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Best headline of the day Mary Riddell, who seems, as it was once said of Oxford University in the 19th Century, to be the home of lost causes, has a column with this glorious headline in the Daily Telegraph (WTF?) today:
“Brown is a better hope for Labour than his rivals”.
In other words, all the other remaining senior figures in the party are even worse, even madder, more delusional, more statist, tax-grabbing, unpleasant, devious and venal than this guy.
That’s the end of that lot, then.
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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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It’s worse than a wtf? La Riddell’s contributions to the DT were met with a storm of abuse when first she started posting. Now, all comments suggesting that she is a brainless bubblehead without a story until she’s briefed by the Cabinet office are deleted. She obviously does her own moderation, as her articles are posted the previous day and overnight comments are not recorded. Typical socialist control freakery in a right-wing paper, which is why the DT has been heammoraging readers.
Brown has no rivals. He isn’t the least worst option he is the only option.
None in the Party are prepared to put their head above the parapet. They are chickens who cannot bring themselves to put their party or the nation first for once. Quite why this is I don’t know. Craven to the party machine? Too make skeletons in too many closets?
Quite why the Barclay twins employ left wing writers like Mary Riddell, who are clearly hated by the readership, is a great mystery. I find it hard to see the logic of buying a conservative newspaper and then trying to turn it into a Guardian clone, but perhaps if I were stroking a white cat on my island fortress it would all make sense.
Is anyone reading this with a print copy of the Telegraph to hand? Could you give us a quick count of the number of advertisements placed by thE government or its agents? I suspect the usual advertisers (motor manufacturers, pharmaceutical and cosmetic companies) are cutting budgets and the dead tree press is hurting. A few government ads, placed at full price, must be a welcome source of income. Of course, if you don’t toe the party line we’ll conduct a survey and discover that Telegraph readers already know about what we’re advertising. so we’ll withdraw the ads.
I am increasingly inclined to the view that a Tory win at the next election will be more disastrous, in the long term, than a Labour one. Just as it was in 1979.
By looking at the comment thread beneath the recent article on Cif by Hazel Blears you can get some idea of how utterly screwed Nulab actually are. I always thought that they would be able to rely on a hard core of supporters that would not dream of voting for anyone but Labour, but they appear to have alienated even their most loyal supporters, even former party activists. I can’t believe that anyone could post on Cif without going back to read the comments, so surely they must understand how loathed and despised they are by the entire British public. The next election may not improve anything but I shall certainly enjoy watching Nulab crash and burn.
Ian B. Your attempt to blame Thatcher for our current situation is utterly risible.
Chris H, rather than answer you myself I’ll let Sean Gabb of the Libertarian Alliance say it more eloquently than I would.
Why would be the end of that lot? I think they bought enough People to sabotage any Government that will come. It would be needed an hardcore free markteer than Thatcher would ever have been to change anything. My listmus test is State Media. If a Government can’t take out a State TV will not have strenght to challenge anything that deserves to be challenged. So next eventual Cameron Gov. will be a nullity to talk about even under the dubious assumption that he wanted to change anything.
So the whole edifice of Western Social Democracy will fizzle i hope like USSR in 10-20 years.
I am a reformer (in the old sense) by nature – I am a defender of a dying light, who wants to restore things (remove the corruptions that have emerged) and defend things. I do not want to take the (to me) mad risk of everything collapsing and trying to rebuild from rubble.
However, I see no sign that either Britain or the United State are open to reform (in the true “reactionary” sense) and collapse seems inevitable.
Things may change – for example Canada avoided bankruptcy in the 1990’s by stern action on government spending. And what seemed like hopelessly statist Puerto Rico now has a reformist government trying to roll back the state and avoid corruption.
But I do not feel it in the air or taste it in the water here, so those that can are going to have to try and rebuild from the rubble after an economic (although hopefully not a social) collapse.
It is unfortunate.
