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.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
The BBC’s political editor Andrew Marr has reported that “senior Government sources” believed that weapons of mass destruction would never be found in Iraq.
Oh dear.
Now let me state my position. I was all for the war against Iraq, and still believe the UK took the right decision to go in, with our US allies, to remove its disgraceful socialist dictatorship. But spare a thought for poor old Tony. He had to convince all of those Guardian readers, and all of those who marched against his policy, as well as those of us who’d already decided the rules changed, when two hijacked planes flew into the twin towers.
So Tony spiced things up, a bit. And thereby hoisted himself on the petard of WMD. And now he’s beginning to twist on it, ever so slightly, in the wind. In the last two days, in a subtle, nay, almost undetectable, change of emphasis, he’s abandoned the line of saying the weapons will be found. He is now saying, quite categorically, that evidence of the weapons will be found.
Now weapons of mass destruction are one thing — a bit of plutonium here, a bit of uranium centrifuge there — but evidence? What constitutes evidence? An old copy of the Cairo Times, with a handwritten Arabic scrawl on the back, saying ‘The Fist of God is in place, Sire’. Will that do? I suppose that depends on either how many people in GCHQ can write Arabic, or whether you’re a fan of Frederik Forsyth.
But the interesting thing is this. Did you spot the change of emphasis, when Blair switched to it on Tuesday? I must fess up, and say I didn’t. He’s a slippery devil.
But those nice kind clever people, at the BBC, did, bless them. Isn’t self-inflicted fratricide, between lefties, simply excellent entertainment.
Reuters reports:
A future European Union constitution will include a flag, an anthem, a motto and a Europe Day, despite British reticence about such state symbols.
The 105-member Convention on the Future of Europe decided at its final session on Thursday to add a reference to the symbols of the 15-nation bloc, due to be enlarged to 25 states next May, in a draft constitution submitted to EU leaders.
The official EU anthem is the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the flag is the dark blue banner with 12 yellow stars in a circle, and the motto is “United in Diversity”, not dissimilar from the first motto of the United States, “e pluribus unum”.
Europe Day is May 9, commemorating a historic speech by French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman, one of the EU’s founding fathers, proposing the creation of a European Coal and Steel Community. [emphasis added]
Oh no, we are not imitating anybody!
The French and German ministers recently tasked with boosting bilateral cooperation have already agreed on one important point – the need for summer crash courses to learn each other’s language. French European Affairs Minister Noelle Lenoir and her German counterpart Hans-Martin Bury said each would spend part of their holidays in the other’s country sweating over grammar rules and vocabulary lists.
They met to prepare an October conference bringing together the heads of France’s 22 regions and Germany’s 16 federal states to discuss boosting cooperation in education, culture, economic development and environmental issues. Lenoir told journalists in French after talks with Bury:
German must gradually become almost as widely spoken and as easily spoken as English is today.
Heh.
I suppose that, one way or another, this will all get smoothed out in the long run but, nonetheless, we can enjoy it while it lasts:
Gerhard Schroder, the German chancellor, called off his summer holiday to Italy yesterday, as the worsening row between the countries began to unravel years of carefully orchestrated co-operation at the heart of Europe.
More and faster, please.
I’ve just watched the film Wall Street for the very first time. I know I’m a few years late, but c’est la vie. The movie subjects viewers to the economic fallacy that asset stripping does not create wealth.
When financiers asset strip a company, they do something very useful. They take assets that are not being used efficiently, and change their use to something more valuable. It may not be nice for those employed by the company, but the country as a whole is better off as a result.
Make no mistake, the moves afoot to ban hunting in Britain have very little to do with animal welfare but everything to do with class warfare. It is nothing less than a clash between those who believe civil society must be tolerant to those who share different minority views and who wish to freely associate in the pursuit of a beloved activity… and those who believe that state and violence backed political interaction, rather than society and voluntary social interaction, is the core around which all activity must revolve.
The class warriors of the Labour and LibDem Parties, and a few statist Tory confreres, wish to regulate notions of free associating civil society out of existence and replace it with a regulatory democratic state in which no aspect of rights or affinity are beyond the reach of regulatory politics… nothing less than an intolerant dictatorship of the political plurality.
