“Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he brought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service….The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: nearly £200 million in 1913-14, or rather less than 8 per cent of the national income.”
– A.J.P. Taylor, English History 1914-1945, page 1. Quoted by Alvin Rabushka in “From Adam Smith to The Wealth of America, page 80. The latter is a particularly good book, written very much from the “supply-side” school of economics with a strong account of developments in UK 19th century politics, Hong Kong, and the Reagan presidency.
Yeah, back in the good old days the rich were much freer from the burden of the poor.
Nice piece of snark, but inaccurate. The rich were not “much freer”, you are presumably overlooking the much larger amount of charitable activity that the rich felt obliged to engage in when there was no Welfare State. And people tend to forget the role that Friendly Societies, unions, etc, played in providing a significant amount of health and pension coverage.
The idea that without state-raised welfare, the poor will be left to rot is of course, one of the underlying assumptions of those who oppose the free market. It is largely a load of rubbish.
From the linked article:
‘For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police.”
Bull-Sh*t.
From the Registration of Aliens Act 1793 onwards, there were a whole series of UK laws which (in various ways and for various periods) required non-citizens to register their arrival, residence and departure with the UK authorities. Masters of arriving vessels were required to report a schedule of dis- and re-embarking foreigners, Customs officers were required to examine foreigners upon entry and issue them certificates allowing them to enter the UK – or not. The various provisions changed significantly at various times, but in general, the quoted statement is completely, utterly and gloriously Un-True.
Just for an example, I link .pdfs of the Registration of Aliens Act of 1836 and the modifying Aliens Act of 1905, in which the requirements for immigration inspection, registration, issuing of certificates, grounds for refusal of entry, expulsion and so forth, are all set out.
http://www.movinghere.org.uk/deliveryfiles/pro/Registration_of_Aliens_Act_1836/0/2.pdf
http://www.movinghere.org.uk/deliveryfiles/pro/Aliens_Act_1905/0/3.pdf
Why do people write things which are so self-evidently untrue, when they are so easily rebutted? The claim about how an Englishman could live ‘as he liked . . ‘ rings pretty hollow, when one considers the laws which denied the civil rights of Jews, Catholics, gays, women, and need I go on . . . . . ? Likewise, the claim about ‘not requiring . . . military service . . .’ – has the author never heard of the press-gang and the ‘Quod’?
This is a ridiculously rose-tinted view of ‘the good old days’.
llater,
llamas
Rabushka’s blog is here:
http://thoughtfulideas.blogspot.com/
Sounds a lot like the Shire; its government was basically no more than the Shirriffs and the mail carriers. Of course Tolkien grew up in that England.
The press-gang conscriptions into the Roya Navy were abolished after 1815. Britain did not have any form of military conscription for a century.
Britons did not need to carry a passport when going abroad until the early 20th century. That also happens to be fact.
You are right, however, that the UK was not quite the free-for-all in terms of immigration that some might think, but this was still a very open place, overall.
The overall thrust of the quote is pretty much an accuraate summary of Britain before the First World War.
Yeah…plusses, minusses on the no id thing though. There’s a glorious letter in the British Library from Lenin, before he was unleashed on the Russians, stating that one of the many advantages of being in the UK was that thanks to no2id he could live anonymously in the UK without being spotted by the authorities……The Kulaks must be loving that policy from their (many) graves.
As to buying goods from abroad on any terms, weren’t there something called the Corn Laws, which severly restricted inport of cereal grains from abroad? I remember that a special dispensation was needed to import maize from America to feed the starving Irish during the Potato Famine.
They were abolished in the 1840s. Britain had no tariffs of any meaningful sort in the second half of the 19th century.
And if they had known about him, what would the authorities have done? Lenin was breaking no British laws, and many British people hated the Tsar’s regime, not knowing how liberal it would seem compared to what followed.
I bullsh*t your ‘bullsh*t.’
Llamas asks, ‘Why do people write things which are so self-evidently untrue, when they are so easily rebutted?’
I don’t know, why do you refer to laws which everyone knows were either repealed or allowed to relapse within a year – like the Aliens Act of 1848 for example?
