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.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
I do not know whether the news of the fire service strike has travelled beyond the UK, but in case anyone is interested, here is the truth behind it: Today’s London firemen’s strike is the most outrageous bid for money since the Fleet Street print disputes of the 1970s. The system is being milked of money, and the public of sympathy. I admire the firemen’s gall and enterprise. They need no sympathy.
[…]
The Fire Brigades Union demand for 40 per cent in the face of the Bain Report may seem outrageous. But money is not really the issue. The issue is reform. Were the present shift system to go, 40 per cent is probably fair compensation and cheap at the price, especially if other Spanish practices go too.
[…]
Last year’s Tube strikes ended in capitulation by London Underground after a preelection call from a terrified Downing Street. This call sent an excited tremor through every London trade union. Tony Blair was an intervener. He would give in if pushed. The fire strike is the result.
It’s worth reading the whole article – it is the best analysis of the wave of strikes hitting London and the UK. London is chaotic at best of times, it is beyond chaos during strikes, but words fail me to capture the situation with an increased threat of terrorism thrown into the bargain…
Update: John Blundell of the Institute of Economic Affairs has some suggestions about how to run fire brigades.
In a comment to David Carr’s post, Alan K. Henderson asks whether Elizabeth the First would have delivered a speech like the one we got to hear yesterday by Elizabeth the Second. A pertinent reminder as the famous speech of her ancestor (in throne, not blood) attests not only to more balls but timelessness of (some of) the sentiments expressed: My loving people, we have been persuaded by some, that are careful of our safety, to take heed how we commit ourselves to armed multitudes, for fear of treachery; but I assure you, I do not desire to live to distrust my faithful and loving people. Let tyrants fear; I have always so behaved myself that, under God, I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and good will of my subjects. And therefore I am come amongst you at this time, not as for my recreation or sport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live or die amongst you all; to lay down, for my God, and for my kingdom, and for my people, my honor and my blood, even the dust. I know I have but the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart of a king, and of a king of England, too; and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realms: to which, rather than any dishonor should grow by me, I myself will take up arms; I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field. I know already, by your forwardness, that you have deserved rewards and crowns; and we do assure you, on the word of a prince, they shall be duly paid you. In the mean my lieutenant general shall be in my stead, than whom never prince commanded a more noble and worthy subject; not doubting by your obedience to my general, by your concord in the camp, and by your valor in the field, we shall shortly have a famous victory over the enemies of my God, of my kingdom, and of my people.
Elizabeth I of England – 1588
The police in Britain have been busy smashing down doors and dragging people from their beds.
Yesterday it was wicked people who were connected to child porn (at least the police said they all were – even though hundreds of people have been arrested over the last few days).
Today however it will be people guilty of ‘hate crimes’ – after all, posters on the London Underground warn that to ‘verbally abuse’ people on grounds of race, gender or sexual orientation�is a crime and will be punished.
So who will defend people who have said nasty things? After all they must all be guilty – otherwise the police would not have dragged them into the street (with the other people who live in the street looking down from their bedroom windows).
Yesterday the Prime Minister made a speech (after the Queen’s opening of Parliament). The Prime Minister explained to us that Britain is stuck in the past with a silly devotion to 19th century concepts of civil liberties – such things as trial by jury obstruct the modern state and must be further ‘limited’.
My word, HMG has been busy of late. You’d think the prospect of impending Middle East conflagration might slow them down a tad, but no, not this lot. They’ve still found the time and dedication to set hundreds of monkeys loose on thousands of typewriters and they’ve whipped up a thunderous swarm of new laws and initiatives with which they hope to cure All The Problems in the Known Universe.
So what, exactly, are the primates gibbering on about now? Let’s see, shall we:
“This approach will enable my Government to continue to invest in the public services, while supporting major programmes of reform on health, education, transport and crime.”
They’re going to whack up taxes again so they can feed the public sector while endlessly tinkering around with the Soviet-style systems in a vain attempt to get them to work properly.
“New types of sentence will be introduced to protect the public from dangerous offenders, help reduce re-offending and deal with young offenders.”
None of which will stop our houses getting burgled, our cars getting stolen or our loved ones getting mugged for their loose change.
