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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
It is easy to understand why those who are not fully down with the whole Green alarmist agenda are annoyed at the fracking ban under Rishi Sunak’s new administration. (In reality, local authorities could and would still try and stop it, even if it was legal at the national level.)
A problem with the ban, though, is that it says something about the approach of the Sunak administration: it is in thrall to the Precautionary Principle. Don’t do anything if there is the slightest risk of harm to the environment or if it upsets some local people. And that means that on issues such as house building, new nuclear power plants, roads, Heathrow third runway or a “Boris island” in East London, or anything else, the risk is that nothing much gets done.
Lest anyone think this is a purely Tory issue, it isn’t. A Labour government is unlikely to be like the Attlee/Wilson ones where there was at least a sort of working class affinity with industry. Trade unionists used to be proud of how they worked in mines, factories and shipyards. They got dirt under their fingernails, and they wore this as a badge of pride. Today’s post-modernist Left bemoans developments such as the demise of steel production, but fails to join the dots between this and the deliberate raising of energy prices through “Green transition” policies. Also, much of the modern Left does not reside in the industrial sector, but is more about the public sector. So the problem is one of a wider cultural/philosophical aversion to making things or doing things that are in any way “dirty”.
Meanwhile, countries such as India and China, or Indonesia, suffer no such inhibitions. And we will import energy and other products from nations that are likely to enforce less stringent controls on pollution. And yet the likes of Starmer, and various commentators, will bemoan the demise of UK manufacturing. But if we refuse to build reliable, cheap energy (wind and solar don’t count, being weather-reliant), then our demise as an industrial power will continue. (Fossil Future, by Alex Epstein, is a must-read and corrective to current alarmist nonsense, not least because it addresses the philosophy of the Greens, and provides an alternative. Too few debunkers of Greens do this.)
A few days ago I went to Battersea Power Station, now fully refurbished and turned into a shopping mall and apartment block, with various offices and things like art galleries. I can admire the architecture, the lovely industrial-style touches and the gantries and machinery. But what strikes me as symbolic of modern Britain is that we have turned a power station into a shop, and when the wind doesn’t blow and sun doesn’t shine, and we haven’t enough baseload power, the building will go dark. That’s where decades of evasion and Green ideology have taken us.
We are turning into a theme park.
Update: Germany is keen to be a theme park too. Major chemicals manufacturers, unable to withstand surging energy costs, are moving out, according to this Reuters report
“Restoring the fracking moratorium would be an error. To rely on imported gas when we have 50-100 years’ supply under our feet is not a stance rooted in science or economics, but political weakness in the face of militant protest groups and anti-development campaigns. This decision will not help the planet; the UK will become more dependent on gas imports, with higher emissions than local production. It will not help the growth plan; we will be borrowing to pay Qatari and US taxes rather than building an industry.
It will not help the low carbon transition; there will be fewer fossil fuel taxes to fund it and the cost of all energy sources will rise. It will not help our allies in the EU or Ukraine; surrendering further dominance of regional gas markets to Russian tyranny. It seems the Government and Opposition are determined to risk blackouts and freezeouts before taking hard decisions rooted in reality.”
– Andy Mayer, of the Institute of Economic Affairs (one of those evil organisations now safely removed from influencing our “sensibles” in government), talking about the decision of the new Rishi Sunak government to ban fracking. The quotation explains the imbecility of that decision. (I received the comments in an email; there is no weblink that I could see.)
Who needs vulgar industry anyway, when we can import all this stuff from grubby foreigners, daaaahhling.
Update: Ambrose Evans Pritchard in the Daily Telegraphs compliments the frackers of the US for helping to save the West (he’s not exaggerating) but argues that UK fracking is far less sensible as an investment proposition, and he may be correct. However, he goes onto laud the benefits of the UK going all in on Green, renewable energy, and talks about hydrogen, etc. But throughout the entire article, written with AEP’s typical brio, is not one single reference to battery storage capacity. Weather-dependent energy requires storage to deal with the baseload power issue. There may well be solutions in the skunkworks, but an awful lot is riding on this. There might well be a sort of “Moore’s Law” effect on renewables and affordability, but batteries are the key. And making batteries needs lithium, cobalt, and other minerals that come from places that are often not exactly very agreeable to the West. And there are environmental side-effects, including damage to water supplies (often far more serious than anything that fracking might cause.)
