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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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Some time in the early 1990s I was a witness to a brief exchange in the House of Commons that went unnoticed at the time but would go on to change the world.*
The scene was an ill-attended debate on Legal Aid Fees – the fees paid to lawyers by the state for representing those of slender means, as the White Paper setting up the Legal Aid scheme in 1949 put it. At the time, I was a very junior civil servant, sent to sit in the Visitors’ Gallery as a minor jolly and to give me some idea of how Parliamentary Questions played out in real life.
Speaking for the Lord Chancellor’s Department – none of yer new-fangled “Ministry of Justice” rubbish then – was a Tory MP I will call My Guy. It was him I sometimes got to write whole paragraphs of briefing papers for. Speaking for the Opposition was a Labour bloke whom I will call Labour Bloke. Up pops Labour Bloke, newly briefed by the Law Society (the “professional association” for UK lawyers, like a trade union but less honest) on how the wicked Tories were driving legal folk to penury and leaving the poor without representation as a result. “What is the Minister going to do,” he said, or words to that effect, “about the savage and unjustified cuts to Legal Aid fees?”
My Guy – a lawyer himself but now poacher turned gamekeeper – smiles and says, “There have been no cuts to Legal Aid Fees”. Labour Bloke visibly checks the papers in his hand but restrains himself from saying the words “But it says here”. He did manage to stammer out something, to which My Guy, who was a bit of a snot but in the right here and knew it, merely responded with the same words again: “There have been no cuts to Legal Aid Fees”.
There followed some bandying of figures, but Labour Bloke never recovered his momentum. The reason the poor chap had been so sure there had been cuts was that the Law Society had made the mistake of feeding him the same guff they put out to the Guardian, which was cleverly worded to make the fact that fees had gone up by less than inflation sound like they had been cut. I could tell Labour had taken their line straight from the Law Society by the familiarity of the words and figures used. I remember thinking how foolish Labour had been to rely so much on one source, and even more strongly, how damning it was that a bunch of barristers [Edit: solicitors, not barristers, according to commenter “llamas”], professional arguers by all that’s holy, had failed to appreciate the folly in both law and politics of not telling their own advocate the whole story.
I was reminded of that exchange by seeing two things on the internet about the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, which, please bear in mind, is not over.
One was this Guardian article, “Jury watches drone footage of Kyle Rittenhouse shooting man dead.” I do not say it contains any lies, but if that were your only source you would never know, you would never guess, you would never imagine, the existence of this video clip.
Imagine, dear reader, that you are a committed progressive. Imagine that you go online to argue against Rittenhouse, armed, if you will forgive the phrase, only with that Guardian article. How would it go? The mainstream media has passed a milestone in its decline to irrelevance when someone who wants to successfully argue for the same things the MSM argues for must use other sources besides the MSM.
*OK, the change concerned was that a quarter of a century later it would inspire me to write this Samizdata post, but that is undeniably part of the world and the world will have changed from not including my musings to including them once I press “Publish”, which I am doing now.
The fact that Chinese state media so widely shared a particularly credulous New Yorker article by Peter Hessler about China’s coronavirus response did not escape China expert Geremie Barmé, who cautioned its author that it reminded him of “another American journalist, a man who reported from another authoritarian country nearly a century ago … Walter Duranty …”
– Michael Senger
Back in 1990 the Conservative MP Norman Tebbit got a lot of stick for his “cricket test”. Amateur. They play that game more seriously in India. The Hindustan Times reports,
‘Those celebrating Pak’s victory will face sedition case’: Yogi Adityanath
Chief minister [of the state of Uttar Pradesh] Yogi Adityanath on Thursday said that the sedition charges will be invoked against those celebrating Pakistan’s victory against India in the recent T20 World Cup match.
“Those celebrating Pakistan’s victory will face sedition,” a tweet posted on the official handle of Adityanath’s office said.
The Pakistan cricket team on Sunday defeated the Indian side by 10 wickets in a Super 12 game in Dubai for their first win in 13 attempts over their arch-rivals in a World Cup match.
A senior police official said a total of five cases were registered against seven people in Agra, Bareilly, Budaun and Sitapur for allegedly using indecent words against the Indian cricket team and celebrating Pakistan’s vicory. He said one case each was lodged in Agra, Budaun and Sitapur while two cases were registered in Bareilly’s Izzatnagar police station.
