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]
|
A follow up on the yesterday’s article about the EU constitution. In today’s Telegraph’s opinion section, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is concerned that “while we liberate Iraq, Europe is busy planning to enslave us”:
The EU will no longer be a treaty organisation in which member states agree to lend power to Brussels for certain purposes, on the understanding that they can take it back again. The EU itself will become the fount of power, with its own legal personality, delegating functions back to Britain. Draft Article 9 puts Brussels at the top of the pyramid. “The Constitution will have primacy over the law of Member States,” it says.
The new order may also be irreversible. Article 46 stipulates that the terms of secession from the EU must be agreed by two thirds of the member states. In other words, one third can impose intolerable conditions.
We can already see the impact of the EU fiasco in handling the Iraq crisis:
The EU will have the power to “co-ordinate the economic policies of the member states” and – showing some chutzpah given what happened over Iraq – “define and implement a common foreign and security policy, including the progressive framing of a common defence policy”.
And there is a bit about, Tony Blair, our hero:
Tony Blair was slow to see the threat. Downing Street at first dismissed the convention as a talking shop, but woke up when the French, Spanish, German and Italian governments gave it irresistible authority by appointing to it their foreign or deputy prime ministers.
The Government then fell back to a second self-deception, imagining that France and Spain would join Britain in blocking any major assault on national prerogatives.
[…]
None of this has happened. France has abandoned Britain, and her own historical attachment to a Europe where national capitals always have the whip hand over Brussels. They seem to be accepting federalism as the price of relaunching the broken Franco-German axis. As for the Spanish, they are silent.
Scary stuff, please go and read the whole article.
Forgive this interruption to your scheduled programme of dark forebodings, war worries, terrorist threats, police state and impending civilisational collapse but I am taking a short break in order to bring you some good news.
It would appear that the political landscape of Britain is not quite as barren as I had hitherto imagined it to be. Indeed, little oases of life-giving sanity are starting to spring up amidst the arid desert of top-down, tax-and-spend socialism.
Case in point being Reform Britain, a campaign group consisting of loads of big-brained luminaries who describe themselves thus:
Reform is an independent campaign to promote new directions for public policy based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, and individual liberty.
As I reflect upon the lowly and squalid state of public debate in this country over the last few years, the above words wash over me with all the fragrant and orgasmic tingle of a cool spring zephyr.
And, as if that was not enough, these wonderful people have launched a related website called ‘Down the Drain’, a perfectly appropriate domain name for a site which is devoted to disclosing just how much money HMG syphons off of its productive citizens every day and, more pointedly, where it all ends up.
Broadcast your seeds with gusto, you Great Sowers of Hope, and may those seeds be nurtured, fed, watered, grow and cover all the land with a golden harvest.
Your normal service of doom, gloom, despair, gnashing of teeth, wailing and general despondency will now be resumed. Thank you.
[My thanks to Stephen Pollard for the links.]
I recall reading an article a few months ago – I think it was either in the Guardian or the Independent, I’m not sure which- bemoaning the low standards of British TV comedy.
Neither am I able to remember precisely the conclusions drawn in said article or, indeed, if any conclusion was drawn at all. Personally, my prognosis is that British comedy is failing to inspire because life in Britain has surpassed any attempt at parody:
A convicted murderer who tried to attack a work colleague with an axe, while out of prison on licence, is to receive compensation for unfair dismissal.
James Robertson, 50, learned of the employment tribunal’s decision from jail, where he is now serving two life sentences.
On Wednesday, the tribunal ruled the council was wrong to sack Robertson without notice after the incident, and ordered the authority to pay him £800 compensation.
I wonder what type of ‘notice’ would have satisfied the Employment Tribunal?
“Dear Mr.Roberston,
It has come to our attention that you tried to murder one of your co-workers with an axe. We take the view that such behaviour is inappropriate and not conducive to a happy working environment.
We must ask you to refrain from such activities in the future, failing which we shall have no choice but to consider further disciplinary action.”
