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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‘It’ being the idea that it is a legitimate function of government to dress its servants in uniforms with shiny buttons and have them bully and interrogate people to make sure they are behaving themselves.
The word, Prussianism, was still used between the wars, but was much more common in the Indian summer of the British Empire, a century ago. It encapsulated the contempt of the liberal British (either little Liberals or little Conservatives) for the Bismarckian state and its imperative to dominate and regulate the lives of the people through petty officialdom. And that state was epitomised by shiny uniforms, the image of Prussianism.
Before the launch was buried under a torrent of further Home Office cock-up stories, the new, excitingly repressive, UK Borders Bill was launched with that image. There is nothing in the Bill about uniforms. Those are matters of prerogative. Likewise renaming the immigration service.
So the fact that John Reid chose to show off his latest ‘get tough’ policy* by unveiling the new uniforms for a renamed immigration service, is an epiphany of cultural change. Yesterday’s chaos (of which more in another post) may have covered it up, but I did not detect a whisper of the same public derision of Prussianism that the early 20th century Brits reserved for government by shiny uniforms.
[* Of course, Dr Reid, making Kylie carry an ID-card will stop people-smuggling dead. Now go with the nice man and have a quiet lie down…]
To ask everyone to embrace everyone else is clearly absurd. Toleration is the best we can do, and what’s more, it works.
– Julian Baggini, encapsulating a much broader principle than that suggested by the context, an article in which he just stops short of telling Guardian readers that the categories ‘racist’ and ‘anti-racist’ are inadequate to cope with real, live human beings. Liberty requires only that we live and let live. It is made manageable by being civil. We do not need conformity. We do not need to love one another. We do not need to censor our opinions. Civility suffices.
A press release from the Association of Chief Police Officers, not surprisingly, welcomes the latest police-state measures. But it seems they were taken by surprise, too:
Ref:21/07 January 17, 2007
ACPO COMMENT ON SERIOUS AND ORGANISATED CRIME BILL
ACPO spokesperson said:
�Tackling serious and organised crime is a serious issue to the police service. ACPO welcomes any measures that support us in our endeavours to combat this from of criminality�.
(Sic. Really – a direct cut-and-paste from here)
The unnamed (conceivably fictitious, since no-one is offered for interview) spokesmanperson – PC being the only correct thing about it – can only be referring to the Serious Crime Bill.
Can the Home Office not even get its news management right? A huge and complicated Bill is launched which will tear up important parts of common law, create major data-mining powers of an unprecedented nature, and create severe sanctions backed by imprisonment for people who have done nothing wrong at all if their conduct is deemed potentially helpful to criminals anywhere in the world. It was not drafted over the weekend.
It is a surprise the department failed to get a Chief Constable briefed and ready to stand up to say how wonderful it is in glorious detail, complete with scary illustrative anecdote – preferably involving paedophile terrorists. ACPO are left not knowing what the Bill is called. Or how to spell what they think it might be called. Still, they are so desperate to kiss the governmental arse that something supportive is rushed out, regardless that it is gibberish.
At some point current ACPO members will have sworn to uphold the law and keep the Queen’s peace. Is that not incompatible with being political lapdogs?
[Thanks to PJC Journal]
The Register reports:
Following four hours of heated debate, the San Francisco Police Commission voted 5-0 in favor of adding 25 new cameras in eight locations throughout the city’s roughly 50 square miles. Currently there are 33 cameras in 14 sites.
I had to read that story several times to acclimatise myself to the culture shock. If you do not live in Britain compare another Register story:
The police and Home Office are to press for regulatory powers that will insist that every one of the 4.2 million CCTV cameras in Britain is upgraded so it can be deputised to gather police evidence and provide a vehicle for emerging technologies that will automatically identify people and detect if they are doing anything suspicious.
Now (if you do not live in Britain) count your blessings.
… on TV programmes he (quite sensibly) does not watch. Her Majesty’s Government was actually doing something about Big Brother. Granting him more arbitrary power. The Telegraph’s legal editor explains:
[The Serious Crime Bill] allows judges, sitting without juries, to make orders which, if breached, would put us in prison for five years.
