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.
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This video shows a group of women on a London tube train chanting, “Settlers, settlers, go back home, Palestine is not your home.” A minute later the racism is even more explicit. They chant, “Israel out of Palestine. Whities out of Palestine’”.
I saw the video via Andrew Fox (Mr_Andrew_Fox) but it is all over Twitter. Like Mr Fox, I reject the racism and religious bigotry displayed by these women. But I am also confused by it.
It is hard to count the number of women in the group of chanters because the camera and the train are moving, but I can see that about half of them are wearing hijabs and about half of them are dark skinned. In itself, that is not surprising. London is by far the most ethnically and religiously diverse city in the UK.
Do they not see the problem? They may genuinely be ignorant of the fact that the direct ancestors of most Israeli Jews came from the Middle East and North Africa, not Europe – because that statistic, and the whole history of the twentieth-century expulsion of the Mizrahi Jews from Muslim-majority countries in which Jews had lived for centuries, is not reported often in pro-Palestinian circles. But surely these women cannot be honestly unaware that by the same criteria that they demand be used to expel Jews from Israel, they themselves would be expelled from the UK?
A good article by “The Liberal Patriot”, Ruy Teixeira: “The Progressive Moment is Over”. The four main points he addresses to his fellow Democrats are:
1. Loosening restrictions on illegal immigration was a terrible idea and voters hate it.
2. Promoting lax law enforcement and tolerance of social disorder was a terrible idea and voters hate it.
3. Insisting that everyone should look at all issues through the lens of identity politics was a terrible idea and voters hate it.
4. Telling people fossil fuels are evil and they must stop using them was a terrible idea and voters hate it.
Twenty-two years ago, alongside John B. Judis, Mr Teixeira was one of the co-authors of a book called “The Emerging Democratic Majority”, which itself was inspired by a book written in 1969 by Kevin Phillips called “The Emerging Republican Majority”. Judging by the popular vote in US elections over the last two decades, Mr Teixeira wasn’t wrong, but all such theses have an expiry date. I would not care to place a bet on who will win the coming US election in eight days’ time, nor on the next one, but I would place a bet on the winners of the 2028 election not being progressives.
I have just returned from a holiday in Switzerland, where I often go to do deplorable things. While visiting a country, I try to keep an eye on which news stories are trending there. The almighty algorithm has observed my interest in things Swiss and even after my return keeps sending stories from the “swissinfo.ch” website my way. I am sure you can guess what it was about the following story that struck me as odd:
Swiss colonial exploitation highlighted by National Museum
Switzerland’s colonial history is the focus of an exhibition at the National Museum in Zurich. Based on new research, it looks at the country’s role in colonialism and slavery, and considers its legacy today.
If it were not for the way that every museum in the Western world has scrubbed out and re-written the labels on its displays to be “anti-colonialist”, I might consider this exhibition to be a welcome corrective. The Swiss are an admirable people, but they do have a slight tendency to think that their neutrality and their benign absence from the indexes of history books are entirely the results of virtue rather than geography. As the exhibition points out, many Swiss were happy to profit from slavery. Then I read further:
It [the exhibition] tells the story of businessmen who took part in the transatlantic slave trade or made their fortunes trading in colonial commodities and exploiting enslaved populations. In particular, the exhibition presents the whips and handcuffs used on slaves on coffee and cocoa plantations in Ghana, which enabled Swiss businessmen to make their fortunes.
It also tells the story of people who traveled the globe as missionaries or left Switzerland to found settlements and exploit territories considered uninhabited.
Why are traders in colonial commodities, missionaries and migrants lumped in with slavers, as if trading with other peoples, trying to persuade them to believe in the same things you do, or moving to a place you thought was uninhabited were evils in themselves?
It looks to me as if this exhibition is less about telling the stories of the forgotten victims of Swiss oppressors than about classifying the Swiss as an oppressor people, or, to be more exact, about making sure the Swiss know that little things like never having had any colonies are not enough to acquit them of being members of a colonialist race.
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Related post: “N star star star star, not N star star star star star”.
Earlier this week three girls were stabbed to death in Southport. Several others are still in hospital. A 17-year-old of foreign ancestry has been arrested. This has led to protests which in turn have led to disorder. The communist establishment has blamed the disorder on “far right” outsiders. Given how widespread the protests/riots have become we will soon have to conclude that the whole of the British “far right” live at 10A Acacia Terrace, Nether Wallop.
