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]
|
Samizdata quote of the day I know that people like me are supposed to write newspaper columns because we have a certain command of the English tongue. However, there are times when even the most experienced of us is forced to struggle. How, after all, can one describe Jacqui Smith, our Home Secretary? The adjectives come thick and fast, but all seem insufficient to describe this ambulant catastrophe. Preposterous, corrupt, dim, incompetent, sleazy, incapable: none of them is quite the job.
– Simon Heffer
I remember the newspaper parliamentary sketchwriter, Edward Pearce (no relation) once remarking, apropos the late Tory grandee William Whitelaw, that no-one would be Home Secretary if they could get a job refereeing sumo wrestling.
|
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.
|
Following the CPS dropping charges against Damian Green MP, those civil servants (and ministers?) who lied to the police about the national security implications of the information leaked should be charged with wasting police time.
Had they not done so there would have been no question of a crime and the police would not have investigated. Further, the Home Secretary was aware and failed to stop the investigation.
“those civil servants ..”
What is the betting it wasn’t actually ‘civil servants’ rather one or other of the SPADs that currently infest Westminster?
McBride?
Your postscript makes for a perfectly good QotD in and of itself.
Her record on free speech is dismal too. The Geert Wilders case and her ban on the odious Fred Phelps show a lack of understanding of the importance of the principle of free speech and a hopeless lack of judgement about the likely consequences of said bans.
Weak measures such as charges of wasting police time will not destroy the hubris that corrupts the entire public sector. These people knew that Green had broken no law.
Only the sacking of a few dozen senior people with loss of all pension rights will inflict the necessary humiliation.
As for our parliament which accepted all this with nary a ruffled feather, what else is to be expected of these third raters?
Dull she may appear, and sleazy, and corrupt, and incapable; but the fact remains that the woman did go to Oxford and therefore must possess a level of intelligence superior to at least 85% of the population. Which begs the question: why does she act “average”? What purpose does it serve? She, and Yvette Cooper (who affects a Mockney accent in order to be ‘down’ with the voters) and Hazel Blears all seem to have made a study of how to appear a non-entity. And perhaps she is spectacularly lacking in imagination. But it is people like she that I fear the most, far more than the posturing, absurdly-Cromwellian Brown: they seem to possess no moral compass, nothing beyond their own individual sense of rectitude, and will ‘follow orders’ without compunction or indeed compassion.
Going to Oxford is not an absolute guarantee of intelligence.
Not an absolute indicator, but a pretty sure-fire indictor nonetheless. (I am acting on the presumption that Oxford, like Cambridge, only accepts students it deems able enough to get a good 2.i – and this in the pre-NuLab dumbing-down days.) And she read PPE which is certainly not a ‘soft’ subject, if soft subjects could be said to exist at Oxbridge.
I think Portillo made a good stab at it in his column today:
The home secretary still thinks nothing untoward occurred. Almost every day some new revelation makes her look incompetent or unprincipled or both. It is beyond human understanding how she can bear to go on. If she were a pet, she would be taken to the vet for a painless end. If she were a boxer, the fight would be stopped before she took more punishment. If she were lying between the trenches, some kind soul would deliver the coup de grâce.
The abysmal policy performance of every holder of the office I can recall leads me to suspect the Home Office not the Home Secretary is the more serious problem.
Mara,
PPE is quite flexible, I think. It can be super-rigorous economics and philosophy, but if you do the bits that would be in a sociology and politics degree at another university, then not quite so.
Smith is my exact contemporary and I saw a lot of similar sloggers get into Oxbridge. (A-levels counted for a lot more in those days, and pretty much anyone could get in with 3 As if they could claim that was all their school prepared them for.)
A schoolfriend of mine attended the same college and I enquired about her when she first became Home Secretary: “She was a fairly inoffensive JCR/political hack… you know… terribly earnest. I think she may have been president of the JCR at some point.”
Most of the adjectives I’ve seen employed regarding Ms. Smith aren’t suitable for a family newspaper.