Dear Noah, thank you for your last contribution to this discussion. I particularly appreciate the title of your last piece given how neatly it maps onto a similar phrase about how “Real Communism hasn’t been tried”.
The thrust of your position, which is shared by a surprising number of people I respect and hold in high regard in Western heterodox circles, is that “if we could negotiate with Putin, wouldn’t that be better than war?” And I agree: if we could negotiate with Putin, that would be better than than war. But I’m afraid it brings to mind a rather “transphobic” saying we have in Russia:
“If grandma had balls, she’d be grandpa.”
Forgive me, but I’m afraid you’ve forgotten who we are talking about.
In 2008, shortly after Russia’s invasion of South Ossetia, Vladimir Putin explained that “Crimea is Ukrainian. It is not disputed territory. Russia has long recognised and accepted the borders of today’s Ukraine”. When pushed, he further explained that [the suggestion that Russia would invade Crimea] “reeks of provocation”.
Three months before the annexation of Crimea, in December 2013, Vladimir Putin told journalists that the idea of Russia sending troops into any part of Ukraine, including Crimea, was “complete nonsense that cannot and will not happen”.
– Konstantin Kisin observing that anyone arguing for good faith negotiations with Putin is in the grips of delusional wishful thinking.
“Since the country [UK] seems to be heading back very rapidly to the 1970s it is worth asking: just what is keeping people in Britain, especially young people?”
– Ross Clark. He’s clocked the fact that far from net immigration being an issue, the challenge over the next few years is persuading anyone with a pulse to stay in the UK, if the prospect is of high taxes, weak growth, and all the rest of it.
I watched a bit of the show. It was certainly full of dramatic twists and turns, but it was all so loud and fast-moving that I lost the will to try and keep up. Dr Who was also rather confusing.
Two years ago, a post of mine looked at why people were falling for the BLM narrative about Floyd and Chauvin – not just the usual suspects who’d already fallen for the ones about Zimmerman and Wilson, but people like this guy, eloquently aware that Floyd was simply…
“a violent misogynist, a brutal man who met a predictably brutal end”
…yet swallowing the idea of police guilt in his death. (Before or after reading this post – or instead, if this post seems too long – by all means (re)read my old one.)
Now that poor (literally) Chauvin’s appeal seems to be overcoming his lack of funds for a lawyer, and the Minnesota Supreme Court’s refusal of a public defender, it’s time to remind people why it is folly to look at a picture of prone Floyd dying while under police restraint and confabulate belief in BLM’s narrative about it. My old post told people to read the story forwards, not backwards. This one tells people to know the background before studying the foreground. The usual suspects will continue telling the usual lies, but after two-and-a-half years of experiencing what believing BLM brings, maybe more people are prepared to review things they fell for back then.
Two superficially-contradictory statements are key to grasping what happened:
Added later: I see that Paul Marks has made a very pertinent suggestion in the comments,
“As there is no minimum time requirement for the (very large) pension a former Prime Minister gets, I propose that each of us is Prime Minister for a few minutes – and then resigns.
“Creating all the money (from nothing) to fund the pensions would be inflationary – but given the already insane level of government spending…”
Added even later: in the comments, TomJ links to this Parliamentary Briefing Paper that says that the rules on Prime Ministerial pensions were reformed in a boring direction in 2013. Right, that’s me out. I won’t do it now even if they ask nicely.
Russia has always been a colonial power in denial. While conquering and ruling multitudes, it insisted that—in contrast with violent Western conquests—the indigenous peoples themselves sought Russian protection and that Russian rule was benign. This gap between rhetoric and reality is evident in the country’s current designation as a “Russian Federation”.