The three Kashmiri students were produced in the court of the special chief judicial magistrate on Thursday. The court sent them to 14 days’ judicial custody. “During the course of the investigation, section 124-A (sedition) was added against these three Kashmiri students,” said PK Singh, the inspector in charge of Jagdishpura police station.
The report continues,
In Budaun, the FIR was lodged under IPC section 124 A for sedition and section 66 of the IT Act against one person at the Faizganj Behta police station.
“Sedition charges should not be invoked in case of cheering in sports. No violence happened in these cases. England had been our bigger and worst enemy ever. But many times people in India do laud England’s team or players.”, said a Samajwadi Party leader on condition of anonymity
The (wisely) anonymous speaker may have been prompted to mention India’s relatively friendly cricketing relations with England by the fact that, as the article says, most of the accused were charged under the notorious Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code. In 1922, Gandhi was imprisoned by the British under Section 124A and referred to it as the “prince among the political sections of the Indian Penal Code designed to suppress the liberty of the citizen”. Ninety-nine years have gone by, seventy-four of them with India as an independent nation, and the prince remains in power.
“Two months ago an education activist told a small group in Virginia that people don’t yet understand that Americans’ relationship with public schools changed during the pandemic. For the first time ever, on Zoom, parents overheard what is being taught, how, and what’s not taught, and they didn’t like what they heard. The schools had been affected by, maybe captured by, woke cultural assumptions that had filtered down from higher-ed institutions and the education establishment. The parents were home in the pandemic and not distracted. They didn’t want their children taught harmful nonsense, especially at the expense of the basics.”
– Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal (paywall), pondering the losses by the Democrats in the recent Virginia elections. A state that was going “blue”, has gone “red”, and the promotion of Critical Race Theory in public, state schools is a part of why.
Maybe the pushback is also a victory for a new breed of scholars and writers who are starting to seriously hammer CRT and parts of the “woke” movement, such as Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay and John McWhorter, or in the UK, the likes of Douglas Murray. This episode also highlights why much of the Left loathes school choice.
Libertarians often like to tell their own “conversion story”, perhaps with just a touch of “humble-bragging” about their own open-mindedness. It seems impolite to boast of having changed someone else‘s mind. If the other person is present there is a distinct danger that they will purse their lips and announce they have jolly well changed back. In any case those who are good at changing people’s minds, as the late Brian Micklethwait was, do not think of it as winning a duel but more as clearing up any misconceptions that were stopping the other person from seeing the true situation and changing their own mind.
But naming no names, have you ever done it?
It has been a long and crazy ride, but we are still here snarling, laughing, bloviating and pondering 20 years later.
In these increasingly intolerant times, never have independent sites been more needed than now.
“Capitalism isn’t perfect, but there is no perfect system, and fantasies of a world in which there are no conflicts, no borders, no pollutants, no waste, and no crime are simply that: fantasies. Capitalism has been the best means ever devised of mitigating these problems – betting everything on an unfounded pipe dream is dangerous, illogical and should not be entertained in the 21st century. It may not sound exciting but the change we need will not come from revolution, but controlled, steady and logical improvements to our existing society.”
– Joshua Taggart, writing in response to the latest pollutant to come out of the brain of George Monbiot. (I hadn’t heard from Mr Monbiot lately, but he’s still there, calling for some sort of totalitarian order where growth and material advancement are strictly regulated, by people such as him. He really is quite something.)
COP26 will help to consolidate this neo-aristocracy. And, bizarrely, the left will cheer it on. The left once said: ‘We do not preach a gospel of want and scarcity, but of abundance… We do not call for a limitation of births, for penurious thrift, and self-denial. We call for a great production that will supply all, and more than all the people can consume.’ (Sylvia Pankhurst.) Now it pleads with the super-rich to come up with more and more creative ideas for how to rein in the filthy habits and material dreams of the masses. What a disaster. It isn’t climate change that poses the largest threat to humanity in the early 21st century. It’s the bourgeoisie’s loss of faith in its historic project, and its arrogant generalisation of that loss of faith into a new ‘green’ ideology we must all bow down before. A revolt against environmentalism is arguably the most necessary cause of our age. Who’s in?
– Brendan O’Neill
Please follow this link for the time and location of Brian’s funeral. Also included is the information required to observe the proceedings online if you wish to do so on the day.
If you are coming in person, please RSVP so we have some idea regarding numbers.
Fellow world leaders and others, we meet at a grave time. I’ve consulted the extinction clock, which chronicles the tireless work of those who alert us to the dangers of climate change, and clearly there is no cause for levity.
