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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day – recovering the West’s mojo edition

· Slogans & Quotations · UK affairs

“Our problem in the West, I believe, is that we got into a vicious circle of decline. Our victory in the Cold War removed the pressure to remain productive and to constantly demonstrate the superiority of the Western model of free markets and free nations.”

– (Lord) David Frost, Daily Telegraph.

He refers to a new essay he has out to coincide with the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference that has been going on in London. I think it is a worthwhile read.

February 14th, 2025 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)

‘I was a green energy zealot – until I had a nightmare heat pump installed’

· Environment · Political Economy · Science & Technology · UK affairs

The title of this post is taken from the title of this Telegraph article:

All Paul Robinson really wanted were some solar panels on his roof.

The company director, who had recently moved to a quiet market town in Mid Wales, is a firm believer in green technology. In the 12 years before he moved, he had benefitted from solar panels and a home battery, both of which shaved money off his power bill.

The Government offers homeowners grants towards solar panels through its Energy Company Obligation (ECO4) scheme. But to take advantage of the generous initiative, Robinson was also required to install an air source heat pump, an endeavour that proved to be more trouble than it was worth.

“I’m so glad I didn’t pay for any of it,” he says. “The amount it cost is crackers.”

Robinson estimates that around 18 tradesmen – a team of electricians, plumbers, plasterers, and supervisors – descended on the stone barn conversion in Welshpool, with the entire installation costing at least £40,000, according to estimates seen by The Telegraph.

Mr Robinson is understandably glad he didn’t pay for any of it.

UK taxpayers, are you glad you did?

February 11th, 2025 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)

Samizdata quote of the day – Covid inquiry actively suppressing evidence

· Health & medical · Science Fiction & Fantasy · Self ownership · Slogans & Quotations · UK affairs

It is notable that the inquiry’s concentration on the work of the Government’s dis- and mis- information operation assumes that anyone questioning the safety and effectiveness of vaccines is spreading such information. In reality the main source of dis- and mis- information is the Government: the manifest failings of the MHRA have been concealed; the safe and effective narrative is a sham.

I have yet to see any news report of the meeting but hope one will appear somewhere. I also hope that transcripts of the speakers’ presentations will become available. I note that the Perseus Group has made several witness statements to the Hallett Inquiry; whether these have been put on the inquiry website is a little difficult to determine, as the ‘statements’ tab leads to a list which is 809 pages long. I got through the first five without finding anything sensible buried among the trivia. Maybe the submissions are there somewhere. Somehow I doubt it.

– Dr. Andrew Bamji

February 9th, 2025 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)

“Blasphemy laws are incompatible with free speech”

· Civil liberty, Law & Regulation · Deleted by the Woke Media · Media & Journalism · Middle East & Islamic · Religion · UK affairs

“Blasphemy laws are incompatible with free speech”, writes Tom Harris in the Telegraph.

The Government is known to disapprove of the term “two-tier”, especially when applied to policing, in which case, says a recent Home Office report, it can be a telltale sign that you’re of the “far-Right”. Isn’t everything?

I shouldn’t have laughed at that, but I did.

Yet in the last few days we’ve had a perfect example of how our laws are written to be, and correctly interpreted by judges as, two-tier, meaning that they are laws intended to offer different levels of protection and punishment to different groups of UK residents, depending on their faith or ethnic origin.

Martin Frost of Manchester chose (ill-advisedly, I might add) to burn a copy of the Koran in public, live streaming the event, in response to his daughter’s death at the hands of Hamas terrorists on October 7, 2023.

It is notable how many media outlets skated over the fact that Hamas murdered Martin Frost’s daughter. You might think the Telegraph’s phrasing (“her death at the hands of Hamas terrorists”) was mealy-mouthed enough, but just compare it to this ITV report that said,

The “trigger” for his actions was the death of his daughter in the Israeli conflict which had affected his mental health, the court heard.

Note the scare quotes around the word “trigger”, the words “the death of” as if she died a natural or accidental death, and the reference to it occurring in “the Israeli conflict”. Not the Hamas conflict, not the Gaza conflict, not even the Israel-Palestine conflict, but the Israeli conflict.

Tom Harris’s article continues,

He [Martin Frost] claimed also to have been protesting at the murder of Iraqi asylum seeker Salwan Momika who was murdered in his apartment in Stockholm after he performed his own act of Koran burning for his internet audience.

