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]
Householders are angered by the discovery they cannot remortgage or sell their homes after installing spray-foam insulation to cut energy use.
Jim Bunce thought he was doing the right thing for his purse and the planet: in 2022, as fuel costs soared, he and his wife decided to improve the energy efficiency of their house.
They discovered that the government had endorsed spray-foam insulation, a quick and unobtrusive technique by which liquid foam is spray-gunned into roof spaces and walls. Their loft was successfully treated at a cost of £2,800 and their gas bills duly fell.
Now, two years on, they have found that, by making their home more energy efficient, they have also made it unsaleable. “We are unable to borrow against it, or potentially to sell it, unless the foam is completely removed,” says Bunce.
I feel sorry for Mr and Mrs Bunce. My title was not intended to single them out as being unusually insulated from reality; until recently the great majority of the population would have assumed that taking up a scheme promoted by the government was a safe choice.
It isn’t. On the contrary, if a new type of technological product is being pushed by government in order to meet national policy targets, that means that it has not been through the filter of large numbers of people freely deciding to buy it and telling their family and friends that it benefited them as individuals.
According to Tim Stanley (Daily Telegraph, 12 August): “District Judge Francis Rafferty said that anybody present at a riot can be remanded in custody, even if they were only a `curious observer’.
This leaves me (a journalist by training) wondering whether this means that, for example, someone such as Brendan Westbridge would be in trouble in being present at the scene such as this, if only as a “curious observer” who chose to share his observations on social media, a blog, etc. In the US, we have seen the case of the remarkably brave Andy Ngo, who covered the actions in places such as Seattle and Portland of Antifa, for example. He covered events that the MSM was less willing to cover, for various reasons.
The term “curious observer” is frighteningly ambiguous. For a start, what about the intent of the observer and the purpose of such action? Does this mean that a person who is walking nearby and goes towards a scene of commotion out of curiosity or concern for his neighbourhood counts as a “curious observer” as far as this judge is concerned? Does this mean that the instruction “nothing to see here, please move along” takes on added menace? Does it mean having eyes and ears is now potentially a criminal offence?
Suppose there were to be a disorderly and riotous gathering of, say, pro-Hamas demonstrators in a street, holding up placards calling for the extinction of the state of Israel (“from the river to the sea” etc). Imagine, say, you are a Jew, and understandably worried for your safety. Are you therefore a “curious observer” if you want to see what sorts of signs people are carrying, their emblems, what they are shouting? All very curious, if you ask me.
This leads me to speculate that we are moving towards the licencing of the media by the State in the UK. The only way not to be bracketed as a “curious observer” as far as this dimwit of a judge is concerned would, presumably, to have a badge and lanyard stating you are “press”, or a jacket of the sort they have in the police and FBI in the US, maybe (and therefore, a target for yobs who hate journalists.) Reporters would end up like official war correspondents in combat zones, forced to wear a garment with the word “press” on it and accompanied by the military or police.
And lest anyone thinks this is a narrowly Left-wing concern, I am sure there are supposedly more conservative politicians who would not be averse to such controls.
Here is an outline of the main political parties said about media regulation before the 4 July election. Not one of the parties came close to a full-throated defence, with no ifs or buts, about press freedom (subject only to the constraints of the Common Law such as libel, etc).
Reading this a few years ago, people might have assumed this was all satire, craziness, signs of the writer getting unduly hot and bothered. Yet here we are, more than a month into the administration of Sir Keir Starmers, on 35% of votes cast and on a 60% turnout, which is low by historical standards. On the basis of this loveless landslide, much mischief is being built. As he showed by his enthusiasm for lockdowns a few years ago, Sir Keir’s happy place, psychologically and politically, is authortarianism.
The idea of how the bottom-up, volantaristic forces drive a healthy society is a closed book to the prime minister. For Sir Keir, and many of his colleagues, they are always “seeing like a state”. The sadness is that in this regard, Sir Keir and is colleagues are far from alone.
Update: I cannot resist not putting up this splendid answer by Andrew Neil, former Sunday Times editor, TV presenter – and my former boss – to the idiotic question from an MP about what the State should do for the media. Play this, and enjoy.
Over the seas and far away, President Milei of Argentina has abolished a government function, that of INADI, the purpose of which was easily comprehensible from its name in Spanish, the Instituto Nacional contra la Discriminación, la Xenofobia y el Racismothe newspaper La Nación has this report, and I quote. “Disolvimos el INADI. Ente ideológico de uso político partidario. Despedimos a los empleados y devolvimos el edificio. Nuestra gestión se concentra en achicar el Estado y cerrar los organismos innecesarios. No creemos en la utopía del Estado eficiente. Vamos por más, mucho más”, escribió el ministro de Justicia.
