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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Nurses, teachers and other state workers in the UK are about to be ghettoised
As a result of their being unable to afford to buy property in London, HM Government has ‘solved’ the problem by announcing that they are going to be coralled into shanty-towns consisting of factory-made pre-fabricated ‘homes’ (tin sheds and plastic boxes to you and I) to be erected on public land which will be set aside for the purpose.
I particularly love this bit of ‘Newspeak’ from the Housing Minister Lord Falconer:
“It’s comfortable, beautiful housing. I would like to see thousands built a year.”
Rumour has it that the public sector ‘tribes’ will be encouraged to earn extra income from tourists by performing native ritual dances, selling beads and arrow heads etc while said tourists tut, roll their eyes, agree that it’s all so terribly sad and that the government should do something aout it.
Frank Sensenbrenner wants David Blunkett to understand that liberty does indeed mean the freedom to do what you want, rather than the freedom to do what he wants people to do
John Stuart Mill asserted that “The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good, in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.” Yet David Blunkett, the British home secretary, seems to have skipped that chapter. In a recent Daily Telegraph conference, Blunkett submitted that “we cannot have a society in which liberty means the freedom to do whatever one wants when it affects no one”, or something to that effect. Why not? At the very heart of a libertarian philosophy is the acceptance of personal responsibility for one’s actions. After all, social impulses govern more efficiently than diktat. Who is harmed by individuals performing acts affecting only themselves? It is up to Mr Blunkett to suggest an alternative definition of liberty to replace the current ‘airy-fairy’ meaning.
Perhaps Blunkett has attended one too many Council of Europe meetings, and has adopted the Continentalist view that personal liberties derive from the State’s ability to grant them, and all powers not expressly granted in a social contract remain with the State. Anglospherists, on the other hand, believe that the only reason for an authority’s legitimacy is the consent of the governed. Europeans lean on an antediluvian notion of “divine right” to defend their views. Promulgated by Jean-Jacques Colbert, the concept of the “divine right of kings” was used to defend Louis XIV against accusations of gross mismanagement of his subjects, and has survived today as a crutch for governments in similar situations. Currently, this reflects an ‘intellectual’ elitism worthy of Plato’s Republic, on the level of both the nation-state and of the EU. Monnet always maintained of the need for European integration to be controlled by an elite, while referenda are either manipulated or ignored.
Blunkett’s final defence is that liberty is elitist, and insignificant to individuals in dire economic straits. If the 1990 domino fall of Communism proved anything, it was the esteem of liberty as the pinnacle of social values, even among people who were materially disadvantaged. While it may not be material, freedom is essential to the quality of life enjoyed in Western, and especially Anglospherist, nations.
Frank Sensenbrenner
If you go to the home page of Talk Sport Radio you’ll find lots of stuff about sport, and only non-sport news if it’s sport related. Someone let off a bomb in Spain yesterday and the Talk Sport Radio homepage notices, because it happened near a football ground. Interesting priorities. On the radio show itself, however, non-sport news does get regularly mentioned, and even talked about a bit.
I never listen to Talk Sport unless I’m on it, but I will be listening to it just after 10 am this morning because I will be on it. I’m to discuss the fact that according to some insane new law it is now, according to the researcher who’s just rung me, illegal to have a compost heap within 270 yards of your house. My memory is surely playing games with me. Our government would never dream of making a law like that. It has to be 270 metres, surely. Either way, we’re in barking fruitbat territory here, with every suburban gardener with a compost heap now breaking yet another idiot law.
The chances are that this particular item of fruitbattery is the result of the idiot collision between the separately sane – but when combined in Britain fruitbatarian – legal traditions of Britain and of Continental Europe. Some Euro grandee says, in some directive or proclamation or fatwa or whatever, that people shouldn’t have violently smelly compost heaps too near their kitchens. Fair enough. Why taxpayers need to pay someone to say things like this isn’t clear, but that’s the price of living in Europe, which by and large is a very fine place as places on this planet go. You nod your head, and get on with your life. You continue to keep your compost heap, if you have one, in the same place as before. All is serene. The big Euro-fromage continues to collect his salary, and God’s in his heaven.