Or do you think that such a letter might be construed as too judgemental?
A trifling distraction in the scheme of things, but this is so hilarious that I just had to flag it up here.
It appears that a small group of British ‘indymedia’ squirts tried to halt a convoy of munitions by chaining themselves to the trucks. Turned out to be a very bad idea:
The convoy was successfully halted on the west bound slip road at Chievely junction (M4/A34) north of Newbury. One group blocked the lead vehicals [sic], whilst others attempted to lock on to the bomb transporters. Police and lorry drivers seem to be under orders to keep the convoy moving at all costs. Activists were forced to unlock as the lorries kept moving despite the drivers being told that there were people under their vehicals [sic].
Kumbaya, My Lord, Kumbayyyaaaaaa…stop…stop….aaaahhh…….
[My thanks to Little Green Footballs for the link]
I want to know how long Tony Blair reckons on dragging out this unjust and illegitimate war of aggression?
I am speaking, of course, about his war on British prosperity:
One in five firms is planning to get rid of staff to help pay for new rises in National Insurance Contributions, according to a business lobby.
The British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) said that small and medium-sized companies would be hardest hit with one-third saying they expected job cuts as a direct result of the rise.
After years of being softened up by the constant bombardment, we are now about one week away from the ‘big push’. The government has maintained its tactic of destroying key strategic targets such as industry, manufacturing and finance.
“The Chancellor could not have picked a worse time to introduce this increase,” said BCC President Isabella Moore.
“Those companies that are not looking to cut jobs are intending to cut wages, investment or research. Their only other option is to increase debt.
“This could be the final nail in the coffin for some businesses,” she warned.
And quite right too! The British public simply cannot be trusted with these Weapons of Mass Distribution!
About one in 10 firms told the BCC they had considered or were considering relocating their operations to another country.
As predicted, large sections of the enemy forces are deserting. After all, who wants to fight just so they can keep some of the money they work hard to earn?
When asked what the government could do to improve productivity in the UK, most said that tax and regulation should be reduced.
TRAITORS!!! APOLOGISTS FOR SADDAM HUSSEIN!!
Meanwhile, a Whitehall spokesperson has denied reports that the government intends to continue prosecuting this war until the besieged British taxpayers realise that they cannot possibly win and just surrender en masse.
While we are furiously warblogging over at The Command Post, the statists at home have not been resting either. Two articles in the Telegraph, drawned by the Iraq war noises, report most worrying news. First about bailiffs allowed to break into homes.
Licensed enforcement agents will be authorised to break into people’s homes and seize property from debtors under new Government plans announced yesterday. They will also be given powers of arrest.
The article quotes a rather disturbing statement by Baroness Scotland, a minister at the Lord Chancellor’s Department:
Society wants those who owe money judgments to pay their dues but also wants to protect the vulnerable. So the system we propose will utilise the full weight of the law on those who won’t pay while at the same time safeguarding vulnerable individuals who simply can’t pay.
The second article reports on extension of police powers to keep DNA files:
Police powers to retain DNA samples and fingerprints taken from innocent people are to be extended, the Home Office announced yesterday. For the first time, they will be able to test people they arrest but do not charge and keep the DNA and the prints indefinitely.
It’s true what they say – the devil government never sleeps…
When Robin Cook resigned from the Cabinet last week in protest at Tony Blair’s decision to authorise military action without the backing of the United Nations, it was obvious he was positioning himself as the potential leader of the Labour Party. The calculation runs as follows:
- If Iraq turns into a political-military disaster and Blair’s political career is over, everyone will remember the noble Mr Cook resigning ‘on a point of principle’ and look to him for the kind of pseudo-moral stance Blair has managed to employ successfully in the early stages of his office. And at least, Gordon Brown will not be the only obvious, if unpopular choice.
