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]
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“The irony is that no other leader could have led Britain so skilfully through financial crisis. Without him, the banks might have collapsed, and the G20 would never have happened. His work on development ensured that thousands of children did not starve and did not die because the rich world deemed them worthless.”
– Mary Riddell, in the Daily Telegraph.
So tell me, Ms Riddell, can you perhaps explain why the financial crisis, that has sent many British banks into the arms of the UK taxpayer, has not had a comparable impact on say, Canada, which shares a rather large landed border with the country at the centre of the credit crunch, namely, the US?
And why do you think that the government that presided over this disaster, that allowed public finances to run into the red, and massively so, before the credit crunch, can claim merit for what has happened since?
Does she not think that the way the Bank of England sets interest rates, or how banks have relied on the “too big to fail” assurance of public support, might not have had a teensy-weensy bit to do with foolish lending, for example?
Just asking, Mary.
The media and chattering classes are agog that the BNP, a fascistic and racist party, have gained some electoral success.
So what?
The Labour and Tory parties have been broadly fascistic (a corporatist ‘soft fascism’ whose symbol is a CCTV rather than the goose-step-and-armband kind) for the best part of a decade. Thus the way I see it, the BNP is just a more overt and perhaps more honest expression of the sort of mainstream democratically sanctioned tyranny that has been steadily and remorselessly stripping away civil liberties for quite some time now.
I cannot help thinking the real motivation for the aghast shrieks about the BNP is that it means the mainstream media do not have to dwell unduly on the far more ideologically antithetical-to-the-establishment and strategically significant growth of UKIP.
The truth is the world view and policies of the (truly vile) BNP is not that different on 95% of issues than the (vile) Tory, (vile) Labour Party and (fairly vile) LibDems, all of whom, once you strip out the overt racism of the BNP, broadly agree about the role of the state. That is to say all their statist-regulatory world views are more or less fascistic when it comes to matters of economy and civil liberties.
The gasps and finger pointing at the thuggish scrotes of the BNP give many an excuse to avoid focusing on the electoral success of UKIP, because unlike the profoundly statist BNP, UKIP is a party filled with people who actually do want a less intrusive and smaller state. UKIP may not aspire to some libertarian minarchist paradise, but they actually want less net regulation and dare to talk about civil liberties as something that matters (as opposed to the LibDems, who strongly believe civil liberties matter and yet want to regulate the crap out of everything, as if somehow that has no bearing on liberty).
In short, the fact UKIP thinks that the liberties of individuals is something to shout about and they want to shrink the state at all, rather than just keep expanding the state, but just a wee bit slower than the other guys… well… in the context of where we find ourselves today, this verges on revolutionary.
No wonder the mainstream would rather emote and declaim about the ultimately irrelevant BNP.
In a comment thread on this posting, the question came up, from the commenter “Laird”, as to why Samizdata has not written about the local UK/European Union elections. Part of the answer, for my part, is that a little bit of me dies whenever words such as “EU elections” come up, but also there has been a lot of commentary and head-scratching analysis, in the press and other blogs, on this issue for the past week or so. What could I say that has not been already said?
Anyway, for our non-UK readers who have not been following it, the ruling UK Labour Party did very badly in both the local UK elections and the European one. In the latter case, Labour came in third place (15 per cent of votes cast), behind the Tories and United Kingdom Independence Party respectively. UKIP is a party that wants the UK to leave the EU. I voted for it – partly because I did not want the Tories to get a larger share of the vote and hence get complacent, partly because I broadly agree with UKIP on things like cutting state spending and the EU. UKIP is not a hardline libertarian party but it is the best of a bad lot, generally. And I happen to know one of its MEP candidates, Tim Worstall – who is a member of the London bloggerati – and I always say it is a good idea to vote for someone you know, trust and like (I also know Syed Kamall, a Tory MEP, but just could not bring myself to vote Tory. Sorry Syed).