“The Bill will also allow retrials for those acquitted of serious offences where new and compelling evidence emerges. It will also simplify the rules of evidence to allow judge and jury to hear all the facts, including relevant previous convictions of a defendant.”
Yes, because abolishing the right to a fair trial is a sure and certain way to keep the crime figures down!
“My Government will introduce a Bill to tackle anti-social behaviour that damages communities.
?????????????????????????
“A Bill will be brought forward to modernise the laws on sexual offences and to strengthen the framework of penalties for sex offenders to protect the public.”
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
“A Bill will also be introduced to improve international co-operation in tackling crime, including drugs trafficking, and to modernise the arrangements for international mutual assistance to catch criminals.”
Hello to the European Arrest Warrant, goodbye to Habeas Corpus.
“My Government will bring forward legislation to streamline the licensing system for premises selling alcohol.”
Alright, I’ll give them that one. Long overdue actually. Still, if you toss around enough mud, some of it hits the right spot.
“Legislation will be brought forward to devolve power and resources to frontline staff; give greater freedom to successful hospitals while increasing their accountability to local communities; and to introduce an independent health inspectorate.”
More jobs for Guardianistas!
“University reform proposals will be published to improve access and build on excellence.”
More semi-literate cretins taking degrees in ‘Cake Preparation’ to keep the unemployment figures from rising.
“A Bill will be brought forward to establish a Railway Accident Investigation Branch…”
More jobs for Guardianistas!
“Legislation will also be introduced to provide for the holding of referendums on the issue of regional governance in England.”
We set about abolishing England, keep our masters in Brussels happy and provide even more jobs for Guardianistas!! An HMG Trifecta!
“Measures will be brought forward to protect our environment, including legislation on the conservation and proper management of water.
And even more jobs for Guardianistas plus the added benefit of crippling industry with lashings of unnecessary red-tape. What’s not to like?
“A Bill will be introduced to enable Parliament to reach a conclusion on hunting with dogs.”
You realise, of course, that this means war.
“My Government will make a decision on whether to recommend entry into the single currency on the basis of the assessment of the Five Economic Tests to be completed by next June.”
Because Europe is heading down the toilet-bowl of history and we are determined to bravely follow them.
“My Government will work for rapid and effective implementation of the agreements reached at the recent World Summit for Sustainable Development in Johannesburg and will focus on tackling climate change and finding new ways to meet our energy needs.”
We’re going to abolish breathing.
“Britain’s aid budget will be increased and we will work to implement the Africa Action Plan in response to the New Partnership for Africa’s Development.”
And we’ll even save time and paperwork by remitting your money direct to the numbered Swiss bank account of Mr. R. Mugabe.
It’s all getting a bit much, it really is. I think it’s beginning to overwhelm me. Living in Britain is like taking part in a 24-hour Grumblethon. Phone in with your generous pledges, ladies and gentlemen. All receipts to HM Treasury who will syphon it all off into the infinite black hole of the public purse, never to be seen or heard from again. Just keep paying and smile like you’re having a good time.
I’m fed up, I’m tired, I’m seriously grumpy and I’m going to bed; perchance to dream of a better world where Saddam Hussein is a cab-driver in South London, Al Qaeda is a gameshow host and where all the monkeys have been rounded up and put in the zoo where they belong.
Crime seems to be a flavour of the day in the UK. Today a battle plan to fight crime was unveiled by the government in the Queen’s speech opening the new parliamentary year. And a new advertising campaign was launched on Monday by the Metropolitan Police Service named “Help us cut out hate crime”.
I noticed such posters on Monday and at first I thought they were designed to change the attitudes of the potential perpetrators of hate crimes by yet another ‘awareness’ campaign. (The New Labour seems to be very fond of ‘awareness’ campaign managing to spend prodigious amounts of tax-payers money on pointless and expensive advertising.) My immediate reaction was that of incredulity that anyone could imagine that plastering posters on the Underground would change anything, let alone someone’s bigoted and hateful opinions. Or do they believe in subliminal advertising?
No, the truth is far less subtle – the campaign urges victims of hate crime or those who have information about it to come forward. A name, an address or even a description of offenders will enable police to target criminals and stop the ‘abuse’. Adverts will appear in newspapers and in a number of gay, ethnic and disabled press titles, and on the Underground. There will also be a hate crime and domestic violence radio campaign as well as posters appearing on washroom panels, the underground, and on trains.
