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]
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It is nice to see HM Customs and Excise get one in the eye from a British court. These people would have you believe they are just acting to ‘protect’ Britain from ‘evil drug smugglers’ whilst in reality just engaging in capricious power trips, confiscating property of travellers without any evidence of wrong doing and reversing the burden of proof with a presumption of guilt.
It is particularly bizarre that Customs and Excise claim:
Cigarette, tobacco and alcohol smugglers cost taxpayers £9 million a day
How does depriving the British state of £9 million per day in taxes, and thereby allowing British consumers to purchase cheaper tax free ‘smuggled’ goods, actually cost British taxpayers? Surly it is the British taxes on cigarettes, tobacco and alcohol that is the added cost to British taxpayers, not the avoidance thereof. Since when is not being forced to pay more money a ‘cost’? The ‘smuggler’ makes a profit by purchasing cheaper goods taxed at lower French levels and then importing said goodies to Britain… and the millions of Britons each year who purchase those less costly tax-free goods are thereby able to afford more of what they want… and the state gets less money to spend on surveillance, property redistribution, bureaucracy etc. etc. etc.
Sounds like a win-win-win situation to me.
In his blog article The Brown Government, Brian Micklethwait observes that the present Labour government is expanding the state. However, Brian thinks this is something new and that it represents the defeat of Prime Minister Blair by Chancellor Brown.
Actually the present government has been increasing taxes, spending and regulations since day one. Neither Mr. Blair nor Mr. Brown are Marxists, but they are certainly not free market folk either. The Brown-Blair dispute is about who should be Prime Minister – it is not about high principle.
However, I am glad that the patronising “you just don’t get it” rubbish about ‘New Labour’ has finally come to an end. There is indeed such a thing as ‘New Labour’ but it is about culture not economics – it is words, spin, ‘lifestyle’.
As I have said neither Mr. Blair nor Mr. Brown are Marxists – but then neither was Prime Minister James Callaghan – indeed Callaghan was rather less of a spend-and-regulate man than Mr. Blair and Mr. Brown.
As for Mr. Blair and Mr. Brown I think I prefer Mr. Brown. Mr. Blair clearly has a deep seated hatred of this country (it is not ‘modern’, European etc – and should be broken up into Euro Regions as fast as possible). Mr Brown may be like this too but if so he certainly hides it rather better.
I have not mentioned the Conservative and Unionist Party. Let me see – lots of expensive trips to various European nations in order to talk about how to make the public services work (i.e. no understanding that the public services cannot work by their very nature).
Perhaps the least said the better.
Paul Marks
Journalist and writer of various leftist economic tomes, Will Hutton, comes in for a bit of a Fisking in this week’s edition of The Spectator magazine, as mention previously by Paul Staines.
Normally, I would be cheering such a piece on but I have my reservations about such articles. It is of course dead easy to belittle a person’s opinions, however dumb, by pointing to examples of hypocrisy. However, it always better and more intellectually powerful to confront a person’s views as such and argue about whether they are sensible or not rather than go after a person’s character. I recall reading Paul Johnson’s book Intellectuals some years ago in which his basic theme was that, whatever one might think of Rousseau, Hemingway and so on, they were all basically shits.
I like to think that we try to play a loftier game here at Samizdata. The libertarian meme will spread much faster if it is propelled by fairness and good manners. Well, most of the time.
A British solicitor has been sentenced to six months in prison under the money laundering provision in the Drug Trafficking Act 1994
Not that he was actually laundering money, mind you. He ‘failed to report suspicions of money laundering’ i.e. he did not go behind his clients back to snitch him out to the authorities and he has now paid the price.
He has paid the price for not sufficiently appreciating that he has been conscripted by the government and that his first and last loyalty belongs to them. I fear he is not the last ‘draft-dodger’ to feel the wrath of the State.
‘When the Proceeds of Crime Bill goes through (it should recive its Royal Assent this week), money laundering will apply to the proceeds of any crime. The implications for the profession will be widespread.’