Of course, anyone with the slightest knowledge of British history or even Herbert Spencer would know this:
‘In a paper read to the Statistical Society in
May, 1873, Mr Janson, vice-president of the Law Society, stated
that from the Statute of Merton (20 Henry III) to the end of
1872, there had been passed 18,110 public Acts; of which he
estimated that four-fifths had been wholly or partially repealed.
He also stated that the number of public Acts repealed wholly or
in part, or amended, during the three years 1870-71-72 had been
3,532, of which 2,759 had been totally repealed.’ [The Man versus the State, Herbert Spencer 1884.]
And they would also know that as late as 1880 Eleanor Marx was still complaining that a socialist overthrow of the British state would be impossible because no one could find a British state to overthrow. [England in 1880.]
Of course, all this probably sounds like ‘a ridiculously rose-tinted view of ‘the good old days’ especially for someone who is happy to link to anti-English and frankly racist screeds of the Enemy Class.
But the interpretation of history requires both intelligence and wisdom and both, it seems, are in short supply nowadays.
A.J.P.Taylor was right.
Our loss is incalculable.
You can bleat all you like but those days aren’t coming back. Not in Britain or anywhere else. We have to hold out for the best settlement we can – collectivism and authoritarianism is here to stay.
Here’s to a liberal Britain. Here’s hoping that we’ll see pigs in flight.
Paul:
Nonsense. What we have today is atrocious, but it (and what the next fifty years may have in store) is still not a patch on what existed in the Dark Ages. As painful and slow as the process was, people once climbed out of that pesthole state, and they can do it again should we sink that low a second time.
Nothing in human affairs is forever, except death. Until then, people can and do change their minds. All they need is reason to do so. So, rather than what would appear to be your drunken resignation (or worse), the proper task would be to identify and provide that reasoning in the right manner.
JJM
llamas,
You are grossly misinterpreting the Aliens Act 1905. It does not provide for permits or registration, merely for immigration officers (appointed to this function for the first time as far as I am aware, it perviously being a customs function to deal with aliens) to be able to deny entry at the ports to individuals on specific grounds, and to the Home Secretary to deport specified individuals.
This is quite the reverse of the current situation where anyone subject to immigration control (basically non-EAA citizens) must petition in advance to be admitted, may be refused admission for a presumed intention to work or settle and may have arbitrary conditions placed on their stay.
In practice, the early 19th century legislation was entirely ineffective and almost entirely unused. The 1905 Act was part of an international panic about eastern and southern Europeans who had begun to flee poverty (and pogroms) in large numbers on cheap plentiful passenger liners. The same period saw the US begin to regulate its immigration quite severely. It was a part of a reaction against globalisation in other words. The important thing about the 1905 Act was it instituted border controls.
All such acts are acts of fear. The 1793 Act was specifically intended to interdict spies and agitators from revolutionary France.
The UK government, with some of the most insolent border controls in the modern world, is now instituting registration of aliens once more. The logical consequence and now declared intent is registration of everyone.
Paul,
You don’t get a desireable outcome from telling yourself “I’m gonna get raped, I might as well not try to fight.” You get a desireable outcome by planting a flag and digging in your heels.
Guy,
I think I’m missing something in your link. Is the absence of St. George’s and St. Andrew’s crosses that big a deal? Because from where I sit the entire discussion of the artistic aspects of national ID cards would seem to fall into the “trying to polish a turd” category.
Just checked: my driver’s license has the Colorado state seal in holograph over the photo. My police ID has the city’s seal as a watermark behind the print. Neither one bears either the US or state flag. For whatever that means.
Johanthan Pearce writes:
Indeed.
The first decade of the Twentieth century was also the decade with the lowest crime rates. Vastly lower than today, and that is looking at proper crimes like murder in isolation ignoring all the un-crimes that have come onto the books in the meantime.
