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]
Mr Syed starts with a discussion of the self-censorship on this issue:
Let me start by telling you about Dr Patrick Nash, a somewhat shy legal academic who in 2017 came across an intriguing finding. He noticed that much of the “extremism” emanating from Pakistani communities seemed to have a “clan” component. The perpetrators were linked not just through ideology or religion but by family ties stretching through generations. He noticed something else too: these communities were cemented together by cousin marriage, a common practice in Pakistani culture. By marrying within small, tightknit groups, they ensure everything is kept within the baradari, or brotherhood — property, secrets, loyalty — binding them closer together while sequestering them from wider society.
At this point Dr Nash hadn’t come to understand the genetic risks, the patriarchal oppression and the bloc voting, nor the growing evidence that rates of cousin marriage strongly correlate with corruption and poverty, but — like any good scholar — he thought he’d do a bit more digging.
But then something odd happened: several academics invited him to the pub for a “drink and chat”. He thought nothing of it, but it turned out to be an informal tribunal. “It was put to me that I might consider another line of inquiry that would be more ‘culturally sensitive’, less likely to provide ‘ammo for the right’ and less likely to ‘make life more difficult for myself’ as a junior, untenured academic,” he told me. “It was sinister.”
You might dismiss this as a one-off or perhaps the testimony of an overly sensitive scholar, but bear with me. You see, I sought to study this area during a sabbatical last year. It’s a subject close to home: when I went to Pakistan as a youngster to meet the extended family, my dad half-joked that he could arrange a marriage with a cousin. He said it lightheartedly but the conversation stuck with me. As I grew up, I kept noticing stories that revealed the genetic risks of cousin marriage and how it could lead to cultural separation. It seemed an area ripe for deeper research.
But I quickly discovered that researchers wouldn’t return emails or calls. When I got through to one geneticist, he said: “I can’t go there.” It was like hitting a succession of ever-higher brick walls.
In the next paragraphs, Mr Syed gives other examples of scientific self-censorship. Both libertarians and many traditional conservatives will share his outrage at this, as will many left wingers. But Syed then goes on to draw a conclusion that in libertarian terms sorts the men from the boys:
Eventually I wrote a column calling for a ban on cousin marriage in April last year. I was assisted by Nash, who had continued his research despite being warned off (his trump card was that his salary was paid not by his university but by the Woolf Institute, an independent body committed to free speech). To my surprise, the piece became one of the most-read stories of the year and was picked up in Scandinavia. Not long afterwards Norway, Denmark and Sweden announced plans to prohibit cousin marriage and Tennessee passed legislation.
Last week the movement picked up momentum when the Tory MP Richard Holden gave a brave speech in parliament calling for a ban. He was strongly opposed by Iqbal Mohamed, one of the independent “Gaza bloc” of MPs, who argued that cousin marriage is a good thing since it “strengthens family bonds”, perhaps the most stunning piece of (unintentional) satire in modern political history. Mohamed’s intervention, however, seemed to do the trick. After first implying that it had an open mind on a ban, the government changed its position to “no plans to legislate”, doubtless fearful of losing more seats to the Gaza bloc. I suspect it will come to regret this cowardly retreat.
But the other striking aspect of the debate was the sinister influence of scientific malpractice. MPs on all sides kept referring to the genetic risks of cousin marriage as “double” those of relationships between unrelated couples. This “fact” is endemic throughout the media, from the BBC to The Telegraph, and for good reason: journalists trust what scientists tell them. But the stat isn’t true — indeed, it’s absurd. When inbreeding persists through generations (when cousins get married who are themselves the children of cousins), the risks are far higher, which is why British Pakistanis account for 3.4 per cent of births nationwide but 30 per cent of recessive gene disorders, consanguineous relationships are the cause of one in five child deaths in Redbridge and the NHS hires staff specifically to deal with these afflictions.
Tragic and terrible. But if you once give the State the power to forbid certain couples to have children the consequences might well be more terrible yet.
The unprecedented move by the country’s constitutional court last week to annul the results of the first round of the presidential election, amid allegations of Russian interference, is a landmark moment in the increasingly embattled arena of eastern European politics. The decision followed an astonishing surge to first place by a far-right admirer of Vladimir Putin, who had been polling in low single digits until the eve of the election. According to declassified intelligence reports, Călin Georgescu benefited from a vote that was manipulated by various illicit means, including cyber-attacks and a Russian-funded TikTok campaign. Analysts found that about 25,000 pro-Georgescu TikTok accounts became active only two weeks before the first-round vote.
