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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Yesterday, as daylight was ending, I encountered this item of graffiti:
In case – what with the rather unhelpful lighting and this blog’s preference for making photos smaller – you can’t read that, it says:
FRENCH RIOTS GET RESULTS! U LOT ARE INSTAGRAM ZZZOMBIES.
The above transcript has the added advantage that if anyone sees this same proclamation and types the words of it into the www, there’s a good chance they’ll get sent here.
This message is (or perhaps now: was) to be seen on the bridge where the top end of Tottenham Court Road goes north over Euston Road and turns itself into Hampstead Road.
I’m not sure what to make of it. He (it probably is a he) has a point, I suppose, if by results you include the riot police getting a pay rise. Riots do sometimes get results, but only in rather particular circumstances, I think. Things like a very weak and unpopular government, and preferably also a dithery and indecisive one; and like: a symbolic issue of great potency, and like: the absence of any other means to express discontent.
But, my prejudice is that the sprayer of the above message is a hell of a lot more interested in rioting, for the sheer hell of it, than he is in what the results of any particular riot might be. “I riot therefore I am” is what this says to me. Or, to adapt that old Marlon Brando line: “What are you rioting against?” “Whaddaya got?”
Personally, I prefer taking photos.
Sarah Phelps is the writer of The ABC Murders. This TV drama starring John Malkovitch is the BBC’s newest interpretation of the character Hercule Poirot, the Belgian detective created by Agatha Christie. Here she is – Ms Phelps, not Mrs Christie – talking about her creation:
“For a long time Britain was caught up in the wave of righteous sentimentality and sympathy for poor little plucky Belgium. Then the times start to pinch. It’s the Thirties. There’s less to go around. People start to be cruel. They want someone to blame and it’s really easy to blame the people who arrived. So he’s being scrutinised now. People are asking questions. ‘You make us look like halfwits and you’ve got a foreign accent.’ English police for English crimes.”
Are there parallels with Brexit Britain? Of course there are.
“I really wanted to think about who we were in that decade and who we are right now. How have we gone from the optimism, the look-at-us-we’re-brilliant spirit of 2012, from celebrating this glorious, inclusive, generous country, to suddenly this place? How quickly something toxic can take hold! When we talk of the nationalism roaring across Europe in the Thirties, we forgive ourselves and think, ‘Well, that never happened here.’ It did, and the language was very much the same as the language that has been developing in our politics over the last four or five years.”
It will indeed be a Poirot for the second half of 2018 and the first three months of 2019.
According to the BBC, ‘persons of interest’ have been identified as responsible for flying the drone or drones that shut down Gatwick airport. As it gradually became clear that this was going on too long to be the work of careless hobbyists or malicious pranksters, the profile of the crime (it disrupted air travel but did not kill anyone) made me think that “climate justice” activists might be responsible. The BBC article says that is indeed one of the lines of enquiry being pursued. Still, let us be no more hasty to jump to conclusions or to blame every environmentalist in existence for the possible crimes of one of their number than we would like them to be next time someone loosely describable as “on our side” commits a crime.
The more urgent problem is that now whoever it was has demonstrated the method, anyone can copy it.
Technically and legally what can be done to stop a repetition? What should be done? What should not be? If you are one of those who have enjoyed flying drones in a responsible manner, or who is developing ways to use drones for emergency or commercial use, start work on your arguments now, because, trust me, the calls to BAN ALL DRONES NOW are going to be loud.
“A citizens’ assembly could break the politicians’ Brexit deadlock”, says a bevy of the great and good.
Remainer strategy:
1) Campaign for a REAL referendum on Europe.
2) When you lose the referendum, spend two and a half years complaining that it was nothing but a “glorified opinion poll.”
3) Campaign for a REAL glorified opinion poll.
They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn,
But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn.
We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom when we learn
That the union makes us strong.
– From the fifth verse of the union song Solidarity Forever, written in 1915 by Ralph Chaplin.
Mind the gap: Tube drivers on £100,000 fly past pilots
Staff who just open and close doors on automatic trains are receiving a 4% rise
Some London Tube drivers have broken the £100,000 pay barrier, overtaking many airline pilots, according to data released under freedom of information (FoI) laws. Their pay packages have gone into six figures even as their jobs have become easier: trains on five of the Tube’s 11 lines are automatic and the driver simply opens and closes the doors. Another four lines will be automatic by 2023.
The pay figures were revealed as drivers on the Central line prepare for a strike on Saturday, one of the busiest shopping days of the year in the West End, over the sacking of a colleague who failed three drug tests.
– From today’s Sunday Times.
Looks like the train drivers’ union ASLEF could give the capitalist exploiters a lesson or two in taking “untold millions they never toiled to earn”. The tube drivers long ago ceased to expend either brain or muscle but have kept their power to stop the wheels turning when, for instance, they feel outraged at the injustice of one of their number losing his job just for failing a drug test or three. They can swing that sort of deal because their employer, Transport for London, is an arm of the government, under no real pressure to keep costs down. Welcome to your future under the next Labour government: Labour has promised to renationalise the railways and ASLEF is affiliated to the Labour Party.
A powerful cross-party group of MPs today warns Theresa May that Brexit is “sucking the life” out of her government – as cabinet sources admit that the crisis is forcing vital domestic business off the government’s timetable.
And the problem is?
So Theresa May has survived the vote of confidence by her fellow Tory MPs. If nothing else the relief that she must feel knowing that Conservative Party rules mean that she cannot be challenged again as leader until a year has gone by should give her a lively appreciation of exactly what is wrong with the much-touted idea of a second referendum.