Is Sean Gabb’s indictment of Thatcher anything close to accurate? I’m legitimately curious. From the vantage point of the US we (I, anyway) basically thought of her as your version of Ronald Reagan: somewhat watered down, to be sure, but basically moving the country in the right direction. Gabb paints her as essentially the British conterpart of George W. Bush (a generation earlier). Any thoughts (from someone other than Ian B; I know how he feels!)?
As an aside, that’s the first use of “risible” I’ve seen here in several weeks. That’s a relief; I was beginning to think we’d all forgotten the word. A reference to Godwin’s Law is long overdue, too.
ChrisH, seconded. The idea that Maggie is responsible for our current state of affairs is just silly. There is nothing inevitable about the database state, or the decision by NuLab to slowly fuck over the UK economy. About the only serious charge that sticks – as made by the Sean Gabb article that IanB links to – is that some of the erosion of Common Law civil liberties started under Maggie; also, she did not do enough to roll back the state. But given how hard that task is, I think Mrs T. did quite a lot. And she did a great deal in defiance of what was still, remember, a fairly statist and cowardly Tory party. Look what happened over the EU.
I have actually heard Sean Gabb make the argument that by her economic reforms, Maggie somehow made it easier for the state to oppress us. She cannot win: had she left the nationalised industries alone, left taxes so high, the UK would have been utterly bankrupt. How is that good for liberty?
I have little sympathy for such attitudes; it is like saying that we need even more terrible statism and horrors from which we can eventually construct a liberal utopia. Yeah, in about 100 years if we are really lucky.
The refusal of some people to critically analyse the Thatcher government from a civil and general liberties perspective, and to apologetically focus on her limited economic reforms never ceases to amaze me. The woman was not a liberal. She was an authoritarian with no restraint and no respect for individual liberty, other than in a narrowly defined economic sphere. She may have thought you have the right to own a house, but cared little for the right to walk in the street unmolested by the state.
IanB, you are projecting. I am not “apologising” for Mrs T – assuming your last remark was directed at me – since as I noted, her record on things such as social freedoms was hardly very good. It was not all that terrible, either, given what else was credibly on offer.
And remember, it is not possible to put liberties into separate compartments. Take the abolition of exchange controls. That is usually presented as an economic measure – it was – but it also freed Britons to take their money abroad. That’s a social freedom, too. See what I mean?
She also scrapped things like Sunday trading laws, much to the annoyance of traditionalist Christians but to the convenience of the rest of us. I can remember that as a young libbo at the time I was annoyed that the Tories were not decriminalising drugs and so forth, but she was not remotely as bad as what we have now. Not remotely.
One of maggie’s main failings was not to do enough to crush what Sean Gabb has called the Enemy Class: the nexus of folk who earn their living via the Welfare State, the state education system, the BBC, quangos, etc. No argument from me there.
I think as libertarians we are always going to be disappointed if a leader falls short of perfection. I am quite able to take what advances come my way. But to repeat: Mrs Thatcher is hardly responsible for the current fuck-up. One might as well blame it on William Pitt.
The Elder or the Younger?
Saying she fell short of perfection is something of an understatement. She never came across as a liberal because she wasn’t a liberal. She was pro-business, but as Gabb said inaugurated a corporatist state. She was happy to use the police as a military force to crush her enemies, and the precedents set then have simply been intensified by NuLab. Perhaps more historically significant than the miner’s strike- in which, let us be clear here, the police were nothing but Maggie’s Army- was the Battle Of The Beanfield. Why? It was a quango (English Heritage) using Maggie’s Army to brutalise that great enemy of the state, er, some hippies trying to have a festival. If anything set in stone the idea that that which is owned by “the public” is owned by the Ruling Class, and that they may use any level of force to protect “their propety”, that did. (That, and it exemplified the tactic of a complicit media generating a panic to justify government excess).
That’s only one thing. It might seem like a small thing. But it’s those sea changes that have pushed us to where we are. We’d already slid a long way down the rabbit hole before Tony arrived, and Gabb’s posting illustrates how. New Labour was a continuation, not a reversal.