What form did the “manipulation of the vote” by these cyber-attacks take? One would think the Guardian’s leader-writer would be clearer on this point. If it was something like changing the tallies on voting machines (I do not know if Romania even has voting machines), that absolutely would be illicit manipulation of the vote. No doubt Vladimir Putin would be delighted to literally falsify the numbers of votes cast for candidates in the Romanian election if he could, but did he? Give us evidence, or I am going to assume that these alleged cyber-attacks are of a piece with the 25,000 fake TikTok accounts – that is, not attacks at all, just the issuance of propaganda. As I have frequently said, Vladimir Putin belongs at the end of a rope. But that is because he is a mass-murderer, not because he gets a bunch of drudges and bots to say words on the internet.
When I was a kid, I used to turn the dial of our family’s radio to “Moscow” quite often. Radio Moscow wasn’t as good – by which I mean it wasn’t as bad – as Radio Tirana, whose announcer would say “Good night, dear listeners” in a strange voice eerily reminiscent of the evil Dr Crow in Carry On Spying, who I have just found out after half a century was not played by Hattie Jacques but by Judith Furse, only voiced by John Bluthal in order to sound more asexual. (The character is meant to be the forerunner of a race of artificially created superior beings who have gone beyond being male or female.) Neither the supervillainesque lady in Albania or the main Russian presenter, whose English accent was eerily good, had much luck in turning me communist. But I always thought that one of the things that made the UK a democracy was that I was perfectly free to turn the dial to Tirana or Moscow and let them try.
Progressives and Left-wingers in the UK have gone right off “Vox populi, vox Dei”. The Brexit vote was the last straw. Every time I try to think of a first straw – Essex Man voting for Thatcher? – an earlier one pops into my head. Maybe, as we discussed last week, the British Left’s long turn away from reverence for the views of the populace goes right back to the popular conservatism of the Primrose League. In itself, this cessation of reverence is probably a good thing.
Whatsoever, for any cause,
Seeketh to take or give,
Power above or beyond the Laws,
Suffer it not to live!
Holy State or Holy King—
Or Holy People’s Will—
Have no truck with the senseless thing.
Order the guns and kill!
(Relax, delatores, it’s only a poem.) The sort of progressives who have reluctantly had to say, “The people have spoken, the bastards” do fewer terrible things than the sort of progressives who still think their will and the will of the people are one and the same.
But although the voice of the people-in-general is no longer sacred to British progressives, the voices of some people still are. Which people? Being from an ethnic minority certainly helps to gain entrance into the category of persons who must be listened to with reverence, even if enough black and brown-skinned British people have followed in the footsteps of Essex Man (including the Essex MP who leads the Conservative Party) that skin colour no longer works on its own.
However, being an ethnic minority and a socialist is a qualification, and being a Muslim Labour MP lets you say practically anything without fear of contradiction. Why, you can cheerfully propose to reverse one of the proudest achievements of the previous Labour government, and the leader of the present Labour government will spray out deliberately-ambiguous words in response that pointedly do not include the word “No.”
Yesterday’s Hansardrecords that Tahir Ali, the Labour MP for Birmingham Hall Green and Mosely, put the following Parliamentary Question to the Prime Minister and received the following reply:
Tahir Ali
(Birmingham Hall Green and Moseley) (Lab)
Q12. November marks Islamophobia Awareness Month. Last year, the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a resolution condemning the desecration of religious texts, including the Koran, despite opposition from the previous Government. Acts of such mindless desecration only serve to fuel division and hatred within our society. Will the Prime Minister commit to introducing measures to prohibit the desecration of all religious texts and the prophets of the Abrahamic religions? (901500)
The Prime Minister
I agree that desecration is awful and should be condemned across the House. We are, as I said before, committed to tackling all forms of hatred and division, including Islamophobia in all its forms.