Whenever I hear people stereotyping based on gender. “Women vote this way”, “Men act in this manner”, I am reminded of the great contrast between Britain’s two women Prime Ministers. Thatcher, won a brilliant renegotiation of the EEC, trounced the unions, denationalized vast swaths of obscene nationalized industries, and was one of the four people instrumental in ending the cold war. May, the other lady from number 10, apparently couldn’t negotiate the purchase of a sausage supper for fifty quid in the local fish and chip shop.
Apparently, it is more to do with the content of your character than the content of your underpants.
– Fraser Orr
(Apart from the free trade bit)
This is an ad for the Liberal Party going into the 1918 General Election. Note that the Liberal Party split during the First World War with some following Lloyd George and others continuing to follow Asquith. This ad is for the Asquith Liberals. Also note this is not an ideological division; Lloyd George’s Coalition Liberals are standing on much the same platform. Also, also note that the statist rot set in well before the First World War.
In December 1918, this Liberal Party was more or less wiped out with Asquith losing his seat. In subsequent elections the general Liberal vote collapsed even further until by the 1950s the by-then re-unified party had only a handful of MPs.
 The Times 5 December 1918 p5
The Guardian‘s Matthew d’Ancona is at least honest about his opinion of Brexit voters:
“Let’s be honest about what’s really driving Brexit: bigotry”.
“What’s wrong with UK financial markets? The global economy is recovering, but British stocks and shares are not keeping pace. The pound has failed to recover from the slide it experienced in the wake of the EU referendum. This is frequently blamed on investors being spooked by Brexit, even more so by the possibility of a no deal. But has anyone actually asked the markets what is spooking them? Look closer and it becomes clear that while Brexit is a problem for some investors, most are much more worried about a far bigger risk, even if they rarely speak about it in public. It is the possibility of a Corbyn government.”
– Ross Clark, in the Spectator (£).
As there is a paywall and it is annoying for those who cannot get through it, here are more paragraphs:
Since last year’s election, when the Labour leader came within a stone’s throw of No. 10, it has been impossible to write off the idea of a Corbyn victory. And we’re about to enter a time when anything can happen. Theresa May looks doomed to lose the Commons vote on her Brexit deal on 11 December; the DUP has said it may well withdraw its support from the Tories, leaving the Prime Minister without a majority. Whatever the Commons result, turmoil is more or less guaranteed — and one possible outcome is a general election as early as January.
A no-deal Brexit would unquestionably cause short-term ructions in the UK economy, as well as affect the pound and the FTSE — for what economic forecasts are worth (which is not very much, to judge by recent history). Oxford Economics recently claimed that GDP would be 2 per cent smaller than expected, pushing the UK into a mild recession. But even if that were to happen (and it has to be remembered just how far Treasury forecasts were out when they claimed the economy would shrink by 3.6 and 6 per cent in the event of a Brexit vote), growth would then rekindle, trade would continue, companies would re-route imports and exports, and an inflationary spike would die down. But if Corbyn were to be elected on a ‘radical socialist’ platform, investors can only guess as to what might happen.
It is the threat of a wealth tax that is scaring wealthy individuals. It is a theme to which shadow chancellor John McDonnell has returned several times. In 2012 he gave his endorsement to a proposal by University of Glasgow academic Greg Philo (sometimes mistakenly called an ‘economist’ but actually a professor in sociology) to subject wealthy individuals to a one-off wealth tax of 20 per cent in the hope of using it to pay off the government’s debts.
`The wealthiest 10 per cent own £4,000 billion,’ said McDonnell. ‘If you took 20 per cent of that you would then have £800 billion and we could tackle our deficit — we could tackle our debt — four-fifths of our debt would then be wiped out. So we’re saying just collect the money and make those who created the crisis pay for the crisis and that way you overcome it.’
The idea that wealthy individuals are as a group responsible for the 2008/09 crisis is absurd — what role, he might like to explain, did the Rolling Stones play in the crash? — as is the suggestion that such a tax would pay off the government’s debts: how McDonnell would manage to capture his £800 billion when, of course, highly mobile wealthy individuals have the option of fleeing the country. There is little appetite around the world for international socialist revolution, the only thing which could stop capital flight in its tracks.
On the contrary, many governments are going in the opposite direction and making every effort to attract wealthy residents. Donald Trump’s tax cuts have set out a big welcome mat for the world’s rich (if not so much for those of liberal opinion). Israel has introduced a ten-year tax holiday on the global wealth of new residents — they will pay tax only on money they bring into the country. Emmanuel Macron has reversed François Hollande’s war on the rich and offered special inducements to attract wealthy residents. Monaco recently held a presentation in London in an effort to attract wealthy individuals. Argentina and Greece, countries from which the wealthy were fleeing in recent times, are now much more settled.
The author is correct; in my own discussions with people in the financial markets, there is a real fear of what these reheated Marxists will do. Anyone who owns land, for example, unless they are politically connected to Labour, will be targeted. And as usual, it will not just be “the rich” who get it in the neck (not that isn’t bad in its own right), but the broad mass of the middle class who will not have the ease of being able to go abroad on a second passport.
The tragedy of the current situation is that Prime Minister Theresa May uses the genuine fear of a Corbyn-led government to scare us into accepting her plans to turn the UK into a European Customs Union vassal state, indefinitely, hoping no doubt that we all become so bored by the Brexit process that we accept that as the least-worst, if still crap, outcome. This situation, however, cannot last and I predict that there will be a significant political party realignment in the next few years, a view that several folk I know share. This current choice menu of Marxist anti-semite Left vs managerialist and hopeless Tory Party is simply shameful for a country of the UK’s standing in the world.
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