Pomp and Circumstance
Heard from a British TV presenter today when reporting on Golden Jubilee Celebrations:
“The crowd greeted the Royal entourage ecstatically. The young Princes went on a walkabout and were treated like popstars“
|
|||||
|
Yesterday four of us stuffed a Libertarian Alliance mailing, chez moi. It will be going out second class mail (don’t ask), on Wednesday (Monday and Tuesday are Golden Jubilee Bank Holidays). Libertarian Alliance publications are written and edited so that they can stand any amount of delay, so I’ll tell you about them when Sean Gabb’s computer is back in business (British Telecom are messing him around royally) and we have them up on the LA website. However, one of the fliers added to the mailing, about a conference next Saturday organised by Liberty (formerly the National Council for Civil Liberties) will hit hall carpets a lot later than would have been desirable. This conference is bizarrely entitled “Human Rights v Civil Liberties”. What’s the “v” about? I guess by “Human Rights” they mean robbing people to pay for other peoples’ education, hospital treatment, etc. But the worst things about the conference are that you have to pay GBP35 to get in, and that it starts at 10 am (lasting until 4 pm.) That’ll keep the riff-raff away, including me. Maybe Tom Burrroughes – wearing his Reuters hat? – can talk his way in for a better price, and at a time to suit himself. The “Workshop” subjects give you the flavour: “Hunting, Shooting, Fishing: Neglected Freedoms?”, How do Libertarians defend equality?”, “The European Union: A threat to our freedom?”, “Libertarian Right v Liberal Left: Insurmountable differences?” Speakers include: Louise Christian (Christian Fisher Solicitors), Claire Fox (Institute of Ideas), Mark Glendening (Democracy Movement) , Lord Peter Goldsmith QC (the Attorney General), Michael Gove (Times columnist), Imran Khan (solicitor), Claude Moraes (Labour MEP), Professor Conrad Russell (Kings College London), Steven Norris (former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party), Rabinder Singh (Matrix Chambers), and John Wadham of Liberty itself. NCCL, as it was, was started by Bolsheviks for their own entirely Bolshevik reasons, and remains overwhelmingly left-of-centre. But as you may have noticed, three of those four workshop subjects push libertarian buttons, and they are apparently making genuine attempts to extricate themselves from the tag of being Blairite poodles. I asked Sean Gabb if he was going? “Oh no, a bunch of lefties chattering amongst themselves.” And in truth that is probably what it will be. Nevertheless, they are trying. (The Libertarian Alliance is affiliated to them, for its own reasons.) But what do you do if your side is now the ruling class and hence the people now most vigorously violating civil liberties? What do you do if you have friends of friends whom you are now supposed to be campaigning against? What if the man who is now stitching up asylum seekers or fox-hunters came to your wedding? Libertarian Alliance Director Chris Tame will also be one of the speakers at this conference, so he at least will know some of what transpires. Marc Glendening, a long-time anti-EU campaigner, is also a cordial acquaintance. Maybe I’ll be able to extract something in writing from one of them about it all. If you’re interested, ring 020 7378 3667, or email zoe@liberty-human-rights.org.uk June 3rd, 2002 | Comments are closed
 David Carr is his usual pessimistic self concerning the possibility of nuclear war between Pakistan and India. I am my usual (cautiously) optimistic self. As I said to David face-to-face over the weekend, and as he said I should stick up here, there is one huge difference between nuclear weapons and the previous sort. Nuclear weapons can kill Presidents, Prime Ministers and Generals, as well as the lower ranks. Would World Wars One and Two have proceeded as they did if, every time you (one of the grand fromages) launched your Grand Offensive from the safety of your French Chateau or your German or British or Russian command bunker, there was a one in five chance that you personally would die a horrible death. Would the Cold War have remained throughout its duration so cold without nuclear weapons concentrating the minds of the Great People? June 3rd, 2002 | Comments are closed
So. Okay. Like right now, for example, the Haitians need to come to America. But some people are all: “What about the strain on our resources?” But it’s like, when I had this garden party for my father’s birthday, right, I said R.S.V.P. because it was a sit-down dinner. But people came that, like, did not R.S.V.P. So I was like totally buggin’. I had to haul ass to the kitchen, redistribute the food, squish in extra place settings, but by the end of the day it was like, the more the merrier. And so, if the government can just get to the kitchen, rearrange some things, we could certainly party with the Haitians. And in conclusion may I please remind you that it does not say R.S.V.P. on the Statue of Liberty. [Applause] Thank you very much. June 3rd, 2002 | Comments are closed
Four people have been gunned down in a drive-by shooting outside a nightclub in Bradford. Residents in Manchester have taken to the streets in protest at the rising level of gun violence. And (just on the TV so no link yet) a man has been shot dead in a pub in the East End of London. June 2nd, 2002 | Comments are closed
The Kalashnikov. The AK-47. The weapon of choice for every communist insurgent and marxist regime in the world. Not just because it was simple, sturdy and effective but also because it was produced by the horny-hands of comrade workers in the Soviet Union and so untainted by decadent and exploitative Western capitalism. Its symbolism was, perhaps, just as important as its stopping power. But that’s all over now
Ironies don’t come thicker than this; the gun that was supposed to blow away people who believed in property rights and profit will, henceforth, be produced under the mantle of both. Yes, the sinister and fearsome Kalashnikov has been co-opted into the Great Capitalist Project. If Che Guevarra were alive now, he’d be spinning in his grave!  June 2nd, 2002 | Comments are closed
“Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” – C. S. Lewis [Courtesy of St.Andrews Liberty Log ] June 2nd, 2002 | Comments are closed
