamshire, claimed that his injuries, which included a leg wound, had affected his ability to enjoy sex and martial arts.
Which he doubtless enjoys best when practised simultaneously. Still, I’d best temper my comments regarding Mr.Fearon lest he ‘win the right’ to come after us with a defamation suit.
“I have to take the view that there are important issues here that need to be determined and that it would be wrong, subject to other considerations, to deprive the claimant from airing his claim and having a full trial,” said District Judge Oliver.
He said that to deny Fearon the right to his claim could contravene the burglar’s rights under Section 6 of the Human Rights Convention.
I must be honest, when I first heard the term ‘burglar’s rights’ being bandied about I thought it must be some kind of blogosphere joke or a bit of British tabloid ribbing. Turns out they actually mean it. I should have known better than to assume that parody could actually be a match for reality these days.
I suppose some clarification of this decision is required. Please note that Fearon has won the ‘right’ to sue Mr.Martin. That does necessarily mean that his claim will succeed. However, as regards that latter prospect, my ‘Glumness Meter’ is already twitching ominously up in the high eighties.
When I first heard about this case, a few days ago, I was glumly convinced that this man would be convicted of manslaughter and sent to prison.
I was wrong:
A company director accused of killing a burglar who had sneaked into his business to steal a lorry has been cleared of manslaughter.
Steven Parkin, 46, of Derby Road, Nottingham, was alleged to have battered Mark Brealey with a pickaxe handle and slashed him with a knife as he fled the site.
It remains to be seen whether or not the Crown intends to pursue any other charges against Mr.Parkin but there is no mention of this either way in the story. All I can say is that I certainly hope not.
Judge Richard Pollard directed the jury to return a verdict of not guilty after a pathologist told the court he could not rule out the possibility death was caused by an accident.
Given the Judge’s direction, I think it is a little premature to assess whether or not this marks any sort of change in the judiciary’s institutional anti-self-defence culture. Probably not. But at least this man is not languishing in prison for defending his property and that is good news.
HMG is being high-handed, undemocratic and arrogant. That is the view of the British tabloid newspaper The Daily Mail on the refusal by the government to put the issues of the EU constitution and joining the single currency to the British public in a referendum.
In response, they have been running a campaign in the form of a ‘People’s Referendum’ which gives members of the public an opportunity to let HMG know how they feel and demand a formal, legally-binding referendum of these issues. The campaign ends at midnight tonight.
Whilst I can wholly sympathise with the sense of outrage and injustice that has driven this ‘voxpop’ campaign, I have chosen not to participate because, strange as it may sound, I do not want a referendum.
I do not wish to be too harsh on the organisers of this campaign or the proprietors of the Daily Mail. They are being far more proactive in advancing the debate in this country than just about any other organ of the fourth estate and, to the extent that the eventual result provides a bellweather of public opinion, it may prove useful in terms of boosting moral. But, tactically, to demand a referendum on these issues is to play right into the hands of the enemy.
I say this because with a government which is committed to the EU project, coupled with the ability to write out a blank cheque to enable them to realise their vision, a referendum is anything but the level playing-field that too many people fondly imagine it to be. There are loads of ways that the result can be pre-determined and HMG is almost certain to employ every single one them.
First off, the ‘yes’ campaign will have access to unlimited tax-payer funds while the ‘no’ campaign will have to rely on voluntary donations from their supporters. The (state-owned) BBC propoganda machine will be put into overdrive and current sceptical non-state media sources will be bought off or bullied into switching sides. Organised indepenence campaigns will be infiltrated with people who will start making nazi-type noises to the press at the right moment, thus giving the impression that the ‘no’ campaign is merely a fig-leaf for a scarey national socialist movement and, every day of the campaign will see dark, ominous op-eds in various established media outlets warning of the ‘dire economic consequences’ of a ‘no’ vote.
Added to all this, of course, is the distinct possibility that the actual voting figures themselves will be diddled. I wouldn’t put it past them. Even if that were not the case and, by some miracle, the ‘no’ campaign won a slim majority, we all know what happens next. Yes, that’s right, just as in Denmark and Ireland, we would have to endure another referendum in order to get the ‘right’ result.