Forst [sic] pleaded guilty to charge of “racially or religiously aggravated intentional harassment or alarm by displaying some writing, sign or other visible representation which was threatening, abusive or insulting thereby causing that or another person harassment, alarm or distress.” That charge is contained in the text of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, introduced by Tony Blair’s government.

The old blasphemy laws may have been consigned to history decades ago, but they were replaced in 1998 by new ones: it is widely accepted that Muslims take very seriously the physical abuse of their religion’s holy book and are known to feel personally offended by any disrespect shown towards it. Similarly, most Muslims also take personal offence at any physical representation of the prophet Mohammed, hence the outcry against the teacher at Batley Grammar in 2021 who did exactly that by showing his pupils a cartoon depicting Islam’s founder.

That teacher is still in hiding.

In modern Britain, Islam and the Koran are protected by the law, by the courts and by the police. Christianity is not. That is not an argument that Christianity should receive equal protection; it is an argument that Islam should receive the same level of legal respect and protection as Christianity – ie, none. Two-tier protection is unacceptable because it equates to two-tier freedom of expression, freedom to criticise one religion but not a different one.

Yes. To forestall criticism that just saying “Yes” adds little of value, I shall try to give better value by amending it to “YES, YES, YES!!!”

We can imagine the horror that police officers, court officials and politicians must have felt when legal proceedings didn’t go their way in the case of Jamie Michael, an ex-Royal Marine who had served his country in Iraq but whose anger at the Southport murders of three young girls last summer led him to upload an ill-advised rant against illegal immigrants that a member of staff working for a Labour MS (Member of the Senedd) felt so offended that they just had to report it to the police.

I would not have guessed that someone working for a Labour member of the Welsh Government actually did have something worse to do with their time than their day job.

A jury took less than an hour of deliberation to acquit him.

The terms Mr Michael used were obnoxious and unpleasant. But as the jury agreed, that should not impinge on his right to free speech.

Juries often do things like that, even now. That’s why “Progressives” keep whittling away at the jury system: “Former Justice Secretary calls for scrapping of defendants’ right to choose jury trial.”

February 7th, 2025 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)

Samzidata quote of the day – voice coach challenge edition

· Slogans & Quotations · UK affairs

“Imagine being Keir Starmer’s voice coach. It’s like being David Lammy’s academic advisor or Bridget Phillipson’s charm consultant.”

– Madeleine Grant.

(For those who don’t – wisely perhaps – follow UK domestic politics, David Lammy is Foreign Secretary, and Phillipson is Education minister. Both are dreadful and therefore classic front-bench ministers in this administration.)

February 5th, 2025 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)

Samizdata quote of the day – an accurate but unedifying image for you

· Economics, Business & Globalization · Slogans & Quotations · UK affairs

The British economy is lying flat on its back in an alleyway with wee dribbling down its leg.

– Rod Liddle (£)

February 1st, 2025 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)

Instead of trying to boost the *grades* of minority students, why not try boosting their achievement?

· Children's issues · Culture Wars · Education & Academia · UK affairs

“Oxford and Cambridge to move away from ‘traditional’ exams to boost results of minorities”, the Telegraph reports.

Top universities including Oxford and Cambridge have been given the green light to move away from “traditional” exams in a bid to boost the grades of minority groups and poorer students.

The elite British institutions could move towards more “inclusive assessments” such as open-book tests or take-home papers instead of in-person, unseen exams in an effort to close the grades gap.

However, the plans have been criticised for potentially “dumbing down” university courses for students.

The approach was unveiled under proposals, known as Access and Participation Plans, which universities must release each year as per their registration conditions to show how they are helping students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

As Katharine Birbalsingh – the head teacher of a very successful school most of whose pupils are from ethnic minorities – said, the idea that black and brown people cannot achieve unless we make exams easier is “utterly revolting racism”. For most of a lifetime, the educational establishment in the English-speaking world has been assiduous in keeping pupils from those groups they consider to be oppressed safe from the momentarily unpleasant experience of being corrected. No tests they might fail, no red ink on their work. Even the idea of the existence of objectively correct answers has been denounced, lest someone oppressed get the wrong answer and feel bad. With equal care, they are protected from ever seeing someone less oppressed get a better score than they did. The upshot has that these pupils have been kept safe from education.

