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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Serial comment writer Molly does not like the look of Britain’s future
The poster of the ‘kindly’ authorities watching us that Perry de Havilland wrote about on Wednesday scared the hell out of me. Is that really how they see themselves? Do they really think we want to have our movements watched? Do they actually think that a bunch of gobshites full of beer on a bus are going to be made to behave by a camera?
The fact is if you have ever had your house broken into in Newcastle (and I have lost count) then you know that the boys in blue, when they turn up a day later to take down your details, are never ever going to catch them. They are just going through the motions. If you are assaulted and raped by someone you do not know, they will take a statement and look around for evidence for a few minutes (like, maybe he dropped his f**king business card perhaps?) and then give you the telephone number of some tax funded and utterly pointless ‘counsellor’ to talk to who will keep forgetting your name.
And yet if you take a baseball bat to a burglar, they will throw the book at you because they know who you are and where you live. Of course they do because you foolishly called them to come.
All the people who live off my taxes, both the ones who empty my meagre bank account to ‘provide me with services’ and the ones on the dole who break into my house to steal what I have left, seem to me to be on the same side most of the time. David Carr is right that if ‘security’ is why the state is watching us, it certainly does not seem to be our security.
No, I am not sure why the cameras are going up but it sure as hell has nothing to do with my safety. The people who put them up do not give a f**k about that, this much I know for sure.
Molly
The future?
Justice Barker has a curious notion of the law. Last time I thought about wandering the streets of London with a crowbar, I remembered that if I were found to be in possession of such an object, that I would be charged with possesion of a dangerous weapon.
A Londoner was recently shot several times by armed police for carrying a table leg: that murder however was entirely justified, according to one of Mr Justice Barker’s colleagues. So presumably the intruder teleported the crowbar into his victim’s home using equipment from the 25th century.
Also, presumably I would be allowed to carry a machete, crowbar or table leg around Mr Justice Barker’s home at 3am, but not in my front garden at 3pm. Perhaps a group of squatters might like to find out where Mr Barker lives and turn up at about 3am with plumbing tools and invite themselves in for a cup of tea.
I assume that Mr Barker thinks there is no difference between this and the “right to roam”. And to think there are people who want the UK to have more common law? With barking Barkers on the judges’ benches, who could tell the difference?
Anyone believe that a future Conservative government would amnesty self-defence prisoners of conscience? Ha!
Excuse me but….I’m…I’m just a little groggy right now. I’ve stopped seeing double but my hands are still shaking. I just managed to avoid hitting my head on the desk as I went down but I hit the floor with a thud. I only hope I haven’t broken anything.
I think I have recovered just about enough of my constitution to link to this editorial in the Daily Mirror:
“The anti-American alliance is made up of self-loathing liberals who blame the Americans for every ill in the Third World, and conservatives suffering from power-envy, bitter that the world’s only superpower can do what it likes without having to ask permission.”
“But don’t blame America for not bringing peace and light to these wretched countries. How many democracies are there in the Middle East, or in the Muslim world? You can count them on the fingers of one hand – assuming you haven’t had any chopped off for minor shoplifting.
I love America, yet America is hated. I guess that makes me Bush’s poodle. But I would rather be a dog in New York City than a Prince in Riyadh. Above all, America is hated because it is what every country wants to be – rich, free, strong, open, optimistic.”
Wait a minute, did I say that was in the Daily Mirror? Let me just check [Pause]. Yes, it was the Daily frigging Mirror!! John Pilger’s dead-tree mouthpiece; Britain’s most popular left-wing tabloid. These are the people who have been running a TV ad campaign inviting the public to regard George Bush as a more dangerous tyrant than Saddam Hussein. Have the proprietors been locked in a cellar somewhere?
And what about the author, Tony Parsons? Not in the Pilger league for sure but still a long-standing, card-carrying member of the sneering leftie ‘intellectual’ classes. Well, at least he was until now. Has someone implanted a chip in his brain?
Would some functional adult please go and read the whole editorial and tell me that I wasn’t just hallucinating, because the world isn’t supposed to be like this. In truth, I am sort of hoping that I am just seeing things because if I am not then we at the Samizdata have to face the thorny problem of there being no more idiots left to denounce. What are we going to do then, for chrissakes??!!