” ‘We have dissolved the INADI. An ideological entity of partisan political use. We are dismissing the staff and are taking back the premises. Our management will focus on shrinking the State and closing unnecessary organs. We do not believe in the utopia of the efficient State. We will be doing more, much more.’, wrote the Ministry of Justice.”
Looks like he means what he says. On one YT video (in Spanish) I saw a comment to the effect of ‘If there isn’t a government Department for Breathing, will we all be asphyxiated?’.
A MAN has been branded a “criminal” after spending six hours tidying up an overhanging hedge to help locals.
Adam Myers, 22, thought he was carrying out a simple act of kindness when he chopped back grass verges on a stretch of 40mph road in the sleepy village of Broughton Moor, Cumbria.
The young lad, who has autism, jumped at the chance to fix-up the area after residents expressed concern online about walkers’ safety.
Around 10 minutes after the the chaotic bushes were strimmed and the weeds were ripped up, local cops received reports of “criminal damage”.
Adam had shared before and after pictures of his work on Facebook before being hit with backlash from the parish council.
A member of the community group commented on Adam’s post telling him he had broken the law and carried out an act of criminal damage.
The report of the incident in the Sun, quoted above, refers to a “member of the community group” reporting Adam Myers for criminal damage. However other accounts, such as the Telegraph‘s, say that the person who reported Mr Myers for criminal damage was actually a member of the parish council.
That would explain the sequel to this tale. According to the Telegraph link above,
An entire parish council has resigned after a man was reported to the police for criminal damage for clearing a roadside pavement of weeds, stinging nettles and brambles.
All seven members of the Broughton Moor parish council near Cockermouth, Cumbria, have quit following a backlash to news that Adam Myers, 22, who has autism, was reported for strimming grass verges and hedges near his home in the village.
They did not leave without a last petulant gesture:
In a statement posted on the parish council website said “As of June 20, and following an orchestrated campaign of bullying and abuse, both online and in person, against the members of the parish council and the clerk, Broughton Moor no longer has a parish council.
“All future plans for improvements for the village have been cancelled and the community centre has been closed.
If the reactions from citizens of Broughton Moor quoted by the Telegraph are typical, the now former councillors in question will not be missed. But to be fair to them – I always try to be fair to parish councillors, because the ones I know do a vast amount of work for either a tiny allowance or no money at all – there is a potential reason to object to individuals cutting hedges. The Sun may have missed that the person threatening to dob Adam Myers in was a parish councillor, but their account did include a little panel on “the rules” for cutting hedges, which said,
Under Section 1 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, it’s an offence to intentionally damage or destroy a wild bird’s nest while it is being built or in use.
It does not say that was the reason the parish councillor or councillors objected to Adam Myers trimming roadside hedges himself; it just says that it could have been. But for that defence to work, it would have to be the case that the council lovingly inspected every hedge for birds’ nests before trimming them. Now, I have not had much chance to observe how the local councils in the vicinity of Cockermouth go about trimming hedges – though I know of a Samizdata reader who has – but I know how they do it in Essex. When the council gets round to it, which is not often, they send a vehicle equipped with a robot arm tipped by three spinning bladed wheels, whose passage instantly reduces any projecting branches of the hedge to dust. Any eggs or baby birds slumbering in their little home also get the scythed chariot treatment. The point is that someone such as Adam Myers – or such as I, since, dear readers, inspired by his example I have gone forth and done some hedgecrime myself – who laboriously snips the hedge branch by branch is infinitely more likely to see and avoid a nest than the man driving Boudicca’s chariot while wearing council-mandated goggles and ear-muffs.
So, all in all, it looks to me as if the ex-members of Broughton Moor Parish Council were annoyed at this young man for showing them up.
Today, however, free speech and politics are under concerted assault in the liberal democracies of the West. The public-private consortia directing that campaign—what has been called the Censorship Industrial Complex—was the topic of a conference at the end of June in London.
[…]
The war against free speech is being fought with treaties and official agreements with wording as broad as a shotgun’s blast. One of many examples is the OAS’s 2013 Inter-American Convention Against All Forms of Discrimination and Intolerance. Article 1 of the Convention includes in its definition of intolerance “disrespect, rejection, or contempt . . . [for the] opinions” of others, while Article 4 states that the “duties of the [35 signatory] states” include “ [to] prevent, eliminate, prohibit, and punish, in accordance with their constitutional norms . . . all acts and manifestations of discrimination and intolerance.” But what is “disrespect”? What constitutes “rejection” of an opinion? Is, say, discussion of the connection between Islam and violence punishable intolerance? There are no clear answers to these questions, because the censors never define their terms. The vagueness deliberately encourages self-censorship by communicating an implicit warning: caveat loquens, let the speaker beware.