Yes, it may seem a good thing to encourage victims to come forward. But that would be more effectively and properly achieved by restoring our confidence in the criminal justice system by making sure that criminals are arrested, sentenced and jailed in timely and effective manner and that victims are not ignored or forgotten in the process.
The effect, if any, of the campaign will be an atmosphere of paranoia at the local community level. Abuse of the system will ensure that. Imagine the trouble you could cause to a neighbour you dislike by simply reporting on him for alleged domestic violence:
“reported cases of hate crime and domestic violence received by the MPS will be, where appropriate, passed to local Community Safety Units (CSUs) for investigation, otherwise handled by local borough police.”
But the scary bit is the bit about the hate crime itself, defined as abusing people because of their race, faith, religion, or disability, or because they are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transsexual. The danger is in the shift from the emphasis on one’s actions that can be classified as criminal acts – murder, rape, theft etc to an entirely different and vague area. Yes, it says ‘abuse’ but so does ‘substance abuse’ and nobody is encouraging drugs to come forward to report on their junkies. Suddenly, the crime is in the eye of the beholder and although it is correct that the victim is the obvious one to do the seeing, it is not correct to encourage the seeing of crime without providing a clear definition. It is precisely such vagueness of definition of hate crimes that encourages victim culture.
As I checked the on-line version of the Evening Standard, a London daily, for an update on yet more travel chaos in the capital, I ended up in the newpaper’s chat room. The posts covered a range of topics from strikes in the UK to German economy, Gordon Brown, the EU, etc. I was fascinated by the following opinions and encouraged by an unexpected degree of common sense they contained.
On Gordon Brown, the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer:
Comparatively other European economies are worse off than ours… for now. The strikes [ed.note: London tube drivers, fire fighters, airport staff] were inevitable. As soon as Brown started raising huge amounts of tax (direct, indirect, stealth, overt, personal & corporate) and making such a great play out of how he was intending to chuck vast quantities of cash at public services without insisting on reform, the unreformed public sector was always going to demand its ‘fair’ share.
In a way, we can thank Brown. He has finally proved, beyond all shadow of a doubt, that old-fashioned socialism with a Treasury-centred tax-and-spend doctrine is a failure. In the past, plenty of excuses have been trotted out about how enough money wasn’t spent to really make a difference. Now, Brown has thrown unimaginable amounts of money, particularly at the NHS… and there is no visible benefit.
It is long past the time when Brown should put the brakes on spending until reform has been carried out. He is throwing good money after bad… our money. He intends to raise taxes further and further because his pride won’t allow him to admit that he has got it wrong. He will end up sacrificing British jobs, industries and competitiveness on the altar of his own enormous ego.
Great Chancellor? Ha! The man has the economic instincts and ability of a whelk.
On German economy:
It’s Economy has tanked. Many small Businesses are closing down due to massive tax and bureacracy. The Unions have way too much power here and the cost of employing people is outrageous. We need a Maggie Thatcher here to deregulate everything and make Germany competetive again. The only light at the end of the Tunnel is the success of the Euro.
Reply: Christ, it must a f***king dim light then.
On the EU:
Every new regulation from the EU seems to add to the pile, and the language of the EU is that Britain should become more like these countries, not that Europe should become more competitive.
[ed.note: to a Europhile in the thread] Do you understand? Do you see why so many of us find your seemingly blind adoration of all things Euroepan so laughable?
What we have now [in the EU] is a ‘club’ for failed socialist politicians where ineptitude, corruption and waste are rewarded by monolithic undemocratic structures. The main political agenda is set by France, whose selectivity in implementing the outcomes are legendary and Germany, which is drowning under the very rules it has helped to create.
How sound is that?! 
The British newspapers are agog at rape allegations inside the Royal Household.
Yawn.
The British state daily rapes million of people of billions of pounds to pay for ‘services’ that fail to deliver whilst blighting the economy and distorting civil society… yet the idiot media concentrates of the trivial antics of House of Windsor, who are little more than a bunch of national tourist attractions who at least generate more money than they cost the hapless taxpayer. Now that is the true scandal, not who might or might not have buggered whom in some drafty palace.
