We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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For those who want us all to live in terror, is that would-be terrorists are seldom very competent, and that doing any very big damage is difficult. An illustration just how difficult has just turned up. The Guardian luridly reports:
Terry Jupp, a scientist with the Ministry of Defence, was engulfed in flames during a joint Anglo-American counter-terrorism project intended to discover more about al-Qaida’s bomb-making capacities.
There has been no inquest into his death, as the coroner has been waiting for the MoD to disclose information about the incident. An attempt to prosecute the scientist’s manager for manslaughter ended when prosecutors said they were withdrawing the charge, but said the case was too “sensitive” to explain that decision in open court.
The Guardian has established that Jupp was a member of a small team of British and US scientists making bombs from ingredients of the sort that terrorists could obtain. There is also evidence pointing to experiments to discover more about radiological dispersal devices – so-called dirty bombs – which use conventional explosives to scatter radioactive material.
A properly skeptical report probably would not use the magic word “al-Qaida”, rather than referring to terrorists in general. Nor would there be the superstitious mention of “radioactive material”.
However the salient facts are informative: An expert; no difficulty obtaining the materials and knowing what was wanted; proper care and attention – and he still managed to go horribly wrong. The task is a very difficult one.
Could it be the reason the average would-be terrorist doesn’t blow himself up prematurely (as used to happen quite often to old-style IRA/Fatah, etc., bombers equipped with commercial/military explosives), is because he lacks the knowledge to make an explosion at all? The idea that even a real expert could disperse suitably weaponised chemical/radioactive agents, or biological ones using low-explosive paint-tin bombs is just a bit ludicrous. The idea that an inexperienced religious nutter/power fantasist using recipes off the internet could do so is wholly absurd.
Terrorists in Britain are a threat to life comparable with police car-chases. Terror of terrorists is the threat to civilization.
No chance of the government, media, security services, just suggesting we all calm down, I suppose? Nope.
What is it this week? Ah, tobacco again. Now displaying them for sale is to be banned. It is a public consultation – but the point of public consultation is to be able to point to endorsement of policy and to disarm objectors at the point of actual legislation, not to discover anything. Departmental minds are clearly made up:
Public Health Minister Dawn Primarolo said it was “vital” to teach children that “smoking is bad”.
“If that means stripping out vending machines or removing cigarettes from behind the counter, I’m willing to do that,” she said.
‘Its-for-the-children!’ – usually delivered in a sobbing voice on the edge of hysteria – remains an unstoppable weapon by which public life crushes private life.
I’m grateful to an anonymous commentator on a The Register story for this, which deserves a wider audience.
Are there any other examples? Does anyone have an estimate of how much it cost?
[A blogapotamus]
Mr Speaker,
Income tax is an evil. It is an evil not because it is a tax, but because of the way it works.
First, it takes from the citizen the choice of how to spend his money. Indirect taxation, though often in the past tweaked to show the state’s displeasure at certain choices, still leaves you a choice; to spend or save, and whether to have booze, burgers or broccoli for lunch.
Second, it requires the tax authorities to enquire how you obtain your money and how you spend it. The existence of exemptions and allowances, of deductible business expenses, returns and taxes management is essential to the operation of a system that would widely be seen as unfair if it fell as heavily on the pauper, the producer, and the rentier drone. But the existence of allowances and schedules, and latterly tax-credits, means people rightly use their rights, and the Revenue is incentivised to regard everyone as a cheat, to treat careful self-management as a form of fraud, and press for more powers and more bureaucracy. The system becomes ever more complicated, by special pleading and anti-avoidance; the complication allows for ever closer investigation of personal affairs, ever more complicated and impenetrable forms, and ever harsher treatment of the negligent, confused or exhausted taxpayer.
The result tends to a system of brigandage, where the law of collection is as uncertain as the Tax Inspector’s patience, where the small taxpayer is as much prey as he has fat on him, and only someone rich enough to fight a case as far as the House of Lords will ever find out what the law is. Having made the travellers empty their pockets, the suspicious highwayman will resort to strip searches, then to probing body orifices. Anyone who has made tax or tax-credit returns for a few years has had a similar experience.
Third through PAYE and deduction at source, it takes and spends your money before you get it. You may never notice it has gone. And if you do, and your financial knowledge is small, you may not realise how much of it has gone, nor make the connection between your vanishing money and state spending. That makes it easy for tens of millions of people to believe that it is always someone else who is paying for political promises.
Yes, income taxation is great evil. It tends to destroy liberty, privacy, and personal responsibility.
It may come as a surprise to the House and the country, therefore, that I, as the first Samizdatista Chancellor, am proposing to increase the rate of personal income tax. → Continue reading: Playing the budget game
Even the most hard-bitten student activist would recognise its not an abrogation of his radicalism to get an ID card if it helps him to provide an assurance of his identity to those who provide services to him.
