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Big demo against the cuts in London today! Takes me back, that does. Maggie, maggie, maggie, OUT OUT OUT!
Simon Jenkins says British demonstrations scarcely ever achieve their aims. I think they often do. Not always quickly, not always directly, and the aims achieved are not always good, but the clue to the effectiveness of demonstrations is in the name. The demonstration demonstrates that there are enough people who care enough about some issue to fill up in Trafalgar Square. They vote, thinks the politician. Not that he panics; he knows that there are other voters shouting or yawning at their televisions as they show pictures of the Trafalgar Square lot, but the highly visible existence of this big shouty bundle of single-issue votiness seeps into his mind and affects his decisions, irrespective of whether he likes them or loathes them.
On the other hand, sometimes the demonstration demonstrates that there are not enough people who care about your issue to fill up Trafalgar Square. (There will be today; I speak in general terms.) If the mainstream media like your cause they will do their very best to help by means of what I think of as the squat shot. That’s when the cameraman squats on the ground and points the camera upwards so that the shot shows only bodies and not the tell-tale large areas of empty pavement between and around the marching feet. (Added later: however eventually, the use of this low-angle crowd-shot becomes a signal to alert observers that attendance was low, and the subject of ridicule. The BBC have wised up and reined back on its use in the last few years.)
And sometimes – in fact ofttimes – the demonstration demonstrates that quite a lot of your supporters are not very nice. The blogger Zombietime went to many anti-war demonstrations in the US while G W Bush was president and quietly snapped away. One of the results was this record of the signs calling for Bush to be assassinated. Here in Britain the student demonstrators against tuition fees did not endear themselves to the public by the fact that one or two of their number were photographed hurling fire extinguishers from the top of buildings or hanging from the flag commemorating the war dead at the Cenotaph. I sympathise with the demonstration organisers in these cases: they did not condone these actions – but like the scorpion in the fable who could not help but sting even at the cost of his own life, demonstrations cannot help but demonstrate something. You asked the public to watch and judge your cause by the people you assembled, and they will.
As will your own people. The demonstrations I went to in the 70s and 80s have merged in memory. Was it at the CND one, or the anti-NF one, or one against changes to the immigration laws where I saw the collection bucket being passed round for the IRA? The bucket filled up slowly, I’ll say that much for my fellow demonstrators, but it was not empty. At all of them I picked up piles of mimeographed leaflets that I now wish I had kept. They were revealing. They were insane. I realised that Searchlight, for instance, who I had thought of as just an anti-fascist group were very left wing indeed. Most of all I remember the posters. Three quarters of the posters, and almost all of the printed ones, were produced by the Socialist Workers Party. Busy little bees, they were. They still are: it is an astonishing fact that this tiny and fissiparous Trotskyist sect has twice dominated massive popular protest movements in my lifetime; the Anti-Nazi League / Rock against Racism movement of the 80s and the Stop The War Coalition of 2001-2008. Sorry, 2001-present, only they stop wars much more quietly now that Mr Obama is president. They were also big in CND.
Most demonstrators back then avoided carrying SWP posters. But it was difficult to refuse if someone asked nicely, so ordinary non-SWP people did end up walking for miles with an embarrassing commie placard thinking, how the hell did I end up doing this and I’m not doing it again. I suspect this will happen today as it did in the 80s.
The problem with demonstrators being turned off by weird extremist literature and weird extremist fellow attendees is not confined to causes that I dislike – even if part of the reason I now dislike them is that I was turned off by the weird literature and people. I sympathised with, although I did not attend, the big demonstration in 2002 against the hunting ban. My husband picked up a BNP leaflet for me while he was there because he had heard earlier verbal versions of the reminiscences about extremists at demonstrations that form much of this post. It depressed me that the originators of the leaflet were probably right in seeing that demonstration as a good opportunity to shift their stuff. One good thing, the leaflet had a picture of a squirrel on it. The good here is not the squirrel per se, fond as I am of the tree-rats, but at least they felt the need to hide behind cuddly things.
Oh yeah, another thing to avoid is having the same demo at regular intervals. Lie all you like about numbers, the media will help you if you are left wing, but when like for like comparisons can be made, decline will out. A left wing writer said in 2003:
The SWP’s main priority is recruitment. Why else did it continually call demonstrations week after week during the Iraq conflict? This was a big tactical error for the anti-war movement. When the bombing started, many people felt dispirited and tired, but were organising and carrying out further actions and protests. More importantly, the SWP had not realised that many people on the enormous demonstration in February were there because they felt they had been denied a democratic voice. These demonstrations were bound to result in diminishing numbers – and many were bound to judge that as the collapse of the anti-war movement.