Firstly, let me welcome you all to this conference on the dangers of Global Warming caused by our abuse of fossil fuels. I hope each of you had a good flight. Joe Biden tells me he can’t recall seeing any ice beneath him as Air Force One flew over the Arctic – no surprise there, as we were warned it would be ice-free all summer from 2017, and have no ice in the month of September from 2015, and be ice-free all year round from September 2016. As regards delegates from the central US, I’m sorry the Hoover dam has spent all of 2021 as a dry hole, but console yourselves with the reflection that it has not produced a drop of drinking water or electricity since the end of 2016, so it makes little difference.
Secondly, let me reassure you that the heavy rain of the last few days does not mean Glasgow is about to drown from a combination of rising sea levels and extreme weather events. It was very sad when London and other British cities vanished beneath the waves at the end of December 2019, but this effect of climate change was well-predicted beforehand, so I’m glad to welcome people who surely despise as much as I do any so-called supporters of the climate cause who spent December 2019 complaining about my election and Brexit instead. But while we know that climate change is making extreme weather events (heavy rain in Glasgow, for example) more common, I observe that only some notorious science deniers are claiming that anything apocalyptically bad could happen during this conference.
Now to the agenda: item one, apologies for absence.
– No-one from the Maldives can be with us because those beautiful islands vanished beneath the sea at the end of 2018. My grief when that happened would have been greater still, had not the islanders already died of thirst after climate change exhausted their supplies of fresh water at the end of 1991. (And if they had survived these earlier disasters, they would surely have perished in the tropical climate catastrophe of 2020.)
– Similarly, we have no delegates from the city of Adelaide, which ran out of drinking water at the end of March 2009 (or was it the end of December 2007?). Looking on the antipodean bright side, at least their fellow countrymen were well-warned that (since June 2020) snow in the ‘Australian Alps’ has been almost as unknown as it is to British children born since 2000, so any Australian delegates who like skiing were spared the temptation to choose Australian snow over Scottish rain. (Australians can condole with the Swiss and Austrian delegates – all their glaciers disappeared last December.)
Item two: what can we do about climate change? Sadly, nothing. I have it on the authority of Prince Charles himself that the deadline for taking action, after which global warming became irreversible, expired in January of this year, and I can only wonder at the royal optimism which set it as recently as that. As a Tory, I of course ridiculed the last Labour PM’s assertion that action on global warming would be too late unless done before December 8, 2009 (five months before he had to face his first and only election!). Since then, however, so many warnings (from figures of great authority in the climate change consensus) have expired that it would be ridiculous in me to dispute His Royal Highness’ assurance that time was most definitely up on January 24th, given that it was definitely up a good six months earlier (June 28, 2020), everyone having been thrown out of the last chance saloon half a year before that (December 1, 2019), after the final opportunity to do anything about it went by a good six weeks earlier (October 16, 2019). And let’s face it: all these warnings were hopeful almost to the point of being deniers, since we all know time had already run out back in September 14, 2016 – or May 24, 2016 – and we passed the “point of no return” in December 2014.
So let us eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we fry.
Decarbonising our economy is the Greenies’ equivalent of the Soviet collectivisation of agriculture, or the Great Leap Forward. With similar effects.
– Fen Tiger
As the vultures circle above Glasgow for the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference a.k.a. Cop26, here is a flashback to Cop15 which took place in Copenhagen in 2009:
Above all, Obama needed to be able to demonstrate to the Senate that he could deliver China in any global climate regulation framework, so conservative senators could not argue that US carbon cuts would further advantage Chinese industry. With midterm elections looming, Obama and his staff also knew that Copenhagen would be probably their only opportunity to go to climate change talks with a strong mandate. This further strengthened China’s negotiating hand, as did the complete lack of civil society political pressure on either China or India. Campaign groups never blame developing countries for failure; this is an iron rule that is never broken. The Indians, in particular, have become past masters at co-opting the language of equity (“equal rights to the atmosphere”) in the service of planetary suicide – and leftish campaigners and commentators are hoist with their own petard.
– Mark Lynas writing in the Guardian on 22 December 2009: “How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal? I was in the room”
The majestic cycle continues: “Biden heads to crucial climate talks as wary allies wonder if US will deliver”. He won’t. China will wreck the deal. Developing countries will grandstand, led by the Maldives. Doom will be imminent if we do not get a Green New Deal within a timeframe just longer than one electoral cycle. Preparations will begin for Cop27.
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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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