Well a bunch of people met in front of Parliament today who said that regardless of what the bigoted class warriors of Westminster say, they are not going to cooperate.
The class warriors are not ‘progressive’ at all… they are in fact the heirs to a view of the role of the politics which in days gone by used law to oppress other despised minorities, such as homosexuals or Roman Catholics. They are just hate filled sanctimonious collectivist bigots.
(the photos taken today courtesy of The Dissident Frogman because my camera is knackered)
“But it may be that I shall leave a name sometimes remembered with expressions of goodwill in the abodes of those whose lot it is to labour, and to earn their daily bread by the sweat of their brow, when they shall recuit their exhausted strength with abundant and untaxed food, the sweeter because it is no longer leavened by a sense of injustice”.
– Sir Robert Peel, British statesman (1788-1850)
The quote by Peel above, coming as it does from one of the greatest of British statesmen and a free-trader who paid a high political price for his convictions, ought to be remembered as we contemplate the recent trip by President George W. Bush to Africa, and indeed the trips by numerous western leaders to the poorer parts of the world.
We live in times when we are constantly told that it is the duty of the prosperous industrial nations to help lift their poorer peers, such as in Africa, to a wealthier state. And yet nothing could be more useful in that aim than if governments, such as those which support the EU and U.S. farm subsidies, chose the path of genuine laissez faire.
Sir Robert Peel may not be a name familiar to many people today – more’s the pity. He may be mainly known as the man who established London’s Metropolitan Police (which is why our police are still sometimes called “bobbies”).
When one considers how he put the industrial future and prosperity of the masses before the vested interests of the land by embracing free trade, the dimwits who inhabit our government today look very small indeed.
Sir John Stevens, head of the Metropolitan Police, has supported removing the automatic right to trial by jury in some serious cases.
In a speech he argued that the move was necessary to fight organised crime by preventing “jury nobbling”. BBC report here.
If juries are in danger then it is the job of the police to protect them – not throw out a fundamental part of our constitution because it is inconvenient and expensive.
To be fair Stevens did say that the restriction to trial by jury – proposed in Big Blunkett’s discredited Criminal “Justice” Act – should be limited to special cases and determined by a judge. However any erosion of this basic Magna Carta right is unacceptable. This proposal is akin to saying “we already know you’re guilty so we won’t give you the same rights as anyone else.”
Remember how door-to-door DNA testing was initially introduced for “special cases” only? Now any time there is a serious crime police roam the neighbourhood asking innocent citizens to “volunteer” a DNA sample.
Special cases have a tendency to become commonplace.
Partially cross-posted to The Chestnut Tree Cafe.
A reminder for our readers: the next few days are a time of demonstration in support of Iranian students. Oxblog has posted a list of times and places he is aware of. If any are near you, by all means go!
Jason and stuff has a brief but relevant pointer to the draft bill on Civil Contingencies:
The definition of emergency is, it seems, quite broad. It doesn’t appear to define what scale of emergency is “major” enough to require emergency powers, nor allow for less extreme emergencies to trigger less extreme powers.
The measures that introduce those emergency powers are not subject to being suspended or struck down by the courts under the Human Rights Act. Parliament “has no role in confirming or approving” a state of emergency – it can be proclaimed by the Queen, or ordered by a Secretary of State, and then Parliament just has to be told about it. And those emergency powers, incidentally, appear to be a little scary – they may “make any provision of any kind that could be made by Act of Parliament or by the exercise of Royal Prerogative”, with a few restrictions (no conscription, no banning strikes, no creating of offences punishable by more than 3 months in jail or without trail).
Jason hopes that things will improve from the draft version, especially if we pester them…
Nothing surprises me about this shower of idiots, collectively known as the UK government, but sometimes their crass shamelessness still manages to astonish me. After six years of adding nothing to the UK road network, other than the insane pink Kremlin lane, from the first class lounge at Heathrow, to the drawing room of 10 Downing St, comes a U-turn of almost epic proportion.
In 1997 they won the election, under a pledge (remember those?) to impose a road building moratorium, in order to bring those of a green persuasion into an anti-Tory rainbow coalition. In 1998, they told us building more roads to ease the road congestion, on the M25, was “not an option”, and in 2000, they held fast to the anti-roads position that “simply building more and more roads is not the answer.” So what do they do, in 2003? Yep. You guessed it. They are going to build more and more roads, in a huge new road building programme, mainly concentrating on widening the M25, and the southern stretches of the M1. Incredible.