Innovative forms of demonstration like Earth Hour (today, apparently) replace the crowd in Trafalgar square with the crowd at home doing something that shows up somehow. This avoids the “embarrassing supporter” problem and the “clashes with the other big demo” problem. However having a metric for your demonstration that is easier to count than crowd size, and having it as a regular event, makes this type of demonstration particularly vulnerable to the cold wind of comparison to last year. The better they do one year, and the more their success is hyped up, the tougher the target for next year.
Patrick Crozier reports on another ripple spreading outwards from the Cobden Centre:
CNBC is much better than the BBC. But that is not saying much. For the most part it offers up a stream of Keynesians with a smattering of Monetarists.
So, imagine my surprise when I turned on today to hear someone talking sense. Real, proper, honest-to-Godness, complete, free-market, Austrian sense. I even spent the next half an hour glued to the show just so I could catch his name.
I succeeded. The guy’s name is Sean Corrigan and he works for these people.
Oh, and he writes for the Cobden Centre. …
Corrigan is indeed excellent, as I found out for myself when I heard him speak at a Cobden Centre organised meeting at the IEA. What marks him out from other people who have jobs as Somethings in the City is that whereas most such persons are only now asking themselves: “What the hell just happened?”, Corrigan was asking himself: “What the hell is happening?” about a decade ago or more. And, as Patrick Crozier notes, he got the answers right too.
Unlike, says Patrick in his immediately following posting, George Osborne.
Godwin doesn’t apply where people really are laughing along about exterminating their opponents.
– House of Dumb. I agree. It’s okay to call people nazis if they did it first.
Over the weekend, Tim Evans, who has been a friend of mine for about a quarter of a century, and who is now part of the Cobden Centre ruling junta (listen to a recent and relevant interview with Tim Evans about that by going here), has been ringing me and emailing me about this, which is a so-called Ten Minute Bill (I think that’s what they call it) which Douglas Carswell MP and Steve Baker MP will be presenting to the House of Commons this Wednesday, just after Prime Minister’s Question Time.
Ten Minute Bills seldom pass. But they are a chance to fly a kite, put an idea on the map, run something up the flagpole, shoot a shot across the bows (see above) of some wicked and dangerous vessel or other, etc. etc., mix in further metaphors to taste. Were this particular kite actually to be nailed legally onto the map (which it will not be for the immediately foreseeable future) it would somewhat alter the legal relationship between banks and depositors. For more about this scheme, from Steve Baker MP (whom we have had cause to notice here before), see also this.
Basically, this proposed law says that depositors should get to decide whether they still actually own what they already now think of as their own money when they hand it over to a bank, or whether their money degenerates into a mere excuse to create much more degenerate money, out of thin air. Depositors get to decide, in other words, about whether their bank deposits will be the basis of fractional reserve banking, or not. Or something. Don’t depend on me to describe this proposal accurately, or comment learnedly and in detail on its efficacy, were we to live in a parallel universe of a sort that would enable this law to pass right now.
What I do know is that Austrian Economics (or, as I prefer to think of it: good economics), which is the theoretical foundation of the Cobden Centre, ought to have massively more sway in the world than it does now. Recently I have been trying to get my head further around Austrian Economics than my head has hitherto been, and I have also been watching the Cobden Centre as it has gone methodically about its self-imposed task of transforming Britain’s and the world’s financial arrangements, thereby massively improving the economic prospects of all human beings.
I have always been impressed by Austrian Economics, ever since I first dipped into Human Action in the library of Essex University in the early 1970s. I knew rather little about Austrian Economics until lately and I still don’t know that much, beyond the fact of its superiority over bad economics. And I am now also very impressed by the Cobden Centre. What this latest parliamentary foray shows is that now Douglas Carswell MP seems to have joined the Cobden Centre network. Or maybe, what with Carswell having been an MP for some while, the Cobden Centre network has got behind Douglas Carswell MP. Whatever, and whatever his rank or title within Cobden Centre pecking order, Carswell is now a senior member of that network. Good. I hope and believe that there are many others now joining too, of comparable weight and intelligence.
I could say more about all this, much more. And I very much hope that in the weeks, months and years to come, I will. In particular I hope to explain more about just why the Cobden Centre has so far impressed me so much. But the important thing now is to get something about this up here, now, so that the Cobden Centre crowd (Tim Evans in particular) will have one more little puff of opinion to point at, to help them suggest that the intellectual wind may at least be beginning to blow in their (and my) preferred general direction.
I just got the news: our friends in Massachusetts have received their Official Massachusetts Government Notification that their Initiative to Roll Back the Sales Tax from 6.25% to 3% is on the November 2, 2010 Ballot.
Carla Howell, I salute you!