Sunfish:
This is an off-topic question, but I’m really curious: is it otherwise normal for documents to bear the U.S. flag or any other federal symbols even if they deal with issues that are entirely outside the domain of the federal government, such as driver licensing or the state and local police forces? I mean, if the document says something merely in the name of the State of Colorado, why would it have any other markings except the symbols of the State, unless it’s customary that the states always assert the ultimate sovereignty of the federal government, regardless of whether it’s relevant to the issue at hand?
Well Ivan, you got me curious enough to get off the couch, and go digging for my FL driving license (now expired). I am pleased to report that the only symbol it bears is the outline of the FL peninsula, the “pan’, as it were.
Ivan,
Just for giggles, I went and looked at the ID card and business cards I had at a previous department (probably should have turned the ID back in, oops), the now-expired driver’s license I had from the last state I lived in, the titles on my car and my bike, my passport, my college diploma (issued by a Big-8 state school), my high school diploma (issued by a public-US definition-school), my state and National Registry EMT certificates, my hunting and fishing licenses, my vaccination “yellow book,” and my birth certificate.
The passport and the vaccination records (with an HHS seal) are the only two with any Federal markings at all.
Unless you count my duck stamp. It says “US Department of the Interior” on the face.
Sunfish,
Is the absence of St. George’s and St. Andrew’s crosses that big a deal? Because from where I sit the entire discussion of the artistic aspects of national ID cards would seem to fall into the “trying to polish a turd” category.
No; but it is a fine metonym for the imbecilic level of public debate on the subject. The Telegraph story was the first one to come to hand on the subject of the Home Secretary’s relaunch of “ID cards for foreigners”.
Here’s me trying to redirect the attention of readers to the facts and away from the rabid barking of conspiracy theorists.
http://forum.no2id.net/viewtopic.php?t=24302
This is more the point:
http://www.no2id.net/news/pressRelease/release.php?name=Jacqui_Smith_bullying
Sunfish & Alisa,
Thanks for your replies. For what that’s worth, I think what you report makes sense; it clearly specifies which exact government entities stand behind the claims in the document, and which ones don’t. I certainly prefer this system to the EU symbols covering all sorts of documents in European states, regardless of whether they have anything to do with any actual business of the EU.
Police were not compulsory till (I believe) 1856 – and even after this county police forces were hardly the administrative structures they are today.
So in many parts of England and Wales there would have been no one capable of enforcing this “alien registration” stuff even if the laws were as is claimed (which, as is pointed out by others, they were not anyway).
Unpaid J.P.s was about all the government there was in most of England and Wales – traditionally.
So the vast weight of Tudor legislation was a dead letter in (for example) much of the north – and a lot of this legislation went (officially or unofficially) in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Central government contained some paid people – but there were mostly chosen by politicians (a spoils system) so there was no real administrative structure (of a European type) even at a national level.
There was no modern census till 1801 – and no government registration of births, marriages and deaths till the Act of 1836.
The Civil Service is basically even later – Victorian.
As for government as percentage of the economy.
National government reached its low point in 1874 (tiny – a few per cent of G.D.P.) although locally some places already had School Boards.
My own town (Kettering) voted against having a school board – but the Act of 1891 forced one upon us.
Just as the Act of 1875 forced about forty different public health powers on councils – whether the local people wanted it or not.
This was the great problem with the 19th century – changing ideoligical attitudes.
People like J.S. Mill (so praised by misinformed libertarians) were really statists to the core – and their ideas eventually had an effect.
Indeed if I had to name a time when opinion was not full of statist “reform” ideas I would have to go right back to the 1820’s.
That was also a time when the Labour Theory of Value (of Ricardo and James Mill) was also out of fashion – although, sadly, it came back into fashion.
Government got smaller between the 1820’s and the 1870’s (as a percentage of the economy) but eventually things started to go the other way – as politics reflected the change in opinion.
Oddly enough “free trade” Manchester showed how things would go.
Almost as soon as it got a council elected by the ratepayers (under the 1835) it started to go for spending projects (the opposite of what Richard Cobden had said would happen) and it later went for municpally owned gas and water (etc) stuff as well (in the best John Stuart Mill way).
Birmingham got the “credit” for radicalism – but Manchester was doing this stuff thirty years before Birmingham.