‘Gunboat Diplomacy’ has a bad name these days: the idea was that if a gang of killers murdered a British subject in a far-flung country, a gun-boat would be sent out. If the local potentates were considered to be accomplices of the killers, the gunboat would bombard the government palace until the potentates agreed to hand over the killers or execute them locally. Otherwise a joint-punitive expedition would be organised with local involvement.
To the extent that the US supported by the UK, carried out such an operation in Afghanistan last year, I approve. My reasoning is that there was a very clear chain of events which anyone, regardless of which side they support, could understand. As regards Iraq however, no such clarity of purpose exists.
The real justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein is that he is
- a tyrant
- the highest profile Arab government opponent of the West.
Therefore Saddam’s overthrow would demoralise Islamic fundamentalists. But the US government won’t put it this way because it looks too much like an imperialist anti-Arab position. Instead an arbitrary objection to the Iraqi regime’s attempt to build nuclear weapons is invoked, creating an opportunity for the campaign to be side-tracked by the weapons’ inspectors issue. There is no mileage for the British government to get involved in this.
First, never start a war which you would be unable to finish if your allies pulled out: the sad truth is that the UK would lose a war against Iraq, unless Mr Blair launched weapons of mass destruction on Iraq.
Second, war against nuclear proliferation cannot be won. There is first the hypocrisy of letting Russia, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea develop nuclear technology, whilst threatening war on a dictator who is no worse than some of the leaders of all the other nuclear powers (all of them anti-American at various times too). Then there is the fact that this is sixty year old technology. We might as well try to prevent cross-bows or hard-encryption from spreading.
Third, unless the British government gets serious about its own internal terrorist threat: Islamic, eco-terrorist and of course the IRA, what is the point of sending British troops to traipse around the Middle East?
Finally, the equipment is so poor, the fighting capability so stretched, the politics so unrealistic, that sooner or later the British Army is going have another Majuba Hill.
The next time one of you says that “The so-called war against Al Qaeda has got nothing to do with us in the United Kingdom, we must just leave the Yanks to sort out their own problems”, please wait a moment while I read the following list of British names to you:
Neil Bowler
Jon Ellwood
Ian Findley
Marc Gajardo
Paul Hussey
David Kent
Peter Record
Chris Redman
Clive Walton
Douglas Warner
Tim Arnold
John Beaumont
Daniel Braden
Chris Bradford
Matthew Chappell
Rachael Edwards
Lucy Empson
Emma Fox
Laura France
Tom Holmes
Chris Kays
Annika Linden
Daniel Miller
Natalie Perkins
Stephen Speirs
Edward Waller
All these British people were murdered in Bali by Islamic terrorists whilst on holiday. Add them to the 67 British reasons from September 11th as to why this is not just a matter for the United States .. and then please shut the fuck up.
In the aftermath of what has been bizarrely described as a landmark speech by Prime Minister Tony Blair (or ‘The Naive Idiot’ as he seems to be known in IRA circles), we are now told in no uncertain terms that the IRA will not disband. Gosh, what a surprise.
As has been the case since British Prime Ministers started making ‘landmark speeches’ about Northern Ireland from 1968 onwards, and republicans started replying to them, “Sinn Fein’s” political spokesmen would have people believe that the Marxist Nationalists of the IRA and the Nationalist Marxists of Sinn Fein are not in fact one and the same thing, regardless of the manifest absurdity of the claim:
Pat Doherty, the Sinn Fein vice-president, said: “The IRA is not Sinn Fein’s private army. Sinn Fein is in government because of its electoral mandate and its absolute commitment to the peace process.”
And I suppose the SS was not the Nazi Party’s private army either. The difference in objectives between the IRA and Sinn Fein are what exactly? Sinn Fein is in government in Ulster in order to induce the IRA to stop setting bombs off. Although it has been manifestly within the capabilities of the British state to achieve a drastic military solution to the main problem of Ulster, the post war British system has ensured that the sort of people who find themselves with their hands on the levers of power in Westminster lack the ruthless Imperial disposition to actually do what would need to be done to put that into effect. Similarly arming the Protestant majority and allowing a bloody ‘domestic’ demographic solution (i.e. the way it was ‘solved’ in the former Yugoslavia) is simply far beyond the mindset of modern British polity. None of that is going to change in the foreseeable future of course, as Sinn Fein/IRA are well aware.