The invasion by Austrian Economics of the Institute of Economic Affairs continues apace, and at lunchtime today I attended this IEA event on that very timely subject staged by the Cobden Centre. The weather today has been so hot that since this meeting I could hardly stay alive and then when I had staggered home, awake, so don’t expect a long and detailed report of what was said. All I really want to say here, now, is that I was greatly impressed by the two speakers, both of whom I photographed in action:
These two gentleman are, on the left, Jörg Guido Hülsmann, and on the right, Sean Corrigan. Watch out for those names. I’m fairly sure that quite a bit more is going to be heard of and from both.
The good news is that Cobden Centre Chairman Toby Baxendale asked both these two gentlemen if their performances could later be made available in written form to the Cobden Centre with a view to online publication, and both promised that they would cooperate fully with such plans.
I took other photos, including a couple of Tim Evans, the Cobden Centre’s Chief Executive. In one of these snaps, Tim poses next to the IEA’s evil monetarist Tim Congdon, who was present only as a picture on the wall.
Tim said that he also thought the speeches by the two gents above to be “superb”. He says that about any performances he has had any part in organising no matter how average, but this time I think he meant it. And as I say, I enthusiastically concur. Judging by the response at the end from a gratifyingly crowded room, everyone else present did too.
Instapundit today links to a bizarre article at something called The American Interest Online, by someone called Walter Russell Mead, which summarises itself thus:
Short summary: the current iteration of the movement – with its particular political project and goals – is dead.
Incidentally true things are said by Mead about the “movement to stop climate change”, to the effect that it has indeed taken a severe beating in recent weeks, and that its denizens will, once they get this, become extremely distressed, and will blame everyone except themselves, rather as Mead himself blames Al Gore. He calls his fellow Warmists “immature, unrealistic and naïve”.
But the most obvious and most important truths of the matter that Mead does not mention are that this “movement to stop climate change” was trying to do something hideously destructive on the basis of a huge pack of lies. This movement was and is both intellectually and morally wrong, and all the more morally wrong as its intellectual failure becomes ever clearer. Mead merely says that warmism has, this time around, been a political failure. It tried to reshape (i.e. utterly screw) the world economy, but (alas?) it failed.
Mead even has the nerve to compare these would-be climate tyrants with the people who, in the 1920s, tried to put a stop to world wars. Bit of a difference there, Mead. There actually was a horribly destructive world war, not long before those efforts. Another equally real world war soon followed, which would also have been well worth stopping. Whereas your planet catastrophe now stands proved as having been imaginary.
I’m with Mead’s appropriately scornful commenters, like this one, “RKV”:
“The climate change movement now needs to regroup.” Excuse me for asking the obvious, “Why?”
What they really need to do is shut the hell up.
And this one, “Lazarus Long”:
Sounds like a defense of the Soviet Empire, after its defeat.
“Darn it, if only the right people were in charge communism WOULD work!”
Sorry, the AGW myth collapsed under the weight of it’s own lies and corruption.
Sorry, as in: you’re a twat, rather than as in: I actually do apologise for anything.
These two worthy commenters, and this posting, all illustrate an important technique of propaganda. Which is: when you have your opponents on the run, keep them there. Do not, because they have started to acknowledge parts of the truth, let them get away with continuing to tell unchallenged lies about other parts of the truth, and especially not if the parts of the truth that they continue to contest are the most important parts.
Do not, so to speak, let them get away with a draw, and with it the continuing prospect of long-term victory, out of a misplaced sense of fair play. I have long known this, but was still extremely glad to find the commenters on this earlier Climategate posting here also getting this particular point so well.
Talking of conviction parties, as I was the other day, how about this shamelessly populist rant, from the leader of the LPUK. Its basic message is very simple:
Join us.
Alas, whenever I hear that phrase I tend to be reminded of a big ugly guy in a hat, beckoning, with a machine gun, to Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon to come over and become bit part players (i.e. corpses) in a gangland massacre that the two soon-to-be cross-dressers have just made the mistake of witnessing. Luckily, the machine gun guys get distracted by the arrival of some cops, or Some Like It Hot would not have been much of a movie.
Mr Devil’s Kitchen didn’t mean it that way. I wish him and his party the best of luck. They will need it. Times have changed since I wrote this, and as I said in my posting yesterday the internet has changed the rules for small political parties hugely. I now think that however difficult and dangerous a British Libertarian political party may prove to be, it simply has to happen. Certainly lots of others think it has to, to the point of joining it in quite promising numbers, and who am I to try to stop them? But many of the warnings in that Libertarian Alliance piece from over a decade ago do still apply.
I wonder how many candidates the LPUK will manage to field in the next general election? The willingness to be (electorally speaking) massacred is unfortunately a job requirement, but as I said in my earlier bit about UKIP, the silly parties might actually soon start doing a bit better, what with the big three parties being so widely despised, and now that the silly parties no longer depend on mainstream media coverage to be noticed at all.
