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With David Willetts blowing yet another unsolicited Kiss of Death into the rapidly fading twilight of the UK Conservative Party, it was interesting to hear Polly Toynbee say Willetts had been using the thoughts of our old friend, John Maynard Keynes, to push forward the increasing statism of his latest ideas, such as using coerced taxpayers’ money to subsidise working mothers.
No wonder Ms Toynbee has been so taken with Mr “Two Brains” Willetts’ recently published pamphlet. What it contains used to be called social engineering, of the most crude kind, but now it has been re-labelled as compassionate conservatism, and even arch-socialist Ms Toynbee has declared her guarded support. I therefore thought we’d better examine the roots of Mr Willett’s new philosophy, and get an Austrian view on the Keynesianism underlying it.
And what better place could we start than Mises.org? → Continue reading: Keynes, the Man
The latest social engineering proposals from the government are out on University education.
If I wanted my son to get into Britain’s ruling class, this is what I would now have to do, according to these plans. First, I would get him into the most expensive private school I could possibly afford. Then at sixteen I would have an arranged divorce with my wife, and I would move with him to the worst sink estate I could possibly imagine. Somewhere grim and remote would do the trick, perhaps the Belle Vue South estate in Carlisle?
And now comes the tricky bit. Once ensconced in Carlisle, we would track down the very worst comprehensive school or sixth form college in North Cumbria, and bung him right in there on the register. But what we wouldn’t do, of course, is actually send him there, oh no. → Continue reading: An admission of failures
The senior political commentator and Guardian newspaper columnist Hugo Young died at home last night, aged 64, after a long illness.
I used to worship Mr Young’s Mount Olympus of a column, many years ago, turning to it even before the daily Steve Bell cartoon, and have retained a soft spot for him to this day. I suppose that may have been because one dark evening Mr Young had to endure the lefty ravings of some drunken young student from Sheffield University, at some Guardian/NUS bash or other, as this young acolyte tried to suck out some of the greatness from the Great Man of the Left. But being from Sheffield himself, Mr Young tolerated this intoxicated idiot for quite some time, before breaking away to escape into the night.
That conversation taught me two things. One was to try to listen, and the other was to try to think. Hugo Young may have been one of our main political opponents, but he was also one of our best political opponents because he thought about what it was he wanted to say, before he then said it. He was also one of the few men on the Guardian unafraid of calling any situation how he saw it. For example, he recently said of David Blunkett:
At the apex of anti-liberalism, bragging his contempt, sits the most dangerous home secretary this country has ever known.
Well said, sir. The Left is seriously weakened by Hugo Young’s departure from this mortal coil, and shall not see his like again.
And although this post may seem strange, I felt compelled to write it. For although Hugo Young was a Titan standing in our way, from initial stirrings raised in that long ago conversation I must thank him for helping me to escape from the clutches of this self-same Left, and especially from men like David Blunkett. Hugo Young truly was a Great Man. May his soul Rest in Peace.
In my statist youth I was a firm believer in compulsory voting. “We should be like Australia,” I used to say, “and make people vote.” Of course, I would never subscribe to such a draconian policy these days, having indoctrinated myself with the works of Popper, Rand, and Murray N. Rothbard. But until swayed by the wise words of Mr Carr, I used to think it unfortunate that so many British people had become addicted to this growing habit of electoral abstention.
Some British politicians even cry the odd crocodile tear about it, on late-night political programmes. Not that it stops Tony Blair from strutting across the political landscape, like Godzilla, despite wielding only a quarter of the votes of the British electorate, from the 2001 General Election. What people in the ruling class like Mr Blair truly fear, of course, is the growing de-legitimisation of the British state, including all of its political parties, which this increase in non-voting represents. However, despite these fears, non-voting is generally becoming a rational and respectable thing to do.
At least that’s according to one of my favourite Telegraph writers, Tom Utley.
I realise that I am preaching the most dreadful heresy. I know that we are all supposed to pull pious faces and say that the vote is our most precious possession, that men and women have died for it and that to abstain in an election is a grave dereliction of a civic duty. But that has always struck me as a silly argument. If we do not honestly care which of the assorted bores, cranks and exhibitionists on a ballot paper should win an election, then why should we pretend that we do?