Education should be a pleasant experience overall. Human beings, especially young human beings, love to learn. But in their own games, or when learning a subject they truly want to master, children do not flinch from putting themselves in positions where they might fail. They instinctively know that the route to success involves climbing over some jagged rocks. Unfortunately for most of my lifetime kindly teachers across the English-speaking world have striven to keep all children, but especially black and brown children, on the soft grass where nothing can hurt them – forever. Almost the only place in school where these children experience public failure is on the sports ground. Not surprisingly, sport is one of the few areas where disadvantaged children frequently grow up to succeed.

First it was just the kindergartens and the infant schools where the wee ones had to be kept happy all the time. Then it spread to secondary schools. Now the sweet-smelling fog has reached the colleges and the universities, where the students are – chronologically at least – adults.

January 28th, 2025 | 34 comments - (Comments are closed)

Pitiful returns, regulatory hassle, unpredictable taxes – why Santander is on the point of quitting

· Civil liberty, Law & Regulation · Economics, Business & Globalization · Political Economy · UK affairs

In the Telegraph’s business section, Matthew Lynn writes about why Santander is thinking of leaving the UK:

Santander’s departure would certainly come as a crushing blow to Rachel Reeves’s ambition to turn the UK into the fastest growing economy in the G7. It emerged during the week that the Spanish bank, a familiar presence in the UK since it acquired Abbey National back in 2004, was considering getting out of the country.

It is not hard to understand why. The returns are pitiful, the regulations are a hassle, costs are rising all the time, and even if profitability does improve, there’s a risk the Government will accuse it of “profiteering” and confiscate whatever money it does manage to make with an extra windfall tax.

For a global bank such as Santander, there are better opportunities elsewhere. It has 76m customers already in South America, for example, and that would seem a better place to deploy its capital, not to mention management time, than the UK.

True, Botin [Santander’s executive chairman] moved quickly to dismiss the reports, telling a panel in Davos how much she loved the UK, and how the bank was committed to the British market for the long term. But then again, she would say that. Nothing will be confirmed until the day a final decision is made.

And yet the simple truth is this. It is a shocking indicator of how poor the prospects are in the UK market that a major corporation such as Santander is even thinking about leaving.

January 27th, 2025 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)

As for “Likes” on Twitter, so for votes

· Culture Wars · Historical views · Internet · Political Economy · Privacy & Panopticon · UK affairs

The political scientist Timur Kuran coined the term “preference falsification” in 1987. Earlier today he sent this tweet:

Musk’s purchase of Twitter was a political game changer. Also important was his decision to hide people’s “likes” from other users. This diminished preference falsification on X. It also boosted the apparent popularity, and thus the circulation, of un- or anti-woke posts.

Tony Blair greatly increased the ease of postal voting in UK elections by means of the Representation of the People Act 2000. That Wikipedia article says the Act made only “minor amendments”. They were not minor in their effects and nor were they intended to be. Whoever edited the Wikipedia article on Absentee voting in the United Kingdom got it right:

After the introduction of on-demand postal voting in the UK, there has been a massive uptake in postal voting. Whilst in 2001 1.8 million postal ballots were distributed to voters, this has increased to more than 8 million postal ballots by the UK 2017 general election and represented one in every five ballots cast in 2019 United Kingdom general election.

Labour did this because they thought it would help them win elections, of course. Did it? Perhaps not. While it did increase turnout, which historically has usually helped Labour candidates, the increase in turnout was particularly strong among pensioners, who tend to have mobility problems that make it harder for them to get to the polling station in person. Pensioners skew Conservative. The change also had other effects, of which more below.

I can certainly see a reason for some mechanism to be available to let people arrange to vote by post (or vote by mail as the Americans call it) when circumstances make them unable to vote in person. But absentee voting unquestionably degrades the secret ballot. This brings us back to the issue of preference falsification. As the same Wikipedia article says,

In the United Kingdom a 2016 government inquiry found that postal voting “was considered by some to be the UK’s main electoral vulnerability and to provide the ‘best’ opportunity for electoral fraud… Evidence was presented of pressure being put on vulnerable members of some ethnic minority communities, particularly women and young people, to vote according to the will of the elders… the possibilities of undue influence, theft of postal votes and tampering with them after completion were all still risks.” The government responded by saying it would consider the recommendations on postal voting.

Presumably the government (by then a Conservative one) did consider the recommendations. It evidently decided it wanted more postal voting anyway. Probably that was to get the pensioner vote.

However something changed in the 2024 election that I speculate might lead Labour to fall out of love with postal voting. Of course Labour won that election with a massive majority – but there were some nasty surprises for individual Labour MPs, many of them quite prominent.