The Tory party has become ‘culturally inbred’ and starts to resemble the deranged Hillbillies of Hollywood myth, just with shirts from Jermyn Street and a better wine list. People like Crispin Blunt et al seem to believe they have a natural right to be in charge because… well, just because. Even marginally democratic input like the Conservative Party members choosing Liz Truss is intolerable as they wanted Rishi Sunak. This of course also explains why Brexit drove them into the florid stage of insanity, given the oiks simply refused to do what their betters had told them to do.
So, Liz Truss is now a sock-puppet for her political rival, a PM in office but not in power. Perhaps a stronger woman would have resisted the pressure and turned things around even at this late stage, but we now know Liz Truss is not such a woman. She seems to have naively assumed that having forced out Boris (who to be fair set the stage of this entire shitshow), the same people would then abide by the Party membership’s wishes and allow her to actual govern.
The absurdly named Conservative Party is in the midst of a CFIT (controlled flight into terrain) due to its internal ideological contradictions. Far from being a broad church, the Wets, better described as Blue Blairites, people with more in common with LibDems or pre-Corbyn Labour Party than the free-market low tax wing of the party, have decided only they are fit to be in power.
That’s it, one hundred years on from 1922 the Tories as currently understood are doomed. They need to crash and burn and indeed they will. The Labour government that will follow is going to be economically and culturally even worse (which given how crap the Tories have been will a remarkable achievement, but I believe Labour is absolutely up to the task). But the destruction of the Conservative Party we know has to happen. We have just arrived at the end point of where 30 years of “lesser evil” voting has led us.
Right then, what eventually comes next 5 to 10 years from now after Labour take their turn to trash the nation? Hard to say but at least we can’t blame the EU now. Perhaps something that calls itself the Conservative Party under Kemi Badanoch will arise from the ashes? A Conservative Party that is actually is a conservative party? Or maybe Reform UK? Perhaps something else entirely? I really don’t know.
Addendum: And Truss is gone. She had some of the right ideas but proved to be as useful as a chocolate teapot politically. Perhaps that is unkind, and given the now toxic internal contradictions in the Party have fully manifested. It was a poison chalice no matter who was the leader. The enforcers of Blue Blairite orthodoxy are determined to destroy the party and that is that, all we can do it watch the unedifying spectacle unfold.
Lord (David) Frost is one of the sanest observers of the UK political scene. He’s in favour of the pro-growth, lower-tax agenda that Liz Truss has made much of. He writes more in sorrow than anger that the time has come for Ms Truss to stand aside.
His article includes the nugget of insight around how, in the very early 80s, Sir John Hoskyns, advisor to Margaret Thatcher in her Policy Unit, had set out in a memo a series of “stepping stones” for reform and change. To make changes on energy, tax, inflation, house planning, etc, requires a lot of patient preparatory work, to ensure that reforms don’t alienate the public on a large scale, or rattle the markets. This is akin to a pilot on a ship or plane having a passage plan before leaving port or taking off.
A serious government needs to have a worked-out idea of where it is going, and how it is going to do it, and have contingency plans. For example: when contemplating the need to take on Arthur Scargill’s National Union of Mineworkers, following the damaging strikes of the early 70s, Mrs T. put Nigel Lawson in charge of energy (before he became Chancellor in 1983) and he built up coal stocks so that the UK had a buffer of coal during the likely strike. This is like a general marshalling his forces intelligently before going into battle.
My impression is that Truss lacked people around her who knew how to guide her in such a way. And this speaks to what in my view is a deeper problem with much politics today in the West: the lack of strategic thinking and understanding of statecraft. Politicians sometimes study subjects such as “international affairs” or “politics” in liberal arts degrees and masters’ degrees in university. There is the Kennedy School of Government in the US , to give one case. But I wonder how much actual practical knowledge of how to get things done is learned. (If any readers have been to these places, let me know.) In fact, they may simply spend time wallowing in forms of ideology; they’d be better off reading Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power, even if it appears to be a treatise on cynicism.