A leading Tory moderniser warned that the party had to be completely transformed and must be ready to give up “some of the things we hold dear” if it was ever to win power again.
Could he possibly mean giving up its statist attitude and blinkered view of reality? Has the Tory Party seen light at the end of the tunnel? No, Archie Norman, a close ally of Michael Portillo once seen as a Thatcherite Tory leader hopeful, called for tax rises to pay for improved public services.
Not only are the views of Mr Norman, a direct challenge to Ian Duncan Smith’s policy (shock! horror!) but tax rises?! To fund public services?! There is light at the end of the tunnel but, alas, it is an on-coming train…
It is morbid fun watching the Conservative party stumble into oblivion. Meanwhile, Labour, given its own problems, must regard it as a blessing rather than political opposition.
There is more information here. It leaves you with a certain level of… uncertainty. Like “why was he writing a draft statement that said this in the first place?”
Time passes….
I’ve now read the original statement by Blunkett and am left wondering who hyped this whole thing into silliness. There does not seem to be any warning of imminent attack, only a general warning of what we all know already: we’re a target and the enemy is utterly ruthless.
Following Home Secretary David Blunkett‘s confused apocalyptic warning yesterday about the threat of an Al Qaeda attack on the UK, which was then quickly retracted, earlier today on News Direct 97.3 FM radio, I caught a fragment of some UK government warning about a “credible threat of an attack against London” and “poison gas” was mentioned. However I have not heard a blessed thing since then. Is this something new? Is it a retraction of yesterday’s retraction? Did any one else hear more of this and get any details?
Is it just a coincidence that there has been an astonishing number of military helicopters (mostly Pumas and a couple Chinooks) flying over my house throughout the day?
Hmmmm.
The Gibraltar government called a referendum and Gibraltarians have turned out in force to vote in a referendum that is expected to overwhelmingly reject attempts by Britain and Spain to negotiate joint sovereignty over the British colony. Here are just a few things that caught my attention:
- Both London and Madrid say the referendum carries no legal weight. I know, I know, legal is far from democratic, let alone commonsensical but are they not even going to pay lip service to the wishes of the governed population?
- A party atmosphere prevailed in Gibraltar, where streets were decorated with red and white pennants and many houses flew Britain’s Union Jack or the Gibraltar flag. One man walked down the street wearing a “Proud to be British” tee-shirt. Yeah, that’s how you can tell it wasn’t in Britain…
- There is no official “yes” campaign. The overwhelming sentiment of campaign posters and of people ready to give their opinion was a rejection of joint sovereignty. What are the chances of replicating this in the UK with a rejection of abrogating our sovereignty to the EU?
Gibraltarians say they have been British since the 18th century and culturally are not Spanish nor do they want to be. They also believe they are better off economically as a British colony than they would be if they joined Spain. (Spain ceded Gibraltar to Britain under the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, but has been attempting to recover it ever since.)
At least the Gibraltarians seem to know what is at stake in their referendum…
Rowan Williams, the next Archbishop of Canterbury, has stated that it is more important to “maintain the society of states” than to depose a murderous dictator, namely Saddam Hussain.
Now if Williams was of the opinion that Saddam Hussain was just the victim of western calumny and he was in fact the generous benefactor of the Iraqi people, then it would be quite understandable that he would oppose starting (or more accurately, completing) a war with the object of deposing him and crushing Ba’athist Socialism.
Yet that is not the case: Williams describes Saddam Hussain as “brutal and violent” and yet still takes the view that the stability of those collective edifices called ‘states’ is more important that the right of Iraqi civilians not to be murdered in order to ensure the supremacy of the Ba’athist Party.
Here is a man who, as an Anglican Archbishop, is presumably concerned not with geopolitics but with Christian morality and yet takes the view that the political stability of the Islamic world’s sundry despotisms matters more ending the nightmare of the 23 million people who live or die at Saddam Hussain’s whim. The fact Hussain is “brutal and violent” matters less than the needs of Realpolitik.
This is exactly where collectivism can lead even an Archbishop, because morality and collectivism are antithetical.
|
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.
|