Wes Streeting, the Secretary of State for Health, had a majority of 5,218 in the 2019 election. His majority in the 2024 election was 528. The person who came near to unseating him was a Muslim Independent who campaigned on the issue of Gaza.

Shabana Mahmood, the Secretary of State for Justice, had a majority of 28,582 in the 2019 election. Her majority in the 2024 election was 3,421. The person who came near to unseating her was a Muslim Independent who campaigned on the issue of Gaza.

Jess Philips had a majority of 10,659 in the 2019 election. Her majority in the 2024 election was 693. The person who came near to unseating her is a Muslim member of George Galloway’s Workers Party who campaigned on the issue of Gaza.

Jonathan Ashworth had a majority of 22,675 in 2019. His constituency was considered a safe seat for Labour, but he lost it in 2024 to a Muslim Independent who campaigned on the issue of Gaza.

There are several other similar examples.

Labour knows full well that its current majority is a mile high but an inch thick, as the saying goes. If Reform eats the Tories, or vice versa, I think that Labour will look with fresh eyes at the issue highlighted in that 2016 report:

Evidence was presented of pressure being put on vulnerable members of some ethnic minority communities, particularly women and young people, to vote according to the will of the elders.

January 26th, 2025 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)

Beatings will continue until morale improves – a continuing series

· Economics, Business & Globalization · UK affairs

For the past decade or more, “neoliberalism” has been under attack. For example, a few years ago I read a book by the journalist Tom Bergin (Reuters), who argued, with a lot of data and references, that cutting marginal tax rates will not boost an economy. He poured cold water on the ideas of US economist Arthur Laffer, the “father of supply-side economics”, and denied that changes to tax rates make much difference to incentives to work, or so on. (Bergin’s analysis is politely and beautifully skewered, here, by Kristian Niemietz of the IEA. See also this new book by Tim Worstall.)

Of course, it is true that a 1% cut or rise to, say, capital gains tax or other tax will not produce an instant or commensurate change in economic behaviour. The elasticity of supply/demand relationships for labour, capital and land are variable. Labour is not homogenous, as Tyler Cowen notes (this also is a killer for the Marxian labour theory of value); there are frictional costs and sources of inertia that mean an economy cannot be turned on or off like a switch, contrary to the delusions of central planners or, indeed, naive advocates of free markets. But there IS an effect over time.

Changes to incentives compound: if you make it harder to hire and fire, and make it more expensive, irritating and difficult to achieve A or B, then less of what you want will get done. Hiking taxes on employment will reduce labour employed and encourage a substitution of capital for labour, just as taxes on petrol or food will causes changes to consumption, or force those who buy essentials to buy fewer so-called luxuries, or adjust in various other ways, not all of them predictable.

The UK government spending total, as a share of GDP, at the highest level since the late 1940s. And following the 31 Oct. 2024 budget, unemployment is rising. We also have about 1 in 5 working-age adults out of the workforce. Like a rusty naval frigate, large elements of the UK public have been decommissioned, fit only for a salvage yard, so it appears.

Tax incentives aren’t the only thing that count, but they are important. The UK has moved decisively down the wrong side of the Laffer Curve, and the results are clear.
January 24th, 2025 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)

Samizdata quote of the day – the Apocalypse Bill

· Slogans & Quotations · UK affairs

This Friday, January 24th, the UK Parliament is due to vote on a Private Member’s Bill that could lead to mass starvation, widespread disease and fatalities and the almost certain collapse of civil liberties and society within a few years. The bill has the support of a third of voting MPs and there is a clear and present danger that it could pass. Many MPs depart for their constituencies on a Friday and 200 remaining zealots could have a chance to swing a vote their way. The bill is a thinly-disguised attempt using meaningless climate and nature crisis verbosity to ration and control almost everything that citizens consume. The obvious attack on civil liberties should serve as a warning to other countries to stand against the Net Zero hysterics that have infiltrated large sections of elite British society.

– Chris Morrison

January 21st, 2025 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)

Believe or disbelieve individuals, not the camera

· Internet · Middle East & Islamic · Privacy & Panopticon · Self defence & Security · UK affairs

I have been predicting this day would come for decades. It is still chilling to see it arrive.

Both today’s Sunday Times and the Mail on Sunday carry the story of an ordinary woman whose life was nearly ruined by an AI-edited version of some doorbell footage that falsely showed her uttering racist abuse. The Mail’s story is here. It has the original video without a paywall, but I had started writing this post using the Sunday Times version before I was made aware by commenter JuliaM that the Mail had the same story, so in what follows I will mostly quote the Sunday Times story, ‘I doorknocked for Labour then racist deepfake ruined my life’. An archived version can be found here.