In short, the referendum on the Euro and the Constitution will be as rigged as an 18th Century tea clipper. If the independence movement has put all its eggs in the referendum basket, then where does it go from there? The answer is nowhere. Having been spiked by the appearance of a ‘democratic consensus’ we will have no choice but to watch helplessly while Mr.Blair abolishes our country with a flourish of moral authority.
That is why I will not join in the voices calling for a referendum. I choose, intead, to demand complete British withdrawal from the EU and not to settle for any less. It is the only position which cannot be bargained away, compromised or outflanked.
Neither this nor any other government has the right to sign away the sovereignty of the British people and I do not accept as legitimate any show of hands which purports to provide it with the authority to do so. I demand independence and I will accept no substitutes.
I was just watching a report on early morning TV which was in itself a rather mundane piece about how the authorities in Britain are clamping (immobilising) cars which are stopped on the road and found to have unpaid vehicle tax. Yeah yeah, whatever.
But then came a remark which astonished me…
“Unpaid annual Vehicle Excise Duty costs the British economy millions of pounds per year”
Now without getting into the rights and wrongs of vehicle ownership taxes (as opposed to road use taxes), the implication is clear: money not paid to the state for the privilege of owning your own several property does not create wealth… only when that money is safely in the hands of the state does the British economy benefit. Note, the words use are not “costs the British state millions…” but rather “costs the British economy millions…”
And with that tax money taken out of private hands, the state creates a net gain in wealth how exactly? Hiring more wealth destroying bureaucrats? And of course that money you selfish tax dodgers have not paid to the state is going to be flushed down the toilet rather than being used for some alternative economic activity, right? Likewise immobilising people’s transport because they have not paid an annual ownership tax, and thereby preventing those people making deliveries or getting to work, that does not British economy a penny, right?
Arrogance and ignorance in equal measure. The state is not your friend.
The mainstream news outlets in Britain are abuzz tonight following today’s statement from Chancellor Gordon Brown that now is not the right time for Britain to abandon sterling and adopt the Euro. Dressed up in the mawkish tinsel of lovey-dovey Euro-warmth, Mr.Brown told the nation that, with great reluctance, he must rule out adoption of the Euro because his ‘economic tests’ have not been met.
Cue shrugs, eyeball-rolls and ‘whaddaygonnado?’ sighs from Mr.Brown and a chorus of booing, hissing, spitting and puppy-kicking from an assembled throng of federasts in both Parliament and the nations newsrooms. It is all a pantomime, of course. Blair and the rest of the executive want to the Euro with the kind of slavering intensity with which an alcoholic needs a shot of gin. The so-called ‘economic tests’ that must be met beforehand are purely a fig-leaf to mask the fact that they cannot convince an increasingly skeptical and surly British public to go along with them. The very nano-second the government thinks it can win a referendum on the issue the ‘economic tests’ will have miraculously been met.
But let no-one be fooled into thinking that Euro-geddon has been postponed. Beneath the blizzard of high-falutin’ fiscal gobbledegook being whipped up by the ‘meeja’ talking heads, an even more sinister tentacle of the Belgian Empire is slowly and quietly coiling around us. → Continue reading: The real EU threat
Miceal O’Ronain spotted a new item in the Times of London yesterday. He has also looked between the lines and seen where this will eventually go
The issue is, at least for now, congestion on the roads:
“…Satellite equipment to monitor every car journey will be ready only in a decade or more.”
[…]
“Satellite tracking and charging will be tried out on the lorries that use Britain’s roads under a scheme that will begin in 2006. If the experiment is successful, the system could be extended to cars as well.”
Here are the technical specifications for the system:
- EU network is preferred system
- A nationwide system would be likely to use the EU’s Galileo global-positioning network, an array of 30 satellites scheduled for launch in 2006 and 2007.
- The alternative, the US military GPS network, used by the current generation of satellite navigation and tracking devices, does not guarantee access to civilian clients. Galileo is designed for civil use and guarantees an uninterrupted service.
- Galileo will be accurate to 1 metre, GPS to only 30m. The lower accuracy of the US model could cause disputes on whether vehicles had actually entered charging zones.
But why stop with cars? Just surgically implant a transponder into each citizen of the UK. If you can do it for cars and wild life, you can do it to people.
Miceal O’Ronain
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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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