Now where I increasingly differ from Mr Utley, after repeatedly failing to hear Oliver Letwin’s outright condemnation of David Blunkett’s plans for a national ID card, is in his proposed solution to the crisis:
People don’t think voting matters, and it is the politicians’ job to persuade them that it does…Elections must be made to matter again. What I am really saying, I suppose, is Vote Tory.
Aside from this hesitant political plug, it’s an interesting article, especially as it’s the first time, as an admittedly irregular reader of the Telegraph, that I’ve seen the rationality of non-voting discussed with any kind of seriousness within its hallowed pages. It seems Mr Carr’s message is getting through.
In occasional moments of reflection, I sometimes wonder why the British government is wasting £5 million pounds of taxpayers’ money on the Hutton Inquiry, when we already know the result: the day the report is published, Geoff Hoon will resign.
But this begs another question. Who will Tony Blair replace the hopeless Defence Secretary with, when Hoon takes the Hutton bullet on behalf of the Dear Leader? With Tony rapidly running out of friends in Cabinet, who could the Teacher of the Nation possibly turn to in such a moment of crisis, especially when the locker is bare of mellifluous wormtongues, despite Tony having hundreds of overpaid New Labour backbenchers to choose from, most of whom spend their long dull mornings wandering around Westminster trying to secure free lunches?
Yes, you’ve already guessed it. No, you couldn’t possibly believe it. Yes, my friends, hold onto your bed-knobs and your broomsticks. For the next Secretary of State for Defence will be, yes, step forward please, the former Secretary of State for Transport, a man who made it through the rain, yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s the new and improved Stephen Byers!
Please. No tittering at the back there!
After having served more than an entire year on the backbenches, for having serially lied to the British people, rumours abound that Peter “Mandy” Mandelson has decided Stephen “Liar, Liar, my Pants are on Fire” Byers, must be returned to the ruling caste, as the new Defence Secretary, to bolster pretty-boy Tony’s rapidly disintegrating regime. If you can’t follow this link, here’s what today’s Daily Mirror said:
STEPHEN Byers is about to return to the Cabinet as replacement for doomed Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon. Byers, 50, who quit as Transport Secretary 16 months ago in a storm over spin, will bolster support for Tony Blair at a time when Chancellor Gordon Brown’s backers are increasing in strength around the No10 table. Mr Hoon is widely expected to go after the Hutton inquiry over Dr David Kelly. Mr Byers has been exiled “long enough”, said a senior source.
Which leads one to think several things may have happened. First of all, Tony Blair has finally gone totally gaga mad. Unlikely, though possible. Second, the new unspun Tony has given up the ghost, and will go the same day Hoon does, handing over the multiplying problems of New Labour to Gordon Brown to fail with. Again, unlikely. Blair has nowhere yet to go, as he’s failed to get us into the €uro, and a daily fix of executive power is a drug few give up voluntarily. Third, Tony has created such a court of Yes-men, that he can no longer objectively discern reality from the sinuous platitudes of his courtiers. My bet is on this third option. It’s that Bay of Pigs scenario again, with Stephen Byers, in this case, being the pig.
Whatever the case, even the kite-flying suggestion that Stephen Byers is a solution to the problem of Geoff Hoon points to a government in mortal crisis, like the proverbial spider about to disappear down the spinning whirlpool of proverbial bathroom history. But with no trusted political opposition in the UK, and falling voting levels in all substantive elections, what happens when such a despised government does collapse? I don’t know, but start writing those libertarian manifestos right now. Our day may be closer than we think. Though I won’t be giving up the day-job, just yet.
Alas, the drinks really are starting to run out now, in the UK’s socialist Wonderland. As the world price of crude has started dropping, because the UK and US Coalition Allies have finally got the Iraqi oil pumps flowing again, instead of passing any resultant economic benefit onto the British people, the UK Chancellor Gordon Brown is about to pass this benefit onto himself by raising UK petrol prices by up to five pence per gallon. A splendid back-door tax effort, I think you’ll agree.
But one would’ve thought he’d learned his lesson during the UK Fuel Crisis, three years ago. However, our Gordon is wiser than we mere mortals. He thinks he can slip this tax rise in when the pump prices are dropping, thereby fooling we gullible British people into not noticing the difference ‘twixt cup and lip. But what happens, Gordon, when some unforeseen event pushes pump prices back up again? Will you reduce your tax-take? Or cut your spending? Or will you steel yourself for the UK Fuel Crisis Mark II?