I think maybe our perspectives differ because I’ve always been more interested in civil than economic liberties. I understand the importance of economic liberties and do not understate them, but unless they are combined with social and civil liberty, you’re aren’t heading in a liberal/libertarian direction. The Thatcher regime was a consistent assault on civil and social liberty. You can’t blame New Labour uniquely for moving to censor the internet when the Thatcher government’s stance on censorship was always to tighten it (e.g. the infamous Bright Bill). You can’t blame New Labour exclusively for random “terrorism” searches when it was Thatcher responsible for stop-and-search. Saying that it was disappointing that the Tories didn’t relax the drugs laws is like saying it’s disappointing that Brown hasn’t privatised the NHS. These things were not in the agenda. It was the Tories who made ravers the Enemies Of The State. Ask Guido.
It’s good that these days i can get a telephone in a few days instead of a year from the GPO. Whether that was worth trading all those civil liberties for- whether it was worth converting the police from a group who harrass black people to a group who harrass everybody- I don’t know.
Anyway, Gabb lists a great many evils of Thatcherism. They can’t all be answered with a stirring cry of “exchange controls!”
Thatcher was not a libertarian we all seem to broadly agree, I don’t recall claiming that she was. What I suggested was absurd was that her reign somehow put in place some invisible tramlines that inevitably led us to our current mess which is what IanB seemed to be suggesting. Please forgive me Ian if I have read this wrong.
Sorry IanB but this is way over the top, even though it contains some aspects with which I agree. But really, to just dismiss the economic gains and liberalisations as you do seems, well, a bit rum. These deregulations had social, as well as economic, effects.
Are you saying that a government that deregulated parts of the economy, slashed tax rates, privatised bits of the UK economy, sold council homes, removed the thug-encouraging privileges of trade unions, etc, fostered a form of soft fascism? The current issues we now rail on about at this blog were barely a blink in the eye back then. As I said, a lot of the trouble stems from Thatcher’s serious failure to destroy the Enemy Class and its works.
Oh and by the way, I think you will find that the illiberal nature of say, the modern police goes back way before Mrs T. to things such as the reaction to the IRA in the 70s, for instance. It is an absurdity to claim that the roots of the current malaise happened in the Thatcher period unless one blanks out the various problems before hand or takes a sort of historical inevitability approach. There was and is nothing inevitable about ID cards, the wholesale erosion of the Common Law, etc.
Signed the Single European Act, and Major the Maastricht Treaty, which massively increased regulation of the economy.
To a small extent. I will never forget how much I cheered when I got a pound back in income tax, and my weekly beer and fag budget went up by three, because I am a sinner.
Corporatised. Gabb addresses this.
I’m not claiming they didn’t have one or two good policies.
Legislated the internal workings of them, as they did with business, cementing the corporatist model. Pro-business legislation is not the same as economic liberalism.
Yes.
If you study any historical progression, you’ll find less of it earlier on. If things continue as they are, 10 years from now Blair’s regime will seem relatively mild.
Laird Mrs Thatcher is a complex case.
Ian B. “Mrs Thatcher had no regard for individual liberty”.
You are wrong, it is much complicated and mixed than that.
“Then refute me with specific evidence and argument”.
You would be within your rights to ask for such – but I am within my rights to refuse to use my time in such a way.
Such as one sided account as yours (or rather Dr Gabb’s) irritates me – to a rather extreme point.
It is like reading history written by Hans H.H.
History as what should have happened (according to various a priori assumptions about what rule by a monarchy will be like and what a democracy will be like) rather than history with any real interest to what actually did happen in various different times and places.
I hate to have to say it, but I will welcome the next Conservative government, because, given the crisis that it will inherit, it will be forced by dire necessity to make fiscal and economic reforms. One has to assume that at least some of its leading members will be sufficiently economically literate for the task.
I will welcome Cameron’s government, even though I view him as an unprincipled and idea-free member of the Enemy Class. Why?