The Proceeds of Crime Bill will extend the current obligation to report suspicions of money laundering to cover all and any unlawful activity. And it will not be a question of what the professional adviser did know but what they should have know.
The professional classes are going to have their lives made hell and, whilst this is an undoubted injustice to the many who work hard and serve their clients interests as best as they can, there is also a raging irony and a fable here.
The professional classes have always anxiously sought the help of the State in order to establish the restrictive practices and barriers to entry upon which much of their wealth and influence has been built. The same State has now turned on them with a rapacious fury.
This should serve as an object lesson to everyone that the Leviathan may have strong arms in which to cradle you but it also has big, sharp teeth to eat you all up. And the beast cannot help its nature.
Paul Staines sees an old enemy and rejoices that someone else is also putting the boot in where it is much needed.
Over at The Spectator business guru Derek Matthews has a splendidly vitriolic go at failed stockbroker, turned failed newspaper editor and soon to be failed think-tank-wonk, Will Hutton.
How this fraud had a hit book I don’t know, even Blair’s circle think he is a left-wing loony.
Matthew’s piece shows Hutton’s total hypocrisy in glorious technicolour. I hate this guy so much I had a go at him myself a few years ago in an LA pamphlet called The benefits of speculation*
*= Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader or similar pdf program to read.
For the last decade my Conservative acquaintances have been waiting for the Blair government to reintroduce socialist economics, confident that any month now they would. And for that same decade, I and friends of mine like Tim Evans have been saying: You don’t get it, do you? They aren’t going to do that. For as long as you fight these people on this terrain, you’re doomed, doomed. Start dealing with the fact that mothers on TV comedy shows don’t want their daughters going out with Conservatives, because Conservatives are too peculiar and too nasty. That’s your problem.
The Conservatives are still as peculiar and nasty as ever, but now, suddenly, the “Blair government” is the Blair government no longer. We now we have a Brown government. New Labour is back to being Labour. And now that public spending really is about to do a huge leap into the wild red yonder, all that the Conservatives can find to say is that they will do public sector extravagance better. Patrick Crozier‘s other blog linked, earlier this week, to an article by Matthew Parris in the Times of London(*) which spells all this out.
But give the Conservatives a few months. They’ll eventually get what’s happening. After all, they’ve been waiting for this for a decade.
Why has Tony Blair let this happen? He has built his whole position in British politics on not allowing Labour to ruin the British economy, and thereby making it unnecessary for Britain to vote for those peculiar and nasty Conservatives.
Could it be that he blames the recent relative success of the British economy for the fact that younger British people don’t seem to believe with anything like sufficient fervour in Britain getting itself stitched into the European Union? Could it be that he wants to wreck the British economy, again, so that we will then be willing to run to Europe for cover, again?
I don’t think it’s anything so cunning. After all, we had an economic semi-miracle by voting economically-conservative six times in a row, four times for the Conservatives and twice for Blair. So if we carry on voting economically-conservative, i.e. voting for the Conservatives again (as peculiar and nasty as ever, but now necessary again), we could semi-rescue the British economy, again.
No. I just I think that Blair has become bored with being the Prime Minister of, as a Bond villain once put it, these “pitiful little islands”. He wants to be the King of the World.
(*)=we have a Samizdata.net policy against linking to The Times of London as they charge for access to their archives and restrict access by people not in the UK.
Back in 1991, the English band that rejoiced in the name of Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine re-released a song called Sheriff Fatman from the album ‘101 Damnations’, about nasty landlords in London. One verse in that song was:
Now he’s moving up onto second base
Behind Nicholas Van Wotsisface
At six foot six and a hundred tons
The undisputed king of the slums
I assume I am not the only one who rather suspected at the time that ‘Nicholas Van Wotsisface’ was referring to Nicholas Van Hoogstraten and ‘Sheriff Fatman’ was lawyer Michael Harris, who was not only a tad portly but was under-sheriff of London, responsible for serving many of the eviction orders Nicholas Van Hoogstraten used to gain possession of properties.
