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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Courteous policemen, red telephone kiosks, afternoon tea, cap-doffing and genteel bucolic stability. That is the cartoon image that many non-British people seem to have of Britain.
I don’t suppose they will want to read this
“Gun crimes during the first 10 months of the annual period have trebled in most of the urban areas which have so far submitted statistics to the Home Office. Sir John Stevens, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, said gun gangs were spreading across the country whereas, until recently, they were confined to a handful of London boroughs”
Drug running, gun culture, drive-by shootings, rampant robbery, burglary and car-crime. Not very ‘Mary Poppins’ is it?
I would, ideally, like to write something satirical and witty about all this but I can’t. First of all, because the galloping erosion of our civil society is no laughing matter. Secondly, I am just too furious. I am furious at the way that the failure of one government prohibition (drugs) reinforces the failure of another government prohibition (guns) and to the detriment of all.
But I am even more furious at the despicable lies that were foisted on us during the campaign to ban private gun ownership. “It will make the streets of Britain safer” they said; “It will put an end to gun culture” they promised; “It will reduce crime” they assured us; “Criminals will find it harder to procure weapons” they proclaimed.
Ad-hoc justification was heaped upon egregious falsehood by every politician, pundit, lobbyist, talking-head and self-appointed ‘expert’ as they all jostled with each other for a place in the Pantheon of the Righteous.
But they won the day. It was no-contest. We few voices of principled reason were pilloried as apologists for child-murderers and psychopaths and who wants to line up with people like that?
So you foreigners can just disabuse yourselves of any lingering image of ‘genteel Britain’. This is a country where, on one side we have a national police force that is overstretched, politically hamstrung, misdirected and, like all nationalised industries, primarily concerned with protecting their own monopoly. They have guns. On the other side, we have growing gangs of ruthless and violent bandits set loose in a playground of grabbable booty. They have guns. In between, is the hard-working, law-abiding taxpayer, naked, and hoping for the best.
I do not believe that this is what was intended.
Well, in the light of the recent crime problems in the UK and the punishment of people for trying to defend themselves, perhaps our police should have a new motto: “Crime is not our business”.
The London based Libertarian Alliance has issued a press release about an outrageous case in Britain in which a man who defended himself from knife wielding home invaders finds himself on the wrong end of the law:
“Drop all charges against householder who killed burglar. This man is a hero“, says free market and civil liberties think tank.
58 year old John Lambert, of Spalding, Lancashire, has been released on bail following two days of arrest after the death of one of two burglars who had broken into his home and put a knife to the throat of his wife, according to press reports.
During a struggle to defend himself and his wife Mr. Lambert killed the burglar with his own knife. Rather than suffering the indignity of arrest and police inquiries Mr Lambert should be hailed as a hero and public benefactor. So claims the Libertarian Alliance, Britain’s most radical free market and civil liberties think tank.
Libertarian Alliance spokesman and Director, Dr Chris R. Tame, says:
“It is a sign of a morally corrupt society that Mr Lambert should have been held by the police for two days and is even now facing the insult of further police inquiries. In a free and moral society the individual has the complete right to self defense, including the use of deadly force, against those who attack and rob them. Any one who invades the home of another constitutes a deadly threat to its inhabitants, and should be dealt with accordingly. Mr Lambert has behaved both honourably and morally in defending himself, his wife and his property – and is a public benefactor by ridding society of one more predatory looter who threatened the safety of us all.
Yet again it is quite clear that the police, like all nationalised industries, have no real interest in their “customers”, but would rather persecute both those who defend themselves and other easy targets. Whilst the restoration of law and order in this country depends upon many things – including the removal of legal impunity from children and adolescents, the restoration of strict sentences and real punishment for real crimes, the return of capital punishment, full restitution by criminals to their victims, the abolition of victimless “crimes” and pointless persecution of politically incorrect lifestyles, and the overthrow of the culture of socialist excuses and social determinism – a great step forward would be the full legal recognition of the right of individuals to defend themselves and others – and indeed, the restoration of their right to do so with firearms and other weapons.
A message must be sent to the criminal vermin that the workers of this country are not prey, that people will fight back, and that the police and the judicial system will no longer side with the predator rather than the victim.”
A 16 year-old boy has been killed in a drive-by shooting in Nottingham. At this stage, there appears to be no motive.
I was fully expecting Steve Thoburn and the other ‘Metric Martyrs’ to lose their appeal before the Lords today. That they did, however, still resulted in my spending almost the entire day in a bug-eyed rage. I spent the afternoon doodling designs for giant siege engines that we could use to surround Brussels and reduce it to brickdust.
But, upon examining the actual rationale behind the verdict, the veins in my head have stopped throbbing with quite such gusto. I am forced to examine the small-print as both a Libertarian and a lawyer and I find myself largely agreeing with Brian Micklethwait below.
