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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Samizdata slogan of the day The Conservative Party wishes to liberate both our society and the individuals within it from the all-encompassing claims of a State that is still believed by some to be able to reap miracles.
– Oliver Letwin MP, seen by many as the chief architect of future Conservative Party policy
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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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Aaah, the Conservatives can’t think of any policy for education and healthcare etc that hasn’t been tried by them or Labour and a complete failure…
Delude yourself about how “libertarian” the Conservatives are all you like, Alex, but I beg you not to continue to use this blog to try to mislead others about the nature of the Conservatives and their policies. The Conservatives appear in no way opposed to the proposed compuslory national ID cards – how very libertarian. The Conservatives also insist on keeping the bureaucratic, inefficient and wasteful mess that is the NHS in place for the foreseeable future. (To name just a couple of serious reasons why the Conservatives cannot be described as pursuing even vaguely libertarian policies.) So I’m going to be able to legally drive 10mph faster on motorways under the Conservatives – great – but I’d rather be limited to 70mph on motorways and have the right to self-defence, be free from this ID card nonsense and not see my money thrown at the NHS than be able to do 80mph with these kind of statist authoritarian laws in place. I think you overestimate the “libertarianness” of the Conservatives although I will concede that they just might be the “lesser of two evils”.
We must be encouraged that libertarian-friendly slogans start getting tossed about by politicians. It means that those politicians think there might be demand for those ideas. That is good.
Correct me if I am wrong….. but wasn’t it that ‘great libertarian’, Mrs Thatcher, who arguably, started the serious decline of the NHS, when she as Health Minister, decreed the abolition of the ‘Matron’ system of management in the NHS, and replaced it with a system that had more administrators than nurses?.
Also, at that time there was the furore over the sale of nurses housing, supposedly to make the hospitals more efficient. A lot of the current NHS problems can be directly attributed to her actions while in that ministry.
She may have been a great politician, but she was certainly pretty awful as a manager.
Stephen Hodgson writes:
” I think you overestimate the “libertarianness” of the Conservatives although I will concede that they just might be the “lesser of two evils”.”
Seconded. There is simply no diguising that the Conservative party has considerable elements every bit a reactionary (to use that lovely old Leftist word) as Blunket and Co. And I’m far from convinced that IDS isn’t really on that wing of the party.
If I vote for the buggers next time around it will be as I did it last time – with my fingers crossed behind my back and wishing that the UKIP had made a better fist of things.
“The Conservatives also insist on keeping the bureaucratic, inefficient and wasteful mess that is the NHS in place for the foreseeable future.”
I think you are mistaken. The Shadow Chancellor, Michael Howard, has described the NHS as “Stalinist”, and the Shadow Health Secretary, Liam Fox is advocating a social insurance system, as pushed by the Adam Smith Institute and others.
Alex, I have yet to come across any evidence that the Conservatives actually want to try to begin to dismantle the NHS should they win a majority at the next general election. It is encouraging that Howard and Fox do not openly advocate chucking even more money at the NHS but for goodness sake, most Conservatives are scared to even hint at the idea of a move towards privatised health care – even when all the evidence suggests that a privatised system would be far preferable to the NHS.
What might convince me to vote for the Conservatives would be if they openly opposed the proposed compuslory national ID cards and announced their intention to abandon this ridiculous idea should they win power – and if they offered their assurance that fox hunting will be relegalised and the Criminal “Justice” Bill/Act torn apart. I suppose they still have time to work on revising their policy before the next general election but I’m not sure I’d vote for them if the next election were tomorrow.
Well, thats because the beloved NHS is a national monument, and the Tories know political suicide (finally) when they see it. Even Maggie T was quick to point out how she sunk billion$ into the NHS, because its a vote winner.
The NHS cannot be dismantled in this, a democratic country, until the public want it gone. That certainly isn’t the case right now, the public want it fixed. Of course, the public have never really been given a choice, but still, fact is right now that if a political party of any colour said “we will dismantle the NHS” they will be atomised come election day.
If the Tories ease the NHS onto a more decentralised footing, and it can be demonstrated to work better than Whitehall diktat, public opinion may, over time, change, until it’s dismantling becomes acceptable to the public.
In short, it aint gonna be dismantled with a snap of a PMs fingers. Thats just fantasy land. Not happening.
It may be dismantled after a decade of slowly loosening the grip the government has on it, and slow opinion change in the public mood on the subject. If the NHS goes it won’t go out with a bang, it’ll just slowly be phased out over a long time.
The Tories seem far more likely to push in that direction than any other mainstream party.
The Last Toryboy wrote:
Even Maggie T was quick to point out how she sunk billion$ into the NHS, because its a vote winner.
Which is a great illustration of the limits of truth and rhetoric in modern politics, because it is still generally believed that the vast increases in public spending in the Thatcher years were “cuts”. Similarly, otherwise apparently sane people will tell you in the 6th year of Blair that “he’s a Tory really” or that New Labour’s policies are “Thatcherite”.
The government remains in a strong position, despite some recent snafus, because it has learned to use the paradox–to manipulate image and action separately. The Conservatives haven’t discovered how to counter it.
Very interesting