So, who are these “far right”-ists? Well given how often Tommy Robinson and his supporters are labelled “far right” it would seem that either of the two demos he has organised in London this year would be good places to find out. As it happens I attended both of them.
Both times I drafted but didn’t publish a light-hearted piece for Samizdata. For the second – which took place what seems a very long week ago – I imagined what a Nazi might make of it. The long and the short of it was not much but given the events of this week it didn’t seem appropriate to post it.
Given the crowd and their flags one would have to conclude that the “far right” are people who are proud of their countries of origin whether they be England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland (both bits) or Britain as a whole, Canada, Israel or pre-revolutionary Iran. One would also have to conclude that many are far from the stereotypical pissed-up, white, working-class male.
Given the speakers one would have to conclude that they are extremely sceptical about mass migration, deeply suspicious about the way the law is being administered, in favour of freedom of speech, pro-Christian, mostly Reform voters and of all the colours and sexes under the sun.
And very, very angry.
 Belfast today. Is there nothing the far right cannot do? Update I have taken on board Mr Ed’s quite correct comments and kicked myself appropriately. And Natalie’s too. The use of the word “foreigner” is, I accept, contentious.
I was going to write a post about the riot in Southport that followed the random knife murders of three young girls in that town carried out by Axel Rudakubana. Prior to Rudakubana’s name being released, a false rumour spread on social media that the perpetrator was a Muslim, leading the rioters to attack a mosque. Then I remembered I had already made the same points in this post about the riot in Dublin that took place in November 2023 following the attempted knife murder of three young children by Riad Bouchaker. I am not re-using the old post merely to save time: I am doing it to demonstrate that the two incidents have a great deal in common.
“Despite police not revealing the suspected knifeman’s identity or motive”
In the following quote, replace “Irish” with “British” and “would-be child murderer” with “child murderer”:
It does not excuse the riots in the least if the rioters are correct to think that the would-be child murderer is any or all of a migrant, legal or illegal, or a Muslim, or from an ethnic minority. But the obfuscation from the Irish authorities and media on this point is making the situation worse.
The usual flashpoint for riots throughout history has been a rumour of crimes committed by a member of Group A against Group B. The riots in the Lozells district of Birmingham in 2005 have been almost forgotten because whites were not involved, but they were a typical example of the type, having been sparked by a completely unsubstantiated story that a black girl had been gang-raped by a group of South Asian men.
Sometimes the rumour is true, sometimes it is not.
If, as in that case, the inciting rumour is not true, the best tool for squelching the false claim and quelling the violence is a trusted press, taking the term “press” in a wider sense than just newspapers. If the rumour is true, the best tool for quelling the violence is still a trusted press. It can do things like publicising condemnations of the crime from leaders of the group to which the perpetrator belongs. What a pity that Ireland, like much of the Western World, no longer has a trusted press because it no longer has a trustworthy press.
It’s not “Despite police not revealing the suspected knifeman’s identity or motive, far-Right thugs emboldened by “misinformation” descended on the streets of the capital”, it’s a damn sight closer to “Because of police not revealing the suspected knifeman’s identity or motive, far-Right thugs emboldened by “misinformation” descended on the streets of the capital”. If the official sources of information won’t do their jobs, don’t be surprised when people turn to unofficial sources instead.
Natalie writes,
That loss of trust is one of the things that has made me much less pro-immigration than I once was. If that means the loss of my Libertarian purity certificate, so be it.
Amen to that. For years I have been trying to reconcile my belief in freedom with my doubts about immigration and have totally failed.
I would prefer not to lose my Libertarian purity certificate. I want a political philosophy that is simple and has universal application. That way I don’t have to think too hard. For the last 30 years libertarianism has been that philosophy. Name an issue of the day and I can give you the answer. Sluggish growth? Privatise, lower taxes and de-regulate. Busy roads? Privatise. Inflation? Abolish the Bank of England or re-introduce the Gold Standard, or, er… privatise the Bank of England. OK, some issues are not quite that easy but usually they are. Until we get to immigration. Because if libertarianism means open borders then libertarianism is wrong because open borders are a disaster.
→ Continue reading: Immigration and the libertarian
I do not know the exact political views of Matthew Syed, but I assume he stands at some “sensible” position in the spectrum from Blairite to Cameronite. All the more credit to him, then, for naming their duplicity for what it is.