– Ms Home Secretary Jacqui Smith (quoted in Computer Weekly) reacting to criticism by the National Union of Students of plans to hustle and hassle students to register themselves for life on the great and glorious National Identity Register. It is just extraordinary how tone deaf to human life, how uncomprehending of the impulses to privacy and personal liberty, this strange class of apparatchiks is. Jacqui Smith’s own concept of radical activism may not extend very far. A friend who was her contemporary at Hertford College commented:
Yes, I remember Jacqui Smith from college but only vaguely. She was a fairly inoffensive JCR/political hack… you know… terribly earnest. I think she may have been president of the JCR at some point.
It seems she has grown, changed, and reinvented herself – as a monstrously offensive political hack.
These things are only more difficult because the govt has deliberately made them so. Pushing my head underwater, then giving me the option of buying an overpriced snorkel isn’t doing me any favours.
– Paul, a commentator on The Register, merely the funniest of many pertinent comments on this story: ‘Boil a frog’ ID card rollout to continue until 2012. Regular readers may gather I have been a little busy today.
There is currently a good deal of fuss about MP’s perks in Britain. People think they are not getting value for money. But conventional wisdom, as usual, is wrong. What we need to do is to reward MPs more the less they do.
It is the rest of the state, created by hyperactive legislation, that is truly out of control. The newly formed UK Libertarian Party suggests that income tax could be abolisheed in its entirety without touching what most people think of as “public services”, if only the country’s autonomous regulatory bodies and agencies – the quangos – were to be abolished.
Should anyone doubt this, a epitomic fabulous fact courtesy of the BBC’s File on Four programme. The part-time chairman of the South East England Development Agency – a body with no reason at all to exist – spent more public money on taxi fares in one year than all 659 MPs put together.
I’m not generally proud to be British. It strikes me as absurd either to claim some sort of credit for an accident of birth, or to assume that the culture one is brought up in is ipso facto the best available to anyone. Nation is usually alien. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: when someone says “we”, I feel like a “them”.
However, I must say I get great pleasure from the fact that nobody does self-parody like ‘we’ do. There is a great British tradition of highly competent people doing extremely serious things unencumbered by wild eccentricity or a very silly-sounding name. It is therefore a matter of considerable joy to me that ‘our’ defence forces are led by Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup GCB AFC ADC DSc FRAeS FCMI RAF.
You should see an ID card like a passport in-country.
– Meg Hillier MP, the minister responsible for the scheme, to the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, today.
Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends.
– Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine, 1943.
And it is The Economist. Unlike some of my fellow Samizdatistas, I am a fan [1]. But then, I am a liberal – conservative only in my suspicion of social management and ‘fixing’ things without enquiry as to whether they are actually broken.
This week in the print edition there is an excellent supplement: The electronic bureaucrat (introduction here). It is clear-sightedly critical of e-government of all kinds, without falling into the know-nothing technophobic rants that I fear some of those who oppose the database state do:
[G]loom, fear and optimism are all justified.
[1] Though I sincerely hope putting Martin Sheen on the cover of the Intelligent Life quarterly was one of its deadpan jokes.
I write a lot of letters to the press. They are usually edited for length by the letters pages subs, and often improved thereby. If you can say something shorter it is usually better. However, occasionally it goes wrong. This week the London Evening Standard mangled something I wrote so badly as to remove most of the point.
The original may not be the most eloquent piece, but it should be published somewhere. I have added a few links to give blogospheric readers the context:
Sirs,
A man is held without charge at the instance of a foreign power and a visit from his MP is secretly recorded on the instructions of police acting without a warrant. A decade ago this would have been Britain only in a science-fictional parallel-world. David Davis is quite right (Article, 5 February) to condemn it. But things are still getting worse. Surveillance powers – most of which date from 2000, before the “War on Terror” was declared – are old hat.
The Government obsession now is “information sharing”, connecting the numerous databases now kept on us by various departments. This “Transformational Government” multiplies the attack on privacy and liberty many-fold. Its shadow falls on almost all new legislation. The Counter-Terrorism Bill currently before parliament, for example, would allow information to be disclosed to and passed on by the Intelligence Services, regardless of how it is obtained and despite confidentiality or privilege. Meanwhile the Ministry of Justice has been given a programme to weaken in general the existing controls on information in government hands, and the National Identity Management Scheme (ID cards), the means to join it all up, is being pressed forwards on a new schedule.
We are facing not just a surveillance state, but the building of a new phenomenon, the database state.
Yours faithfully
Guy Herbert
General Secretary, NO2ID
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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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