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I first became aware of David Trimble some time in the early 1990s. I was impressed. He was way more impressive in his media appearances than any other unionist of the time. I was so impressed that – wearing my National Association of Conservative Graduates hat – I interviewed him. We covered the basics of the Ulster issue, why Northern Ireland existed, and, er… memory escapes me. The fun part was when he claimed that the Conservative Party had ceased to be a British party. At the time pretty stinging.
Sometime later, after he had become leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, and about a week after the IRA had bombed Canary Wharf, thus ending their ceasefire, I walked in to his Westminster office – I had somehow managed to acquire a pass – and declared that I was working for him. And so I did for the next year. In that year, we had Drumcree II, John Major’s government losing its majority and endless talks about talks in Belfast.
About the first thing he said to me on that day I joined, after asking whether or not I took sugar in my tea, and quite unprompted, was that the British governent was forever on the lookout for a unionist leader who would on the one hand keep unionists in line while on the other making endless concessions.
I was lucky enough to have a desk in his office – there is less space than you might think in the Palace of Westminster. I learnt an awful lot.
I learnt that Henry VIII died a Catholic. I learnt some very grim things about the Republic of Ireland’s justice system and the retribution the IRA visited on Ulster Britons after Bloody Sunday. I learnt that there is a difference between a member of the Irish peerage and and Irish member of the British peerage. I learnt that there were moles in the RUC. I learnt that if you receive an invitation to a Royal Banquet the stated dress code is black tie but don’t you dare turn up in anything less than white tie. I learnt that there was a time when ballots were not secret. Your vote would be published. David looked up to see how one of his ancestors had voted in a previous election. He was delighted to find that he had voted Liberal. I learnt that joining the Orange Order was “something you just did” and that a lot of loyalists have Irish names (O’Fee, O’Hare, that sort of thing). I learnt that journalists will twist your words at the drop of a hat, while giving your opponents a free pass. I learnt that the IRA is something of an aristocracy and that beyond the leadership quite a lot of them are really rather thick. I learnt that internment is essential in defeating terrorism.
I also saw him lose his temper now and then. It was quite something to see so long as you weren’t on the receiving end, his face turning a very deep red indeed. By far the best explosion was the day one of his fellow Ulster politicians showed up. Within five minutes – it may have been less – the two were shouting at one another at the top of their voices. The meeting was not a success.
It wasn’t all shouting though. At some point in the day he would just stop being the leader of a political party and start playing Windows Solitaire.
To my mind if you want to do good in Ulster you have to understand the issue. That’s not so easy when an awful lot of people are trying to obscure it. Clue: it has nothing to do with religion and nothing to do with civil rights. David was very helpful in this regard. The upshot was Ulster for Beginners which I rather self-indulgently re-published here a while back.
Sadly, David’s understanding of the issue was not – in my eyes at least – combined with a strategy for getting the word out. Very quickly, his leadership descended into a series of fire-fighting actions which I felt took away from the key job of making the case for unionism.
I left shortly before the 1997 Blair landslide. It was a good time to leave. The Labour Party had never held unionism in any great affection and was determined to make some sort of deal with the IRA. The result was the Good Friday Agreement with the nonsense of power sharing and later on the abolition of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. It also included a promise from the IRA about disarmament which they probably didn’t mean at the time but after 9/11 probably did.
David became the first First Minister of Northern Ireland’s new devolved government but it didn’t last. What he didn’t see – I didn’t either – was that power sharing meant that voters had to elect the most extreme representatives their tribe could offer. The result was that the moderates of the Ulster Unionist Party and the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party were to all intents and purposes wiped out. So, it was with Trimble who eventually lost his Westminster seat.
David Trimble was one of the smartest, most knowledgeable people I have ever met. He combined that with an unusual ability – certainly amongst unionists – to get his message across. Had he been a mainland politician he would almost certainly have been a member of the Cabinet. It was even at one point suggested that he should join the Cabinet just the way he was. They say you should never meet your political hero. Well, I met mine and got to know him very well. And I am glad I did.
David Trimble as I remember him. Taken in the office at a time when taking photos on the Parliamentary estate was forbidden.
Tegnell was aided by another worthy candidate to share the Nobel, Johan Giesecke, who had formerly held Tegnell’s job and served during the pandemic as an advisor to the Swedish public health agency. Decades earlier, he had recruited Tegnell to the agency because he admired the young doctor’s willingness to speak his mind regardless of political consequences. In early March 2020, as leaders across Europe were closing schools, Giesecke sent his protégé an email with a sentence in Latin. It was a famous piece of fatherly advice sent in 1648 by the Swedish statesman Axel Oxenstierna to reassure a son worried about holding his own in negotiations with foreign leaders. An nescis, mi fili, quantilla prudentia mundus regatur: “Do you not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?”