Now we are living in Manchester.
Police were not compulsory till (I believe) 1856 – and even after this county police forces were hardly the administrative structures they are today.
So in many parts of England and Wales there would have been no one capable of enforcing this “alien registration” stuff even if the laws were as is claimed (which, as is pointed out by others, they were not anyway).
Unpaid J.P.s was about all the government there was in most of England and Wales – traditionally.
So the vast weight of Tudor legislation was a dead letter in (for example) much of the north – and a lot of this legislation went (officially or unofficially) in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Central government contained some paid people – but there were mostly chosen by politicians (a spoils system) so there was no real administrative structure (of a European type) even at a national level.
There was no modern census till 1801 – and no government registration of births, marriages and deaths till the Act of 1836.
The Civil Service is basically even later – Victorian.
As for government as percentage of the economy.
National government reached its low point in 1874 (tiny – a few per cent of G.D.P.) although locally some places already had School Boards.
My own town (Kettering) voted against having a school board – but the Act of 1891 forced one upon us.
Just as the Act of 1875 forced about forty different public health powers on councils – whether the local people wanted it or not.
This was the great problem with the 19th century – changing ideoligical attitudes.
People like J.S. Mill (so praised by misinformed libertarians) were really statists to the core – and their ideas eventually had an effect.
Indeed if I had to name a time when opinion was not full of statist “reform” ideas I would have to go right back to the 1820’s.
That was also a time when the Labour Theory of Value (of Ricardo and James Mill) was also out of fashion – although, sadly, it came back into fashion.
Government got smaller between the 1820’s and the 1870’s (as a percentage of the economy) but eventually things started to go the other way – as politics reflected the change in opinion.
Oddly enough “free trade” Manchester showed how things would go.
Almost as soon as it got a council elected by the ratepayers (under the 1835) it started to go for spending projects (the opposite of what Richard Cobden had said would happen) and it later went for municpally owned gas and water (etc) stuff as well (in the best John Stuart Mill way).
Birmingham got the “credit” for radicalism – but Manchester was doing this stuff thirty years before Birmingham.
Now we are living in Manchester.
“But the more complex society that the industrial revolution created meant that government had to do more”.
Simply not true.
For example, in spite of the 1875 Act (which made loads of things compulsory, whether local people wanted them or not) there was still quite a bit of freedom before 1914.
And the city of Newcastle allowed electricity, gas (and so on) to be provided by voluntary (not local government means).
Things did not stay in a “pre industrial” way – people found new ways to provide stuff (on a bigger scale and more safely) to an expanding population.
In 1914 the people of relatively free Newcastle were certainly no worse off than relatively statist Manchester.
Although I was unfair when I said “we are all living in Manchester now”.
By modern standards even Manchester was free market before the First World War.
Last point.
The welfare reform of 1834.
This had its well known dark side – such as the greater use of workhouses (although “out relief” was still twice as common as the workhouse – it was just that the fit and able could be told by the locally elected Poor Law Guardians “if you want relief go to the workhouse” if that is what they decided to do – and they were under a lot of national pressue to say just that).
But it did work.
From the 1790’s onwards (with the French wars and so on) more and more people were on Poor Relief (wage subsidies – like Mr Brown’s “tax credits”).
And from 1834 this went into reverse.
By the early 1900’s few people on any form of government help.
Even most of the very old were either looked after by their children or were being paid pensions by “Friendly Societies” (over 80% of industrial workers were members of Friendly Societies by 1911 – and it was going up).
Then the “reformers” (like Lloyd George obsessed with Germany) came along – and messed everything up.
Please note that a detailed – and effective – rebuttal to the nonsense posted by John and Guy Herbert is being held for smite control.
I can’t think why – I didn’t use a single bad word or anything.
‘I hear that smite a’comin’ . . . . ‘
llater,
llamas
“People like J.S. Mill (so praised by misinformed libertarians) were really statists to the core . . . .” – Paul Marks
Thank you for that. I get so tired of hearing JSM lauded as a proto-libertarian by people who apparently haven’t ever actually read what he wrote.