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Samizdata quote of the day – How Labour wants to make another people’s revolt impossible Starmer, we are told over and over again, is just ‘a normal bloke’ who likes to play football and wants Britain to be well run. He’s just a bland technocrat who rejects divisive ideological narratives in favour of sound government.
But, in truth, Keir Starmer and the people around him do have a radical vision of politics and our democracy. It’s a vision of a country where people who think and act like them are in power forever and where the populist revolts against the new elite which erupted over the last decade, through UKIP, Brexit, the Brexit Party, and then the reassertion of popular sovereignty in 2019, are made impossible.
Labour want to do this by taking political power away from elected governments and giving much more of it to an assortment of unelected civil servants, regional assemblies and spurious quangos.
– Matt Goodwin
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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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The UK bureaucracy is already so powerful it controls all the politicians and is able to torment it’s critics at it’s leisure. Enter Gorgeous George. (boo! hiss!) Try any of that debanking crap on him and face the Muslim army. When asked about Sunak’s steps-of-number-10 speech his reply was basically “who cares? Nobody likes him anyway.” I’m expecting him to add to the gaiety of the nation.
Given that the government is not your friend, when they warn you of imminent danger posed by Galloway, it’s reasonable to ask “for you or for us?”
Roue le Jour has a point about the growth of the power of the bureaucracy over a long period of time. Although Mr Galloway is worse (not less Collectivist – more Collectivist, sadly Neil Oliver does not seem to grasp this)
However, Labour will complete the process of all power to the Progressive bureaucracy – and will complete the war on Freedom of Speech, making “right wing” dissent unlawful.
So those who think “well this election will see the victory of Labour – but the election after that will see the victory of Reform!” are sadly mistaken.
As dissent will be illegal (“racist, sexist, transphobic, Islamophobic…..” for advocating lower government spending or whatever) there will be no Reform (or other “right wing”) election victories – this side of total economic and societal collapse. Totalitarianism leads, in the end, to collapse – but a lot of good people die in the collapse.
The courts will also complete their transition to instruments of “Progressive” tyranny.
They will be like the New York and Washington D.C. courts – where no conservative (not “just” President Trump – no one considered “reactionary”) can get a fair trial in a Civil or Criminal case.
This process is already happening right now under the supposed ‘Conservatives’ so who cares? Let Labour do their worst, we are heading there anyway, but this time without the supposed ‘opposition’ aiding and abetting them. As it literally doesn’t matter if the Blue or Red Blairites are in power, let them push thing to the point they explode & lets see who in the long run ends up on the edge of England’s sword. I’m polishing my lobster-tail helmet in anticipation of us finding out what the trigger for the 1642 moment is over the next 5-10 years.
@Perry de Havilland (Wiltshire)
I’m polishing my lobster-tail helmet in anticipation of us finding out what the trigger for the 1642 moment is over the next 5-10 years.
One of the few things JFK said that I thought was wise (and I think he nicked it too) was: “those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable”. What I know of the British civil service I learned from Humphrey Appleby, but that was more a benign inaction rather than a radical action. Here in the land of the free and home of the brave the civil service has become the dominant power in government. The theory is that the President, as head of the executive, controls and they act on his behalf, however, union rules make it impossible to fire bureaucrats that don’t do what he says. If you can’t fire someone, you are not their boss. In a sense I feel like the actual political apparatus is more theater to disguise what the real government is doing.
Side note, regarding JFK. “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask rather what you can do for your country” is a epithet that entirely misses the whole point of government. And “We choose to do these things not because they are easy but because they are hard” goes even further, being an epithet that entirely misses the point of doing things at all.
Oh, and Perry, as you polish your helmet[*] you might remember what happened last time. You replaced a rather loathsome king with a brutal dictator (you know, who arrested people for celebrating Christmas and stuff.) Let’s not have a revolution that has the people begging for the old tyrants to be restored. And what then? First the dutch and then we give the whole country over to a bunch of incompetent Germans.
French revolutions are far more common than American ones.
[*] No pun intended.
Indeed. But when you look at it from afar, the aftermath of the nasty Commonwealth period did lead to something better. I did not say I am gleefully looking forward to things blowing up, I just happen to think they will, and actually need to, and we are well past the point of no return. I am under no illusions it will be pretty or necessarily lead to sunlit uplands.
BTW I have an original painting, artist unknown, of Thomas Fairfax as a younger man circa 1635 or thereabout on my wall. He is wearing armour.
Sounds like Blairism all over (and in fairness, although each of the post 2010 Tory PMs have had their differences, each one of them have largely pursued variations of Blairism. Even with Brexit they seem to be looking how best to use it to pursue Blairism, as shown by immigration policies that make the levels under Blair seem restrained).