I consider it interesting that UKIP and LPUK have both recently followed the Conservatives in choosing a couple of Old Etonians to be their leaders. Coincidence? Probably, but Etonians have always been good at smelling power. Two further straws in the wind to suggest that the age of the silly parties may now be with us?
As far as I know, it was my very good friend Sean Gabb who first posited a theory about who may be responsible for the hacking of the CRU e-mails that have now formed the basis of ‘Climategate’:
In short, I believe the Russians are behind this. It may be that all those megabytes of data were stolen by a computer hacker. There may be any number of people who are up to such hacking in the technical sense. But this seems to have been an integrated operation. Having the technical skills to get access to a computer archive is not the same as knowing where to look in that archive and what to look for. Nor is it the same as knowing what to do with it.
But the Russians had means and opportunity to do the job. Perhaps their security services are no longer as efficient and as well-funded as in Soviet times. But they are still there. Their mission is no longer to win the Cold War. But making life easier for Mr Putin and his friends is a large mission in itself.
I have no idea whether or not there is any truth in this. Certainly the Russian state has plenty of motivation but then so do a host of others. Sean offers very little in the way of evidence because there is very little in the way of evidence.
But, interestingly, there are some tufts of corroboration emerging:
Suspicions were growing last night that Russian security services were behind the leaking of the notorious British ‘Climategate’ emails which threaten to undermine tomorrow’s Copenhagen global warming summit.
An investigation by The Mail on Sunday has discovered that the explosive hacked emails from the University of East Anglia were leaked via a small web server in the formerly closed city of Tomsk in Siberia.
Have they merely read and then embellished Sean’s article I wonder? Or is there some flickering fire to accompany this smoke? The evidence is, at best, circumstantial.
But what if it does turn out to have been the former KGB? Would it not be an irony of historic proportions that an organisation formerly devoted to establishing a global tyrrany has thrown a big hammer-and-sickle into the works of their would-be successors? And, not just ironic, but also just.
Because if the warm-mongers get their way, then it is not the powerful and the well-connected that need fear their zealotry. The Al Gores and Zac Goldsmiths of the world can afford to bask in the green glow of personal glory, safe in the knowledge that their opulent lifestyles will not be compromised by so much a sterling silver napkin ring. They will soar (both literally and metaphorically) above it all. No, it is the Average Joe/Jane who will be forced to endure the austerity that their new overlords will demand. It is those who struggle to make ends meet who will be told that the planet can no longer afford their humble family saloon or their two weeks a year in the Algarve. It is the little people who will be stepped upon because they can be stepped upon.
Maybe, one day, we will know the true identity of the e-mail hackers. Or maybe we will never know. But I do sort of hope that it does turn out to be some guy called Yvgeny, acting on orders from the Kremlin, tapping away in a windowless room in a drab building on a military base in Krasnoyarsk because then, we will be able to say: congratulations, tovarisch! You have, at long last, established yourself as a Hero of the Proletariat.
I’ve just watched the Channel 4 Sky news video clip to be seen here, in which Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, berates Fraser Nelson, editor of the Spectator, thus:
“… it’s remarkable how the so-called sceptics have been using this as a propaganda tool to promote a political end … People with a clear vested interest in creating public confusion because they want to undermine action on climate change, they should shut up and wait until the investigation is done rather than carry on a witch hunt.”
Fraser Nelson took exception to this, in particular because Fraser Nelson thinks that AGW is quite a bit truer than I now think it is. In other words, said Fraser Nelson, he is a true sceptic, rather than a “so-called sceptic”.
However, if Bob Ward had been shouting at someone like me, instead of at Fraser Nelson, as in his own mind he surely was, then he would have had a point. I definitely want the whole AGW thing to collapse in ruins, and suspect that it quite soon may collapse. In the meantime, I definitely do dislike all the regulations and taxes that Bob Ward and co want to see introduced, and I am most definitely using Climategate as a propaganda tool to promote that political end. I certainly prefer the current state of public confusion about climate science to the public unanimity that this confusion has now replaced. Insofar as I had any tiny part in helping to create and spread such confusion, and I did, I am a proud man.
But, as the true object of Bob Ward’s ire, I do have some incidental disagreements with him.
→ Continue reading: Bob Ward says we should shut up!
I recently recorded a conversation with Toby Baxendale, who owns and runs a fish distribution empire, and who is the founder of the Cobden Centre. Listen to it by clicking here.
Our chat lasted about fifty minutes and a lot of interesting biographical and intellectual ground is covered. For the benefit of those for whom that is rather a long time to spend listening to talk, I have written at greater length about listening to and learning about this interesting and formidable man here.
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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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