Except in Britain. When Brussels says something, it becomes in Britain the basis of the law. This vague piece of Brussels sermonising is taken away and “clarified”. How smelly? An answer is made up. 94 smelibels. How far away? 270 yds/metres. (Not 250, by the way, which was the number the radio researcher originally supplied to me. 250 would be too round a number. That would sound like they just made it up.) Never mind that about a quarter the suburbanites of Britain have compost heaps stinking to the tune of at least 300 smelibels, and within about 10 yards of their back doors. The point is to abide by our European treaty obligations. And so this law is duly composed, with no more thought given to it than Talk Sport gives to non-sport news, in fact a lot less. Nobody thinks about it. Nobody can be held individually responsible for it. Not the twat who made it up, not his superior (who had 412 new laws to think about that morning alone), certainly not the Undersecretary of State at the Fruitbat and Related Creatures Office who is supposedly in charge of this process. So, the new law of compost heaps, together with all the other laws made up that day, is driven over to the House of Commons in a convoy of articulated lorries, and a few months later the Queen signs something and it’s the law for real.
Members of Parliament? Aren’t they supposed to have “readings” of these things? Yes, but that doesn’t mean that anyone actually reads the stuff. Laws in Britain nowadays are like academic papers in America. The overwhelming majority of them are not actually read by anybody except the drones who write them. Nobody at all.
The remarkable thing about this law is not that it passed, but that someone did eventually read it, pointed out that it was insane, and turned it into a media ruckus and an excuse for me to be on the radio.
There goes the phone. Excuse me while I dazzle the nation …
It turns out that it is illegal to have a compost heap within 270 yards (it is yards) of your house without a license. This is actually just as insane, but a bit more subtle. The insanity will only get seriously under way when the Compost Heap Office opens, and gets swallowed up in financial scandal, and when people with bona fide Compost Heap Licenses, which they just went and got, for seventeen quid, start keeping totally unregulated compost heaps in their kitchens (which used to be sort of illegal). Why has the Minister for Fruitbats not taken immediate action to curb this malpractice? … Why have more resources not been set aside? (That’s spent, to you and me.) Why? … Why? … Why? …
Another radio call. Busy day. Next up: I’m on BBC Radio Scotland at lunchtime, on whether Britain needs twenty three new laws to curb the British National Party. Here’s my plan. Keep a few of the laws we already have against being seriously nasty. Punish people if they break them. Apply them vigorously to the BNP, and to everyone else.
Another call. LBC Radio. Cannabis march on Saturday, you’ve heard about that? (No, being a libertarian these days means that you miss things.) Okay. 2 pm tomorrow.
All this chat radio excitement probably results from Sean Gabb being on BBC Radio 4‘s Today Programme, yesterday morning. Unlike most of the stuff I do, that’s a big one.
Police in Manchester will be patrolling the streets armed with machine-guns in response to a massive upsurge in gun-related crime
“Recently, the level of firearms incidents particularly in areas of south Manchester has reached an intolerable level,”
You see, gun control really does work!
I seem to recall that one the tasks undertaken by our Cold War fighters was the smuggling of Bibles into the former Soviet Union. Looks like their services may be required again before too long.
A British EU judge has warned that distribution of Bibles could violate proposed EU Anti-Racism Laws.
Unfortunately, subscription is required in order to read the article in full but this is the opinion of Lord Scott of Foscote:
“The proposed offense would include ‘public dissemination or distribution of tracts, pictures, or other material containing expressions of racism or xenophobia. So distribution of, for example, literature containing expressions of belief in race, color, national origins, etc. as a factor determining aversion to individuals or groups would be a criminal offense.
Among the literature that could fall foul of this definition, according to Lord Scott, is the Bible and also ‘Biggles’, novels about a fictional WWII fighter pilot.
Looks like Perry was rather prescient when he decided to call this blog ‘the Samizdata’.
As part of the intellectually confused but nevertheless laudable Daily Telegraph project called A Free Country, Charles Moore, about whom I am rather ambivalent, writes an exceedingly good article called Rally on May Day to blow the whistle on the control freaks:
Whose job is it to defend freedom? The answer really is, everyone’s. In practice, unfortunately, that tends to mean, no one’s. The people who want to ban tobacco advertising or fur farming or dangerous dogs or drugs or the publication of a something they don’t like will seldom outnumber the people who would prefer them tolerated, but they will almost always out-organise them. MPs do not get round robins from the “Please let us get on with our lives” society, but from the thousands of groups that want to ban or control. “Stop X Now” is a far more common message than “Leave X Alone”. Politicians, who rather like exerting their power to stop things, are only too happy to oblige.
And that is indeed the problem: we must change the frames of reference. Time to start refusing to tolerate force backed intolerance just because it is sanctified by some notion of democratic legitimacy.
And it’s getting closer to home. A man in his 20’s has been shot dead on the dancefloor of a North London nightclub. The club is situated about 400 yards from my front door.
Patrick Crozier of UK Transport looks at Britain and realises we have seen it all before.