So let us not pretend that the persistent terrorist violence of the IRA has not been successful politically and that Sinn Fein is both the beneficiaries and authors of that violence. Accept that and just get on with the process of managing Britain’s incremental surrender and withdrawal. Of course if my Green and Orange Northern Irish relatives are anything to go by, what Sinn Fein/IRA will actually get in a post-UK Ulster will be rather different to what they hope for. The Protestants are no more going to disappear under republican pressure than the Nationalists have under British/Loyalist pressure, regardless of what Britain does in the future. The current situation is an Indian Summer, a comfortable delusion that in the long run will be seen to mean a lot less than it currently appears to.
I have always thought it will end extremely badly in Ulster and nothing has changed my mind in the last few years… but to be honest, if I did not know both communities so well I would care a lot more than I actually do.
Paul Marks sees who is really getting shafted by state
It is well known that Sweden has the highest taxes in the Western world (one should always been careful to remember that it is the Western world – the corrupt regimes and plundering rebels in much of the rest of the world make their ‘tax as a percentage of G.D.P.’ stats quite meaningless).
However, as the Adam Smith Institute has reminded us, it is Britain were taxes have gone up the fastest (in the European Union and, I believe, in the Western world generally world) since 1997.
There is one good thing about this. At least now people will stop talking about there being an economic concept behind ‘New’ Labour.
There may be many new things about the present government, but its economic policy of tax, spend and regulate is not new.
Paul Marks
The first round of the Mayoral elections are in from Stoke-on-Trent, a provincial town in the British Midlands.
The Labour Party incumbent is running pretty much neck-and-neck with an Independent cadidate but the real news is that the British National Party candidate is only just tucked in behind them and the Conservatives have been pushed into a rather feeble fourth place.
Not time to man the panic stations yet but I suggest that a careful watching brief is maintained.
In the maelstrom of epic and terrible world events, prosaic, but nonetheless, important bits of news have a tendency to slip anonymously beneath the waves of sound and fury. Entirely understandable, I suppose, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t throw out a life-saver every now and then and haul one of the spluttering half-drowned items back in.
The man overboard in this case was an article which appeared in the Telegraph yesterday which covered a speech given by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf and during which he boldy opined that British Judges are not bound by decisions of the European Court in Strasbourg.
“”However, if we are satisfied that the Strasbourg jurisdiction is wrong we should be bold and either not follow or distinguish the Strasbourg decision. If that is what happens, we should take particular care to make clear why we have rejected the authority.”
This is significant because I cannot recall having heard any official or serious doubt cast upon universally-accepted position that British Courts are wholly beholden to Strasbourg. It is, if you will, a murmuring of dissent.
Of course, Lord Woolf stresses that conflict would be a rare thing:
“The Lord Chief Justice predicted that occasions when there would be a conflict between the House of Lords and Strasbourg were “likely to be few and far between”.
Maybe, maybe not. And, in his position, Lord Woolf could hardly suggest otherwise but the consequences of rejecting a Strasbourg ruling even once means that a precedent is set for further rejections and that kind of thing can so easily snowball to the point where, for all intents and purposes, Britain’s judiciary is independent again.
However, the champagne should be kept on ice for now. First of all, Lord Woolf is not a politician and cannot introduce legislation. He is the highest Judge in the land but this is not a ruling, merely an opinion and, as such, has no force of law. His colleagues in the House of Lords are free to reject his invitation but also may take him up on it and proceed accordingly.
Secondly, the entire address was couched in terms of the overriding concern for the rights and welfare of immigrants. This may have been due to the nature of the audience but could equally be the result of the obsession with ‘asylum-seekers’ that has taken a hold of our entire political and judicial class. Whilst it is not a damnable concern by any means, is it too much to ask that they consider the liberties and rights of the other 60 million people who live here? Still, one step at a time, I suppose.
Overall though, an address in which the country’s most senior Judge gives a green light to his fellow Judges to tell Europe to take a hike, must, on balance, be seen as positive.
