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]
But the new military Keynesianism is based on a delusion. It refuses to confront the fact that defence spending is, in strictly economic terms, one of the very worst ways to promote broad industrial rejuvenation. The growth multipliers are weak and the long-term productivity gains are non-existent. Unlike, say, investment in large-scale capital projects, building things, creating new fixed assets in energy, transport or digital infrastructure, there’s little diffusion of defence spending through the wider economy. While the construction of new roads, power stations or tram networks might provide decades of cheaper inputs, rearmament has a severe opportunity cost. An arms factory might create demand for steel and provide jobs for workers in much the same way as a high-speed rail link — but the former produces few positive spillovers, while the latter can regenerate whole regions. Rather than building the lifeblood of work, jobs and economic activity for the next century, in short, this khaki-clad Keynesianism sacrifices domestic prosperity for a real or perceived threat from without, or else because of an illusory attachment to the idea of Britain as a “global player”.
In truth, building and maintaining a world-class military exists downstream of a serious level of industrial capacity that Britain now sorely lacks. In the days of Bevin and Glubb, Britain built over half the world’s exported cars. Today it’s around 4%. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the UK was second only to the US in its steel production. Today, it manufactures less than Iran and Brazil, not enough to satisfy even half our own national demand. For all Labour’s rhetoric about a manufacturing renaissance, we simply don’t have the basic foundations of a durable industrial ecosystem: steel production; petrochemicals; plastics and advanced materials; energy independence and abundance; and a self-reliant productive base that isn’t subject to the whims of international oil shocks or geopolitical wrangling.
– Jonny Ball writing What the Anglo-Gaullists get wrong
The shape of England’s local government this morning is one that neither of the governing parties of the previous century would recognise.
Reform controls councils across a geography that would have seemed fantastical three years ago: the coalfields of Yorkshire and the North East; the post-industrial heartlands of the West Midlands; the prosperous Essex commuter belt; a London borough; the county halls of ancient Conservative shires. The party that did not exist at a local level in 2022 is now the second largest force in English local government.
Labour has lost control of towns it has governed since the age of Harold Wilson. The Conservatives have lost county councils they held through Thatcher and Major and every convulsion since. Both parties are being eliminated simultaneously, Labour in the post-industrial north and midlands, Conservatives in the shires, by the same insurgency operating through different electoral vintages in different places.
The political establishment consoled itself after 2025 with explanations about protest votes and mid-term difficulty and the challenges of governing. Those explanations have not survived 2026. The protest vote does not win fifty-eight of seventy-five seats in Sunderland. The mid-term difficult does not take Wakefield from a party that held it for half a century. Something more fundamental has changed, and the thirds system means that those councils still holding on by accumulated history will find out, in twelve months, what Wakefield found out on Thursday.
The tide is still rising. The next wave is already dated.
The simple fact is that the Ofcom Fees Duties are expressed to be binding, they are a functional burden on American speech, and they are imposed for the purpose of funding an official censor.
The Ofcom Fees Duties are a British censorship tax on American speech, no matter what language Ofcom chooses to dress it up in. In the United States, those are unconstitutional. See Grosjean v. American Press Co. or Minneapolis Star v. Minnesota Commissioner of Revenue.
The Britain of the mid-19th Century was the greatest civilisation that has ever existed. It had a mighty empire, a mighty navy, it had wiped out the slave trade and it was at the forefront of the Industrian Revolution, the greatest improvement in living standards in history. And now, as I write, it is hanging on by a thread: divided, debt-ridden and weak.
So, where did it all go wrong? Here – in reverse chronological order – is my list of the key dates:
2008. Reaction to the Financial Crisis. Had the banks just been allowed to go bust and the banking regulation that reduced their numbers abolished we would not be looking at 20 lost years.
1997. Opening the borders. Allowing the establishment of hostile communities in your country is not a good idea.
1987. Leaving the NHS untouched. By 1987, the Thatcher government had privatised just about everything. Only the NHS and education were left. And they flunked it. Mind you it would probably have been electoral suicide.
1969. Failure to defeat the IRA. If you reward terrorism you get more of it.
1965. Race Relations Act. Keir Starmer is wrong. Britain does not have a “proud tradition of free speech”. But it did have some free speech. This act along with various successors outlawed some forms of speech. Those successors progressively outlawed freedom of association which might have gone a long way to taking the sting out of the Integration Crisis.
