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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 quote of the day “You could argue, indeed, that the great lesson of the 20th century – desperately hard learned in less fortunate countries than Britain, but tough to swallow even here – is that the state does not have the answer to human problems in the way that so many hoped so naively for so long.”
– Martin Kettle, at the Guardian. I love his expression “you could argue”. There’s no argument, Martin. The failure of the state is so total, so widely proven, that it is quite astonishing that it has taken some folk a while to catch on.
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Is there any significance to the fact that this is in the Guardian? Also:
Huh? Or am I misunderstanding the word “retreat”?
I was wondering the same thing about the Guardian…
This is FWIW my take. There has, in a way, over the last 30 years been a rtreat of the state within the UK. Certainly the left see PFI hospitals, the sale of council houses and trust schools that way. I prefer to see the first and third anyway as being a rise in the idea that it is no longer necessary to own the means of production, merely to regulate. Blair and Brown called it the “third way” but it has an older and much nastier name…
So, for a truly believing leftie, this is the reason it all went Pete Tong. (Demented) aspects of the “market” were brought into health, education and housing policy. These policies have failed ergo it’s the market to blame. That’s the logic. They utterly fail to see that their attempt to tame the market to socialist goals was always going to end in tears. They fail to see because they are true believers in socialism. What they do correctly see clearly is that the form of capitalism adopted is demented. Oh, they’re right on that one.
We see the results everyday with a deranged attempt to make all schools & hospitals equal even if that means equally bad. We see the insane nonsense of “affordable housing” as well.
I see the worst of all possible worlds – a castrated capitalism (really croneyism) yoked to the socialist cart. This for me is even worse than pure socialism because it involves quangos out the kazoo, regulatory bodies and all manner of related total nonsense. It doesn’t mean honest business-folk make a few quid, it means Tony & Gordon’s friends do. It’s awful… It’s socialism in it’s post-modern phase and say what you like about Mr Attlee, he was at least honest in his goals.
Right or wrong it isn’t socialism which has shafted us, the third way has shafted them as much as it has us.
This is just a sick joke. The Uk government does not believe for one minute that there are things it can’t do best. Neither does the EU. Government at all levels is falling over itself to find new areas and ways to interfere in people’s lives. And as we saw from the Nuffield Council for Bioethics, there are plenty of people who still consider that government has a role to play in individual lifestyle choices.
We see daily that governments are not the best instruments in most areas of life, but the people in power never learn the obvious lesson. There conclusion is always the same, “if government failed, what is needed is more government.”
The “retreat” is for people like the author of this article. He believed in state education, state healthcare, and state housing , for everybody. He is aware enough of the failure of these things that he will pay for his own family to not have to use the services that the state provides. So he retreats.
Pity the poorer people who have no such alternatives because the state has crowded the alternatives out.
Michael: your point is taken. However, what Nick describes is the bigger problem, IMO. I see it often when discussing health care, mainly with people outside the US, who like to point out how the “private” health care in the US is not working (these people, who, BTW, are a majority, would not dream of using quotation marks like I did).
So what about the Guardian, is this unusual (I don’t read the thing)? If so, then it is a good sign, no?
He might as well have been addressing one of our weekly Security Theater[1] threads with this one.
People don’t like to be told that their problems do not have solutions. If the problem is terrorism/air piracy, hiring a bunch of people to be screeners, who couldn’t get twelve bucks an hour from Wackenhut/Group4/Securitas or some other mall ninja outfit isn’t a solution. Nor is searching Grandma. Frankly, nor is searching Middle Eastern males ages 18-45 travelling in groups without women in attendance on one-way tickets bought in cash less than a day before the flight.
Sorry, but there just isn’t a perfect solution. And screaming at the state to protect us from the BAD BAD MANS isn’t going to do it. We’ll get more Security Theater and an increasingly-thin illusion of security, and that’s it. Look at how my night has gone:
We’re getting snow, and for much of the state this is the first snowfall worth mentioning of the year. Naturally, people start driving like morons and smacking their cars into other cars, barriers, light poles, flying saucers, etc. And when that happens, they want the state (and especially the armed jack-booted thug part of the state) to fix their cars, write traffic tickets (on the other drivers only, natch), make their insurance companies pay up, and re-open the roads (or at least let THEM through, because the two marked squads, two fire trucks, two ambulances, and three POV’s since the area is served by a volunteer fire department would ALL be more than glad to stop cutting a hurt guy out of that car in order to let you get past them and get home in time to watch House.)
After the fourth time I got yelled at by a motorist to “do something about these roads,” only usually with some choice language mixed in…I imagine that there are people who actually believe that they can have a law against bad weather. No, the armed JBTs of the state can’t make it stop snowing. Nor can we make it safe to drive like an ass in this snow. Nor can we fix ten years of trashed marriage in fifteen minutes. Nor can we raise your kids for you, etc.
Sorry, I thought I was off-duty and able to sit around and read SD in my car. Nope: forced overtime, three hours standing around outside in the slop. I think I’m a little cranky.
[1] Security Theater probably should be a topic category all its own.
Bang on Sunfish. I get the same (though obviously to a much lesser extent). Someone’s kid has defenestrated a laptop and I’m asked to “do something”. Well, you know I can do something. I can tell them to pick it up put it in the bin and I can also tell them what the latest deals are at Dell. From my experience almost anybody who ever says “Something must be done” is not part of the solution.
I wouldn’t mind security theatre anything like as much if I believed for a second that anybody involved, the security guards, the screeners, the queueing punters actually believed that the whole farce did any good. Has it occurred to any of the powers that be that enormous queues at airports and the like are terrorist magnets?
Michael,
I would have more respect for the rich on the left if they did privately educate their kids. As it stands they gerrymander catchment areas or move house to get their kids into the state-schools that are as good as the private-sector. Where were the Blair kids educated?
“it is quite astonishing that it has taken some folk a while to catch on”
Unfortunately, I would say most folk has yet to catch on….
Well the Welfare State (government health, education and welfare spending) is bigger than it is ever been – and I mean as a percentage of the economy.
Regulation has been on the rise since the Single European Act of 1986 (there was a bit of deregulation in the early years of the government Mrs Thatcher led).
As for privatization – well there was some in the 1980’s (and even in 1979 the nationalized industries were only about 10% of the economy, if that, as opposed to government spending which was over 40% of the economy) and early 1990s and most of it has not been reversed (although the rail network is now government owned, even though most people do not seem to know that “Network Rail” is govenrment owned), but it has not advanced in recent years.
So overall the government is getting bigger rather than smaller.
However, it is good that even Guardian people have their doubts. Hopefully these doubts will grow over time.
I have just noticed Alisa’s question.
The Guardian is, and has been for many years, the main newspaper of the left in Britain.
Paul: I know, that’s why I asked. Some leftist papers (which are most papers anyway) have a “resident right wing” writer, such as William Safire at the NYT. I was wondering whether there is something similar at the Guardian.
Not on the Guardian, as far as I know Alisa.
Is W.S. still writing for the New York Times?
I thought that their resident right winger these days was Ben Stein – the Republican who just happens to support tax increases (just about any tax increases) and shows Republican respect for science and reason generally by attacking evolution and defending “intelligent design”.
“If we have to have Republican round here, let us pick a daft one” seems to be the idea.
I just checked, and it turns out he quit in 2005. I stopped reading the NYT (and papers in general) long time ago, so I had no idea. Ben Stein? He is a tolerable comedian.