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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Want to know quite what I find so laughable about this story?
Gordon Brown has ordered another inquiry into the funding of the National Health Service, which is expected to lead to a further injection of billions of pounds next year.
In a move that could also pave the way for a further increase in national insurance payments before the next general election, the Chancellor has asked Derek Wanless, the former chief executive of NatWest, to study whether the NHS needs more money on top of the £40bn allocation over five years announced last year.
The answer lies in the way that Gordon Brown has ordered an ‘inquiry’ into NHS funding in order to provide a patina of scientific, objective justification for the tax increases that he has clearly already made up his mind on.
And would you like to hear something even funnier? Well, just wait until the ‘opposition’ (chortle, snigger) Conservatives launch a fierce attack on the government for not spending enough on the NHS. Won’t that be a scream?
Yes, yes I know, it’s not really funny and I shouldn’t laugh. But, honestly, I just don’t know what else to do.
There will be no ticker-tape parades for the returning heroes of Gulf War II and, given the current political and cultural climate, I suppose that is understandable. However, one would have thought that Mr.Blair might at least see the benefit of a suitably discreet pause before publicly shafting them:
Tony Blair is prepared to radically scale down the Royal Irish Regiment as part of his proposals to persuade the IRA to destroy all its weapons and halt all paramilitary operations, army and political sources claimed yesterday.
So it appears as if the Royal Irish Regiment, whose members fought with such gallantry and tenacity in the Battle for Basra as far back as…ooh, let’s see…a few days ago, are to be issued with a whole new set of marching orders. Thanks very much, chaps, now fuck off!
The irony can surely only be desribed as breath-taking. Whilst neither Saddam’s Ba’athist thugs nor his Republican Guards could put so much as a dent in them, their very existance as a fighting unit is about to be sacrificed by a government that will stop at nothing in a (vain) attempt to appease the brooding war-dogs of Sinn Fein/IRA.
The Daily Telegraph is running an impressive scoop of documents allegedly proving that George Galloway MP was in the pay of Saddam’s regime. George Galloway has long been ridiculed as the “Member for Baghdad Central” for his defense of Iraq; now it appears that he was motivated by pure greed rather than just a love of controversy.
It is impossible for outside commentators to be absolutely certain of the authenticity of these documents. Perhaps they have been planted by British intelligence. Perhaps they were written by the Iraqi foreign office as a prepatory insurance policy, for blackmail. Perhaps there is even an innocent explanation, though I do not see how there could be.
Occam’s razor, however, suggests that George Galloway MP was corruptly attempting to change government policy towards an hostile nation from the floor of the House of Commons, that he was giving aid and comfort to the enemy for personal gain.
I believe there is a legal term for that.
Our worst suspicions have been confirmed. The British Chancellor Gordon Brown is suffering from SARS (Severe Acute Robbery Syndrome) but every time he sneezes it’s the rest of us who catch the cold:
Pay increases in the private sector have slumped and are not enough to cover Gordon Brown’s tax increases, figures from the Office for National Statistics showed yesterday.
Economists were alarmed by the news as it could make the recent downturn in high street spending prolonged. It may also be politically significant, especially for Mr Brown.
The last time millions of voters had their pay packets cut because of tax increases was in 1974, when the then chancellor Denis Healey put 3p on income tax. Over 21m people currently work in the private sector.
I don’t know how many people work in the public sector but I do know that the number is much higher than in was in the early 90’s. Since 1997 especially, the ratchet of taxation (both direct and indirect) has gradually been cranked up to fund a staggering growth in government. The Labour Party’s natural constituency, the middle-class kleptocracy, has been showered with money and perquisites as a reward for their loyalty while, even now, they moan interminably about a ‘lack of resources’.
Meanwhile, the 21 million wealth creators have sadly bought the lie that only by accepting an ever-increasing burden can their lives improve. These Atlases may soon want to shrug and give their allegiance to a genuine tax-cutting, government-shrinking political party.
Sadly, we don’t have one in this country.
A legal fight is being waged by a gentleman to avoid having to pay the detestable British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) licence fee. I honestly do not fancy the chances of a successful outcome to this fight, but good luck to anyone, I say, in taking on the BBC.
The BBC, as has been pointed out on this blog many times before and elsewhere by the likes of Andrew Sullivan, is able to get away with its grotesque bias in reporting on current events, its gloom-ridden soap operas and ghastly “sitcoms” because it is able to shrug off the bracing winds of consumer choice and competition. The BBC does actually have good people working in it (trust me on this). But unless and until the licence fee is consigned to the ash heap of history, expect no serious improvement from that organisation.