Farage is a snake, but if we were honest on migration he’d have no fangs
[…]
Hordes of journalists, camera crews and podcasters (including Emily Maitlis and Jon Sopel from The News Agents) were there to witness Farage and analyse his appeal. For many in the centre ground the answer is obvious: he draws his success from the bigotry, racism and gullibility on the fringes of polite society. Alastair Campbell has called him a “dangerous demagogue”, and on the radio last week a former adviser to David Cameron contrasted the “superficial showman” with the statesmanship of his own former boss. In The Times Daniel Finkelstein said Farage promised “chaos”, unlike the sensible Sunak.
Permit me to offer a different interpretation of the man who has arguably exerted more influence on British politics than anyone else over the past two decades, despite not winning a seat, and who is set to be a protagonist in the fight for the soul of the Tory party after the election, regardless of whether he wins in Clacton. Farage draws his power not principally from racism (as the son of an immigrant, I can testify that Britain has made great strides on bigotry) or gullibility. Rather, he draws it from deceit.
I am not talking about his own deceit, mind you, although he is more than capable of it. I am talking about the duplicity of the very people who now castigate him: the acolytes and promoters of Tony Blair, Cameron and the others who have held power these past few decades. I say this having gone back to the main party manifestos during the period of Farage’s rise and what they said about the issue he has made his own: immigration. And, as you might expect, and as Farage has consistently claimed, I saw lie after lie.
Don’t, for the moment, consider whether mass immigration is a good or bad thing; instead focus on a point that I hope we can all — left, right, rich, poor, black, white — agree on: the importance of truth-telling. It was Aristotle, after all, who intimated that without some minimum level of candour a polity cannot survive.
Now, consider that Blair said in 1997 that he would ensure “firm control … properly enforced” — and then presided over an intake of 633,000 between 1998 and 2001. In 2005 he said that “only skilled workers will be allowed to settle long term” and promised “an end to chain migration” — and then net migration reached over quarter of a million despite a deep recession, not least because of movement from the new EU states. The government claimed this would be a trickle of 13,000 migrants a year; it turned out to be 1,500 per cent higher.
But if this was merely deceitful, it is difficult to locate the term for what followed. In 2010, 2015 and 2017 the Tories promised to cut immigration to the tens of thousands. In every manifesto. In ink. What happened? Immigration rose to an average of 300,000 a year over the period, totalling over 1.4 million for 2022-23 — a period in which free movement had ended and a high proportion of the intake were dependants of low-wage workers from non-European nations.
People often wave such figures away, saying: “Oh, Britain has always been a nation of immigrants”, which is perfectly true. But if you look at a graph of inflows over the past thousand years, let alone the past hundred, this represents a spike of an unprecedented kind, something that will echo decades — perhaps centuries — into the future. Again, whether or not you think this inflow is overall a good or bad thing, you can’t deny that it has altered the complexion of the UK in ways both subtle and profound.
Now consider another trend over roughly the same period: trust in politics has plummeted to lows that are, again, unprecedented. This may sound a minor issue but it is anything but. Advanced social science tells us trust was the secret to the rise of the West, the invisible forcefield that incubates a healthy, prosperous society. But now we in the UK are living through an age in which trust is slowly — almost imperceptibly — dissipating from public life.
There I must disagree with Mr Syed: the dissipation of trust is no longer slow. That loss of trust is one of the things that has made me much less pro-immigration than I once was. If that means the loss of my Libertarian purity certificate, so be it. I see a similar change in many others. We used to talk expansively about how we did not trust the state one inch, but I think in secret we did trust the bureaucrats and the politicians to be responsible gatekeepers. We no longer do. Inevitably, that means we want stronger gates.
If you feel my “we” above does not include you, feel free to explain why in the comments. My old self, the one that hovered on the edge of being an advocate for the abolition of borders, is still in there somewhere, pleading to be reconvinced.
A week or so ago I posted about the case of Abdul Ezedi – the corrosive liquid attacker – and compared it with a similar case from a hundred years ago. Ezedi would appear to have been found in Mayor Khan’s makeshift morgue otherwise known as the River Thames. Meanwhile, a hundred years ago Ezedi’s counterpart’s case has reached a conclusion. This is from The Times of 29 February 1924:
At the Central Criminal court yesterday, EDITH LOUISA BASSETT, 30, was found Guilty of throwing corrosive fluid upon Arthur William Thompson, and upon three other persons, with intent to do grievous bodily harm to Thompson. MR. JUSTICE SHEARMAN sentenced her to three years’ penal servitude.
