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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“What you need to know about Ireland’s economic crisis is that it’s not about Ireland: a small country of slightly more than 4 million people and an economy of roughly $200 billion. It’s about Europe. For decades, Europe has pursued two great political projects. One is the democratic welfare state, designed to improve economic justice through various social safety nets. The other is European unity, symbolized by the creation in 1999 of a single currency — the euro — now used by 16 countries. The fact that both contributed to Ireland’s troubles suggests that Europe could be on the brink of a broader crisis.”
Robert Samuelson.
He’s a steady-as-she-goes, moderate voice of, well, good moderate sense. And he’s just said that the welfare state and the creation of the euro are going to tip Europe over a cliff. When Tory MPs said this a decade ago, they were called “swivel-eyed extremists”, and in Mrs Thatcher”s case, deemed to be insane.
To anyone with a vaguely libertarian perspective observing the relentless creep of regulatory politics into ever more aspects of civil life, it has long been self evident that as a practical matter the statist right are largely interchangeable with the statist left. After all David “I see no liberty” Blunkett was simply standing on the shoulders of Michael “there is something of the night about him” Howard, no?
Hence the recent remark by the dependably dismal John Major that he likes being in coalition come as no surprise to me whatsoever. Indeed the only thing that ever so slightly raised one eyebrow on my part was his willingness to left the mask slip.
And with this in mind, I left a comment on Norman Tebbit’s blog in response to this:
“I respect those who are working in UKIP, but I would hope that you would respect us Eurosceptics in the Tory Party too.”
“Well I would respect you a lot more if you were not aiding and abetting the people who have turned the Conservative party into a party of Big Euro Statism… but the fact is they could not have done it without folks such as yourself helping to keep a critical mass of genuine conservatives voting for the party despite profound unease with the likes of Cameron, Major et al.
If you are hanging in there because you seek to take over the Tory party (re-take really) and drive out the twerps who now freely admit they are ideologically fungible with the left (something I have been pointing out for a decade, so Major’s remarks are hardly a revelation to me)… ie you remain a Tory so you can do a UK version of the Tea Party… well great, that is certainly something I could get behind… but if you are just going to be enablers for people who frankly do not share your conservative views, then with all due respect Norman (and I do mean that) you are part of the problem rather than part of the solution, and that is a great pity.”
Singleton’s conclusion:
… it is not just fish where the EU is damaging us, but in financial services, manufacturing – indeed, its ever-increasing regulations impose unnecessary costs across the whole of our economy. Greenland, which retains free trade with the EU, shows that we can have the benefits of European exports, without the costs of its diktats. It’s surely time that we, too, said goodbye to Brussels.
Okay, cards on the table, Singleton is a sometime Samizdatista and a good friend of mine. But more pertinently, he is one of those free marketeers who is, unlike many of our breed, highly sensitive to mood, to atmospheres, to appearances, superficialities, surface trends, straws in the wind, stylistic nuances. He may not always be right about who is hot or who is cool (as opposed to merely who is right), but he is always thinking about such things. He is, after all, a paid journalist working for a major British broadsheet newspaper, who is trusted by that newspaper with editorial as well as writing responsibilities. When he writes stuff, he is typically wearing a suit. He is, in other words, the exact opposite of your typical old grump UKIPer. The significance of this piece of his about Greenland and the EU is not just in what it says, but in its timing. If Singleton reckons that now is a good time to be saying such things, that says something to me, as in something else besides what he is actually saying.
As still current Samizdatista Johnathan Pearce has often said here in recent months, especially in comments, something important just might be stirring in little old Blighty. It’s as if “we”, whoever exactly we are, have been sitting on our hands, waiting for Gordon Brown to depart, and then waiting to see how David Cameron would turn out (given that his mere words communicate so very little). Now we are beginning to learn, and now we are beginning to find our voices and to exert some actual pressure.
Who the hell do you think you people are?
– Nigel Farage MEP uses the TV cameras in the European Parliament in Strasbourg to berate the Euro-elite and to create another few minutes of video that is now starting to make some waves, particularly in the USA. Which means that it is that much more likely to get noticed over here also. That “people” should probably have come after the first “you” rather than the second, but it will do. As a major British Newspaper has now noticed, the Euro-project is starting to look not just seriously corrupt and seriously nasty but also seriously vulnerable.
I read this article by Peter Oborne and felt more or less in sympathy with it until I came to this clanger:
“But this shift, while of long-term significance, has been dwarfed by the most astonishing development of all: the apparent ending of the 20-year Tory civil war on Europe. Last weekend, David Cameron opened the way for a sharp increase in our budget contributions to Brussels, while giving the green light for a new treaty to save the eurozone. On Monday, he announced a new era of defence co-operation with France. The Prime Minister has developed an easy, relaxed and mature relationship with both President Sarkozy and Chancellor Merkel. Until very recently indeed, there would have been uproar had a Tory leader countenanced any of this. Last week, there was scarcely any reaction on Conservative benches. The spectre of Europe, which has engulfed the Tories since the assassination of Margaret Thatcher exactly 20 years ago, may have been laid to rest.”
That paragraph is written in a tone of approval. Now, unless I have missed something, wasn’t Mr Oborne the man who wrote a book a few years ago condemning the rise of a political class that tended to associate its own material interests with those of the country? I remember at the time pointing out that Oborne failed to give due weight to the significance of the European Union in all this. Well, now it appears he has become a sort of cheerleader for Britain giving ever greater sums of money to countries determined to pursue wrongheaded economic policies.