The quote is from an article (h/t instapundit) that starts
The frontrunner for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize … is the World Health Organization. It’s hard to imagine a worse choice. (Okay, Vladimir Putin.)
Most of the world ignored Tegnell and Giesecke, but they had equivalents in Florida. Those Floridans may have known Count Oxenstierna’s remark. But it’s more probable they knew what John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson on July 9th, 1813.
“While all other sciences have advanced, that of Government is at a stand … little better practiced now than three or four thousand years ago.”
Clearly they also knew that science bureaucrats are a lot more like bureaucrats than like scientists – not advancing science but at a stand as to how to apply it for anyone’s benefit but their own.
If Boris Johnson had listened to the Swedes instead of Professor Neil Ferguson and suchlike, he would still be prime minister. Boris (and Dominic Cummings too!) should have remembered what Dominic saw during the Brexit campaign.
Most people in politics are, whether they know it or not, much more comfortable with failing conventionally than risking the social stigma of behaving unconventionally.
It made a strange end to his career that, after getting his dream job by winning unconventionally, Boris then lost it as a delayed side-effect of failing conventionally. Fate offered him his longed-for Churchill moment – whereupon Boris let the Swedes, not the Brits save themselves by their exertions, and give the world their example: not something I would have predicted before I first saw it.
“If consumers and businesses cared about the CO2 they emit, the last cars they might buy are hot-selling EVs like Ford’s Mustang Mach-E or GM’s Hummer EV.”
“California toddler and an infant in D.C. were likely infected by ‘household contacts’ and both had contact with gay or bisexual men, CDC chief says”
Although the report is consistent with the study, I suspect Ian Miles Cheong thinks the phrase “between men“ may be understating the age range involved. “Are we allowed to ask any questions?”, he tweeted – to which the literal answer may be ‘no’, since Twitter has announced it will censor those who use the word ‘Groomers’, and I suggest the question Ian has not (yet) asked might involve that word.
However, I have a question – a modest proposal (and it truly is modest, as it would be dishonestly vain of me to pretend it was my idea; I owe it all to the inspiration of Professor Neil Ferguson and Dr Fauci).
Why don’t we just ban male homosexual sex – for three weeks “to Flatten the Curve” or fifteen days “to Slow the Spread” or whatever period sounds good? (How long hardly matters, provided it’s long enough to prepare a case for banning it for a lot longer. Here again, I must modestly disclaim all inventiveness of my own. I owe the idea of banning briefly, then using that time to get the ban extended to Dr Deborah Birx.)
Of course, such regulations reduce liberty – but surely global health experts have established beyond question these last two years that liberty can and should be sacrificed whenever the WHO declares a global health emergency.
Of course, Sweden claimed they would (and did) get a better outcome through doing much less by regulation, leaving far more of the distancing and restraint decisions to individual discretion – but the health authorities and media of most of the rest of the western political world treated the idea as ridiculous then, and do not call themselves ridiculous now.
So I put it to my readers that it would be absurd for those who guided us through the last pandemic not to enact my modest proposal for handling this one (especially as the rules would be easier to draft, since I’ve a vague notion that there’s an old law that could be revived to ban this unhealthy behaviour).
But which is least bad? We love to say that politicians “are all as bad as each other”, but that is very rarely true. There is nearly always some difference between them. Go on, make me care.
I am in a sulk because Kemi Badenoch is out of the running. She is my local MP. I have seen her in person a couple of times, and once, during the interminable Brexit crisis, I sent her an email. She replied, and although she did not agree with me, it was clear from the reply that she had read my email and was responding to the point I actually made, not the superficially similar point that a lot of people were making at the time. That is no small thing.
I know the spectrum of views on this topic among Samizdata folk varies widely, from “Hell, yes” denialist to, well, me. That is, to someone who climate alarmists would call a climate denialist but who does not self-identify as such.
Anyway, on Monday and Tuesday it was hot. I mean really hot compared to the UK average. I remember 1976, and it was hotter than that. We have often poured justifiable scorn on predicting the climate by computer models and quoted versions of Groucho Marx’s line from Duck Soup: “Who are you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” – or in this case, your own epidermal thermo-receptors. The evidence of my own senses said it was the hottest two days of my life and that’s still true even if the BBC said the same.
Professor Sowell wrote this article in 2016. Little has changed since then, except that I doubt that today’s Associated Press would dare publish it.
Surely murder is a serious subject, which ought to be examined seriously. Instead, it is almost always examined politically in the context of gun control controversies, with stock arguments on both sides that have remained the same for decades. And most of those arguments are irrelevant to the central question: Do tighter gun control laws reduce the murder rate?
That is not an esoteric question, nor one for which no empirical evidence is available. Think about it. We have 50 states, each with its own gun control laws, and many of those laws have gotten either tighter or looser through the years. There must be tons of data that could indicate whether murder rates went up or down when either of these things happened.
