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You probably missed it, because how the hell can anyone keep up with this stuff? But, I just happened to chance upon a couple of comments (numbers 269 and 276) on this at Guido’s, both of which had, copied and pasted into them, this:
Downing Street in ‘meltdown’
PRWeek – David Singleton 15-Apr-09
Downing Street was this week in ‘meltdown’ as Gordon Brown’s inner circle attempted to limit the fallout from the Damian McBride scandal.
Well-placed sources told PRWeek there was mounting fear in the heart of Downing Street that fresh revelations about senior MPs could emerge over the next few weeks and months leading up to the general election.
Brown’s close lieutenants such as Ed Balls, Tom Watson and Ian Austin are all believed to be vulnerable. It is feared fresh stories could be revealed by the handful of journalists who were fed negative stories by the Brown camp – or as a result of further emails that were sent to Labour blogger Derek Draper being made public.
One Downing Street insider said there had been ‘endless conference calls and crisis meetings’ since the story of McBride’s plans to smear senior Tories broke on Saturday.
The source added: ‘This is a full on disaster for Gordon – Downing Street is in meltdown. But it is more of a problem for Brown’s inner circle than it is for the Government more broadly.
‘The great fear of Brownites is that all of their activities over many years are suddenly now at risk of spilling out. It is an open secret that Gordon’s operation has been carrying out character assassinations, leaking documents and briefing against ministers and so on, but nobody has ever caught them red handed – until now. Now they have been caught out, it becomes legitimate to talk about all the other occasions.
‘It is a bit like getting Al Capone on his tax returns; it is actually one relatively minor misdemeanour – by no means are those emails the worst thing that Brown’s operation has ever done.’
Another source with close links to Downing Street said the PM’s defence was looking increasingly fragile: ‘Brown has had to stake his defence on this being a rogue operation, a single aberration that nobody else knew anything about.
‘The worry is that someone will produce evidence that it went much wider than this handful of emails and it went much wider than McBride.’
Which they will, because it did.
In short, matters are developing exactly as I told you they would in this posting. Brown’s ludicrous claim not to believe in dirty tricks has turned this from a few dogs chasing a small smear of dirt (The Emails and who knew what about them and whether anyone had tried to spread the particular smears in them) into a thousand dogs swimming happily in a quarter of a century of liquified shit, and now, too late, Downing Street realises it. But, like I say, it’s too late.
These people are smart enough to realise the terminal mess they are now in. Good. Nobody is smart enough to extricate them from it. Good again.
It occurs to me, reading this item about the decision by the authorities not to prosecute Damian Green, the Conservative MP, over his farcical arrest, that they decided that picking on this guy now that the UK government is in such a terrible mess might not be a runner. The police/Crown Prosecution Service might have been more confident of doing the government’s bidding when the government appeared all powerful. Now, I get the impression that in Whitehall, and across much of the government machine, arses are being covered, positions prepared. The police have probably woken up to the idea that soon, perhaps sooner than some imagine, their masters will be different, if only by political colouring.
This is how regimes die. Their toadies and functionaries start to turn on them.
Meanwhile, I wonder if we can persuade our American blogger friends to notice that the government of a G7 nation and NATO ally is, er, about to implode. I mean, I think that might even be of interest to The Community Organiser. Or maybe not.
Classic:
“I take full responsibility for what happened. That’s why the person who was responsible went immediately.”
This ridiculous Prime Minister of ours can’t now string two sentences together without talking drivel. If sentence one is true, then he is resigning, as Guido’s commenters are already queueing up to point out. But sentence two says he isn’t. Not yet, anyway.
The BBC gets a lot of flak from right-wing bloggers, but the BBC is now objectively anti-Brown. Just by solemnly reporting everything that this ghastly and now absurd man says, with or without any further comment, they are destroying him.
Brown’s problem, to spell it out, is that he created the atmosphere within which The Emails were exchanged, and we all know it. He has been a dirty trickster all his adult life. Yet, again and again, he is now taking every opportunity he gets to deny this universally known truth. Not only he is a liar, which in politics is very forgiveable. He is an obvious liar.
The BBC’s caption under the video of Brown’s latest bout of self-strangulation says this:
Mr Brown said he was working to clean up British politics
LOL. In fact that is my LOL of the month so far.
You probably read all this first everywhere else, the exact same quotes and the exact same complaints, but I don’t care. This is a chorus now. Maybe Instapundit, who does read Samizdata and link to it from time to time, will finally work out what’s happening over here (a libertarian blogger is destroying a Prime Minister) and copy out a chunk of something relevant and comprehensible. Here would be an excellent place to look.
See also: this.