I really don’t think you have a clue. Because, idiotarian though you are, you’re a highly intelligent man. And you know if you allowed this price cut to be passed onto the British private sector, instead of keeping it to pay for all your new lesbian nicotine-awareness counsellors, it would stimulate economic growth and increase your long-term tax-take. But you don’t care about the long-term tax-take, do you Gordon? When the British economy is heading over a waterfall, as you recently told the Cabinet, let’s just get that oar in the water and start paddling as hard and as fast as we can. The long-term future will just have to take care of itself.
And it will, Gordon. It will. Let’s just hope that you and your kind aren’t in it.
There are many definitions of the Rule of Law, and I’m no lawyer, which may or may not be a good thing, but if freedom before the Rule of Law is to mean anything, surely it means only answering to well-defined pre-established law, rather than to the arbitrary and discretionary edicts of governments, particularly retrospective legislation where you get punished for something you did before it was made ‘illegal’.
Now I’m no card-carrying member of the Jeffrey Archer fan club, but when a government arbitrarily singles out just one man, even one as notorious as Lord Archer, and then ramrods through a piece of retrospective legislation deliberately designed to harm and humiliate just this one single individual, then if the Rule of Law was already on the critical injuries list, comatose in a life support unit, I think now is time to simply turn the ventilators off. What’s the point of keeping them on? The Rule of Law, in the UK, is dead.
Nurses, quickly please, the screens.
It may be because I’m reading too much Rothbard, at the moment, but when you see the world through the tinted glare of Rothbardianism, even the tiniest stories acquire potentially ghoulish significance. One such story that caught my eye today, over a celebratory coffee espresso, was John Prescott’s decision to abolish polling booths for local elections, and introduce postal-only ballots.
No doubt once this has been hailed a great success in such paragons of civic virtue as Doncaster City Council, this policy will be transferred to General Elections and the much anticipated Euro referendum.
Again and again through Rothbard’s writings you find references along the lines of, “the state will try to acquire control of the roads, in order to march its forces to trouble spots more easily, it will try to acquire control of the schools, in order to more easily educate the public on the munificence of the state, and it will try to acquire control of the postal system, in order to more easily monitor and control its citizens’ communications”. Or possibly to get ‘Yes’ votes on Euro referendums, or to get vital councillors elected in hung councils, or to get marginal seat Labour MPs returned to Westminster?
No, surely I’m not accusing a clearly honest administration, like Mr Blair’s, of deliberately rigging elections via a state-owned postal system? Surely I wouldn’t even dare to suggest such a calumny? I wouldn’t put it past them for a second. These parasites, these useless feckless human beings, these politicians, I wouldn’t put a single corrupt thing past them, and if I was a politician in control of this country and I wanted to take full control of the ‘democratic’ process, for the long-term good of the people naturally, I would make all elections postal-vote only. And then get all my ‘democratic’ friends in MI5 to do the decent thing and fix all my election results for me. It’s nice work if you can get it. Just ask all those nice French people who made up the majority of those who voted ‘Yes’ in the skin-of-the-teeth Maastricht vote in the French 1992 referendum. If any of them actually exist, of course.
Democracy in the UK? It’s a holiday in Cambodia.
My faith in America is restored. My furtive bid to try to acquire a Green Card may be renewed again in anger, and the people of New Hampshire or Texas may yet hail me as one of their Britain-escaping sons. Yes, folks, the voters of Washington State’s Seattle have rejected the idiotarian espresso and latte tax, recently proposed, by a margin of seven voters to three. Good on you, Seattle. May the three out of ten of you who voted for it, be shipped out on a boat to Guardian-loving Britain, immediately, to see what it’s like to live under the corrupt welfare monolith you would so dearly love to create.
After two years of investigation, Superintendent Ali Dizaei of Britain’s Metropolitan police has been acquitted at the Old Bailey of two minor charges of falsely claiming £200 pounds worth of travel expenses, and lying about where his car was when it was vandalized.
Yes, maybe it is the right thing to investigate alleged bent coppers, up to a reasonably sensible cut-off point, but so far this case has cost the British taxpayer up to £7 million pounds, has involved MI5 style surveillance involving legions of personnel, and has subjected Henley-on-Thames’s very own Mr Dizaei to levels of public humiliation which will almost certainly see him win massive compensation against the Met, should he file a claim against them. It seems reason has long since flown out of the police cell window.
And despite being found innocent, Mr Dizaei faces further disciplinary charges from his bosses, while still remaining suspended on a £52,000-a-year salary.