Well, I have family and friends (and they have family) and we can’t all escape the UK, and I’d much rather not have us all try to live through a total economic collapse. (Apologies for all the ands in that sentence.)
Furthermore, whilst progressives are hostile to anything and everything that went before, Conservative politicians are for the most part merely indifferent.
Better, of course, if Brown were removed by his own party and the present government were forced by circumstances to start making reforms before the general election. At least then they could start sharing the blame, which is rightfully theirs.
Where the next government should go, but won’t is to remove the likelihood of any future Labour government by a Gabbite* attack on the Enemy Class and the public sector and also by restricting the electoral franchise.
Broadly, Labour has created a massive client group for themselves of welfare recipients and public (and third sector) employees. Remove the bulk of them from the electoral roll and adjust constituency boundaries accordingly. (I am surprised that I haven’t read other people arguing for restricting the franchise, as it seems to me to be the only way to stop the one way ratchet towards an ever bigger state.)
As it is, the Conservative party is not nearly ruthless enough for the task. All we might get under Blue Labour is a breather before fresh insanity from New/Old/Whatever they call themselves next time Labour.
* I trust most readers of Samizdata will know that Gabbite refers to Dr Sean Gabb of the Libertarian Alliance.
And not terribly convincingly by Mr Gabb, I would say. The fact is that yes, some parts of the privatised industries continued to have to put up with some regulatory oversight of their business – such as the water and electricity industries – but some industries, such as Rolls Royce, BAE, steel, etc, were run as entirely private sector businesses.
And tax rates were slashed. You can try to dismiss the reduction in income tax from a disgusting 83 per cent to a rather more tolerable 40 per cent as being of no account to you because the cost of beer and fags went up, but that does not discount the fact that a section of the population – entrepreneurs – who had been more or less hounded out of this country, no longer were.
Of course Maggie conceded too much on the EU, etc; she eventually was pushed out by her Europhile Tory colleagues on that account.
Even if maggie were a consistent libertarian – and hardly any major politician is – I find the stance that some ultras take on her role to be a bit childish. I have conceded enough ground in accepting that some of the problems we now face were pushed in the 80s, but I also find it bizarre to pinpoint the main origins of our woes in the events since 1979, rather than for decades before. The issues we face have been a long time in the making.
As for Sean, I suspect his attitude towards the Tories resembles that of a spurned lover. Parts of the libertarian movement fondly imagined they would get what they wanted from a political party in a historically muddle-headed country like the UK, and were surprised when that did not happen. It is sad, but there it is.
As a side-observation about the policing of the miners’ strike, I’d be intrigued to know how a libertarian could or would defend the violent tactics employed by Scargill’s men in defence of their tax-subsidised existence.
Not the point. If we claim that liberty works, we can’t then support state thuggery when it’s against people we don’t like. If we say “except against bad people” there will always be some bad people whose rights we are tolerating being suspended. The policing methods used by Thatcher, e.g. control of peoples movement, are the direct forebear of the ominpresent policing we now enjoy.
And the general point that Gabb is making is that New Labour is just a coninuation in general of the type of government she inaugurated. She did not represent a reversal. She was a pro-business and family values statist, not a liberal. The fact that her pro-businessism sometimes produced results a liberal would want, such as some tax cuts, does not make them the same thing, just as a marxist opposing the Iraq war is not the same as a libertarian non-interventionist.
Oh come on Ian. Note that I talked about the “thuggery” of unions demanding, and using force, to prevent their state-funded (via tax) business from being closed by the representatives of said taxpayers, ie, the-then Tory government. It had nothing to do with whether I or anyone else liked, or disliked, coalminers. That is besides the point.
Again, up to a point. Some of that policing, remember, was connected to things such as attempts, however inept, to control the Brixton riots, or the massive levels of football violence of the 1980s (now much reduced, thank god). Some of the policing methods were over the top, quite true.
Somehow, Ian, you don’t strike me as a defender of football hooligans.