Does the word hypocrisy never spring from these people’s lips? Do the lies, which tumble so effortlessly from their spin-doctors’ word-processors, never keep them up at night? Do they actually manage to catch themselves, in the mirror, each morning, and think to themselves, what a good-looking and upstanding politician you are? Or do they shuffle out of the door, ashamed, and afraid? Sorry, I was forgetting these people are socialists. All the New Labour lies will be worth it, one day, for the greater good. Some time real soon now, apparently.
But, linking to Mr Carr’s story, from earlier, do I detect a tang of bare panic?
After stealing £40 billion pounds, annually, from the motorist, and then pouring it into the black hole of the railways, which get worse by the day, I think they might have realised the game is up. This may be their last throw of a taxpayer subsidy, from a pot which is rapidly dwindling. They can not admit to themselves that socialism does not work, of course, propped up as it is on a crispy bed of lies, so they have done the next best thing. They have simply blanked out, from their minds, the last six years of their failed policies.
No doubt they will call this new roads programme a ‘Fresh Start’, or a ‘New Beginning’, or some other such Stephen-Byers-style nonsense. But what they will not admit is that they have dropped the ball, big style, and made a complete hash of their fabled 10-year plan — even Uncle Joe had the sense to only impose 5-year plans!
I do not claim an authoritative knowledge on transport issues, and you may want to go here to find such a thing, but from where I am sitting, it looks to me like a severe case of headless chicken street, down there in Whitehall. They are on the ropes, and the poor loves just don’t know what to do about it.
And with the Tories rising in the polls, remarkably even ahead of St. Tony’s party, the New Leftist panic is in. So let’s steal some of the Tories’ policies; let’s abandon our own ‘principles’ of car-bashing, and let’s try to buy back some of those hateful south-eastern votes we’ve lost. They will not bring in any of Tory Tim Collins’ more sensible road privatisation plans, or private road toll schemes, or cut the outrageous levels of fuel duty, but they will try to keep Mr Commuter, of Epping Forest, happy, with an extra ‘free’ lane, on the M25.
I must say, as somebody who had to commute from Oxfordshire to Surrey, every day, for six months, I would welcome a new lane, but I have got news for you, Mr Blair. Six years of nothing, and then a big splurge to try to buy back my favour, ain’t going to work. You are like the girlfriend who chucked me out, who then asked me back when she could not get her grasping hands on anybody else. You had your chance. But you blew it. Big time. Thank you, Tony, and goodbye!
And now, to paraphrase Mr Carr, as we watch the tigers in valley, a green-striped tiger joins the BBC-striped tiger, to attack the red-striped tiger. Let’s just sit back, and enjoy the view! 
Phil Bradley asks us to spot the common thread here
The Cato institute has just released its annual Economic Freedom of the World Report and interesting reading it makes.
The top 10 rankings of economic freedom – 1. being the most free – are as follows:
- Hong Kong
- Singapore
- United States
- New Zealand
- United Kingdom
- Canada
- Switzerland
- Ireland
- Australia
- Netherlands
The report itself analyses how over the long term differences in economic freedom results in large differences in economic growth and prosperity. If you are interested in the details you can read the report.
What struck me is that every significant anglophone country makes the top ten and only a single continental EU country (Holland) sneaks in at last place. The list is rounded out by Britain’s last colony of any size (Hong Kong), another ex-british colony that has 100% anglophone middle class (Singapore), and the last continental EU hold-out (Switzerland).
France comes far down the list at number 44, Italy and German do a little better, ranked at 35th and 20th respectively.
Most people think of the Anglosphere in terms of political alignment in world affairs. The Cato report identifies something more important, which is a common understanding of how economic freedoms are integral to society, our economic well-being and personal liberty. Those in continental Europe who wonder why Britain is so sceptical of the EU and its attempts to ‘harmonize’, have only to read this report to see that harmonization would unavoidably result in the erosion of freedoms in Britain.
Phil Bradley
|
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.
|
Recent Comments