Wikipedia claims that “The common law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel were formally abolished in England and Wales in 2008 and Scotland in 2024.” The laws concerned had been dead-letter laws for some time before that, but their final extinction in England and Wales under Gordon Brown’s premiership was actually accomplished by means of an amendment to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill 2008 put forward by the Liberal Democrat MP Dr Evan Harris. There was little serious opposition, even from the Established Church. For instance, the Bishop of Oxford said,
“We are representatives of religious, secular, legal and artistic opinion in this country and share the view that the blasphemy offence serves no useful purpose. Yet it allows partisan organisations or well-funded individuals to try to censor broadcasters or intimidate small theatres, print media or publishers.”
That, and more importantly the fact that such laws directly contradict the teaching and example of Jesus, was why I and many other Christians welcomed the end of the offence of blasphemy.
I must admit that when the new age of toleration dawned in 2008, I was expecting a gap before it dusked, if that is a word, of longer than fourteen years in England and Wales and, er, zero years in Scotland.
Because dusked it has. Blasphemy against the Muslim religion is already effectively illegal in the UK, and has been for some time. As reported by the BBC, “A religious studies teacher at Batley Grammar School was forced into hiding in 2021 after showing a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad during a class.” He is still in hiding. There are other similar cases. Defenders of Sir Keir argue that his two-faced waffle in response to Tahir Ali’s question was just him trying to keep two factions of his own party on side – in other words they celebrate his evasiveness as a clever move. But when the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has to resort to deception in order to avoid saying “No, we will not reintroduce a law against blasphemy”, darkness has already fallen.
Twenty years ago it was simple: to any problem, freedom was the answer. But in recent years I have become less sanguine. Some might say I have grown up. Still, I have this uneasy feeling that Western societies are beset with problems and that freedom is not always the answer.
I thought what I would do was to write down the biggest problems facing us here in Britain, write down the libertarian approach and assess in a blog post if it would be successful or not. Well, like many of my big ideas that soon ran into the buffers of indolence. But I did manage to identify what I think are the biggest problems – or crises as I call them – that we face. They are (in approximate order of importance):
1. The Freedom of Speech Crisis. Cancel culture, de-banking, lawfare and actual punishment are being used to prevent people from expressing their opinions. Much of this is being done in the nominally private sector. If this continues the results will be disastrous.
2. The Integration Crisis. Hundreds of thousands of people live in this country and have no affection for its people or its customs and more are coming every day. This is a recipe for an Ulster on the grand scale.
3. The Debt Crisis. Government spending is unsustainable. Mind you, I was thinking that 15 years ago.
4. The Housing Crisis. Young people cannot afford a home where they can bring up children.
5. The Net Zero Crisis. OK, this hasn’t happened yet but when the electricity goes off, modern society will come to a halt.
6. The Ukraine Crisis. Well, you can add in Israel, Taiwan and probably a few other places too. The West is under military attack by people who would like to see it destroyed.
7. The NHS Crisis. Long waits for poor care and indifferent service.
There are a couple that tend to get mentioned regularly that I haven’t included. The Migration Crisis is really part of the Integration Crisis and part of the Housing Crisis. Wokery is part of the Integration Crisis (again) and also part of the Freedom of Speech Crisis.
People occasionally mention the Population Crisis – not enough babies being born. I tend to think this is either not a problem at all (the market will sort it out) or something that is beyond politics.
Is there anything I’ve missed? Do libertarians have the answer?
Earlier this year, Bruce Caldwell, a biographer of Hayek (and a sympathetic biographer, not someone out to traduce him), gave this Hillsdale College talk about the Austria-born economist’s arguably most famous book: The Road to Serfdom. This Youtube segment runs for just over 16 minutes. I think it is an excellent talk.
The book influenced a generation of politicians and intellectuals, such as Margaret Thatcher, Norman Tebbit and Sir Keith Joseph. It came out at a time when a number of important writers were beavering away in illustrating the weaknesses and dangers of socialism and state central planning: Karl Popper, Ayn Rand, Joseph Schumpeter, Isabel Paterson, and Henry Hazlitt. They were seen as outliers at the time, but by the period of the late 1970s when the Keynesian/Big Government consensus was breaking down, a partial counter-revolution in economic and some political thought took place. (Looking back, the 40s was a remarkable time for good, pro-liberty/anti-tyranny writing. Harsh times can have that effect.)