1964. Abolition of the Death Penalty. I appreciate libertarians tended to be divided on this issue. We may have a lot to say about what the law should be but very little about what should happen when it is broken. But if you are going to end a long-standing tradition it had better work. It didn’t.
1963. Robbins Committee. This led to the subsidisation of higher education and the subsidisation of student living costs. Where you get subsidy you get communism.
c.1948. Ending of the right to defend oneself with a firearm. I got this from the late Brian Micklethwait but I haven’t been able to confirm it. Brian’s point was that if you couldn’t use guns to defend yourself there was very little point in having one and so it became easy for the state to ban them.
1948. Nationalisation of rail. Along with coal, steel and many others along the way. Losses, strikes, decline, waste, unemployment.
1947. Town & Country Planning Act. Pretty much stopped building anywhere where people might want to live. A huge contributor to putting home ownership out of the reach of millions.
1931. Abandoning the Gold Standard. Inflation and boom and bust became the order of the day.
1920s. Abolition of the Poor Law. I mean to write about this one day but TL;DR while the Poor Law had many shortcomings it did at least keep people alive while keeping the costs down.
1922. Creation of the BBC. A monopoly communist propaganda organisation using the most powerful media then in existence which non-communists were forced to pay for. What could go wrong?
1920. Beginning of the War on Drugs. Other than the crime and changes to the drugs themselves (making them more dangerous than ever), the persistent failure of the War on Drugs gave the state the excuse for ever greater assaults on civil liberties.
1918. Universal Adult Male Franchise. This meant that people could vote themselves other people’s money. It very quickly led to the replacement of the (not very) Liberal Party by the (not-at-all liberal) Labour Party. Mind you, it should be pointed out that a lot of the damage was done well before.
1910. People’s Budget et al. In introducing the state pension, a state GP service and unemployment benefit this laid the foundations of the Welfare State that is currently doing such a good job of bankrupting the country.
1910. Payment of MPs. I put this one in tentatively. I would like to say it meant Members of Parliament no longer had to have made something of themselves but given that a large number of them came from rich families that is not quite true.
1906. Taff Vale Judgement. This effectively put trade unions above the law leading to endless strikes, uncompetitiveness, industrial decline and unemployment.
1890s. Death Duties. Bit by bit this destroyed the aristocracy by forcing a fire sale every time the head of the household died. [And that did what exactly, Patrick? Summat! It did summat!]
1875. Trade Union Act. This allowed picketting or the intimidation of non-striking workers by trade unionists. I have to thank Paul Marks for bringing this one to my attention.
1870. Forster Act. This established state education along with all that went along with it such as indoctrination, poor quality education and the opportunity costs involved in children not being able to earn money or learn a trade.
1845. Banking Act. This began the extension of the Bank of England’s monopoly to the whole of the country.
I thought that this apparently minor news story from the Telegraph, the comment made by someone called Bernie@Artemisfornow while linking to the story on Twitter, and the reply to that comment with an apt quote by Alexis de Tocqueville were all worth highlighting.
In case the screenshot goes away, the Telegraph story has the headline “Volunteer banned from cleaning graves over ‘health and safety’ fears” and the standfirst “Ben McGregor says South Tyneside authority has threatened him with legal action, despite praise from families“. It continues,
A volunteer has been banned from cleaning graves because the council says it is not safe.
Ben McGregor, 25, washes the headstones at Hebburn Cemetery, South Tyneside, with only soap, water and a bristle brush.
He lost both his father and his best friend to suicide and, after struggling with his own mental health, said that “if I am helping others, it helps me”.
However, the Labour-led council claims it would be “inappropriate” for Mr McGregor to continue his work because “safety checks have not taken place”.
He has been praised by families for his transformations of the headstones, but said the council had threatened him with legal action if he did not stop.
Mr McGregor said: “The one that stands out to me is a woman who was suffering from cancer. She was crying on the phone, saying that’s the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me. The council’s response has blown my mind. It’s doing my head in”.
To which Bernie@Artemisfornow replied,
This is England, where even the kindest, most human acts are subject to control by authoritarian pen pushers.
Using “health and safety” to stop a young 25 year old man from cleaning gravestones with soap and water.