“To make things worse, we also invented a technology that enables every Tom, Dick and mad Harry to publish whatever they like on opaque global platforms, which are incentivised to propagate the wildest nonsense. And to this we have now added powerful tools (called AI) that automate the manufacture of misinformation on an epic scale. If you were a malign superpower that wanted to screw up the democratic world, you’d be hard put to do better than this.”
Worse? It is strange how the writer of an article saying how the ability of everyone to publish whatever they like makes things worse claims to be so concerned for democracy. If he would deny mad Harry the right to publish what he likes and read what he likes, why would he grant Harry the right to vote?
Naughton continues,
At the root of all this are two neuroses. One is the Republicans’ obsessive conviction that academic studies, like those of DiResta and her colleagues, of how “bad actors – spammers, scammers, hostile foreign governments, networks of terrible people targeting children, and, yes hyper-partisans actively seeking to manipulate the public” use digital platforms to achieve their aims is, somehow, anti-conservative.
The other neurosis is, if anything, more worrying: it’s a crazily expansive idea of “censorship” that includes labelling social media posts as potentially misleading, factchecking, down-ranking false theories by reducing their distribution in people’s social media feeds while allowing them to remain on a site and even flagging content for platforms’ review.
Down-ranking theories deemed to be false by secretly stopping them from being communicated freely is not a crazily expansive idea of censorship, it is censorship. The censors’ kindness in allowing the censored material to remain on site so long as nobody sees it is akin to the kindness of the 1960s London gangster Charlie Richardson, who, having had a man beaten bloody in front of him, would make a gift to his victim of a nice clean shirt to go home in.
I was aware of the boycott but did not join in. We do buy stuff from Wickes on occasion. It is useful that they open at 7am and close at 8pm. I certainly was not going to give up that utility because the company had gone woke. If I were to boycott all the companies who waste their substance by hiring “inclusion and diversity” teams and whose senior staff members gush about it to the media, I would have to live like a hermit. Still, it was foolish of Fraser Longden to first tell Pink News that “Creating a culture where everybody can feel welcomed – can be their authentic self, can be supported – is about modernising our business” and then tell the same Pink News that, in his estimate, ten percent of the UK population are “not welcome in our stores anyway”. I did not know whether my position on these issues, which I like to think of as nuanced, would have allowed him to welcome me through the rainbow-festooned portals of Wickes. Nor did I care. Wickes can hate me and still sell me screws.*
The DIY giant Wickes has been accused of stifling freedom of speech after its boss tried unsuccessfully to shut down a website criticising it as “woke” after its boss told trans-critical “bigots” to shop elsewhere.
[…]
In response [to Mr Longden’s comments], Timothy Huskey set up the protest site featuring the headline “Woke Wickes” and claiming “the UK calls for a boycott of Wickes” due to its “highly controversial sexual agenda”, claiming that the company “hates” customers who think there are only two genders.
[…]
In July, the home improvements store’s lawyers contacted Nominet, the body which oversees UK domain names, to complain that the website was abusing the company’s trademarked name, contained “malware capabilities” and was being used for “phishing”, a reference to the use of emails and online platforms for fraudulent behaviour.
Papers filed with the watchdog also said the site was set up for commercial gain and intended to “unfairly disrupt” Wickes’s business.
In response, Mr Huskey, who is American, said he set up the site as “legitimate criticism” of Wickes, and made it “abundantly clear” it is not connected to the company, even offering visitors the address for the company’s official website if anyone wanted to shop with them. He insisted it was not used to make money or for any phishing fraud and contained no malware.
The adjudicator, who ruled on the dispute, found the use of the word “boycott” in the protest site’s name meant visitors would not think it was linked to the official Wickes’s site.
They concluded the company’s claims the site was malicious or set up for “phishing” fell “well short of what is required to support its serious allegation”.
They added that Wickes had not proven that the criticism on the website was “of such an exceptional nature” to merit the site to be shut down. They were also satisfied it was not set up for commercial or illicit purposes.
Wickes’ use of obviously spurious claims about malware and phishing to attempt to silence a critic enrages me. I am glad the attempt failed; https://www.boycottwickes.co.uk/ is still there. Mind you, so is Fraser Longden. Obviously the earlier boycott did not damage their bottom line that much. And I do not delude myself that my little mini-boycott will leave their accountants a-tremble. Mr Longden is right about one thing, most grand resolutions fizzle out when it’s 6:30pm, everywhere else is closed, and you desperately need a screw.