But have you ever heard any gun control advocate cite any such data?
Konstantin Kisin is a former stand-up comedian who, along with current stand-up comedian Francis Foster hosts the YouTube channel Triggernometry, which is partly a political interview show and partly a comedy show. His thoughts have even been referred to a couple of times here on Samizdata. Kisin is also a Russian who moved to this country when he was eleven to study, oddly enough, at the same English public school that produced Earl Haig.
And now he’s written a book. I have only just started reading it so these are initial observations hence the Part I bit. There may be a Part II but I promise nothing. Kisin is a good writer (all the comedy stuff showing through?) and a thoughtful one. As he says:
If there is one thing my Soviet childhood taught me, it’s that subscribing to someone else’s ideology will always inevitably mean having to suspend your judgement about right and wrong to appease your tribe. I refuse to do so.
Kisin’s essential argument is that we in the West don’t know how lucky we are. We don’t know what it is like to live in non-Western countries. We don’t appreciate how much better life is here. And if we do we don’t know why it is so much better. Kisin has seen Russia and he has seen Britain and it is not difficult for him to decide which is better. Which is why he is so angry when well-meaning (and not-so-well-meaning) activists start playing around with our traditions and institutions. They – the well-meaning ones – think that they’re just improving things. He thinks that they are playing a game of civilisational Jenga – at least he does since Foster came up with the analogy. Jenga’s the one where you have a tower made of sticks you remove them one by one and eventually the whole edifice collaspses, isn’t it?
So far I’ve read chapters on the Soviet Union, slavery (and the Soviet Union) and free speech. All good stuff. Or mostly. In one bit he says, “Think of it like Margaret Thatcher’s Section 28 – which forbade the promotion of homosexuality in Britain in 1988.” That’s not how I remember it. I remember it as local councils not being allowed to promote homosexuality as “a pretended family relationship.” Otherwise people were free to promote homosexuality to their heart’s content. And did. He also seems to think that people were broadly-speaking equal in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union of my imagination has Zils, dachas and shops for party members only. Not equal at all. I suppose this is how distorted history gets propagated down the ages but that is the subject for another blog post.
Only good stories matter, ‘representation’ should not be an objective in and of itself or daft things happen. That is why a super diverse cast in The Expanse works superbly but black elves in a Tolkien story are as laughable as Kate Beckinsale playing Martin Luther King.
Although it is already being offered at 50% off, I feel so reluctant to put money in the pocket of Dr Birx that I will delay reading her new book until I see a remaindered copy on a charity bookstall.
Meanwhile, I recommend reading the whole of this and then also this (h/t instapundit) for some rather important information about the attitudes of one of the not-very-scientific science bureaucrats who brought lockdown to the USA. Here is a tiny sample.
No sooner had we convinced the Trump administration to implement our version of a two-week shutdown than I was trying to figure out how to extend it. Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread was a start, but I knew it would be just that. I didn’t have the numbers in front of me yet to make the case for extending it longer, but I had two weeks to get them. However hard it had been to get the fifteen-day shutdown approved, getting another one would be more difficult by many orders of magnitude.
Decide to lockdown first, find justification later. I resist the urge to add quote after quote; read the two complementary – but very uncomplimentary 🙂 – reviews of her book at the links above!
In Britain, it was ‘three weeks to flatten the curve’, not two weeks, but in both countries somewhat reluctant chief executives were persuaded, against their instincts, to go along with it – and with extending it. (Both Trump and Boris would probably still be safely in office if they had refused.)
Birx wittingly and unwittingly reveals much. Boris will soon have some spare time for reflection and for writing another book. Will he – will anyone – tell us more about the Birxing of the UK?
Twenty-two years after 16-year-old Lucy Lowe, her mother and her sister were burned to death in a house fire started by Azhar Ali Mehmood (the 26-year-old who impregnated her when she was 14), the inquiry into grooming gangs in Telford has released a report on the phenomenon of which that was an example.
the authorities dismissed the 1,000 figure as ‘sensationalised’ and suggested the newspaper had ‘made it up on the back of a fag packet’. This week, inquiry chair Tom Crowther QC described the Sunday Mirror’s estimate as a ‘measured, reasonable and non-sensational assessment’. (h/t spiked)
It’s another example of how one of the things Blair made it unsafe to say back then was not only true in Telford (and true enough to compete with Rotherham – and with Rochdale, Aylesbury, Oxford, Derby, Halifax, Keighley, Peterborough, Huddersfield, Manchester and Newcastle) but became much more common, much more true, because the resulting politically-correct suppression of anything resembling basic policing “emboldens offenders”.
‘Islamophobia’ is not the only ‘phobia’ restricting free speech. But it has a certain claim to priority in this century’s war on free speech in Britain, so if we want to know what’s coming up for the others, we’d better pay attention to what the effects of hating free speech were as ‘Islamophobia’ permeated culture and law.
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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