The complaint now being widely voiced, referred to in passing in his recent posting about the nuclear ambitions of Iran by our own Johnathan Pearce, is that bloggers like me droning on and on about this Smeargate saga are perhaps falling into the trap of taking the contents of the “Westminster Village” (see also: “Westminster Bubble”) somewhat too seriously. There is, said JP, a world out there, as indeed there is. And blow me down if JP, just as I was finalising the links in what follows, put up yet another Smeargate-related posting here with one of those very same phrases, “Westminster Village”, right there in the title.
So, why this fascination? Why do I and so many other bloggers just now seem able to blog about little else?
Where to start? One place to start is by saying that, while this Westminster Bubble-stroke-Village indeed shouldn’t be that important, it actually is very important. The people inside it dispose of at least half our money. Arguably, given recent financial events, they are now disposing of just about all of it. They are the people who must give their attention – if they have any to spare from their smearing of each other and of anyone else whom they take against – to such things as the nuclear ambitions of Iran.
A classic tactic of our current gaggle of rulers, when they are caught out doing something wicked, is to let the complaints about whatever piece of nastiness they just did rumble on for a day or two, but then to say: okay, okay, enough. Now we must “move on”. We mustn’t be obsessed with the Westminster Village, the Westminster Bubble. For yes indeed, these very phrases make up one of the key memes that is used by our present government to protect itself from sustained scrutiny. If like me you drone on about their latest petty atrocity, this means that you are indifferent to all the other ills of the world and want those to continue and get even worse, is their line.
And indeed, if I thought that this current government was doing anything good, I might see the force of this argument. As it is, even the few vaguely good, maybe, perhaps, things that the Government is now attempting, concerning various “reforms” of the sort favoured by the likes of James Purnell, will only serve to discredit such reforms in the future, and in the meantime they will be bungled. The only thing I want this government now to do is drop dead, not just because of Smeargate, but because of, well, everything.
With far greater force, as was appropriate to a far greater evil, I felt this about the old USSR. The USSR, I believed, was smashable, and I believed this before it was actually smashed. I further believed, during the 1980s, that smashing the USSR was one of the very few big yet almost unambiguously good things that the world then was capable of administering to itself. Magic buttons in politics are rare, but here was one. The USSR, then and ever since it had begun, blighted everything. Nothing else could be effectively dealt with until it was dealt with. All the other problems (notably Islamic terrorism) were being inflamed by that one big problem, namely the apparently relentless arm-wrestling that then dominated world politics, between the USSR and the civilised world. And, to repeat, that one big problem, the continuing existence of the USSR, had one huge advantage over most other problems then or since. It was fairly easily solvable. The USSR was worth breaking because, in the word of Gordon Gecko, it was breakable. A few more well-aimed shoves and over it would crash. Accordingly, I and all other anti-Soviet elements at that time brandished whatever weapons we could find at that evil empire, threw whatever mud at it that came to hand. In my case that meant writing and publishing little pamphlets about such things as how the USSR was both worthy of being broken and breakable. (I probably contributed even more by have an unusual surname and a father, “Sir Robert” if you please, who was once upon a time in MI6. What else was I doing? Nothing as it happened. But they didn’t know that.)
In my recollection, nobody accused all us anti-Soviets at that time of being obsessed with the “Moscow Bubble”, but we were certainly accused of being obsessed with the USSR, and told that there was a world out there, full of “real problems”, and that we should stop being so monomaniacal about just the one mere government, disagreeable though it was. I agreed entirely about all those other problems, but believed that a huge step in the right direction, a huge step towards making all those other problems that little bit easier to get to grips with, would be to sweep the USSR from the board. Just smash it to rubble. I rejoiced then when that was done. I rejoice still that it was done. The post-Soviet news agenda hasn’t been a hundred per cent good, but it would take a month of blog postings to even begin to count all the ways in which the USSR’s collapse has made the world a better place.
On a far smaller scale and in a history-repeating-itself-as-farce kind of way, I now feel the same thing about the Gordon Brown government. Yes, there are a thousand problems out there that the British government and the wider British political debate ought to be addressing. Of course there are. And I will continue to try to find time and brain-space to blog about them too, just as I often wrote about other things besides the desirability of smashing the USSR during the 1980s. I would be very sorry if all other Samizdatistas were as monomaniacally fascinated by Smeargate as I now find that I am, and note with satisfaction that they are not. Nevertheless, here is a battle that both should be won and can be won. Quite soon now, it will be won. And the sooner it is won, and the more completely and dramatically and unforgettably it is won, the better. Once it is, we can all get back to arguing about all the other important stuff, without the chaos that is this present government screwing everything up, by the simple, sordid fact of its continuing existence.