It is an essential service. It has been starved of funds. It is in desparate need of modernisation. Of course, this will require some money but the politicians promise us that after they’ve got the new technology working everything will be as right as rain. Is this the National Health Service (NHS) we’re talking about? No, British Rail in the 1950s.
The railway was clapped out just like the NHS. It had been the pride of the nation – just like the NHS It had faced years of re-organisation coupled with fare control, followed by Depression, followed by War, followed by nationalisation. In an age of diesel and electricity, British trains were powered by steam and the industry was losing money fast. So, they called for a Modernisation Plan and a stack of cash was produced. And in the late 1950s British Rail spent it – just like the NHS is about to. And, boy, did they spend it. They spent it on diesel locomotives, electric locomotives, steam locomotives (would you believe it), marshalling yards, DMUs, EMUs, electrification projects. They commissioned something like 20 different types of locomotive – some of which actually worked. Some of which are rattling around the network to this very day.
But by the early 1960s things were looking bleak. British Rail was still shipping cash even though it was supposed to be breaking even. It seems that people had found alternatives to one-size-fits-all railways. They had bought themselves flexible, go-anywhere-anytime cars and lorries and didn’t need boring old trains anymore. Cue Doctor Beeching. Cue the closure of half the network.
As with the railways, so (up to a point) with the NHS. They will spend the money. Some of their IT projects will work. There will be some nice new hospitals. And in 5 years’ time there will be little else to show for it.
The big difference is customers. British Rail wanted customers. The NHS doesn’t. British Rail didn’t get what it wanted and neither will the NHS. British Rail lost out because there was an alternative. The NHS will lose out because there isn’t. The NHS is going to gouge out the private sector for doctors, nurses and beds. In doing so it will force even more people to suffer its tender mercies. And in 5 years’ time a new Doctor Beeching will have to sort out the mess.
Patrick Crozier
Britain’s worst-kept secret is now out in the very public domain. Chancellor Gordon Brown announced his annual budget today and, as widely-expected, has hiked up National Insurance (a type of payroll tax) in order to increase funding of the National Health Service.
This was called the ‘Budget For Health’ by the government. Whose health? Certainly not the health of the economy. The business sector will have to stump up a whopping £3.9 billion a year more in taxes in a desperate attempt by the government to placate its public sector supporters and defer the dark day when the NHS simply collapses.
And it probably will collapse in due course. The NHS is Britain’s version of Yasser Arafat; an odious, Soviet-inspired monstrosity that has caused countless deaths and yet is mysteriously exempt from anything even approaching a critical word. Its status among the British is that of Sacred Cow, nay Red Heiffer. It is the Holy of Holies, the state of which is the barometer by which every government is finally judged. It is hardly a surprise that the press roundly trumpets opinion poll results which overwhelmingly endorse tax rises to improve the NHS when an answer in the negative is probably more outrageous than supporting legalised child-prostitution. The left never miss an opportunity to hector the British public with the admonition that, if they want improved health care, they have to pay for it. I agree, of course. I just think they should cut out the middle-man.
But the cracks have been showing of late. Too many people have been travelling abroad for their health care treatment, forking out for private insurance or watching their elderly relatives expire on trolleys in dank state hospital corridors and you can’t keep that kind of disquiet from spreading. Everybody seems to know or sense that the NHS is crocked and beyond redemption but they are prepared to shut their eyes and wish very, very hard that the government will hose enough money at it to make it all wonderful, gleaming, efficient and keep it free.
It won’t work in the long-term or even the medium-term but the government is gambling that the massive cash boost will tide them over to the next election when they will be able to annouce that they have ‘saved’ the NHS and ensured its future as ‘the best insurance policy in the world’. On the face of it, it is a dangerous gamble. The Labour government was elected on the promise that they had put behind them, for ever, their old ‘tax and spend’ policies and it is at least pragmatic to assume that they will be judged harshly for breaking their promise without delivering.
On the other hand, it might just fool ’em by providing a glimmer of ersatz hope. It is almost impossible to underestimate the sacred status of the NHS. The faith it is has traditionally inspired may prove a strong enough medicine to anaesthetise the public’s critical faculties and enable them to go on believing in the Easter Bunny.
In the meantime, we’re all going to get poorer. Poverty is bad for your health.
Dr. Tim Evans welcomes ‘Red Ken’ to the world of capitalist rationality… sort of
I have long been an advocate of private roads and road pricing. State ownership of public space and its attendant services such as police beat patrols is madness. Indeed, I have long believed that London and all other geographic areas will only get decent integrated roads and transport systems through genuine private ownership and good old free market price signaling.