I always thought it was one of Margaret Thatcher’s greatest missed opportunities that she did not privatize the BBC.
When it comes to the British International Development Secretary, Clare Short, any attempt to analyze her views are bedeviled by the fact she is such a mass of contradictions and illogic. Yesterday at a briefing in London she was asked by a journalist if she thought the death toll of Iraqi civilians was a price worth paying for the overthrow of Ba’athist Socialism, to which she replied:
I do not think that the death of any human being is a price worth paying
Let us ponder that remark… that the Ba’athist regime was mass murderous is beyond doubt and clearly something of which Clare Short would be cognisant. So what is she saying? She is not saying that what even the hilarious Iraqi Minister for Information admitted was a small number of Iraqi civilians killed was too high a price to end two and a half decades of tyranny.
No, she is saying that the loss of even a single life is not a price worth paying… paying for what? To prevent the murder of thousands of Iraqi people every year, that is what. The term ‘absurdity’ seems inadequate somehow.
Face it… Clare Short does not give a damn about the Iraqi people. She is more concerned about preserving the sanctity of her surreal world view. Why else would she say such an idiotic thing if not because trapped within her dogmatic meta-context, she is simply incapable of saying anything else regardless of florescent evidence suggesting better moral theories.
As I have written before, to oppose the war on the grounds that the domestic cost in Britain or the USA in blood, treasure and encroachment of the state is too high a price for the sake of the Iraqi people, is at least a coherent viable argument… but to oppose the war on ostensibly altruistic grounds that the price to the Iraqi people of overturning the Ba’athist Socialist status quo is too high is simply ridiculous, given that the scale of that Saddamite tyranny was hardly a secret.
To have taken such a position at before the war or in the early stages of the campaign was at least somewhat tenable, at least for a person with a poor understanding of the military and technological realities, on the grounds the cost in blood would indeed be mind bogglingly high.
But to still use that argument after we know that the ‘massive casualties’ scenario has not proved to be the case is bizzare. Pictures of tragic little Ali Ismail Abbas are truly heartrending for sure, but how does that change the cold hard facts about the butcher’s bill if Ba’athism had not been overthrown?
To argue on a ‘what is best for the Iraqi people cost/benefit analysis’ means the likes of Clare Short cannot have it both ways… unless all that matters is not that a ‘single life’ is lost to violence but only who did the deed. Although Clare Short’s logic is hard for me to fathom, perhaps she is saying that preventing thousands of Iraqi civilians dying every year in Saddam Hussain’s jails and torture chambers is not worth a single Iraqi death if a British taxpayer funded soldier was the one who ended the ‘single life’ in question. Or maybe she means nothing of the sort.
So who exactly does Clare Short care about? What does she mean when she opens her mouth and makes noises that sound like English? I cannot figure it out.
In what I am sure will be a crashing disappointment to lots of people who go around calling themselves ‘human rights campaigners’, the British legal system has opted not to further persecute a victim:
A burglar has failed in his attempt to win damages from the jailed farmer, Tony Martin, who shot him.
Malcolm Starr, who has led the campaign for Martin’s freedom, said Martin’s lawyers had contacted him to say that a planned legal action by burglar Brendon Fearon had failed.
I cannot really bring myself to call this justice because if there was even a smidgeon of justice then Tony Martin would not have been incarcerated in the first place.
“Tony has probably had more letters about this issue of him being sued for damages than he did after the original shooting incident. He does want the law changed to stop this happening again.”
It is not just the law that needs changing.
Well, what do you expect? They’ve booked all the buses, printed all the placards, made all the sandwiches, they can’t possibly just call it all off. They’ve got momentum now and they just have to keep going:
Up to a quarter of a million protesters will march in London on Saturday despite the apparent success of coalition forces in Iraq, anti-war groups say.
The Stop the War coalition believes public opposition to the conflict is still strong – in spite of scenes of jubilation this week as American tanks entered Iraqi cities.
Jubilation in Baghdad, agitation in London.
But the police, who will have about 2,750 officers along the route, have said they expect fewer than 100,000 people to take part.
Flagrant fascist Bushista propoganda!!!
Speakers will include MPs Tam Dalyell and George Galloway, who face having the Labour whip withdrawn because of their anti-war stance.
Heroic martyrs!!
The group’s spokesman Chris Nineham said he believed “a great deal more problems” lay ahead for the British and US forces as they tried to take over Iraq’s administration.