Thanks to Scrofula we know that the British MP, George Galloway is still out there, way out there.
Galloway spoke last Friday at the American University of Beirut, urging students to take to the streets in massive demonstrations if they wanted to avoid a century in which they will see their resources stolen and continued Israeli domination in the region. He talked about a Western plan aimed at carving the Arab world into smaller and even weaker states.
He claimed that British officials are deciding whether Saudi Arabia will be two or three countries and if Sudan will be two states or not. Their intention, according to Galloway, is to create a holy Saudi Arabia for the Muslims and keep the other Saudi Arabia that has oil fields for themselves.
Nothing’s missed, we have it all here – Israel, oil, British imperialism – Brendan O’Neill should leap for joy… I wonder whether Mr Galloway reads Spiked (former Living Marxism).
Galloway told the audience that people in Britain have done their bit by organising protests against a war on Iraq. But he said it is time for Arabs to demonstrate that they can threaten interests of the West in the region.
I led the biggest demonstration in the history of Britain two weeks ago, half a million people marched through the streets of London under the slogan ‘Justice for Palestine and no war in Iraq’
Apart from confusing two very different demonstrations and blatantly lying about importance and size of the anti-war one, what the hell is going on here?! How can a representative of the British public, a member of the nation’s legislature, incite violence (as in inviting ‘demonstration of a threat to insterests of the West in the region’) against his own country? This used to be called treason, fair and square, and George Galloway is guilty of it many times over. If democracy has any spine, why is he running around spewing such non-sense as an elected member of the Parliament? Do the people who voted for him agree with his treason? → Continue reading: What’s the punishment for treason nowadays?!
I remember seeing an American-made TV movie thriller a few years ago where a young female babysitter, alone in a big house, receives threatening phonecalls from a psychotic killer. She calls the police who advise here to stay calm while they trace the origin of the calls. Meanwhile the abusive phonecalls from the killer grow more deranged and fenzied. Terrified out of her wits, she then receives a call back from the police telling her to get out of the house: they’ve traced the call and it’s coming from an upstairs bedroom!
Well, we’re all young female babysitters now; a transformation formally recognised by the Telegraph:
“Terrotist recruitment and fundraising by Islamic militants centred on a London mosque were ignored for years by the British security services, a former Special Branch informant claimed yesterday.”
Perhaps the spooks were on leave or something.
“While his British handlers preferred to keep a watching brief on the mosque, where the imam is the radical cleric Sheikh Abu Hamza al-Masri, the French became increasingly infuriated.
French counter-terrorism experts refer to the capital as “Londonistan” because of the number of wanted extremists who have sought and found safe haven there.”
We actually managed to infuriate the French through lack of action. Surely a world first?
“”The French felt British law was very, very soft on these people. Britain was looking at Irish terrorists; it couldn’t see the threat. It gave these people flats, benefits, passports, citizenship.”
That’s a relief. For a minute I was worried that some of their needs were not being fully catered for. Anything else required? Satellite TV? Chauffeur-driven limousine? Jacuzzi? Comfort girls?
As I type, Detectives from Scotland Yard are jetting off to Bali to look for terrorists. One wonders what, precisely, has been stopping them from taking a bus to Finsbury Park? And if any non-Britons are mystified as to how this bureacratic indifference on the home front squares with Tony Blair’s (quite genuine, I believe) hawkishness in the War on Terror, all I can say is, join the club.
Whatever the explanation (assuming there is one at all), we find ourselves in the tangled undergrowth of the most dangerous possible combination of tactics in response to Islamic terrorism: aggressive foreign policy and an inept domestic policy.
Those phonecalls are getting increasingly threatening. I sincerely hope we don’t all end up running from the house screaming.
After periodic, and if the truth be known, inevitable paedophile scandals in Britain of the sort that occurs in every school system in the world, checks on the backgrounds of teachers have been stepped up and made more rigorous. No problem there as if someone has a history of paedophile activities, it is entirely reasonable that a potential educational employer should want to discover that.
But then why does the state insist that as part of this information gathering process, that the prospective teacher reveals their banking details and how to access their secure password to get at their financial details?
It is because the Panopticon state regards privacy as in and of itself a cause for suspicion.
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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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