In the Blair years it was easy for him to get away with the ‘normal guy’ persona concealing the radical nature of what his government were pursuing. There was relative prosperity and even if you disagreed with his foreign policy adventurism, it only occasionally impinged heavily on the British public. There was rage in certain quarters (the race riots around 2001, Countryside Alliance protests, Iraq war protests etc) but it was relatively contained and ineffectual. At least until the banks started to come under serious difficulties not long after Blair stood down, it was very easy to be apolitical and ignore politics in Britain (Election turnouts plunged under Blair).
Keir Starmer will not inherit a relatively strong economy and largely quiescient culture. Liberalism has got more visibly ‘nasty’ in the intervening years, perhaps illustrated by the open contempt contemporary liberals like Biden, Macron,and Tusk have for large sections of the populace in their countries,and their increasingly obvious weaponisation of the justice systems. Blair had this contempt but was better at hiding it back then. I do wonder how long a PM Starmer would be able to get away with the ‘normal bloke’ moderate act in a Britain with a ruined economy, polarised culture, and bad international context,and himself lacking any real charisma. It seems likely we’ll get Blairism without a human face.
Not a normal bloke, more of a broken robot.
Inner workings of British politics aside, I’d like to point out that the general predictions of “They’ll never allow another vote…” are usually wrong.
Once a given regime discredits itself enough, which all totalitarian and totalitarian-adjacent ones manage by the end, you’ve got everyone sitting around and going “Well, we’ve shot Ceaucescu, now what…?”
The real problem is how you prevent these idiots from ever getting in charge, and thus putting a punctuation point to the whole “Yeah, we’re living through an interregnum between periods of common sense…”
Romania, for example? Had a bit of something like a holiday from sense in between WWII and the day they shot Ceaucescu. He thought he had an eternal iron grip on things, but… Not so much, apparently.
This, too, shall pass. The trick is making sure you survive and prosper while everyone else is learning the hard way what you saw up front… Sorta the way that the Clinton/Obama/Biden progressives are steadily discrediting themselves with the vast middle of the US population.
Fraser Orr and all, I’ve always wondered if a President can re-assign bureaucrats to the Federal building in Nome, Alaska!? No building? No problem…the Military will set up temporary housing and really fast wifi while the new building is erected.
No need to have real jobs being done there…same as in DC! And no need to have 100,000 seats; besides it would take 1,000,000 to get rid of the useless bureaucrats. The threat of it might be enough, so maybe 10,000 seats with each one occupied for 12 months to make room for the next useful idiot. Or, they can resign and get a nice severance which again, painful as it would be to me to see those folks getting paid on the way out…it would be a bargain.
If the building cost $1B to build, also a bargain.
Legal? Workable? Thoughts?
Put Sarah Palin in charge of it all! [“Hey, I can see Russia from the top floor!”]
@GregWA
Fraser Orr and all, I’ve always wondered if a President can re-assign bureaucrats to the Federal building in Nome,
Interestingly there is a Yes Prime Minster Episode that deals with pretty much exactly this idea. Watch it. It is pretty funny. But its humour comes from it being a bit too close to the truth.
Most likely what you suggest can’t be done within union contracts. And even if it were possible, the civil service would start with a ten year interdepartmental feasibility study, and then a five year public comment period and so on. And these procedures are probably in place in law so can’t be circumvented. Then it would get bunged up in congress appropriations, and rules committees and drown in red tape. So it would never get done. As Appleby once said, “Permeance is power, rotation is castration”. Politicians don’t last long enough to make a difference whereas the civil service is there for the long haul.
So, I think it is probably impossible (unless you get Vivek Ramaswamy elected — he seemed to have a feasible plan.) And of course that is dealing with benign government agencies. Once you get into the CIA or FBI, some of the more dangerous agencies, they are untouchable because they know all your dirty little secrets. And, if you don’t have any dirty little secrets, they can set you up so that it looks like you do.
GregWA: Illegal. Federal statutory Civil Service protections hold that an exec cannot take “adverse action” against CS workers. A judge gets to define “adverse action” in each instance.
You can fire a worker for misconduct, after lots of documentation and effort. You can de-fund programs and shut things down.
But you cannot take action that arguably harms the property-interest that CS workers are granted in their employment for political purposes. (Yes, if you are hired for a Civil Service position in the US fed gov, you OWN that spot. Sort of.)
What you do has to pass the smell test, and moving the entire office to Alaska wouldn’t do so.
(If you could show that there was a valid purpose – say, you want to move farm regulators to farm country – and were prepared for a huge court fight, you might be able to do it.)
And the court referred to by bobby b would be …. in DC.
However, you could certainly encourage some of them to resign by defunding. If they don’t get paid, a few of them might seek alternative employment. But I believe there’s a “permanent appropriation” of infinite amount whereby the government is empowered and required to pay up anything ordered by a court. So you’d have to start by nixing that bottomless pit of court ordered funding.