Only three years? But there’s a bit more to this woman:
After the jury had found the prisoner Guilty, Inspector Aldridge said she had a remarkable history. Throughout her life she had been of a violent disposition. In 1905 she was sentenced to 12 months’ hard labour for wounding with intent to murder. She had made the acquaintance of an omnibus driver and one night after he had stated that he wished to have nothing more to do with her she went on the top of his omnibus and cut his throat with a razor. In 1910 she married a man named Bassett. The marriage proved a unhappy one and the husband joined the Navy. She next met a wealthy young man, and saying that she was the daughter of a retired doctor, persuaded him to go through the ceremony of marriage with her. She was charged with bigamy and bound over. Later she went to Scotland and assaulted a gentleman whose son, she said, had failed to carry out his promise to marry her. The prisoner in 1914 was sentenced to 12 months’ imprisonment with hard labour at the Central Criminal Court for perjury in the name of Melville. In that case she had borrowed a person’s baby to obtain an affiliation order against a man. In 1915 she made the acquaintance of an Army officer, and told him that her father was a ranch-owner in Mexico, and induced him to marry her. She also married another officer, and in that case borrowed a baby to work on the generosity of the officer’s parents. For that bigamy she was sentenced to 18 months’ imprisonment.
I make that 4 weddings, 4 assaults and 3 jail sentences. The women of today yesterday…
One of the big stories over the last couple of week has involved an attack involving a corrosive substance. The fact that the perpetrator appears to have been an illegal immigrant has not gone unnoticed.
Here’s another case:
After being five weeks in hospital, Arthur William Thompson, an omnibus inspector, attended at the Westminster Police Court yesterday to give evidence against EDITH LOUISE BASSETT, alias Mabel Young, 31, of Fentiman-road, Lambeth, on the charge of throwing corrosive acid in his face in the vestibule of the Court with intent to do grievous bodily harm.
But – as you’ve probably guessed from the presence of the word “omnibus” and a hyphenated road name – this isn’t recent. In fact it’s from The Times from Thursday 14th February 1924. And it’s far from an isolated case.
Tommy Robinson. EDL. English Defence League. Racists. Racism. Racist. Case closed, yes?
A few years ago at a loose end – in full knowledge that the above was true – I was browsing YouTube and I came across an interview with the man. I pressed play. Almost the first thing he said was something like, “I am not the person people think I am.” That seemed interesting – challenge your beliefs and all that – so I listened further. Boy, was I in for a shock. Since then I’ve read his book, Enemy of the State – available from obscure retailers – and followed him on obscure social media platforms. This is what I have gleaned:
- For a racist he has a suspiciously large number of black friends.
- For a racist he has a suspiciously large number of Jewish friends.
- He even has a Muslim friend.
- He doesn’t seem to like racists much, even telling them to **** *** out of his comments and burning their flags.
- They don’t seem to like him much, sometimes claiming that he is a Mossad agent.
- His main argument is that mass migration in general and large-scale Muslim immigration in particular represent a threat to Britain and the British.
- He utterly hates the police. A lot of this springs from an incident when (so he claims) he was attacked by an off-duty officer who subsequently lied in court. But there are plenty of other cases outlined in his book.
So why the hate? Or to put it another way, why does Robinson attract hate in a way that Douglas Murray does not despite the two having almost identical political views? I can’t help thinking that a lot of this is to do with class. In accent, dress and associates Robinson is unapologetically – for want of a better term – working class . It would appear that a lot of the MSM etc have much the same attitude to the working class as they do to ethnic minorities: they should be seen and not heard. They should accept the opinions that have been assigned to them and be grateful.
Another explanation lies in – how shall I put this? – his general attitude to authority. Take yesterday, for instance. An “Against Anti-semitism” march was being held in Central London. Robinson encouraged people to go along. The organisers – because they know nothing about the man and think that attempting to curry favour with the MSM is something other than a fool’s errand – stated that his presence would not be welcome. He went along anyway. The police arrested him. The police’s actions were, of course, disgraceful but Robinson resisted arrest and got a face full of pepper spray for his trouble.
A further explanation lies in what might be described as “information management.” Robinson believes – as do I – that actions speak louder than words. So, he doesn’t believe he has to defend himself when smeared; his actions will speak for themselves. Except that – so far – they haven’t. This means that he hasn’t gone to the trouble of organising a defence of his beliefs in an easily retrievable manner. My gleanings above are the result of years of followship. His book is also terribly organised.