As for the aftermath, well, UK PM Gordon Brown has managed, by a mixture of party membership cowardice, shellshock, bullying and flimflam to persuade his colleagues in Parliament to give him another chance in the job. Labour has suffered the lowest share of the vote since the First World War, albeit on a very low turnout of voters. The national socialist British National Party, a party which, let it not be forgotten, holds to fairly hard-left views on economics, has picked up two seats in the European Parliament, and did so by playing fairly hard on the grievances of traditional Labour voters in run-down parts of the UK. There has often been a streak of “sod the foreigner” in the makeup of the UK left, although it has been tempered by a sort of transnational progressivism, at least from the Fabian middle classes who have provided Labour with some of its intellectuals (if that is not too grand a word to describe such people).
So there you have it – Britain is on course, if poll data are accurate, to have a Conservative government by the middle of next year, when a general election must be held. Europe has moved, politically, to the right, with concerns about immigration and economics driving some of that. But the UK Conservatives, while they have benefited from a mortally weakened government, have not convinced me that they have a serious intent to shrink the state. It may be that when or if David Cameron gets the keys to 10 Downing Street and has a chance to read the financial books, that the full horror of what he sees will necessitate spending cuts. We shall see.
And in the meantime, the US has, at least for a moment, moved to the left under Mr Obama, although for how much longer, it is premature to say (bring on the mid-term elections!). Ideologically, the Atlantic may be widening. We live, as they say, in interesting times.
Douglas Young, Professor of Political Science & History at Gainesville State College in Gainesville, GA, has some well expressed views on the wrong turn the USA has taken
At 47, I lament how today’s America is far less free than the country of my youth. Replacing it is not a 1984ish totalitarian dictatorship, but what Alexis de Tocqueville called the ‘soft tyranny’ of what Mark Levin sees as a 21st century ‘nanny state’. We so feared a Stalin or Hitler that we ignored endless assaults on our liberty by idealistic home-grown statists and the seductive narcotic of ever more government goodies buying our acquiescence. What makes Americans’ surrender to statism so shameful is that we freely chose this course in direct contravention of our founding principles.
Nowhere have we seen such an accelerating atrophy of our freedom as in K-12 public schools where recent decades have witnessed far more books banned, and not some print version of Debbie Does Dallas. No, literary classics like J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Mark Twain’s Huck Finn are verboten – required reading in those decadent days of my 1970s high school. But educrats with the backbone of a large worm now avoid anything controversial.
Students have far less choice of classes in high school, and often teachers can not make their own lessons since they must teach the test so schools can make “adequate yearly progress”. Only about 40 percent of my college students say they ever discussed any controversial issues in high school. My high school classes revelled in such debate.
Similarly, so many high schools have become gated, closed campuses. Mine was wide open. ‘Zero tolerance’ for drugs and violence policies punish students carrying aspirin, cough drops, and Tweety-Bird key chains. Now diligent do-gooders want to ban school coke machines as well. And to think at my high school we could even smoke!
Today political correctness constipates free speech at many schools (as well as in much of the public and private sectors), and hysterical sexual harassment policies suspend children for hugging a classmate. If you had predicted all this to my 1980 senior high class, we would have laughed that you had smoked some mighty bad dope to conjure up such an Orwellian dystopia. → Continue reading: America: closing her door to freedom
Doubtless politics has always had its dark side. But the depths to which it has sunk over the last 12 years under New Labour has been unprecedented in this country. Of all the legacies left by this Government the poisoning of political discourse is surely the worst. Gordon Brown, foul-tempered and intolerant, has been at the very centre of this mess.
Gordon Brown never was fit for Number 10 and, given the wreckage of the economy, the public finances and the financial regulatory system, was never fit for Number 11 either.
– Ruth Lea adds to the admosphere now being created by the WAGS. Have those Blair Babes finally justified their existence?
I guess it is a sign of the times that when the UK ruling Labour Party is in such a mess, the appointment of a character such as Sir Alan Sugar, the businessman and brash TV show main man, gets a collective raspberry, rather than the coos of applause and “well dones” that would have been the case say, five years ago. It is a largely pointless appointment.