Nonetheless, given that companies will count an expensive advertising campaign a success if it increases custom by one or two percent, they would be wise not to do things that cause even a few of their customers to get into the habit of looking elsewhere first. That is how most of my “boycotts” end up. In 2019 Nigel Farage had a milkshake thrown over him for the first time. Someone in Burger King’s social media team proved their worth by putting out a tweet saying, “Dear people of Scotland. We’re selling milkshakes all weekend. Have fun. Love BK. #justsaying”. The net worth of most companies’ social marketing teams is negative: until then I had often used the Burger Kings at motorway service stations because, like Wickes, they remain open when other outlets are closed, and because a family member gets a discount, but their encouragement of political violence led me to declare a boycott. Predictably, my resolve wavered. I have eaten several Burger King burgers at motorway services since then, when BK was the only place selling food open, or because it was what other members of the party wanted. But five years of looking elsewhere first adds up.
*I meant the type of screw that comes in Metric, Imperial or Whitworth. Although having started that line of thought, I did not have the strength not to follow the Wikipedia link that told me that all screws have inherent male gender.
Eye-catching data from this article, by Nicolai Heering, on UK anti-money laudering regulations (AMLR) in the UK:
About 170,000 individuals are being debanked in the UK every year due to the AMLR. By comparison, only some 1,000 individuals are actually convicted of money laundering. Thus, the remaining 169,000 individuals are done a very serious injustice as being without a bank account has profoundly negative consequences for most people.
And
How can that be resolved? The electorate needs to understand the scale of the costs of AMLR compliance: that they themselves are ultimately paying those costs, that the AMLR have little to commend them by way of crime-reducing results, and that the AMLR are causing vast numbers of innocent people to be debanked every year. Only then are the politicians likely to sit up and listen.
The article refers to this study from the Institute of Economic Affairs about money laundering controls, debanking, and the perverse consequences of forms of regulation.
Part of the problem, in my view, is that because banks are not purely free enterprise institutions, but are umbilically linked to the central bank as a lender of last resort, and hedged around and protected by all manner of rules, they are almost obliged to treat clients poorly. There is nothing resembling client confidentiality. Under AML rules, bank staff are required, on pain of serious penalties, to report supposedly suspicious transactions. It means that in many cases that people are obliged to prove they aren’t doing anything wrong. And add to that the cookie-cutter approach embedded in a lot of modern “regtech” software, it is easy to see how you can end up with stories of tens of thousands of innocent people “de-banked” for no good reason.
The story last summer of how Reform leader Nigel Farage (he wasn’t leader then, but a GB News presenter) was de-banked by Coutts, (see my related thoughts here) and how evidence surfaced that he was ousted in part because the bank appeared to dislike his views, and also because of possible issues with his being a Politically Exposed Person, hasn’t vanished. There remain serious issues about how banks treat clients. And with a Labour government likely days away from achieving office, I doubt some of the more outrageous examples of “debanking” will be dealt with. As ever, the current Conservative government appears to have missed an opportunity to take decisive action.
Despite everything, I will vote Conservative in this election, because my local MP is Kemi Badenoch, of whom I approve. But what a silly party the Tories have become.
I had my say about their proposal to reinstate conscription a month ago in this post: “A press gang there I chanced to meet”. I am honestly amazed that the proposal is still alive as anything other than a guaranteed laugh line for Radio Four comedians. It seems I was wrong: the prime minister still maintains this is something he will do after his surprise election victory. OK, let’s run with that. If he thinks that it would be a good thing for the state to compel British youth to spend a year in the army or “volunteering” (yes, they really do call it that) in the community, why does he evidently not trust the legal mechanisms of compulsion that the state evolved over centuries to enforce it?
Taking away people’s driving licence is an arbitrary punishment. For one young draft-dodger living in the country it might come as a disaster, for another convicted of the same crime but living in a major city with good public transport, it would be no more than a mild inconvenience. A young person who could not drive in the first place would laugh in the faces of the enforcers. Did we not once have some sort of legal system to iron out inconsistencies like that?
Another thing, I could have sworn we used to have this idea that a driving licence was issued when a person had demonstrated he or she could safely operate a motor vehicle on the public highway, and could be revoked only if that person drove dangerously. If it can be revoked for offences that have nothing to do with driving, trust in the whole system of licensing is damaged.
Colchester always looks prosperous when I go there. There are designer clothes at prices I cannot afford in its charity shops. I think of it as a place where the last serious incident of anti-social behaviour was in AD 61. Not so, according to the Telegraph:
All the crime in British libraries has traditionally been contained between the covers of our books – any rowdiness instantly quelled by the librarians’ famous “Shh!”