As many of our readers know, this counter-revolution was incomplete. Sections of the public sphere, such as higher education, were not swayed by Hayek’s arguments, at least in their most profound sense. The State remains a bloated monster; in the UK, taxes are at post-1945 highs, and large numbers of work-aged “adults” (I use inverted commas for a reason) aren’t interested in working and subsist on the taxpayer instead. Regulation of business and human relations is a problem. But…it is also important to understand the gains made in the late 70s and during the next decade or so, and why they existed. They took place because people with good insights were able to find an audience when the shit hit the fan. The solid, smelly stuff is hitting many fans now, and this is a time for advocates of ordered liberty, to coin a term, to make the case aggressively, passionately and with a “happy warrior” mindset. Remember how bleak the cause of freedom must have looked when Hayek sat down to write this book, or when George Orwell wrote 1984.
The older I get, the more I think that it is not enough to be intellectually right; you also need to seize the moment, to have an argument to make that is digestible and understandable in any era. (Here are reflections on a book written about all this in the mid-80s and where we are now, by Kristian Niemietz.)
As the late Brian Micklethwait liked to write, to win an argument, you need to have one in the first place.
I recently purchased a train ticket online for a trip wholly within Sweden from Swedish Railways, SJ. The terms and conditions came in an English version, and I note the following:
‘Terms and conditions of purchase and travel
The ticket is non-transferable. On the journey, you need to show a valid ID document (passport, Nordic driving license or ID card, national ID card from an EU country or the Migration Agency’s LMA card that shows that you are an asylum seeker).
The covering email also states:
‘If you can’t show the ticket digitally, you can print it and take it with you on the journey. It’s not possible to print at the train companies’ service points.
The tickets are personal and only valid together with an ID document.
Have a nice journey!
SJ’
So in Sweden, you can become a fare dodger (i.e. a criminal) if you don’t have some form of State ID on you even if you are using a train ticket that you have paid for in full.
How long before our exciting new government finds this a useful way to limit movements, although some might think that in the UK, if you do have a passport, as a regular citizen, you soon won’t be allowed on a train in case you go somewhere nice or go to meet people of a like mind. Either way, it is a sinister development.
“If free speech is a measure of a modern liberal democracy, Brazil is in trouble. A crackdown on expression and the denial of due process for those who contradict the state’s version of the truth dates back to 2020. Now it’s getting worse.”
– Mary Anastasia O’Grady Wall Street Journal ($). She is writing about Brazil’s clampdown on X, aka Twitter. Other countries are looking and watching.
In a previous post – borrowing from C.S. Lewis – I used the word “unconciliatory” to describe Sir Keir Starmer, and I increasingly find it the most appropriate one when thinking about the tenor of governance to which we are now subject. Labour’s victory in the 2024 election was artificial and its well of support is ankle-deep; since only one in five of the electorate actually voted for the party it was already unpopular at the very point of taking office. Politicians who were not thoroughgoing mediocrities would, finding themselves in such a position, be prudent. They would recognise their priorities to be consolidation, calmness and concession – their aim would be to lay stable foundations for future governance with quiet competence. But the current crop do not really understand the word ‘prudence’, or like it. So we are patently not going to get that. We are instead going to get a programme of improvement imposed upon us from above: eat your greens, do your press-ups, and do as nanny says (oh, and hand over your pocket money while you’re at it).
This will all unravel very quickly. People will not get with the programme, because people never really do, and certainly not when it has been designed by those they actively mistrust and sense have nothing but disdain for them. And therefore, in short order, as the truth dawns on the Government that the people are not on board with its plan of action, the sense of disappointment it feels is going to turn to rage. This will in turn have the inevitable result, as the rage becomes nakedly apparent, that the population will start to kick back – mulishly, and hard.
Tommy Robinson being interviewed by Jordan Peterson presents me with pair of people I am not predisposed to like. But set aside Robinson’s thesis about Islam in the UK for a moment, which you can agree with or not, I contend what the state does to try and shut him down is actually the critical issue. Indeed, I would say if even a small fraction of what he says about security services is true, we have rocketed past the point where normal politics can be relied upon for redress and remedy. Watch and listen with an open mind. We are not heading towards a police state, we are well and truly in one.
Fraser Nelson, in a Daily Telegraph (£) column entitled “The Tories didn’t defend liberty in office. But it’s never too late to start.”