Two conditions must be satisfied before the court can make a serious crime prevention order. First, the judge must be satisfied that someone has been “involved in serious crime” – anywhere in the world.
To be “involved”, you do not have to have committed a serious offence, or even helped someone else to have committed it. All you need to have done is to conduct yourself in a way that was likely to make it easier for someone to commit a serious offence, whether or not it was committed.
And what is a serious criminal offence? Drug trafficking and money laundering, of course. But also fishing for trout with a line left unattended in the water. Depositing controlled waste without a licence. And anything else that a court considers to be sufficiently serious.
Read the whole thing here. The Bill itself is here. Observers of government will notice that it is, unusually for important legislation, being introduced in the Lords. I would welcome any theories why.
I don’t do not know if the sainted editors will tolerate the colloquial English – the Samizdata style-guide proscribes contractions – but I couldn’t could not. So I won’t will not.*
A.C. Grayling pithly outlines the absolutism behind Tony Blair’s total information awareness scheme on The Guardian Unlimited. Do read it. I know a few of our readers refuse ever to move out of the safety of right-thinking reading, but they are missing comfort as well as understanding when they seek to avoid mental pollution from the liberal left.
* [editor’s note: does that answer your question, Guy?] 
Subjugation of a cultural minority by a much bigger population is politically pretty stable. It can last hundreds of years. Subjugation and exploitation of the many by the few for any length of time needs structural legitimation or overwhelming power.
FW de Klerk inherited the Afrikaner hegemony but he recognised it had run out of road. Will Gordon Brown think again when Scotch Tony hands over the mob? Or is he another Botha?
I like Scotland and many Scottish things. One of the highlights of January is that it is easier to get haggis in London shops. I would shed a tear waving off that good liberal Sir Malcolm Rifkind at King’s Cross, if we had to exile all Scottish politicians for English national security. The Scots Nationalists are an ornament of the UK parliament: they have distinctive views clearly and openly expressed, rather than mouthing mush for the benefit of focus groups. But I am damned if the bullying puritan clique in Downing Street shall continue to buy votes north of the border with money plundered from the English.
An additional English Parliament (the BBC to the contrary) is not what we need. Overweening government is not ameliorated by more government. There is already too much government – both in Scotland and in England.
I have my principles, but I am a pragmatic voter. Never mind UKIP, if Alex Salmond wants to stand a candidate in Holborn & St Pancras, this libertarian Tory would be sore tempted. I do not know her politics, but I am sure our local Glaswegian Sharlene Spiteri would romp home on an SNP ticket.
You see Mr Brown, we English actually love Scots. Some of them we worship. It is you we do not like.
Am I still going to be regarded as a wild-eyed loony by quite so many members of the general public after this?
Probably. Note the delicate way in which one big file on everything in your life – a British Dang An – is justified by a lacrymose anecdote about a family having to have dozens of contacts with government agencies after someone died. Who makes them do that in the first place?
I am not mad myself, but I rule over mad, impious and arrogant folk. It is for this reason that I play the madman myself and pretend to be possessed by demons in order to frighten them and prevent them from harming the Muslims.
– Askiya Dawud (1549-83), emperor of Songhai, quoted in I.M. Lewis, Islam in Tropical Africa. No doubt he would also have fitted right in as a fictional mid-20th-century character in John Brunner’s The Squares of the City or a real late-20th-century emotional tyrant in Faking It.
I would like to draw your attention to what’s happened to The Times’s Law section in the noughties. Once upon a time this was a lively mini-newspaper on a Tuesday, aimed at lawyers, with two or three substantial comment pieces, news, Law Reports and lots of job ads. Now it is a single sheet of newsprint, and found buried inside a growing section entitled Public Agenda.