It started harmlessly enough. A PE teacher called Cheryl Bennett said that she would help deliver leaflets for her colleague, Quasim Mughal, who was standing as a Labour candidate in the local elections in May last year.

For that display of friendship, she has paid a heavy penalty. What happened that morning — or, rather, did not happen — has changed her life forever. For a time, it cost Bennett her reputation and her career. She was at risk of a criminal conviction too, and police visited her home to arrest her.

As she approached the door of a household in nearby Dudley, she was accompanied by two people: Mughal, the candidate who is of south Asian heritage, and her previous head teacher, who is not. At first, the owner did not answer.

By the time the door was opened, both colleagues had moved on to the next property, leaving Bennett to ask the person whether they intended to vote. Unbeknown to her, a CCTV camera perched above the door was filming.

Within days, a short segment of the footage had been leaked, edited to remove Mughal, and given subtitles. The resulting video falsely depicted Bennett launching into a racist tirade against the homeowner, with subtitles declaring: “F***ing p*kis. P*kis,” as she walked away from the front door.

Nobody has been able to establish who maliciously doctored the footage, but it was given to Akhmed Yakoob, a Lamborghini-owning criminal solicitor, nicknamed the “TikTok lawyer”, who was an independent pro-Gaza candidate for West Midlands mayor and had close links with George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain.

Yakoob posted a narrated version of the fake video on TikTok. He also posted Bennett’s name and place of work.

The video caused a sensation. Within days, it had received 2.1 million views across TikTok, Facebook and X, and prompted hundreds of people, including dozens of parents at her school, which has a large British-Pakistani community, to demand she be sacked. Yakoob and his followers cited Bennett as an example of Labour and Sir Keir Starmer’s lack of interest in Muslim and minority ethnic voters in the wake of the Israel-Gaza war. She was forced into hiding.

Yakoob has since paid substantial damages for his publication of the video.

For a time, however, it looked as though vindication might never come. Within a short time of Yakoob’s TikTok post at 7.30pm, her phone started to vibrate while she was at a friend’s house.

“My phone just started going off like I’d just stepped out of Love Island or I’d just become famous. It was going absolutely berserk on the table. So I picked it up thinking: ‘Family, is there something going on?’ So I looked at my phone and I had loads of work emails going through.”

Most of them contained abuse. Some were written by children at her own school. “Appalling,” one pupil said. “Being racist is harmful because it disregards the inherent worth and dignity of individuals solely based on their race.” Another wrote: “I didn’t expect a teacher of your standard to be discriminative of races.” Bennett, confused, protested that she had said no such thing, but the messages kept on coming through Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. “Stop lying.” “Ur not getting away with this.” “Racist little bitch.”

Then came the formal complaints, as well-meaning parents wrote to the head teacher demanding an investigation and threatening to contact the board of governors. The secondary school received 800 complaints in a short time, some from parents at her school, others from her previous school.

Within hours, the head teacher had told Bennett not to return to work for her own safety. She was not safe at home either, where she lived alone. Strangers arrived at the homes of her parents and her grandmother demanding information as to her whereabouts. Even her car number plate was circulating online.

She stayed at a friend’s home that night. At about 2.30am, West Midlands police went to her home to arrest her, putting a postcard through her door asking her to call them.

The Mail’s version of the story makes it clearer that Ms Bennett having fled to a friend’s house was the reason that she was not present when the police arrived at her home to arrest her at 2.30am. Even if she had been guilty, I do not see why the police thought it was necessary to turn up at that hour to arrest a woman for a non-violent crime.

The Sunday Times account continues:

“I was just constantly in survival mode. I was just trying to get through every single day. And it’s only because I’ve been raised by a very strong family, by very strong women, in terms of you keep fighting and pushing through. Because there was days where I just thought: ‘Would it be easier if I was to just end my life?’ Just because I felt like my career would never be same.”

Before long, police discovered the video was a hoax. They obtained the original doorbell footage, which specialist officers could see bore no resemblance to the subtitles in the video. On May 8, a spokesman for the force said they had found “no evidence of any racist slurs or language used”.

Lucky for her the original footage was still available. How long do they keep it on file? Round here we tend to assume surveillance is bad in itself, but we may soon end up being grateful for it more often than not.

January 19th, 2025 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
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