 Robinson is the one on the left. The guy on the right is long-time political ally Danny Roscoe.
Some propositions:
1. Freedom is a good thing. It is good in itself and it leads to good outcomes.
2. Freedom includes “free movement”.
3. Free movement is a bad thing. It leads to bad outcomes.
I can imagine some of the responses to this.
Freedom of movement is a success.
Really?
 Anti-Jewish sit-in at Liverpool Street Station. Still think it’s a success? I’d love to know what you would regard as failure.
Freedom of movement worked in the US in the 19th Century.
Yes, but not anywhere else. And certainly not here, and not now.
I know some great immigrants (and their descendants).
And so do I.
 I’d go to war with her.  …and her. The issue is not with those who come in small numbers. Or the ones who marry in. It’s with the ones who arrive en masse, live separately and learn to despise the natives.
There are problems but these would be solved with more freedom. If we abolished discrimination laws, hate speech laws etc things would be better. If we abolished planning (US=zoning) laws, the NHS and state education a lot of the pressures that immigration causes would be eased.
I am not sure that abolishing hate laws etc is even possible. People who find themselves mocked for their immutable characteristics are going to try to do something about it. Abolishing planning etc would be a good thing but that would do nothing to reduce the problems caused by mass migration. By making migration even more attractive it might even make them worse.
If you ditch freedom of movement where do you stop? freedom of speech, property rights?
That is the bit that troubles me the most. I want to believe that libertarianism has universal application. But what if it doesn’t? Here is an idea. Matters concerning the tribe are off-limits. Who is a member of the tribe? Where shall the tribe live? How shall the tribe defend itself? are simply outside the realm of libertarianism.
Update 5/11/23. When commenters started to mention the welfare state I had something of an “Oh drat!” moment. I’d simply forgotten to mention it. And it is a plausible explanation for both mass migration and its failure.
So, how do we assess the claim? We need to find examples of unsuccessful mass migration in the absence of a welfare state (or similar). This is not an easy thing to do. Welfare states and transport becoming affordable to even the world’s poorest came about at about the same time. There are a couple of counter-examples. Irish immigration to Belfast in the 19th Century for example. There were no Irishmen in Belfast before about 1800. There was no welfare state. There was lots of immigration to the shipyards and other industries. And by 1858 (if memory serves) there was lots of trouble. Another example which I can’t find was in a comment left here maybe 15 years ago. The commenter pointed out that Singapore had no welfare state, lots of immigration and ethnic tensions.
No, I don’t mean torture. Torture will make people say they believe whatever will make the pain stop, but what I am talking about here is using physical mechanisms to make people truly believe something different by literally changing the manner in which their brains function.
“Disabling parts of the brain with magnets can weaken faith in God and change attitudes to immigrants, study finds”
“A joint team of American and British scientists have discovered that powerful magnetic pulses to the brain can temporarily change people’s feelings on a variety of subjects – from their belief in God, to their attitude to immigration.
The study, published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, saw scientists use a metal coil to create strong magnetic fields around certain parts of the brain.
The non-invasive practice is called trancranial magnetic stimulation, and has can be used to treat depression.”
Induced changes in belief do not all go in one political direction:
“Testosterone Administration Induces A Red Shift in Democrats”
“Summary: We tested the fixity of political preferences of 136 healthy males during the 2011 U.S. presidential election season by administering synthetic testosterone or placebo to participants who had identified the strength of their political affiliation. Before the testosterone treatment, we found that weakly affiliated Democrats had 19% higher basal testosterone than those who identified strongly with the party (p=0.015). When weakly affiliated Democrats received additional testosterone, the strength of their party fell by 12% (p=.01) and they reported 45% warmer feelings towards Republican candidates for president (p < 0.001). Our results demonstrate that testosterone induces a “red shift" among weakly-affiliated Democrats. This effect was associated with improved mood. No effects were found of testosterone administration for strongly affiliated Democrats or strong or weak Republicans. Our findings provide evidence that neuroactive hormones affect political preferences.”
(Links found via Wilfred Reilly and The Rabbit Hole on Twitter.)
What do you think about this? I make no specific point and ask no specific question, but it seems to me worthy of discussion that it would take only a minor advance on presently available technology to make a lot of dystopian science fiction into reality.
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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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