Sir Alan, who is also the front-man for the BBC TV talent show, The Apprentice – modelled on the US one fronted by Donald Trump, is a Labour supporter, believing that there is a large, possibly even larger, role for the state in business. For all his image of the self-made man, he is in many ways quite a corporatist in this sense. And in his demeanor, he represents what a lot of leftists think business is: cut-throat and aggressive. Socialists often buy the idea that commerce is not a positive-sum game, so when they go into business, they behave like the worst caricature of the cliched 19th Century mill-owner. The whole vibe of “The Apprentice” is dog-eat-dog, pandering to the worst impressions that many people have about business.
And make no mistake, Sir Alan, even if he is a nice guy in his private life, comes across as a bully. And this is not a snobbish point, by the way, about his London accent or razor-dodging demeanor. I watched a BBC TV programme the other day when he was asked about his trip to see Gordon Brown, and the media outlets were rife with speculation on what he was doing. Sir Alan could hardly be surprised to be asked about it. Instead, he brushed aside this situation by almost telling the news presenter to shut up. “I’m not gonna talk abaaat it.” For one minute I thought the BBC was going to cut the interview short. It should have done so.
In the fag-end of Labour’s days in power, the elevation of this man to the peerage and a pointless job in “enterprise” will be seen as a rather bizarre footnote.
To quote David Davis MP, three months ago, “How will we know we are living in a police state?”
Is it when the police conduct a systematic campaign of false arrests in order to gather information on people who might commit a crime? Is it when they do that, and public reaction is no more than a shrug? A couple of days ago, The Daily Telegraph reported discoveries made by my local Liberal Democrat PPC, excellently living up to the first bit of her party’s vaguely oxymoronic name:
Officers are targeting children as young as 10 with the aim of placing their DNA profiles on the national database to improve their chances of solving crimes, it is claimed.
The alleged practice is also described as part of a “long-term crime prevention strategy” to dissuade youths from committing offences in the future. […]
A Metropolitan Police officer made the claims after figures were released showing that 386 under-18s had their DNA taken and stored by police last year in Camden, north London.
The officer said: “Have we got targets for young people who have not been arrested yet? The answer is yes. But we are not just waiting outside schools to pick them up, we are acting on intelligence.*
“It is part of a long-term crime prevention strategy. If you know you have had your DNA taken and it is on a database then you will think twice about committing burglary for a living.
“We are often told that we have just one chance to get that DNA sample and if we miss it then that might mean a rape or a murder goes unsolved in the future.”
Acting “on intelligence”, that is, hearsay, unsubstantiated allegations, and prejudice, when they know they have no evidence let alone reasonable suspicion of any actual crime — for intelligence is not evidence, it is a substitute for evidence in its absence — the Metropolitan Police are making unlawful arrests, in order to take samples (fingerprints and DNA), that it is deemed by the human rights court to be improper for them to hold in any case. And that fact has not caused public outrage. It has yet to reach any broadcast news service, as far as I am aware.
A quiescent, compliant public and a quiescent, compliant media, are the handmaidens of a police state.
“Food, we are told, is the new sex. It is certainly true that food has taken over from sex as the principal concern of what I call the “interfering classes” – the nannyish, middle-class busybodies who have appointed themselves guardians of the nation’s culinary morals, and who are currently obsessed with making the working class eat up its vegetables. We no longer have the prudish Mary Whitehouse complaining about sex and “bad language” on television; instead, we have armies of middle class amateur nutrionists and dieticians complaining about all the seductive advertisements for junk food, which are supposedly corrupting the nation’s youth. By which they mean working-class youth; everyone knows that it’s the Kevins and Traceys who are stuffing their faces with fatty and sugary snack foods, not the Jamies and Saskias.”
Watching the English, pages 306-307, by Kate Fox. A sharp passage from a perceptive book on the inhabitants of this odd, damp island in north-east Europe.
