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Over on Dodgeblog, there is a short post about a panel of guests on a talk show who had much sympathy for the Taliban and Al Qaeda but none for their victims.
Can any rational human living in Britain who is not a 24 hour somnambulist have failed to notice the overwhelming support for the USA by people across this country?
I am all for airing a wide range of views, I am a libertarian after all, but why is it that such a high proportion of views shown on television of the various talking heads is so at odds with the views of society at large? If the show Andrew Dodge was referring to was just on some commercial channel then that would be alright… after all, I can always surf off to another channel.
But it is not just another commercial channel, it is the channel that the British state uses the force of law to make me contribute to financially for the ‘privilege’ of owning any television in Britain. It is the tax funded BBC. The official state media. The voice of state establishment. I am being forced to pay for the propagation of this poisonous shit and that is not alright.
Strange how this issue is kept strictly off of the political and media radar. Not a word about it on the BBC
But this is from the London Evening Standard
SCOTLAND YARD has ordered police in north London to wear bullet-proof vests at all times because of soaring gun crime — the first time such an order has been made in mainland Britain.
Officers in Haringey have been told protective armour should be worn on the streets even on routine patrols after a dramatic rise in the number of firearms offences.
In the past 12 weeks there were 300 emergency calls in Haringey in relation to alleged firearms, 109 of these resulted in evidence of guns being used or seen.
Bob Elder, chairman of the Police Federation’s constables’ branch, who is based at Haringey, said: “My colleagues are increasingly worried. In Haringey there are 999 calls about firearms activity on an almost daily basis.
“There is a heightened awareness of firearms issues in boroughs such as Haringey and Hackney and there is now a directive that officers should wear body armour on operational duty as a health and safety issue.
“We have pretty strong gun laws in this country but they do not seem to be having any effect.”
Is it possible that we taxpayers could have body-armour as well? Or would it be unsafe in private hands?
On Saturday night, 3 men were shot in Palmers Green, North London. One was killed, the other two are in serious condition
Last night, a man was shot and seriously wounded by an armed intruder in Brixton, South London
The Metropolitan Police have announced a London-wide campaign to tackle the growing problem of gun-related crime
The British government has promised to tackle Britain’s underachieving railway system head on and build a brand, spanking, new, spiffy, super-duper, hi-tech, luxurious, efficient rail network for the 21st Century
According to HM Government this miracle of modern transportation will be so generally splendiferous and commuter-friendly that, not only will the trains run on time, they will actually call at your house, wake you up, get you dressed, make you a cup of coffee and kiss your kids goodbye before whisking you off to your destination in hitherto unimagined levels of opulence and comfort
Sounds great, doesn’t it? There’s only one teensy-weensy little snag: er…there’s no money to build it. Nada. Zippedy-doo-da. Not a bean, a sou or a red cent
See, you can forget all the guff you may have heard about the alleged privatisation of Britain’s railways. The railways were never privatised. They were leased off on state franchise and bound hand-and-foot by regulations. A few years down the line (scuse pun) and the government is shocked, SHOCKED to discover that the main operating company, Railtrack is running at a huge loss and promptly takes it into receivership
Now the government is saddled with responsibility for rebuilding a decaying transportation system, mollifying an angry public and dodging lawsuits from even angrier Railtrack investors who have lost all their money. Boy, do these guys know how to make a rod for their own backs or what??!!
Still, ever mindful of the next election, the government has promised the above-mentioned whizz-bang new railway system with the money that they ‘hope’ to raise from private investors
Fat chance!! After watching the government send the Railtrack investors home with nothing except a kick in the pants, I know what my response would be if the government asked me for my money. I can’t print it here but it would consist of two words the second of which would be ‘off’
So, this weeks competition is to find a solution to this problem: How can the British government build an envy-of-the-world, state-of-the-art railway network for the 21st Century with no money whatsoever?
Please send your answers to:
The Right Honourable Tony Blair PM
10 Downing Street
London SW1
The winner will have the honour of having his or her idea credited to the aforesaid Tony Blair for PR and re-election purposes
In a nauseating opinion piece by authoritarian paleo-socialist Dea Birkett, writing in The Guardian (naturally), the state is urged to use force to abolish private education altogether in Britain. Birkett wants people to be deprived of even having the possibility of privately educating their children. We are told society must have a common purpose and once private education is made illegal, presumably socialist education police will start locking up people who dare to set up underground schools or educate at home. Birkett urges nothing less than universal forced backed nationally planned state education for all, regardless of what a family actually wants, in order to further national socialist goals.