Come on Johnathan. Margaret Thatcher sought a confrontation with the miners, and used all the resources of the state to win it. You know obviously I do not approve of nationalised industries- but that was the state of play at the time. Unions have a right to “demand” whatever they wish. Whether picketing is force is an interesting question, since a free society will have entirely free unions, remember. Unless this would be a libertarianism that bans the free association of workers.
The policing methods included police control of citizens’ movements- the coalfields were made virtually a police state (yes, in the same way as we now complain that Nu Lab do to the rest of us). The police were empowered to stop anybody they thought might be a miner who might be going to a picket (or whatever) because there might be trouble, and if you can’t see how intrinsically opposed to the concept of rule of law, citizen’s rights as individuals, due process and anything else intrinsic to western liberalism, I would ask you to think again. I don’t believe any libertarian should ever support the idea that somebody can be banned from entering yorkshire because a policeman thinks they look like a coal miner. This principle of “preemptive policing” is what we suffer under today. It is now routine.
Aother example I referred to above was the state’s assault on hippies, which was something (as an ageing Hawkwind fan) I was rather pesonally interested in at the time, though I wasn’t personally there. The deployment of massive police force, initiating assault against citizens (especially “The Battle Of The Beanfield”) and destroying their property, on behalf of the spurious property rights of a quango- English Heritage- was another precedent for uncontrolled policing power. The complicity of a compliant press, demonising the victims, and who went so far as to smear Lord Cardigan after he refused to let the police onto his land to continue the thuggery, and then dared to testify against them in court, is another black mark. The policing in the 80s became the ubiquitous policing we suffer today. It was not invented in 1997. New Labour took what was already happening, and pushed harder with it.
The point I’m making here is that Thatcherism was not a liberal time, and Thatcher was not a liberal, some pro-business reforms and anti-marxism notwithstanding. It was a good time for many people who fitted with Thatcher’s worldview of heroic paternalist capitalism, but not for the people on the fringes. And it is always the people on the fringes, the outsiders, who matter, because the state will always turn on them first to set a precedent. I think Mencken said something similar, about liberals always having to defend scoundrels. If you support the state controlling the movement of union members, or hippies, or football supporters well, you will be next. As indeed now we all are, very much, next.
Thatcherite authoritarianism and police statism was not an aberration by an otherwise liberal leader. They were part of her “regime”. New Labour are a continuation on the civil and social liberties front (if not economically), not a reversal.
She was a good general; given how the miners had fucked the Heath administration and how unions arguably did the same to the UK economy during much of the post-war period, and used the intimidatory structures of the closed shop to do so, my sympathies do not lie with the unions.
The problem I suspect is that I share a good deal of your own views, Ian, but I just don’t buy this idea, which Sean Gabb eloquently voices, that much of our current troubles originated in the Thatcher period. It goes back much, much longer.
I also find the designation “heroic paternalist capitalism” to be off-target. Paternalist? I thought Maggie was pretty much a fan of the self-made type and disliked the paternalist tradition in UK culture. She was certainly attacked for her gospel of rugged individualism at the time, as I remember.
Anyway, I am done with this thread.
Thatcher screwed the taxpayer by selling off public utilities to her corporate friends for insultingly cheap prices.
The taxpayer had to foot the bill while the cronies creamed off all the profits. Disgusting.
Thatcher and Reagan both supported crony capitalism.
The trend of privatising profit and socialising risk was pioneered by Thatcher and Reagan.
If we think of picketing as using persuasion alone to stop people crossing the picket line then no Libertarian can be opposed to it. However, we all know that the pickets used intimidation both at the work entrance and
notoriously by dropping a concrete block onto strike breaking miners. Since the Libertarian credo is no force is permissible except to protect others from the use of force there is ipso facto a justification for the minimal state to intervene to protect the intimidated miners who wanted to work.
I’m more sympathetic to the idea of no interference in the business of the union. Quite clearly the union had been captured by a minority of Marxist entryists. However the union itself split over the matter, which is the correct way to resolve such problems.