The meltdown of Gordon Brown’s Labour government continues. I was struck by this passage of resigning Cabinet minister James Purnell’s letter to the Prime Minister. It is very revealing in what it says not about the differences between these men, but their similarities:
“We both love the Labour Party. Party. I have worked for it for 20 years and you for far longer. ‘‘We know we owe it everything and it owes us nothing. I owe it to our party to say what I believe no matter how hard that may be. I now believe your continued leadership makes a Conservative victory more not less likely.
That would be disastrous for our country. This moment calls for stronger regulation, an active state, better public services, an open democracy. It calls for a Government that measures itself by how it treats the poorest in society.
Quite how one can “love” a party responsible for so much mayhem is an interesting question. There is something distinctly creepy about a man who says that he owes “everything” to a political party founded upon socialist principles. Everything? Does this man have no conception of a life beyond party politics? Does he not understand the concept of civil society, of a world outside government?
And although one can possibly agree on the need for better public services and open democracy, there is something revealing in his call for “stronger regulation” and an “active state”. We have, as this blog likes to point out with reference to the financial crisis, for example, had a bucket-load of regulation and state activism, and these have arguably helped create many of our problems, not solved them. I am also not aware that Mr Purnell, or his peers, would be any better than Brown in their stance on issues such as civil liberties and the database state, for instance. They might simply try to make it a bit more palatable.
So although one might be glad that this man has helped plunge a dagger into Mr Brown, it is not entirely clear to me that this fellow would represent a significant improvement. He wants the NuLab regulatory, interfering state to continue. I see no awareness of the disaster caused by runaway public spending. In other words, he’s not much of an improvement. A spell in the private sector, away from the party machine he claims to “love”, would be the best thing that could happen to Mr Purnell, if he wants to develop a wiser worldview.
Meanwhile, the BBC is asking the question about Gordon Brown: “Why has the man once regarded as one of Britain’s finest Chancellors [finance minister] in such trouble?”
Hilarious. This is a man who, as Chancellor, took hold of a relatively strong set of public finances, and over a course of 10 years, ran the UK into the red even before the credit crunch hit. Far from having been a “brilliant” finance minister, he has – apart from his keeping Britain out of the euro, arguably – been a disaster.
Update: the political situation in the UK is now having direct effects on financial markets.
Update: more resignations. It could all be over for Brown by the end of the weekend. Goodness knows what other countries must make of this.
President Obama must have heard of my disappointment. He heard how my slothful and procrastinating ways lost me the opportunity to essay a therapeutic fisking, and considerately stepped in to give me another chance. I refer, of course, to this gushy article in the Times by Ben Macintyre. I meant to comment when it appeared on May 28 but I was busy and the moment passed.
I will get to Obama, but Macintyre first. After some mostly unexceptionable stuff about the importance of history in schools, Macintyre wrote:
History follows politics, and the Bush-Blair years were Dark Ages for the subject.
O frail flickering light of knowledge, only kept aflame by the devoted labours of Channel 4 documentary producers! I would say that we were a teensy weeny bit lacking of a sense of proportion here, except that all the history nobs these days say the Dark Ages weren’t. Plagues, Normans etc. can happen to anyone after all.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan showed scant understanding of the history of those regions.
Mr Macintyre wrote a well-received book on the American adventurer who was the inspiration for Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King. So I suppose he cannot really be promoting the currently popular racial theory that Iraqis or Afghans are essentially “unconquerable” or “untameable”. But let us put it this way, he is content to leave most of his readers with that impression. Personally it seemed to me that Afghan women were pretty much conquered and enslaved by the Taliban but I have high hopes that their untameable Afghan nature will be proved by their never again returning to that state.
Both Bush and Blair were technocratic leaders, more concerned with the mechanisms of power than the human context in which it was wielded. Neither possessed a historical hinterland.
Hinterland is one of those irritating words that dates the person writing it, usually to a wet Monday. Actually Bush read so much history that a professor of history at Yale had trouble keeping up with him. Blair, I suspect, is a man more fond of thinking about History than history, but all the same, I expect he reads enough to power his reveries.