If I was a betting man I would say he’ll win a full £1 million settlement fee, if he does sue the Metropolitan police for harassment. So I don’t think we taxpayers will see much change out of the thick end of £10 million quid before this outrageous shambles is fully played out. But hell, what price the integrity of Britain’s premier police force?
Who needs the state’s policemen, anyway, to be out on the street apprehending criminals, when they could be up each others’ trouser legs hounding out offensive tattoos, hounding out speeding motorists from behind their desks, or hounding out innocent superintendents falsely accused of expense account fiddling. Money is no object, apparently, except of course when it comes to actually protecting the public against the appalling rising squalor of modern British life.
In a shock move, last night, the UK’s Defence Secretary, Geoff Hoon, spectacularly failed to resign when given an open goal opportunity to do so. In a powerful and sometimes moving soliloquy from the floor of the House of Commons, Mr Hoon looked on as someone else made a dramatic speech demanding the Defence Secretary’s resignation. This was Mr Hoon’s reply:
I don’t know what all the fuss is about. I didn’t fool anyone important when I lied to the intelligence and security committee, just the proles.
Under strong media pressure, UK Premier Tony Blair also defended his beleaguered colleague:
Come on, guys, look, well, you know. Geoff can’t resign now, I need him to resign when the Hutton Report comes out. If I throw his body out the back of the plane before then, there’ll only be me left to carry the can, and I’m not having that. Don’t worry, you’ll get your scalp, but only when Mandy, Alastair, and I decide you will. We’ve got all the ‘least worst’ resignation moments mapped out on the grid, and it’s not Geoff’s turn yet. So can we draw a line under this, guys, and move on?
When pressed on whether it was a disastrous though retrievable situation for British troops to be in the line of fire, in Iraq, while their Ministry of Defence Chief hid in a hole in the ground in London waiting for his resignation grid appointment, a furious Mr Blair went on to add:
Look, come on, do you really think Geoff Hoon is the real Secretary of State for Defence? He’s just a stooge, a figurehead, a nobody. I’ve got one of my Downing Street boys running the real operation, and he’s reporting back directly to me. It makes the lines of control much easier.
Mr Archie Scroggins, 17, a former apprentice gas-fitter from Lewisham, was later revealed as this vital kitchen cabinet insider. His mother, Mrs Olive Scroggins, was as surprised as anyone:
Archie got this job installing a new boiler, in 10 Downing Street, and Mrs Blair took a shine to him. Archie’s been there ever since. He told me he was an assistant masseuse, when I saw him on telly in the back of a car with Tony. But to find out he’s Secretary of State for Defence is a mum’s dream come true! I’m made up for him! And he hasn’t even started shaving yet!
Archie Scroggins was later said to be unavailable for comment, as he was on a plane to Iraq to discuss British and American troop deployments. His father, Mr Reginald Scroggins, 74, was said to be down the pub.
The improbably named UK Home Office Minister Paul Goggins, with the even more improbable title of Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Correctional Services, has defended the lack of strict definitions in a proposed new Internet grooming law. This is designed to prevent the entrapment of young children by older sexual predators. However, the proposed law, as it is currently drafted, could theoretically see a 15-year old boy-and-girl couple, who have mutually consenting sex together, being prosecuted, and sent to jail for five years alongside a 45-year old man who has sex with a 13-year old girl.
On the BBC Today program this morning, Mr Goggins said that the government could find no way of wording their new legislation to include the older predators, but to exclude the under-age couples. However, he said this would be alright, because the Crown Prosecution Service would receive the correct legal guidance on when to and when not to prosecute, to avoid imprisoning sexually adventurous youngsters. Which of course begs the question, why aren’t they clever enough to frame this splendid new legal guidance in the new law?
It also begs the question of how many Samizdata readers would be criminalized if this new law were to be retro-actively applied to them, and only kept out of jail via the masterly whim of any future Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Correctional Services? As our socialist lords and masters wrap us in ever more legislation, to criminalize us, in order to control us better, their excuses and deceptions for this cacophony of intrusive legislation grow ever flimsier. I’m confident they’ll soon make it illegal to walk on the cracks in the pavement, in a loud shirt. But don’t worry, I’m sure Mr Goggins will be kind enough not to bang us away for this heinous misdemeanour, unless of course we do something else much more serious to annoy him, such as calling him a very rude name. Mr Goggins, you are an idiotarian.
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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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