But in Colchester, Essex, that idyll increasingly resembles fiction. Over the past three months, the city’s local library has recorded a shocking 54 incidents of antisocial behaviour, forcing librarians to consider donning bodycams for their own protection.
Books have been snatched from the shelves, tossed about and destroyed. An irreplaceable collection of local 18th-century maps has been defaced with obscene sketches. A glass door has been shattered, fires have been lit on the carpet tiles of the quiet study area and staff have been subjected to appalling verbal abuse and – on one occasion – a physical assault.
Perhaps most worrying of all, however, is that the Essex librarians are far from alone, with similar learning sanctuaries across the country now battling a wave of criminality and disorderly behaviour.
In Kent, such institutions witnessed a 500 per cent increase in antisocial incidents affecting staff and library users between 2020 and 2023, while in Bristol, several libraries were forced to close or change their opening hours over the school holidays last year to deter unruly young visitors.
Note the timeframe. I suspect that this startling 500% increase in antisocial incidents in Kent public libraries between 2020 and 2023 was a ripple from the Black Lives Matter tsunami finally making landfall after crossing the Atlantic. However that is but the latest book in a multi-volume saga. The article speaks of any rowdiness being ‘instantly quelled by the librarians’ famous “Shh!”’ When did that last happen, 1975? Perhaps there really were Shh-ing librarians like that once. My imagination gives them beehive hair and cat-eye glasses. Never actually saw one though, and in the 1980s I spent vast amounts of time in the local public library. All my life, trendy young librarians lived in terror of being thought to be that sort of librarian, and the fear never went away while they gradually turned into old librarians who’ve still got their CND badges in a drawer somewhere.
No longer the silent book storage and study areas of old, libraries have evolved to become “community hubs” offering a wide range of free or affordable services to visitors of all ages. You can go to a library to access the internet and use printers and photocopiers. They host knitting clubs, manga drawing sessions and bereavement support meetings. Often they’ll loan out medical equipment such as blood pressure monitors, with many becoming Covid vaccination centres during the pandemic. A new Scottish scheme even offers up musical instruments for users.
In Colchester’s library, parents and grandparents are supervising toddlers clambering around a small soft play area situated on the two-storey building’s ground floor.
There is nothing wrong with the manga drawing or the soft play areas in themselves. Nor do I have any automatic objection to a library, in the sense of a place whose primary purpose is to make books available to the public, also hosting activities such as Drag Queen Story Hour, as Colchester library has done. Although I do think the famous Rainbow Dildo Butt Monkey whom Redbridge council commissioned to do the rounds of its children’s libraries in 2021 might have been a little off-putting to certain demographics.
If public, government-run libraries were private, commercially-run libraries as once existed in the UK – Boots the Chemist used to run a mass-market circulating library – we could have lively competition between the “We’re not your grandma’s library” libraries and the “We are your grandma’s library” libraries. I am sure there is room for both.
But that is a dream. In the real world, low as its fees were, “Boots Book-Lovers’ Library” could not compete with the government-subsidised version which proudly boasted it was free to all. And the generations of public librarians since then thought they were being non-authoritarian by taking that “to all” literally. “The library isn’t just about books”, they said. The banks of computers pushed the books into a corner. “The library isn’t just for swots”, they said. “We won’t make you stay quiet”, they said. It stopped being a quiet haven for swots. “We are inclusive”, they said. “The library is for all sorts of people.” And, lo, no one was excluded and all sorts of people came.
What effect will this have? Personally, I suspect the Democrats have caught a tiger by the tail. They saw some polling in 2020 that said X per cent of voters would be less likely to vote for someone if they had been convicted of a crime and thought, “Aha, this is how we do it”. But it all looks very different when the election is 159 days away. They should have watched more Yes, Minister.
Bernard: “And as you know the letters JB are the highest honour in the Commonwealth.”
Hacker: “JB?”
Sir Humphrey: “Jailed by the British. Gandhi, Nkrumah, Makarios, Ben Gurion, Kenyatta, Nehru, Mugabe, the list of world leaders is endless, and contains several of our students.
(From Season 2,Episode 2 “Doing the Honours”.)
A spell in the clink is not quite so certain a predictor of future high office when the jailers are your own countrymen, but the principle still holds. If the Democrats are really as afraid as they claim to be that Trump will make himself into a second Hitler, they should have considered where the first one got time to write his bestseller.
By the way, there is much of current interest in that 43-year-old episode, including discussion of British universities being dependent on overseas students and what Sir Humphrey calls the “catastrophic” possibility of a pro-Israeli Foreign Office.
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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