This is good analysis, if horrible in what it says about the UK public and where things are in terms of public opinion:
More bans and restrictions will be on their way. Starmer’s logic is clear enough: if sickness and illness cost the NHS money, then your diet becomes his business. Obesity, of course, costs the NHS far more than smoking. So there’s not much to stop restrictions on alcohol, fizzy drinks, bacon and life’s other guilty pleasures. If you let go of the principle of freedom, including the freedom to make bad health choices, it is hard to see where it all stops.
Indeed. A few years ago, people who went on about second-hand or “passive smoking” denied they wanted to ban smoking as such. That was a lie then, and now the mask is well and truly off.
Crucially, this is being driven by not by the nanny-statism of meddling politicians, but by public opinion. Over decades, there has been a shift towards wanting the government to ban more, to regulate more. The Sunak/Starmer smoking ban is backed by six in 10 people. Polling by the Health Foundation found a majority saying alcohol should not be promoted at sporting events, that salty and sugary foods should be taxed more. Another poll shows a third of the public wants smoking banned everywhere, immediately. When covid struck, there was a mass panic and huge demand for Wuhan-style lockdown.
Exactly so. Having said which, people in their actual behaviour – what economists and sociologists called “revealed preferences” – can act in ways that are rather more liberal than suggested by their answers to a pollster about banning X or Y.
For years, the jurist Jonathan Sumption has been pointing out how the empire of law is fast expanding, because the public seem to seek the state’s protection from a greater list of life’s everyday perils. And are prepared to accept ever greater curtailments of their liberty in order to do so.
Indeed. It adds to the costs and irritations of daily life.
It appears that there is some anger, even from the Labour side, about the Starmer proposal to ban smoking in pubs’ “beer gardens”, etc. So I hope that at least on that topic, the relentless urge to micro-manage life is meeting with resistance. But Starmer will not give up easily. Authoritarianism is his “thing”. Remember, the Prime Minister, when leader of the official opposition in the previous Parliament, wanted lockdowns to continue for longer than they did. His nickname, “Capt Hindsight”, was partly born out of that episode.
Of course, it’s good that so many of those responsible for a week of terrifying far-right violence are facing an especially swift and severe form of justice – but there’s one extremely rich and powerful suspect who should join them in the dock. If the UK authorities truly want to hold accountable all those who unleashed riots and pogroms in Britain, they need to go after Elon Musk.
Freedland then accurately describes the way that pogroms throughout history have started:
In 1144, it wasn’t Southport but Norwich, and the victim was a 12-year-old boy called William. When he was found dead, the accusing finger pointed instantly – and falsely – at the city’s Jews. Over the centuries that followed, the defamatory charge of child murder – the blood libel – would be hurled against Jews repeatedly, often as the prelude to massacre.
There are differences, of course, starting with the fact that, so far and thankfully, these riots have not killed anyone – although given the attempts to burn down buildings with people inside, that seems more a matter of luck than mercy. But the common element in events nearly a millennium apart is that lies can wreak havoc when they spread. And that spreading now takes seconds.
So Mr Freedland describes a phenomenon that has recurred throughout history, citing an example that occurred 862 years before Twitter existed. He observes that this phenomenon has taken place yet again, but with the blessed difference that this time (when Twitter was present) no one was killed – and concludes that Twitter made it worse.
That does not make sense. Not only did the Norwich pogrom that Mr Freedland cites happen before the coming of Twitter, it happened almost exactly three centuries before the coming of Gutenberg’s printing press, with its terrifying ability to spread unvetted commentary right across Europe in mere weeks. “And that spreading now takes seconds”, frets Mr Freedland, but on these islands at least, the correlation between the speed of propagation of information and the frequency and severity of race riots and pogroms has been negative. As has been the correlation between these things and the freedom of the press.
“I am under no illusion that even the most passionate and articulate defence of classically liberal values would be an enormous vote winner. But in an election likely to return a Labour government who will, by their nature, proselytise about the good the state can do, and with a Conservative Party which has in recent years shown a frankly alarming tendency towards illiberalism, implementing sugar taxes and attempting to ban smoking forever. The country desperately needs a counterweight to slow our seemingly inevitable slide towards an ever expanding state. Even if the Tories don’t get completely annihilated at the ballot box they are likely to spend at least the next six months tearing themselves apart in a leadership election. The Lib Dems will be providing the real opposition for a while and they need to stand for something.”
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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