Perhaps the nature of those in public life has changed. Whatever else one might say of them, the old landed gentry and business class of people who tended to be Tories had an understanding of the processes of government and making change, although a lot of them were also capable of mass incompetence. On the Labour side, the experiences of unions and working in industry gave a certain realism and understanding of how tough life could be.
I worry that too few in public life have this sort of “ballast” in their lives. And we end up with people who don’t really know what they are doing.
Perhaps a more intractable problem is that so many people now assume that government, on the scale we now have it, is the “normal” state of affairs, and that anything taking us to a smaller State is terrifying. And it requires tremendous rhetorical skill, management capability and insight to show how a route to a saner state of affairs is possible, even exciting and enticing. This is doubly hard to do after a pandemic, and after when a large chunk of the professional middle classes had spent two years on furlough, watching TV and baking bread at home. And the sadder fact is that a lot of such people, although they will never admit it unless after several drinks, rather enjoyed the experience.
“….it is more useful to see Liz Truss’s rise and fall as symptomatic of an identity crisis among free-market policy-makers across the West, as they wake up to a world in which can exist neither as competent technocratic administrators nor as a radical liberalising movement. This new world is one in which both Thatcherism and the Blairite Third Way are dead. What those commentators suffering from Brexit Derangement Syndrome appear to have missed is that the country is reeling from what many hoped was a transitory crisis, but now seems to be a permanent paradigm shift: one in which high inflation is endemic and the welfare capitalist model that has been propped up by cheap credit for the past 20 years is vanquished.”
I wonder if people will talk of these times in the way they once discussed the tumultuous Corn Law/free trade debates that led, eventually, to the formation of the Liberal Party (Whigs and Robert Peel supporters joining) and the Tories, led by Lord Derby and later Disraeli, languishing in opposition for 20-plus years. Stephen Davies of the Institute of Economic Affairs (and a Manchester man who relishes the traditions of classical liberalism and economics in that city), argues that big realignments are going on. I think, contrary to his view, that economics is as important as “culture wars” stuff to what is causing politics to shift. The public has just had a big lesson in why economics matters. It matters a lot.
More recently, Western experts have talked back military reforms, stating that they have been less successful than previously claimed. As the war in Ukraine has shown, reforms have had limited if any influence on Russian military’s operational effectiveness. In many ways, the Russian army still resembles the former Soviet army in its mentality, hierarchical structure, poor quality officers, poor levels of training, ill-discipline, poor logistics, and corruption.
The war in Ukraine pits a vertically structured Russia with a subject population against a horizontally structured Ukraine composed of citizens. During Vladimir Putin’s 22 years ruling Russia as president and prime minister he has re-Sovietized the country, fanned militarism, promoted a quasi-religious cult of the Great Patriotic War and Joseph Stalin, and destroyed civil society and volunteer groups. In Ukraine the opposite has taken place in each of these areas. Ukraine has undergone de-Sovietization since the late 1980s and decommunization since the 2013-2014 Euromaidan Revolution, has denigrated Stalin as a tyrant, switched from military celebration of the Great Patriotic War to commemoration of World War II, and built a dynamic civil society and volunteer movement. Ukrainians have organized three popular revolutions since 1990 to demand their rights; Russia’s last revolution was over a hundred years ago.
[…]
Another important factor has been the widespread view of the Ukrainian state as weak and badly divided between a ‘pro-Russian’ eastern and ‘pro-Western’ western Ukraine. In the last three decades the greatest number of articles published in the media and by think tanks and academics on Ukraine has been on regional divisions and the country split between a pro-Russian east and nationalist, pro-Western west. In Moscow and among Western experts, Ukraine’s Russian speakers were deemed to be inherently unreliable and likely to swing to supporting Russia if Moscow invaded the country.
A shock-and-awe style Russian invasion of Ukraine would exert tremendous pressure on Ukraine’s regional divisions, leading to the state’s fragmentation and the collapse of the Ukrainian army (as in Afghanistan). This did not take place and the reason why it did not was because Ukraine was never a regionally fractured country; its Russian speakers were Ukrainian patriots, and there was never any possibility the Ukrainian army was going to disintegrate in the same manner as the Afghan army.
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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