Well, it was nice knowing you, Peter.
I see that EU Referendum thinks as I do.
Is this how the EU got a Yes to Lisbon from the Irish? asks Mary Ellen Synon in the Irish Daily Mail, reprinted in the British one.
Ireland and the other eurozone countries might be suffering savage spending cuts, but the EU self-publicity budget thrives: in 2008 the Open Europe think-tank calculated that the EU was spending at least €2 billion a year on ‘information’.
Much of it bent, which is to say, propaganda. The commission actually admits that its information is bent. One of its publications declares: ‘Genuine communication by the European Union cannot be reduced to the mere provision of information’.
Perish the thought! Reducing communication to mere provision of information might mean that journalists got a handful of leaflets rather than a stay at the…
Hotel Manos Stephanie (‘the Louis XV furniture, marble lobby and plentiful antiques set a standard of elegance rarely encountered,’ the hotel brags, and so it should since the rate is listed at €295 a night for a single room).
“Ireland’s membership of the euro was thus the single most important reason for yesterday eye-wateringly large bailout of the Irish banks, which will take the budget deficit to 32 per cent of GDP and its gross government debt to 96 per cent of GDP. The tragedy is that nobody is pointing this out: the political establishment is too closely implicated and may yet need to draw on a European bailout fund. Imagine what would have happened had Britain also embraced the single currency: our interest rates – which were substantially higher than the Eurozone’s, albeit still too low – would have stoked our own bubble to an even greater extent than anything managed by the Bank of England. The UK property bubble would have been even larger and its implosion even more devastating. We don’t realise it – but Britain’s bust of 2008-09 could easily have been much, much nastier.”
– Allister Heath.
It might be worth re-reading this to recall the ferocity of those pro-euro folk and their treatment of anyone who sought to stand in their way, including, it seems, ordinary voters.
“Traditionally, a bank is a means by which old people with capital lend to young people with ideas. But the advanced democracies with their mountains of sovereign debt are in effect old people who’ve blown through their capital and are all out of ideas looking for young people flush enough to bail them out. And the idea that it might be time for the spendthrift geezers to change their ways butts up against their indestructible moral vanity. Last year, President Sarkozy said that the G20 summit provided “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to give capitalism a conscience.” European capitalism may have a conscience. It’s not clear it has a pulse. And, actually, when you’re burning Greek bank clerks to death in defence of your benefits, your “conscience” isn’t much in evidence, either.”
– Mark Steyn, writing about Greece and the ongoing train-crash of the European welfare state model.
Vicki woods writes in the Telegraph that Greek justice makes a mockery of the law.
Now the trouble with cases like this is that just as one is firing up to get outraged… along comes the thought, yeah but he might be guilty.
So he might. Or he might not. But the Greek justice system does not seem to be in any hurry to find out in the case of Andrew Symeou. He has spent a year behind bars without trial. Oddly enough the Greek authorities did manage to energise themselves sufficiently to issue a European Arrest Warrant. That got snappy action all right! A stirring display of how the nations of Europe can act together to leapfrog pettifogging national legal procedures! After this strong start, however, the Greeks did not quite manage to maintain the spirit of pan-European efficiency when they twice denied Mr Symeou bail on the grounds that he was not a Greek national.
To all intents and purposes, the banking industry inside the EU has ceased to have any serious claim to be a part of the free market. The EU has voted to cap bonuses for bankers, introducing remuneration controls that look pretty draconian.
Of course, defenders of such controls might say that we are where we are: the modern banking industry, with all its privileges, “too big to fail” ability to claim taxpayer support, controls on capital ratios, and the rest, means that banking has not been a proper model of free market behaviour for decades. That is true. But capping bonuses is about the least relevant reform that policymakers could make, though no doubt this panders to the sort of anti-banker sentiment that also recently encouraged Germany’s government to impose, without warning, controls on the investment techniques of hedge funds. The radical overhaul of our banking system advocated here, for example, is not really considered.
We are in the best of hands, as Glenn Reynolds likes to say.
I commend this fascinating article to those who have not yet come across it – A Hidden History of Evil:
Why Doesn’t Anyone Care About the Unread Soviet Archives?
The archives contain “unpublished, untranslated, top-secret Kremlin documents, mostly dating from the close of the Cold War”, yet their guardian “can’t get anyone to house them in a reputable library, publish them, or fund their translation.” Amongst numerous other tidbits, there is some very interesting stuff about Soviet dealings with François Mitterrand, Neil Kinnock, and several past and present “European Project”/EU bigwigs.
(From the excellent Michael Totten, who’s doing a fine job of holding the fort over at Instapundit)
History and ordinary prudence dictated that the union might be broad and shallow (a free-trade area, with embellishments, capable of taking in all-comers) or else narrow and deep (an evolving political union, confined to countries willing to be led there). Of the two, I always believed that the first was better. But the architects did not even have the brains to choose the second. They recognized no limits to their ambitions. They set about creating a union that was both broad and deep. A federal constitution, a parliament, a powerful central executive, one central bank, one currency – all with no binding sense of European identity. As for scale, well, the bigger the better. Today Greece, tomorrow Turkey. And why stop there? Madness.
– Clive Crook ponders the excessive ambitions behind the EUropean project.
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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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