Now this wouldn’t happen to be the same Chris Nineham who played such a prominent role in Marxism 2001? But I thought this march was supposed to be representative of ‘public opposition’, a great, spontaneous outburst of ordinary people’s sentiments?
The march is underway about now. I’d say 250,000 is probably a gross underestimation. Expect at least half a million. No, two million. No, twenty million….no, the entire population of the Northern hemisphere!!
As mentioned by Perry, British Chancellor Gordon Brown set out his wealth-grabbing agenda for the next fiscal year in today’s budget.
As well as all the usual predations, he has also decided to increase government borrowing from £20 billion to £27 billion. Guess who has to repay that (plus interest)?
Oh but what’s another £7 billion or so when it’s other people’s money? Besides we productive workers have got far more money than we strictly need and never forget that Diversity Development Executives..er, I mean ‘poor underprivileged children’…need as much money as they can possibly get.
For some temporary (albeit ultimately futile) relief, my thanks are due to Samizdata.net reader Simon Austin who sent me this link to a deliciously naughty ‘swear-a-tron’ where a few of us monstrously overburdened Brits can take out some of our frustrations.
After watching the thrilling news from Iraq… back down to earth with a thud:
Chancellor Gordon Brown’s budget… the long version of Brown’s ‘New Labour’ drivel can be found here.
The short form:
- More money for defence and security (the state’s only legitimate role)
- More socialist ‘social fairness’ and less economic freedom
- More regulation and a clamp down on theft-avoidance schemes
- More wasteful public spending and a big injection into the idiotic NHS
- More tax on sinful things because the state knows what is best for you
- Britain’s economy is growing and Gordon is going to continue chucking spanners into the machinery until it ain’t
Oh joy.
I’m a very unusual kind of libertarian; I’m an optimist. The fact that libertarians far more impressively credential-ed than I regard positive thinking as little more than a crazed attempt to destroy the last few remains of decency in British culture today, rather like having tea with the Vicar when we should at least be complaining about not having enough guns to shoot him, has never stopped me looking at the full half of the glass.
And listening to the news on the BBC today, I found myself cheering yet again for the greatness of Britain over the dumb arrogance of the rest of the European Union. The Eurozone, we hear, has been forced to halve its economic growth forecast to a miserable one per cent, while the UK, left-wing government and attendant tax hikes notwithstanding, is set to grow by a more-than-double-that two point two per cent.
Now, I am not advocating that libertarians pack up bags and go home to spend the rest of their political lives sitting on cushions of laurels while eating Pot Noodles. Nor do I think we ought to cease our scepticism of all things state-owned, our campaigning for free maket capitalism, or our advocacy of civil liberties and individual freedoms. Bad things are continually happening in the UK of course: this interference with university admissions procedures, for instance, smells very bad to me, even if it is only going to apply to institutions wanting to increase their student fees.
But on the other hand, looking at the wider picture even in that case, although universities will lose out from the new politically-correct impositions, they will also gain from the extra money: so compared to what they were like say fifteen years ago, when I was at Cambridge on a totally free government grant including rent and pocket-money, I’m not sure there’s an argument that things are horribly deteriorating.
Sure, they’re not exactly perfect yet: but what do we expect? The first ever totally libertarian state on the planet, tomorrow? Improvement is improvement, and, as these people say, the perfect society will have to evolve, whether we like it or not. Indeed, its values and practices already are evolving, in the most civilised countries of the West, and slowly spreading. But they aren’t as easy as just wanting them: the nuts and bolts have to be worked out as we go along. The freedom of our country’s future does not depend on whether its government is left, right, “libertarian” (if there were a libertarian political party anyway, of course) or Monster Raving Loony: the freedom of our country depends on what that government actually does.
And at the moment, the United Kingdom is not signing up to the Euro. British people simply do not want the Euro. Hence our economy is more free than that of Europe, and will continue to grow better than otherwise. I predict that the British people will continue to get what they want until long after the Eurozone has fallen years behind in the economic race and given up begging us to join at any price.
Another important advance was made today in the War Against Terror:
Three men have been found guilty of masterminding a dissident republican bombing campaign in England two years ago which injured several people and caused millions of pounds worth of damage.
Guilty as charged! Whatever the length of their sentence it will not be long enough. Throw them to the dogs, I say. We must give no quarter when dealing with these murderous terrorist scumbags.
Among the targets were the BBC Television Centre in White City, west London.
On the other hand, we should never lose sight of the fact that among the most important characteristics of our civilisation is the quality of mercy and the capacity to forgive.
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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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