From an advertisement in last week’s Economist:
Devolution Trust for Community Empowerment (DTCE), a Pakistan based non-governmental organisation funded by a consortium of donors through UNDP, is plannning to undertake a social audit in 110 districts across the country compatible with baseline social audit established in 2001/02 and first annual follow-up application undertaken in 2004/05. The objective of the exercise is to obtain policy feedback on citizens’ views and experience in relation to key public services sectors like health, education, water and sanitation, police, access to justice and engagement in local governance arrangements. The study design should consider the comparison overtime [sic] with the baseline and follow-up applicaions in citizens’ views, use and experience of public services under the devolved local government system in Pakistan with a strong element of institutionalization of the social audit process.
Meanwhile, working the other way round, a flyer reaches me from De Havilland information services [no relation] for a conference on “Embedding the Third Sector in Public Services”:
Third Sector public service delivery is a new, effective and exciting avenue to further revolutionise and modernise service provision as we know it. However, this is no longer an innovation, it is a reality and public money already funds multiple public services through third sector organisations. It is acknowledged that the opportunities, expertise and fresh, grass-roots approach the third sector brings will bring improvement and better value to public services.
Major efforts to reinforce this through building an infrastructure and action planning to rationalize and embed this are underway in te Third Sector Review, recently conducted by the Office of the Third Sector. The final report is due in March [and?] will culminate in summarising the sector’s contribution and propose how this will work in a better, stronger, more resilient infrastructure.
[all sic]
The Office of the Third Sector is very pleased with what has happened to the role of charities, and will be colonising more of British civil society presently..
“Metaphors furnish clues to transformation, but they are not the powers that resist or engender such new realities,” a literary theorist once wrote.
The Executive Committee of the Exeter University Evangelical Christian Union has today (5JAN) issued proceedings in the High Court seeking a Judicial Review of the decision to suspend the Christian Union from the Guild of Students; such acts by the Guild violating the rights of association of religious bodies and representing religious animus. The Court will be asked to quash the decision to suspend. The committee has also instructed Paul Diamond, a leading Civil Rights Barrister to represent them.
The action was taken after the students advised both the Guild and the university authorities that it had failed to support their right as Christians to the freedoms of speech, belief and association.
The 50-year-old Christian Union (CU) at Exeter University is currently suspended from the official list of student societies on campus, has had its Student Union bank account frozen, and has been banned from free use of Student Guild premises, or advertising events within Guild facilities, because the Student Guild claims the CU constitution and activities do not conform to its Equal Opportunties Policies, which have only recently been introduced.
That’s the Christian Union point of view. Here is the Exeter Students’ Guild point of view. It appears what’s wrong with the Christian Union (though there seems to be a side dispute about what it is called) is it expects members to be Christians – and this is written down somewhere.
I find it very difficult to believe that the Student Friends of Palestine welcomes applications from hardcore Zionists, or that the change-ringing group offers opportunities for extended bongo solos, or that their Amnesty branch is really open to those who think the Uzbek government is a bit wishy-washy and needs positive reinforcement in the form of fedexed floral tributesfrom the society to its president in order to hold the line on law-and-order. It is just those bodies have not recorded such obvious facts in their constitutions.
Clubs don’t and shouldn’t appeal to everyone. That’s the whole point of them. They provide social opportunities through giving scope for people to get together with people with whom they know they’ll have something in common. That’s why traditionally they were so much a part of student life, as escape from the non-discriminatory potluck of faculty and accomodation. If Exeter Students’ Guild doesn’t get that, then why is it offering subsidy to societies at all?
Update: A notice that is rather strangely hidden away, but dated the same as the threat of action above, says that privileges have now been ‘restored’. Though nobody seems to have changed their mind about anything, there is to be a “consultation process” instead. Does this mean the Christians are expected to be persuaded not to be Christians? [Is this consultation going to involve lions?] Or is the question being postponed in the hope that it might go away, or that a new set of officers might have a better idea? All very odd.
Well, fancy giving money to the Government!
Might as well have put it down the drain.
Fancy giving money to the Government!
Nobody will see the stuff again.
Well, they’ve no idea what money’s for –
Ten to one they’ll start another war
I’ve heard a lot of silly things, but, Lor’!
Fancy giving money to the Government!
– A.P. Herbert (no relation)
Thanks to Brian Walden for reminding me of this, in a brilliant but very depressing radio essay: Lessons from Herbert.
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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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