So now, about that Derek Draper fellow …
A comment on this posting made me think that our US/non-UK readers value this blog’s coverage of the whole business of the scandals now hammering the UK government on a daily basis. As Iain Dale, the political blogger, said the other day, we are entering a period not unlike the fag-end of Richard Nixon’s time in power, with Gordon Brown playing the Nixon role, and his various acolytes, toadies and henchmen in the various roles of shit-stirrers and frighteners.
Another day, another twist. A few months ago, a Conservative MP, Damian Green, was arrested by anti-terrorism officers after he had received material, concerning illegal immigration, that was leaked to him by a civil servant. Some of the material claims that illegal immigrants have managed to get jobs that bring them close to the very heart of government. Whatever you think about immigration – I am a defender of free migration BTW – this is a legitimate issue for a politician to make a fuss over.
Yesterday, a committee of MPs concluded that the use of such anti-terrorism powers was grossly excessive. You don’t say. Of course, not all aspects of Mr Green’s behaviour, or indeed that of the civil servant, are above reproach. But given that journalists, MPs and other potential “whistle-blowers” on public problems cannot do their job unless leaks occur, it does seem rather rich for a Labour-led government to operate in this way. But they just love their anti-terrorism powers, do they not? Just ask the government of Iceland.
I must admit that in recent days I have tried to post stories that take one out of the Westminster Village, not simply because I wonder whether this is a bore, but because reading constantly about the doings of Gordon Brown and his circle makes me want to take a shower to feel clean and human again.
Update: Damian Green will not be prosecuted. It should never have come to this. The position of the Speaker of the House of Commons, a product of the Labour thugocracy from Scotland, is untenable.
Further thoughts on the vileness of the government from Fraser Nelson in The Spectator, which also has a picture of Guido Fawkes on the front cover. Question to Paul Staines: when do we get the movie?
The American Tea Parties were a huge success. Just go visit Glenn Reynolds for a great roundup with links, stills and videos.
Onwards to July 4th!
Reader ‘CountingCats’ reports that the next developmental stage of the Polywell fusion device has been funded.
Now let us cross our fingers, and perhaps the more religious among us do their thing, that the next scale up version continues to show positive results. If it does, then we will have plenty of cheap energy at the top, from small local power stations, as well as at the bottom.
God, this is an interesting time to be alive!
We are approaching the days of magic, the long ago predicted days when computing and electronics technology ceases to be visible and vanishes ‘into the walls’. One of the key solutions required for that disappearance is in the process of being solved.
If you are going to have an ‘intelligent environment’ around you, the computing elements involved must not only be small but they must have a source of energy. If we are truly talking about ubiquitous computing, there will be thousands of nodes in a home, millions in a neighborhood, billions in a town or city. You cannot feasibly wire them to external power and you can also not have thousands of folk running about changing a billion batteries every week or two.
That is where environmental energy scavenging comes in and it is not a future technology. It is here and several different types are purchase-able off the shelf from AdaptivEnergy, Texas Instruments and others. The systems work by picking up small amounts of energy from vibration, tiny amounts of ambient light, temperature differences and even the broadcasts from the local TV station.
Some applications are already in use for sensors in factory environments but the threshold is nigh where applications will move into businesses and homes. Tiny gadgets that you install and then forget about because they just keep doing their job for year after year with no maintenance, no battery changes, no replacements and no attention. They will effectively become invisible adjuncts to daily life.
According to Sir Arthur C. Clarke, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. We are just about to cross that threshold.
I would never have considered that the energy output of a TypeI Civilization could fit into my flat:
It is difficult, even for someone who has been working with these ideas and numbers for the past couple of decades, to get one’s head around the utter raw power potential of real nanotechnology. What Drexler is saying in this dry passage is that the amount of nanomotors needed to power a Kardasheff type I civilization, using all the sunlight that hits the Earth, would fit in a 500 square foot apartment (with 8-foot ceiling).
I might need a bit of air conditioning though…
They still don’t get it. In what is a generally very good, readable account of the life and times so far of Andrew Sullivan and his role in driving the blog format, the author, Johann Hari, comes out with this:
Oakeshott believed we should be sceptical of all human institutions—including markets. He savaged Hayek’s market fundamentalist bible, “The Road to Serfdom”, as another rationalist delusion. He saw it as a utopian plan to end planning, yet another argument that a perfect system could be found, this time in markets. Sullivan’s scepticism, by contrast, has been lop-sided. He is highly sceptical of the capacity of governments to act, but he has often presented markets as close to infallible, if left undistorted by government action.