Today history is suddenly central to politics again. Gordon Brown repeatedly invokes Adam Smith, an earlier son of Kirkcaldy, in his defence. David Cameron refers to the essential importance of “a shared history” in building a coherent society.
“Central to politics again” my hinterland. More like two routine examples of politicians ticking the boxes marked “famous person with connection to self” and “buzz word.”
And Barack Obama is the historians’ president, the apostle for a distinct view of the world seen though the prism of the past. His election campaign was firmly based on his own history.
A little too much so, some might say. His life prior to the presidency seemed to consist mostly of writing autobiographies.
His historical allusions are occasionally inaccurate,
Yeah.
but his references to Abraham Lincoln’s “Team of Rivals”, to the horrors of Auschwitz, to Churchill, to the Crash of 1929, are not merely political positioning (although they achieve that too), but a subtle recasting of politics that invokes a shared historical memory.
Anyone know what this means? When trying to work out what something means it usually helps to ask “as opposed to what?” but that gives no answer here. How does the new, recast politics invoke a shared historical memory in a way that the old politics did not? And does he mean any historical memory in particular?
Next week Mr Obama comes to Europe to mark the 65th anniversary of the Normandy landings, and to Ohrdruf, a satellite of the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald that his Uncle Charlie helped to liberate at the end of the war.
The visit is a clever melding of personal and general history, evoking shared aims, spectacular heroism and the defeat of evil.
When Bush came to Europe for the 60th anniversary five years ago, was that a clever melding too?
But more than that, the historian-President will be enlisting the past to a cause, at a time when the power of history to shape our lives has never been greater, or more necessary.
Despite evoking so much gush that you would think Mr Macintyre had struck oil, the historian-President sometimes comes out with rather odd views. It might be more accurate to say that he does not notice when his speechwriters come out with some rather odd views. One example came up in the (generally pretty good) speech he just gave to the Muslim world. He said, “Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance. We see it in the history of Andalusia and Cordoba during the Inquisition.”
Hmmm. I do not claim to know much about Spanish history but I do know that the Reconquista was practically over – and was certainly long over in Cordoba (by more than two centuries, I see from Wikipedia) – by the time the Inquisition came along. To my chagrin, David T of Harry’s Place spotted the same gaffe while I was writing this post, and he seems to know a good deal. There are at least four comments before anyone makes a Monty Python reference.
In a break from the usual hurlyburly of current affairs and to protect my sanity and sense of humour, I like to scoot around to blogs such as the Deep Glamour site set up by Virginia Postrel, for example. There is a great entry by one of the contributors there on the subject of wristwatches. I have a few, mostly cheap, plus a nice, limited edition Breitling that is probably the most expensive thing I own and that I bought from a dealer for what I reckon was a bargain (no, not a guy with a briefcase in Hong Kong!).
Will these things ever die out? I don’t think so. Yes, you can tell the time by looking at your mobile phone – I know a few people who do this – but I find it such a convenient, reflexive action to look down at your wrist and see the time. And yes, there remains a fashion appeal, which applies as much to we chaps as it does to the ladies. Watches can convey a macho, outdoors “I am an astronaut/pilot/yachtsman in my spare time” appeal or a sophisticated look that goes well with a suit. And as long as people enjoy adornment, then the wristwatch, I think, will remain.
Which given the state of its banking sector right now, is good news for the Swiss.
Timothy Sandefur writes about the very different treatment in the media, as he sees it, of the case of the guy who shot an abortion clinic doctor and an Islamist who killed an armed forces recruiter in the US. I must admit that until I read Mr Sandefur’s piece, I had not even come across the story of the army recruiter. I am amazed not more of a fuss is being made about this.
A distant relative of mine used to be a US Air Force recruiter up in the Buffalo area. Recruiters are, and have been, targeted for attacks before. I hope this is an issue that is getting plenty of attention.
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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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