It is just a theory of course 
Newly-elected Archbishop of Canterbury…
As part of a longer e-mail to me from first class blogger Jim Henley of Unqualified Offerings fame, he had the following pearls to cast:
Boy, your country is a rich source of material, isn’t it? First, outlaw the most basic right going, the right to defend yourself from imminent harm. Then, since that causes a crime problem, outlaw jury trials!
Safety and social perfection will arrive, I suppose, when you’re all living in proctored dorms.
Sad but true.
It was only a matter of time, I suppose, before the slumbering beast of the real British left emerged from its stupor and began to tramp around the country laying waste to all before it. And by the word ‘left’ I do not refer to the new, touchy-feely, big tent left but the old, proper, card-carrying, high octane, full-fat, extra-strength bona fide followers of Lenin.
They’ve been pricked and cut too much to stay dormant; Blair in bed with Big Business, Blair in bed with ‘right-wing’ European politicians and (probably the deepest cut of all) Blair in bed with George W. Bush!!.
They’ve had enough. They’re mad as hell and they just won’t take it anymore. So they have organised a grand gathering of their clan today in London to formally announce that Blair and ‘New’ Labour is a dragon to be slain.
The ‘old’ left has never gone away, of course. Nor have they abandoned their dream of turning Britain into North Korea. But they have been very quiet for the last few years because the Blairites captured the high ground of the Labour Party and made it electable again by being business-friendly (after a fashion). Out of fear of a return to Tory government, they kept still their waspish tongues.
But, either they no longer fear a Conservative revival or they are so desperate they no longer care. Either way this legion of marxist trade union leaders and Labour party activists want a fight. Methinks they are going to get one.
I have always believed that the political classes have one project and one project only: maintaining power. All other considerations are dispensible; smoke and mirrors for the voters come election time.
The political class that we are lumbered with in Britain wish to tighten their grip somewhat by removing the obstacle of an 800 year-old Common Law right known as Double Jeopardy i.e. a person cannot be tried twice for the same crime.
This was not a defence mechanism fabricated on some altruistic frolic. It was seen as essential if a citizen was to maintain their liberty against an all-powerful state which had the resources to pursue them at will if so desired. It was a mechanism which maintained the rule of law not the rule of whim.
Home Secretary David Blunkett has announced plans to ‘modernise’ our legal system by abolishing this hard-won right. He wants to make it easier for the State to pursue serious criminals who are seen to ‘get away with it’. It sounds like a noble impulse but the truth is far darker. Of course, the government has been at pains to stress that it will only abolished in so far as it relates to very serious matters e.g. murder but I’m afraid that we’ve heard this one before. Once the principle is established it is only a matter of time before mission creep drives it forward to cover all and any offences (including, possibly, EU-mandated offences such as ‘xenophobia’ or the deliberately vague ‘computer-related crime’).
The ability to prosecute by instalments will manifest itself as a tool of control in politically-sensitive cases with any risk of the ‘wrong’ result. The State will simply be able to drag a defendant back into Court time after time until it gets the result it wants. Sooner or later, with its ability to write a blank cheque, the State will win and everybody will know it.
There are few more pointed weapons of political control than this. There mere threat of it is enough to silence or cow difficult or even unpopular people into quiessence. With the endless threat of constant prosecution hanging over their heads, normal life becomes all but impossible. Keep quiet and do as you are told or your life will simply become unbearable.
Like my now defunct hard-drive, our collective memories are no longer accessible. If they were, the polity would rise up in revolt at the merest hint of the government arrogating this kind of power unto itself, but by the time iron rule has replaced rule of law, nobody will be able to remember a time when it was any different.
British legislators have used their privileged position to vote themselves a 25 percent rise in their own pensions, in contrast to the vast majority of we mere mortals, who are suffering falling returns on our pension schemes as stock markets fall off a cliff.
Remember, these are the same guys and girls who like to wax indignant about the behaviour of chief executives at scandal-ridden firms like American energy firm Enron or telecom company WorldCom. But of course they are dirty businessmen, whereas public-spirited folk who devote their lives to politics earn every penny they receive, don’t they? 
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