What I did not expect was that that doyen of the British left and now Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, would be the man to instigate the transition to such an approach. Let me be clear, Livingstone is planning to introduce road pricing into the capital city early next year. However imperfect his plans will be (and my God, they have some glaring holes at present) and however he seeks to dress this move up with all the usual environmental waffle, the long term affect of his policy of “congestion charging” is going to lead to the commodification of public space. By pricing roads, encouraging an income stream down them and therefore deriving revenue, Livingstone will slowly become addicted to the money.
As he becomes addicted and the approach spreads – already Durham, Cheshire, Milton Keynes, Surrey, Warwickshire, Isle of Wight, Cumbria, South Gloucestershire, Leeds, Hampshire, Derby and at least twenty other areas are already talking to the Department of Transport about introducing road pricing – the incentive for a supply side revolution in roads and public space will mount. For as money pours into the coffers and drivers slip into the psychology of becoming consumers of road space, so there will be ever more pressure to find new ways of generating more income and therefore getting the supply side of public space to meet people’s demands: that is – some semblance of a market approach.
It is with this in mind that the utopian ideas so long espoused by the Libertarian Alliance in such glorious pamphlets as:
LA Economic Notes No. 49, Brian Micklethwait, The Private Ownership of Public Space: The New Age of Rationally Priced Road Use, 1993 *
LA Economic Notes No. 57, Martin Ball, Liberate the Roads! The Benefits that will come from road privatisation, 1994 *
LA Political Notes No. 17, Max More, Private Police and the Free Rider Problem, 1983 *
LA Political Notes No. 40 Chris R. Tame, On the Side of the Angels: A View of Private Policing, 1989 *
LA Political Notes No. 58, Sean Gabb, The Case for Privatising the Police, 1991 *
…will begin to become relevant to everyday experience and discourse. And that in turn could well mean fantastic new private roads and even maintenance work being undertaken with the customer in mind and not the producer interest.
Sure, these new roads might be built underground by private sector companies who put in the latest air purification technology. And yes, the owners of X road might well want to contract with a private security company to breath test one in every 10,000 drivers for excessive alcohol. But hell, that is capitalism. The owners of X road will want to tell customers that this road is the cleanest and safest way to travel.
None of this will happen in the short term. But slowly, step by step, the incentives to engage a market in road provision are mounting. Sod the Queen’s nationalised highway. I want it owned by capitalists. As a driver, I want roads to be appropriately priced and to be served as a customer.
Come to think of it, perhaps that is why those most hard-line privatisers at the Adam Smith Institute had Ken Livingstone visit their offices three times over the last year on the subject of roads?
Come on comrade Ken, scatter those libertarian seeds and take us to the supply side!
Dr. Tim Evans
*= (links requires Adobe Acrobat Reader (or similar pdf reader) which can be downloaded for free)
British government plans for data sharing mentioned earlier in the Libertarian Alliance press release I posted yesterday are a clear indication of the casually authoritarian attitudes of those who would control every aspect of our lives. What I find so infuriating is that the supporters of this giant leap towards the Panopticon State are so arrogant that they are hardly even trying to hide the scope of what they want.
The Orwellian sounding Performance and Innovations Unit (PIU), who are the cutting edge of the leviathan state’s intrusions into every aspect of private life, have had the gall to announce (emphasis added):
Information is processed without people’s knowledge only where necessary for national security, public safety, statistical analysis, the protection of the economy, the prevention of crime, the protection of health, morals, or the rights and freedoms of others
Can anyone out there please tell me ANYTHING that the state does which cannot with the barest minimum of effort be classified under one of these amazingly broad categories?
In short, any functionary of the state with a computer terminal can examine any aspect of your life they wish. They are not even really trying to hide what they are planning.
Government bodies with names like the ‘Performance and Innovations Unit’, a body finding new ways to intermediate the state into every aspect of private life, have always reminded me of the Terry Gilliam movie Brazil , in which the ‘Information Retrieval Unit’ was the name for the agency who extracted information from people by torture. Perhaps it is time for Harry Tuttle to pay the PIU a visit, spanner in hand.
When the state watches you,
dare to stare back
New revelations that Alec Douglas-Home, the foreign secretary under the conservative government of Edward Heath, had planned to try and find a way to hand Gibraltar over to Spain in 1971 against the wishes of its people have been greeted with ‘shock’ and ‘amazement’ by current members of the Tory party.
Well I can only marvel at the credulity of modern Tories. This is the government that did more to undermine the common law basis of British civil liberty than any other in the 20th century by taking us into the European Economic Community (as it then was) under knowingly false pretenses. If they were happy to do this to all of the UK, is it really so surprising that the harbingers of modern super-statism would think twice about selling out a mere 27,000 people in some remote outpost of the Old Empire?
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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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