India and Pakistan. Will they? Won’t they? Will there be mushroom clouds over Peshawar or will it all amount to nothing more than sporadic mortar fire, vigourous fist-shaking and some spectacular face-pulling before all parties come grudgingly to the table to thresh out their differences? I couldn’t tell you because I just don’t know. The preponderance of opinion, though, seems to be that it won’t go all the way. That both parties have far too much to lose from all-out, balls-out war and, consequently, the instinct of self-preservation, if not common humanity, will win the day. I don’t regard this as a misapprehension. After all, both India and Pakistan do have a lot to lose from all-out war, particularly if it escalates to the point where plutonium bhajias are being lobbed over the Line of Control, and I am sure that this is not lost on the polity of either protagonist. But just because war would be a disaster, that doesn’t mean it won’t happen anyway. We in the West find it very difficult to contemplate true catastrophe so we tend to assume rather too glibly that such catastrophe is not possible because catastrophe leaves a vasy body-count in its wake, not to mention the damage it causes to many investment portfolios. But have we not been lulled into a false sense of guarded optimism by the 20th Century? The Century that saw the Nazis buried by the Allies in Word War II, the Soviet Union laid low by capitalism and France beaten by Senegal in the World Cup (Alright the last one happened in the 21st Century but I am just too pleased not to mention it). In other words, our generation has become well used to seeing the world in terms of the rise of badness and madness being overwhelmed by the onward march of goodness and reason. Those of us born post-WWII have been particularly fortunate to have lived through an era of relative peace where ‘war’ is played out on TV and mostly consists of a bit of a fracas followed by a peace process. So many times have we seen these melodramas played out that they have become the topography of conflict. We assume that the men in uniforms will be free to do their thing for a short period before everyone calms down and the men in suits step in to press flesh and hammer out some sort of deal. But we may forget that this is a manifestation of our era and not an eternal truth and all eras have to come to an end sooner or later. ‘Jaw-jaw is better than war-war’ has been the axiom of our age. ‘There is no substitute for victory’ may be the axiom that replaces it. June 2nd, 2002 | Comments are closed
June 1st, 2002 | Comments are closed
Paul Marks takes a radical view of Britain’s transport system No one has yet explained to me why the railways could not have been sold as a single unit. If it had been more efficient to brake up British Rail into regional companies then the new owners would have done just that. Just as if it had been more efficient for the rail to be owned by one company, and have the trains run by other companies this is what would have evolved via the choices of people buying and selling shares (“market forces” are, of course, simply the choices of people engaged in trading). There was certainly no need for the government to engage in complicated schemes – just sell the thing and stand back. People often talk for the need for subsidies for the railways to compete with the roads (and, to a lesser extent, the airlines) – but whilst I am pleased to accept the fact that the railways and roads do compete for custom (which rather undermines the idea that the railways must be compulsorily broken up to ensure “competition”) I think the whole idea that the railways must fall apart without subsidies is false. Firstly the roads should not be provided “free” (i.e. free at the point of use) by the state. The problem is not that the government builds motorways late – the problem is that it builds them at all. If people want motorways let them build them and charge people to use them (such things as “road tax” should, of course, be abolished). If people really want to build free motorways let them do so – but I doubt charitable people will put up enough money for this idea. As for the railways – subsidies should be abolished, but so should regulations. The railways have been attacked by regulations as far back as the 19th century (there were such things as profit controls even then), but in 1906 the government basically declared war on the private railways. Putting trade unions above the law of contract (i.e. outside civil interaction) hit British industry badly – but the railways companies were a specific target of the 1906 Act (the Act was, after all, a direct reaction to the “Taff Vale Judgement” in which the courts declared that a railways company had the right to sue a trade union for organised contract breaking). The “Liberal” government of the day also launched a tidal wave of regulations at the railway companies in the period 1906 to 1914. And then (during the First World War) the railways were taken over by the government, maintenance neglected and the system undermined. We should be very wary of making claims such as the idea that the British railway system was the best in the world in 1919 – such claims are not only rather easy for statists to refute, but (more importantly) undermine the libertarian case that regulations and state control have undermined the railways. Why the history lesson? Simple – after the returning of the railways to a sort of private ownership history repeated itself. First history repeated itself as farce – in that the government of Mr Major did not intend to harm private railway companies with regulations (but did anyway). And then history repeated itself in a straightforward way with the Labour government’s transport boss (Mr Prescott) setting out to undermine the railway companies as much as he could. A policy continued by his supposedly arch “New Labour” successor as transport boss. Without the regulations the railways might well be able to compete quite well with the roads without any subsidies at all – even if the roads remained free. And (of course) a railway system without regulations would be a much safer railway system – as it would be clear who was in charge and who was responsible. Paul Marks June 1st, 2002 | Comments are closed
It will come as no surprise to anyone who habitually reads British newspapers that the state likes the idea of being able to intercept any and all of your communications on the Internet. Well it just so happens that some people are not going to roll over for the government and play ball. Just as the state comes up with new technological ways to spy on its subjects (i.e you), those same subjects are finding ways to prevent them from doing so. Mathematician Peter Fairbrother simply refuses to just accept the Draconian powers that the state has taken upon itself via the Regulation of Investigative Powers Act and is developing M-O-O-T, an integrated privacy system that you just pop in your PC or Mac at startup. As it uses off-shore key storage, the user can rest safe knowing that the British state cannot get access to your sensitive data at a whim. Bravo!  June 1st, 2002 | Comments are closed
|
   |
||||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