The application of EU Directives in British Law is, in fact, governed by British Law, namely the European Communities Act 1972 which rendered all British law as being subject to override by European Community Law. However, the Communites Act itself is a Constitutional Act. As such, it cannot be side-stepped by any subsequent legislation but it can itself be amended or even repealed by the British parliament.
There is a way out of the EU; all that is required is the parliamentary will.
I will disagree with Brian, though, that the Lords ruling is an implied ‘Declaration of Independence’. That ‘Declaration’ can only be made by a sovereign British parliament and, given the near-blanket commitment of our current political class to the EU project, the manifestation of that ‘will’ is still along way off.
I followed the link Perry gave us re the Metric Martyrs case, and read the piece by Helen Szamuely with interest, indeed fascination.
Now I realise that nothing involving the EU is ever quite what it seems, but my understanding of Helen Szamuely’s understanding of the case is not that the EU now rules Britain, but that the EU now rules Britain on British sufferance, which can, any time we like, be unsuffered. The basis of EU rule in Britain is that Britain switched it on with a Parliamentary Statute, and Britain can switch it off. The British Parliament is and will always remain sovereign.
At the heart of the EU project is the claim that once you’re in, you can’t leave. Not so, say our judges.
The Metric Martyrs lose, not because the EU says so, but because the EU says so and we say, for the time being: okay. But in the future, we could decide to say: not okay. Britain is not yet a province of the European Superstate, according to these judges. It would be complicated to unravel, very complicated, and it would require a great and highly self-conscious, so to speak, Parliamentary convulsion, in the manner of, say, contriving a new amendment to the US Constitution. But, say Their Lordships, we could unravel it if we chose to, and declare national independence again.
Which means that, in a sense, they just did.
It is a small matter really, just a trivial case involving some grocers who sold some fruit using Imperial rather than metric measurements. Yet the implications are staggering for the entire structure of British life.
Don’t co-operate in your own repression
The Scottish Parliament has just done what unfettered democratic institutions do: make the prejudices of the majority into laws backed by violence to suppress minority view points. They have now banned fox hunting in Scotland, refusing even to compensate the people who will lose their livelihoods as a result. On the later point I am actually glad as the immoral viscousness of this statist intrusion is made all the more stark to see.
Until people start to respond in kind and impose a physical cost on such actions by the state, and on supporters of such actions, it is unlikely much will change. Given the complete lack of viable political opposition to the socialist Labour and National Socialist SNP in Scotland, it is horrifying that only Sinn Fein, a grotesque organisation whose objectives are antithetical to liberty, provides the only viable model for friends of liberty who wish to oppose the increasingly repressive intrusions of the state.
Patrick Crozier is happy to see the old lags of British terrestrial television being given a run for their money
UK Channel 5 has been dismissed by the elite as being a non-stop orgy of sex and violence. Such statements in themselves lay bare the warped priorities of our ‘leaders’ but there is one other problem: it isn’t true. Channel 5 is simply the most dynamic and innovative British terrestrial channel around.
It has the best reality TV programme: The Mole
It has the best two animations: The Powerpuff Girls and Tintin
And it has some of the best history documentaries around. My favourite has to be Hitler’s Henchmen. Not least because an inspired piece of scheduling led to biographies of Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler being interspersed with shows covering the life and works of John Prescott and Pete Waterman.
In fact, Channel 5’s documentaries seem to be giving BBC2 and Channel 4 something of a headache. For many years these stuck up elito-vision channels have been pumping out nothing but revisionist pap. You know, ‘Churchill was a drunken child molestor’, that sort of thing. But then Channel 5 started broadcasting things like “British Heroes of World War 2” (the title says it all). And then “Secrets of World War 2”. In the hands of the elite this would have been all about how Churchill contributed to the slaughter of Russians on the Eastern Front but from Channel 5 it a set of stories about the daring exploits of our ancestors.
I do not know if Channel 5’s documentaries are particularly popular. But the reaction (especially from Channel 4) has been revealing. To “Secrets of WW2” Channel 4 countered with “Battle Stations”. To “Heroes” they countered with “Commando”. And to a fine 3-parter on the Falklands they dusted off a 10-year old documentary of their own and put it out as a spoiler.
But the really interesting thing about this is the way the content has changed. Quite simply, Channel 4 has sobered up, smelt the coffee and dumped the revisionism. Commando was an hour long show but contained little more than half an hour’s actual information. Could it be that the missing half an hour was the revisionism they had to axe to get the ratings?
Patrick Crozier
Two men have been killed and a third seriously injured after being shot by armed men in a pub in South London
It is a few minutes past noon and I can hear the sound of artillery from my home here in Chelsea… no, it is not the start of an anti-European Union revolt but rather a 41 gun salute being fired off in Hyde Park that heralds the start of the Queen’s Jubilee.
Two people were shot, one of them fatally, in a West London restaurant today
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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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