Well I cannot recall what Oakeshott – a writer that I have studied a bit – said about the Road To Serfdom (both men taught at the London School of Economics, by the way), but that strikes me as a terribly confused paragraph. The whole point about Hayek’s demolition of the argument for central planning and socialism is that these ideas take no account of human ignorance, of the inability of any central planner, or group of planners, to have at their fingertips all the knowledge needed to co-ordinate supply and demand. Capitalism, and the “discovery process” of competitive markets, and risk-taking of entrepreneurs, works precisely because it does not require humans to be omniscient, but to capitalise on what they do know. Far from being a utopian, Hayek’s brand of classical liberalism – he called himself an “old Whig – is premised on the very kind of doubts and skepticisms that someone like Andrew Sullivan professes to hold. In fairness to Sullivan – to whom I have been rather unkind because of his support for a Big Government man like Mr Obama – he understands this point, or at least he used to do so.
Hari then goes on to approvingly quote a bete noire of mine, Naomi Klein:
This belief has been at the core of the left-wing writer Naomi Klein’s criticisms of Sullivan. She says: “Where is this ideal capitalism of which [he] speaks? It reminds me of people on the very far left who, where when you present them with evidence of the real-world application of their ideology, say, ‘That doesn’t count, that was a distortion.’ Well, where’s the real version?”
The “real version” of free markets can be found in say, parts of 18th and 19th Century Britain, when wealth exploded by any historical precedents; in Hong Kong, a place with no natural resources other than the entrepreneurial vigour of its people, and in the US, for much of its history, etc.
The more free, the less distorted, such markets are, by such things as central banks, taxes and regulations, the better such places tend to be, although the public can be misled by the prophets of big government into thinking that further progress requires something different. As I unashamedly say over and over, the current financial snafu lies, at root, on the doorstep of central – state – banks. That is not just a quibble. It is at the heart of the issue. It is no good socialists like Ms Klein trying to compare free market critics of mixed-economies like the UK with socialists trying to claim that the Soviet Union did not work because it was not done right or was a bit oppressive. The two worldviews are coming from fundamentally different premises about the issue of how you deal with lack of complete knowledge by individuals who must still act and take decisions. The disasters of socialism are features, not bugs.
There is another point for Mr Hari and others to consider: when firms go bust, it actualy generates knowledge and encourages businesses to do something different, to adjust. When a government department fails, as the CIA failed in not stopping 9/11, or the SEC failed in not stopping Bernard Madoff, does the organisation suffer the equivalent of going bankrupt? No, of course not. Instead, there are calls for more regulations, more officials, bigger budgets. There is no negative feedback loop in government, apart from the highly unreliable process of the occasional general election.
At some point, I have to wonder whether simple ignorance can explain why such articulate writers can get it so wrong. A part of me wants to suppress the desire to say, “Because they are evil”, since that clearly is not quite right. Why do such misconceptions stick, like barnacles on a ship’s hull, so tenaciously? Perhaps such people have crafted a viewpoint for themselves that defines their very being. I guess even I might have to admit some of that.
Update: Sullivan asks some hard but fair questions about the Tea Party protesters. He’s got a point. If opposing the bailouts means letting say, AIG go down the U-bend with all that implies, the protesters should perhaps concede as much. That is why the work of economists over in the UK such as Kevin Dowd is so important. We need to chart a course to a better, less imperfect, place.
“There will be about as many people prepared to admit that they ever voted Labour as there were prepared to admit they collaborated with the Germans. Everyone was in the resistance, honest.”
– Blognor Regis
And then there is this piece of genius from Harry Hutton.
Okay, let’s remember that there is a world outside the Westminster Village. The president of Iran is not a man whom anyone would want with his hands on the nuclear button, certainly not Israel, which has reason to worry that the man is an anti-semitic fruitcake. It appears that there has been a possible change in the tack of US policy towards Iran now that Mr Obama is at the helm. Now it may be that Mr Obama is playing a devilishly cunning game and, by trying to make nice to Iran, is either buying time or trying to engineer real, positive change. Of course, it also may be that Mr Obama is out of his depth and has made the fatal mistake that one can do business with a regime like Iran.
The danger, it seems to me, is that failing to stop Iran from proceeding with an enrichment programme for nuclear material is going to worry the hell out of Israel. And remember, that while Iran may not be the West’s immediate problem, it is a massive, existential one for Israel. The US may be wise not to want to pick a fight on this issue, given that such a course could go horribly wrong. Israel may not have the luxury of having to make even that choice.
Given that the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction tends to work when both sides are basically rational, even if they are bad, it is folly to suppose that nuclear deterrence will work with a regime led by a man who sincerely dreams of taking his place in heaven, and putting lots of those he loathes somewhere else, very violently. At the very least, a defence policy must now involve greater development of anti-ballistic missiles to shoot down incoming weapons, since there will be the risk that the launch sites and development sites may be out of reach of an airforce or ground assault team.
Consider this: why does Iran, with all its oil reserves, want to spend billions of its currency reserves on developing enriched fissile material? What does the Iranian government propose to do with it – use it for garden compost?
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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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