Another scheme would be to tax income from jobs with statutory protection from at-will firing at twice the rate of other income.
@Lee it is certainly possible to defund entire departments and lay off people that way (this was the Vivek plan), though it isn’t as simple as you might imagine. These people are not stupid, they have spent the past one hundred years building up layers and layers of protection to feather their own nest.
Government is a devil’s bargain between the civil service and politicians. They help each other out to ensure that their core goals — the growth in power and budget of the civil service and the re-election of the politician are met. And let’s be clear, measuring the growth of civil service and the re-election rate of politicians, one has to conclude they are REALLY good at their jobs. (Which is not at all about helping the actual citizens of course. Perish the thought.)
How exactly are you going to get this discriminatory tax system passed? It is the civil service who do a lot of the drafting of the laws, and certainly have a lot to do with marshalling them through congress. Congress can barely pass a law to rename a post office these days. Touchpoint — watch some Yes Minister to get a flavour of how the “humble servants” of the civil service in fact control pretty much the whole government.
Personally, I think government jobs should not be allowed to unionize, from the cops and firefighters all the way up to the top civil servants. They need to serve at the pleasure of their boss, the people, and through their representative, the executive, either President, Governor, Mayor or head of some executive department. Being able to fire someone as the ultimate sanction is the thing that makes the boss the boss. That is the way it is supposed to work. But of course that won’t ever happen.
Turkeys, as the saying goes, don’t vote for Thanksgiving (or Christmas for you Brits.)
Perry – yes things are bad, but that does not mean that they can not be made worse.
Your own post shows that Labour wishes to make dissent impossible – and without widespread dissent a “reactionary” election victory is not possible.
That is the logic of your own post.
Yes – the totalitarian system that Labour intends to introduce will not last for ever – eventually Economic Law means that it will collapse. But societal collapse is very unpleasant – and many people will not survive it.
As for the present government, yesterday the Prime Minister said that the thing he is proudest of in his life is the vast amount of money he spent on the “Furlough” scheme, and the Chancellor said that the main thing that made him “proud to be British” was the “NHS” – i.e. the 1940s British copy of the Soviet health care system set up 20 years before, in the 1920s.
Russians have many faults, very terrible faults, but I have never heard a Russian (politician or ordinary Russian) saying that what he-or-she was proud of was paying many millions of people vast sums of money NOT to work (with reference to some terrible disease – and Russia also had Covid), and I have never heard a Russian saying that the thing that made them proud to be Russian was government hospitals. Just in case anyone does not know – British government policy during Covid did not “save lives”, quite the contrary, and the Russian government lockdowns and “vaccine” injections (yes they to had both of these policies) did not “save lives” either.
I can only assume that the Prime Minister and the Chancellor said what they said, because they think most British people agree with such sentiments. If that is true, if most British people do think like this, I do not know what to say.
Just playing devil’s advocate, but, isn’t that how we get a Chicago? I mean, that’s exactly how we GOT the Chicago Machine for decades. Everything was political, everybody lost their jobs with every new admin or when someone higher had a brother who needed your job, you got in by paying “contributions” and stayed in with regular payments but the bosses made sure salaries were high so the bribes would always be paid . . . Arguably, it was all pretty bad for the City.
Then do a Javier Milei. Simply abolish and defund the Executive agencies, using the funds to end the deficit and anything left over to reduce taxes.
FBI? Gone. IRS? Cancelled. EPA? Deleted.
That affects legislation? Repeal it as no longer active.
Same in the UK…cut, cut, cut.
So, to sum up: it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
All is not lost, in the USA at least. The USSC (Supreme Court) heard arguments in January on a case that could make a huge difference in how much power unelected ‘crats can have in our system. Enough Justices asked enough skeptical questions about administrative deference rules to make one think they could possibly limit it in this case ruling when it comes out.
(Excellent explanatory article – https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/01/supreme-court-to-hear-major-case-on-power-of-federal-agencies/ )
((Sorry, how this analogizes to the UK system is out of my pay grade.))
How do you get the extra tax passed? Surely employment protections are a benefit-in-kind, just as my employer-provided bus pass was, so is additional non-monetary income, so tax it thusly.
How about this from my kind of POTUS: “From now on, every Civil Servant in every agency will rotate jobs once every 3 months. This will give the workers a much broader understanding of and capability to run said agency. It will give the agency a much more broadly trained workforce.”
Effect: nothing will get done, absolutely nothing, because these dolts can barely do the jobs they have after years of on-the-job training. So, the agency is non-performing as opposed to its former “low-performing” state. Shut it down.
POTUS, 6 months after the above change: “In spite of our best efforts to improve training and efficiencies, this agency no longer performs its function, at all. We are therefore closing it down, re-assigning staff to similar positions in other agencies”.
Where they will rotate jobs once a month!
@bobby b
Just playing devil’s advocate, but, isn’t that how we get a Chicago?