- If Blair is vindicated and Saddam’s regime quashed, the process may be so bloody that it will eat away much of its political capital. With the end of Iraq war, the reality in Britain’s backyard will start to bite – the French, the EU, the crime, the schoolsandhospitals etc.
- The Labour Party has been having its rude awakening as to the nature of Blair’s leadership for some time and there is an increasing number of Labour MPs becoming more vociferious in their disagreement on a range of issues.
And they need a leader! – Mr Cook concludes and exactly a week after his ‘principled’ resignation he hints that “he is prepared to act as leader of centre-Left discontent in the Labour Party as he promised to fight for more ‘radical’ and ‘progressive’ policies from the backbenches”. How public spirited of him!
Cook says that Britain now finds itself in a diplomatic position ‘that it will come to regret’. Too close to America, too far away from Europe. This is his worldview:
Where should we be looking for the future direction of Britain’s strategic international relations, for me the answer is Europe, to make sure that we are a major player and we are passionate that Europe speaks with a strong voice which means we try and speak without a divided voice.
There are many reasons for that but the need to have an alternative pole, not a rival, but an alternative pole within international affairs is one of them. I have always been strongly committed to a multilateral system. We must respect international institutions.
We need to engage in an international community that can bring to international forums and state with clarity the type of European values that are certainly not shared by many of those in the Bush administration.
Firstly a respect for multilateral protocols, secondly if we are going to achieve a world governed by rules then we need to respect international process. There are two other European themes: a respect for global environmentalism and that the priorities of the international community reflect the massive priority of tackling poverty.
I smell a rat. Or a Tranzi. Oh, wait, it is the same thing…
image by the amazing Scrofula!
For years now the British soldier-in-the-field has been bitching about the crappy Light Support Weapon version of the bug-ridden SA-80 rifle that they have been saddled with.
So I was delighted to see picture after picture of British Army and Royal Marines using the excellent Fabrique National Minimi Squad Automatic Weapon. British soldiers deserve proper weapons and at last they seem to be getting them.
Soldier of the 1st bn Royal Regiment of Fusiliers in action in Iraq, using the FN Minimi SAW
The answer is when it comes to counting the numbers of people at a ‘peace protest’.
The Stop The War coalition claimed 500,000 people turned up for today’s protest in London (they later lowered their claims to 200,000) … yet the Metropolitan Police were quoted on SkyNews tonight as have said “less that 100,000 attended”.
Of course membership of the Stop The War coalition has considerable cross over with CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament), a well known glove puppet of the old Soviet regime. During the Cold War, CND also used to vastly inflate the claimed attendance at its rallies, aided and abetted by the left wing BBC who would just report these claims as though they were incontrovertible. The fact CND & the BBC consistently inflated these numbers was exposed by Dr. Julian Lewis MP by using aerial photographs of CND protests.
The world may have moved on but the old Marxist left have not changed one iota.
Fortunately it is now it is easier than ever to ‘fact check their ass’.
I think my relationship with the BBC is finally settling into something quite satisfactory. Having been through the stages of disillusion, mistrust, contempt and loathing I now find that I have reached the point where I now regard the BBC as reasonably reliable reverse indicator.
For example, whenever the BBC presents an event as a spontaneous outburst of public feeling, I immediately turn my mind to the possibility that it is anything but.
A case to consider is this series of nationwide anti-war protests by schoolchildren:
Hundreds of children are among crowds protesting at Westminster.
School children have been played a big part in many demonstrations across the UK while others have staged their own protests at their schools.
Sixth-former Sam Beste, from Fortismere School in north London, has organised many protests against the war.
He is staging a demonstration with dozens of others in Muswell Hilll before heading for Westminster.
In Carlisle, the police were called to a school after hundreds of pupils staged an anti-war demonstration.
There were two separate demonstrations in Belfast with more than 1,000 students and schoolchildren mounting a sit-down protest, blocking the road outside Queen’s University.
In Nottinghamshire, more than 100 pupils walked out of lessons at West Bridgford School to stage a demonstration on a nearby playing field.