But such a tiny minority holding on to such an outdated view on the right to exclusivity would increasingly appear absurd, as redundant as the royal family. Once private schools were reduced to such insignificant numbers, they could be easily, quietly closed down. The benefits would be enormous.
[…]
Education would become something we all shared, equal stakeholders in its quality and worth. Education could be effectively and efficiently planned on a national basis, in the knowledge that every child would go to a local school.
[…]
It’s no longer any good just offering carrots. It’s time to reach for the stick.
Will someone please remind me which side won the Cold War? Natalie Solent has described the equality and sense of common purpose Birkett demands as the equality and common purpose of galley slaves. If that ever comes to pass, Birkett and her ilk need to be shown that they are not the only ones who can reach for the stick.
Of all the memes in all the countries in all the world, Blairism is the one that is catching on as this article in the Spectator reminds us.
They are also quite right to foresee a similar prohibition in Britain should even one little poppet get his or her fingers barbecued next Guy Fawkes Night (and we know, we just know that at least one of them will)
The Safety Nazis have been crusading to ban fireworks for years and, in a country whose prime (perhaps only) preoccupation is safety, it is only a matter of time before they succeed. So, in future, we’re all going to have to spend Guy Fawkes Night gathering around the central heating and letting off some party poppers (until they ban those as well)
Pessimistic? Moi?
When Tony Blair and New Labour got elected in 1997 the understandable dismay among Conservatives manifested itself as dire warnings that ‘New’ Labour was a glossy sham and it was just ‘Old’ Labour dressed up in electable clothes. Soon, they warned, the public would realise that they had let the wolf back in the door and the days of Trade Union militancy and a crippled economy would return to haunt us again. You just wait and see, they said.
Mere sour grapes, said all the pundits. And, thus far, the pundits appear to have been proved right
Thus far, but maybe not much further. And it isn’t just transport that looks like grinding to a halt. Post Office unions are ballotting their members on a nationwide strike and mail in North London is already in chaos thanks to a local dispute
Those of us who are old enough to have lived in Britain in the 1970’s under ‘Old’ Labour remember only too well what it looked like. It looked a bit like this
Samizdata reader Jim Muchow answers my question about why Tony Blair does not do anything forceful in Zimbabwe
In hopes of resolving your befuddlement as to why Tony Blair is only willing to fight for American interests, not British ones, I refer you to your post Our good friends, the Police further down the page.
If Blair (or the British government in general) can’t or won’t protect landowners at home, why would they want to protect British citizens in foreign countries?
Wonderful site, by the way. It is refreshing to read commentary by people who DON’T have their heads up their ass. And using the list of links to other similar sites, I see I stumbled onto their nest.
JM – I used to be disgusted, [but] now I try to be amused
He has a point there.
More, that is, of high-handed Tory paternalism on display here in the Telegraph.
The Tories are not a part of the solution, they are a part of the problem. Oh and by the by, would anyone like to bet that, in the event that the Tories got into power again, their Eurosceptic position would be jettisoned as well?
The following is the text of a letter sent to the London Daily Telegraph and published on 5th January 2002
SIR- It is perhaps not surprising to read of the rapid increase in armed crime (report, Jan.3 )
Since the authorities have banned the legal ownership of guns, the market in illegal arms has been stimulated and is no doubt very strong. Also, the treatment meted out by the authorities to people such as Tony Martin and the exhortations of the police to the public to yield passively to armed assault have given criminals the message that the public – unarmed whether it likes it or not – can be expected to be easy targets
It appears that some people (albeit a few) are starting to get it
In response to an e-mail from a reader that asked me “Why do you distrust the state so much? How else do you expect order to be maintained and property protected?”… I present the following gem from the Daily Telegraph:
A LANDOWNER was arrested by police he had summoned to help him after more than 60 “ravers” had broken open a padlocked gate and started a party in one of his barns.
[…]
“It was like being a farmer in Zimbabwe,” Mr Benton told Radio 4’s Today programme. “The police stood outside the gate while inside people were smashing up my property and they were doing nothing about it.”
Does that answer your question?
Fellows, read Stuart Reid in the Monday, December 31 edition of the Daily Telegraph, the Conservative Party supporting daily, for an example of how not all of the most idiotic remarks on September 11 and the aftermath have come from the hard left. This is a good case of how some of the remarks emanating from the paleo-right have echoes of “they had it coming”, only in this case the sins being punished are sexual rather than to do with capitalism. Reid is deputy editor of the Spectator. Let’s hope his editor, Boris Johnson, finds a decent replacement.
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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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