Right, that’s the voters fault though — they can vote for someone else[*]. If you consider what you are saying (or more precisely what your devil’s advocacy is saying) — the permanent bureaucracy should be unaccountable to voters because if it isn’t the voters will make a bad choice. That is, in many ways, the root cause of most of what is wrong in western democracies.
It reminds me of the poll tax issue that killed the Thatcher government. The idea of the poll tax was that local government budgets should be directly accountable to the people in their district by way of that budget being partly split up among the residents. This was to make local government accountable to the people. But it had exactly the opposite effect. Somehow the profiligacy of the local governments (resulting is hugely disparate poll tax rates) was blamed on Thatcher. So the attempt to expose local government incompetence, waste and overspending somehow redounded to the central government. Talk about shooting the messenger!
[*] Of course Chicago was also notorious for massive voter fraud, but that is kind of a separate issue. But the stupidity of Chicago voters should never be underestimated. The worst mayor in history, Lightfoot got booted for her incompetence and instead of voting in someone more moderate, someone more police friendly, they voted in someone even worse. Someone even more committed to the insane policies that had destroyed Lightfoot. This new guy (whose name I forget) apparently recently had to take several “mental health days” because he was so stressed about the utter failure of his policies. Needless to say, he didn’t actually CHANGE them, god forbid. And of course as he sat in the spa, relaxing from his stressful day, another bunch of children were shot to death on his watch. Welcome to Chicago!
Part of the Harrogate Agenda is true devolution. The only local level of historical legitimacy are counties. Mine being Hampshire gas nearly 2 million people. Far more than several nation states around the planet.
The per-person community charge was replaced with the per-household council tax, which also should put the pain of council spending on the residents that pay for it. Unfortunately, playing to politics, Central Government capped how much council tax councils could raise, so the tax payers are isolated from the spending they vote for, and again, the blame is levied on central government for closed libraries and pot-hole filled streets. But more justified in this case, as councils are actually BANNED by central government from inflicting their spending requirements on their residents.
Stuart Noyes and jgh – I am going to make a guess that the Council Tax in Hampshire (like elsewhere) is going to go up 4.9%.
This is because of Adult Social Care and Children’s Social Care – which are both “demand led services” by national law. There can be no “devolution” or “local democracy” when elected authorities have no control over most spending. “You have to provide XYZ regardless of what the local taxpayers want” goes all the way back to Disraeli and the Act of 1875 – but things are vastly more extreme now.
I will say that again – under national law these (Adult Social Care and Children’s Social Care) are demand-led-services. And they now (with the collapse of Civil Society – the family and both religious and secular associations) make up most of the budget.
The United States.
Two cities are, financially, vastly worse than all the other major cities.
Chicago and New York City.
And, yes, the voters are partly to blame for this – in NYC the voters voted for the socialist (and he was a socialist) Bill De Blasio, three times in a row.
And in Chicago the democratically elected Mayor (although it was a very close election – and given the history of voting in Chicago that raises questions) is part socialist and part lunatic – and I mean lunatic, as some of the things the Mayor of Chicago says are just wildly irrational.
At the State level several States are just not economically viable any more – and that includes two of the largest States, California and New York (and there are quite a few others).
And, the elephant in the room, the Federal Government has an official debt of more than 34 Trillion (“Trillion with a T”) Dollars, and Entitlement liabilities (old age pensions, health care, and so on) many Trillions of Dollars above that.
This is due to the PURPOSE “common defense and general welfare” of the specific spending powers listed in Article One, Section Eight of the Constitution of the United States, being “reinterpreted” as a “general welfare spending power”.
I can not stress too strongly that the Federal Government was NOT supposed to have a “general welfare spending power”, the “common defense and general welfare” is the PURPOSE of the specific spending powers then listed in Article One, Section Eight of the Constitution of the United States.
Once a “general welfare spending power” is accepted then bankruptcy and economic (and societal) breakdown will eventually occur.
Paul Marks “I can not stress too strongly that the Federal Government was NOT supposed to have a “general welfare spending power”, the “common defense and general welfare” is the PURPOSE of the specific spending powers then listed in Article One, Section Eight of the Constitution of the United States.
Once a “general welfare spending power” is accepted then bankruptcy and economic (and societal) breakdown will eventually occur.”
Unfortunately any recognition of that concept is anathema to any federal politician: USA, Canada, Australia, NZ or UK. Wise words uttered long ago, in a galaxy far far away:
““I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and duty of the general government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit. A prevalent tendency to disregard the limited mission of this power and duty should, I think, be steadfastly resisted, to the end that the lesson should be constantly enforced that, though the people support the government, the government should not support the people.” President Grover Cleveland vetoing the 1887 Texas Seed Bill.
A strongly originalist view of the Constitution, but then again, he was a pale, stale dead white male….