In Manchester, about 200 school children joined a big demonstration.
The article makes no specific claims but first impressions would lead one to believe that these pre-pubescent protests are just breaking out everywhere like typhoid. Who knows, maybe they are. I certainly cannot prove anything but, for me, this wave of teenybopper discontent bears all the hallmarks of orchestration. And, if that is so, who are the conductors?
Far be it from me to point the dirty end of the stick at their teachers and lecturers, but it would not be an entirely unreasonable inquiry to make. Just don’t expect anyone at the BBC to make it.
Here in my office, the early stages of the war in Iraq are accompanied by a sort of low, whining tone of complaint from colleagues seated all around. Some are actually joking about Saddam’s taunts at Bush. What big men and women they are.
I have tried in my own mind to figure out what goes on inside the heads of supposedly intelligent people – folk with university degrees, who can produce work of great skill and complexity, but who, on this terrible issue of the day have the moral intelligence of total imbeciles. A sort of collective death wish seems to have gripped whole swathes of the smarter elements in our population. I am not just talking about the usual assholes on the far Left, mind you. Let’s not forget the head-in-the-sand isolationists with whom we occasionally mix in the libertarian parish. Not to mention the Pat Buchanan-style wackjobs either.
When this whole dreadful period in our history is over, and I hope really soon, I would like to renew my request to the anti-war folk who I would broadly classify as libertarian as to what they would actually do when confronted with terror and state sponsors of terror. And let’s have answers instead of the usual “we had it coming in the past so in future we should keep our heads down” evasions.
So it appears that we are now a few days, or possibly even a few hours, away from being engaged in an honest-to-goodness, actual, balls-out, fighting war. Despite the misgivings of Antoine Clarke, I believe HM forces will acquit themselves admirably although there is no doubt that the bulk of the war effort will fall upon the much larger US contingent.
We are here now because Tony Blair has prevailed over the anti-war sentiments of much of his own party. Without wishing to sing his praises per se, he has confounded the sizeable number of British commentators who believed that he did not possess the spine to see through his pro-war commitment. He clearly does and he clearly has. Last night’s vote in the House of Commons, on a motion to delay hostilities with Iraq, was defeated despite a record number of Labour rebels voting for it and, ironically, with most of the opposition Conservatives voting against.
Of the Conservatives who voted for the motion, some are undoubtedly what Mark Steyn has called ‘defeatist patricians’. In all but name they are Social Democrats and are driven by sentiments that are not so much anti-American as they are pro-EU. For them, the top-down, corporatist paternalism of Europe is much more resonant of the natural order of things than the racey vulgarity they see as intrinsic to the American way of doing thigs.
But there are others on the British right who are vigourously opposed to Britain taking any part in the attack on Iraq not because they harbour anti-American sentiments (indeed, they heartily reject such nonsense) but because they believe that it is not in British national interests to do so. They are far from confident that any US administration would go to bat for Britain in the way that Britain has gone to bat for America and whilst this may or may not prove to be the case, they (and I) do have genuine cause for complaint about the kid gloves that successive US administrations have put on when dealing with the IRA.
However, it would appear that at least some of isolationist argument in this regard is based on the erroneous (and largely left-inspired) view that Tony Blair is merely acting as George Bush’s ‘poodle’; that he will get his ‘orders’ direct from Washington and that he will send British troops off to yomp around the planet in whatever direction the Whitehouse commands.
It is this kind of thing that makes for good copy, but it is not actually true. For good or for bad, Blair has very much acted as his own man throughout this whole affair. Had it not been for Tony Blair, the Americans would almost certainly have not agreed to take (the ultimately fruitless) UN route to disarming Saddam. Had George Bush had his way, the war in Iraq would, by now, have been over and done with. Try telling anyone in Washington that Tony Blair is their ‘poodle’. I think you will be sharply disabused of any such view. → Continue reading: The widening channel
|
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.
|
Recent Comments