This is how you crush a society. You do it by smothering small acts of decency, like driving people home from the pub and cleaning gravestones. You do it by putting rules in the way of people pulling together, until eventually they just stop trying.
and TurnedFourthing @turnedfourthing in turn replied,
de Tocqueville had this figured out 180 years ago:
After having thus taken each individual one by one into its powerful hands, and having molded him as it pleases, the sovereign power extends its arms over the entire society; it covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules, which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot break through to go beyond the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them and directs them; it rarely forces action, but it constantly opposes your acting; it does not destroy, it prevents birth; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupifies, and finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
I have always believed that this sort of servitude, regulated, mild and peaceful, of which I have just done the portrait, could be combined better than we imagine with some of the external forms of liberty, and that it would not be impossible for it to be established in the very shadow of the sovereignty of the people.
There is a ritual as old as democracy itself, and it has nothing to do with voting. It takes place in the days before polling, in the offices of think tanks, the studios of broadcasters, and the columns of political magazines. It is the ancient art of expectation management — the careful calibration of what counts as success and failure, conducted not in the interests of accuracy but of narrative. This week, with the May 7th elections bearing down upon us, we have been treated to a masterclass of the genre.
Peter Kellner, former president of YouGov and a man whose estimable intelligence I have no interest in disputing, has published a guide to the upcoming elections in Prospect. It is admirably readable and contains much of interest. But embedded within it is a paragraph about Reform that repays close attention, because it illustrates with almost pedagogical clarity how the expectation game is played.
Kellner deploys the Rallings and Thrasher model to suggest that if Reform win 1,400 seats, they will be “sunk in gloom,” and that anything short of 2,000 should indicate that they are “slipping back.” He frames sub-2,000 as the threshold of adequacy. The implication is clear: a party that currently holds two councillors among the seats being contested should apparently consider 1,400 gains a cause for institutional mourning.
Only?
Let me be direct: I would be happy with 1,000 seats. I would be delighted with anything north of 1,200. And I say this not from false modesty but from an honest reading of the data, weeks of campaigning on the ground, the political landscape, my own politically pessimistic nature, and, perhaps most importantly, from a sceptical eye on the baseline figure Kellner has chosen to make his arithmetic work.
Nextdoor, for those that don’t know, is one of those local social media apps. It can be a great place to find out local news, although the number of posts about cats being run over can be depressing. The other day I saw a post that depressed me despite featuring no dead pets. A presumably well-meaning lady asked, “Would it be unreasonable to remove the shop brand labels on clothes that I want to give to local charity shops?” She had observed that some people buy clothes with prestigious labels from charity shops or second-hand clothes apps such as Vinted and then sell them at a profit. She wanted to prevent this happening.
Several people challenged her view. “Why would you take the labels out if you are donating to a charity?” said one response. “The charity could make more money with the labels in”. That seemed to be the majority opinion. But a distressingly large minority clearly felt that reducing the charity’s income from selling donated clothes was worthwhile to ensure that no “spivs” could make any money from selling them a second time.
It follows from this that digital ID could easily function as a permissions system. The computer might say No, leaving John unable to hire the car or buy the wine. That could be the result of an administrative error or technical glitch but, by the time the issue was resolved, John’s plans would have been cancelled. But it could also be due to the cancellation of his digital ID, a possibility the Government makes explicit in the consultation, explaining it would need the power to revoke someone’s digital ID.
Speaking at the Parliamentary committee, insider-outsider Whitley said that the system envisaged for the right-to-work checks was one in which permissions for other activities, such as buying alcohol, could be switched off and on at will.
The title of this Telegraph article by Daniel Hannan “Here’s why I’m quitting the Conservative Party” is true – he is quitting – but not for the reason you think. The Reform Party will not be getting its first representative in the House of Lords quite yet. Hannan writes,
Here is the nub of the problem. A majority of the electorate believes that Britain, which has the highest tax rate since the aftermath of the Second World War and whose national debt is about to overtake its annual GDP, is some kind of Hayekian, if not Dickensian, state. The single most unpopular Labour policy since polling day was to seek to remove the winter fuel allowance from better-off pensioners.
Our politician problem, in short, is a manifestation of our electorate problem. Plenty of MPs, including Labour MPs, can see what needs to be done. But they can’t see how to get re-elected if they do it.
For example, almost every politician will privately admit that the pensions triple lock is condemning Britain to penury, yet no party proposes abolition. Why not? Because, by 65 to 11 per cent, voters want to keep it (all figures are from YouGov polls within the last 18 months).
MPs likewise know that the NHS cannot remain a state monopoly. Wes Streeting, Nigel Farage, Kemi Badenoch – all have eyes in their heads. But, having eyes, they are also aware that voters oppose any use of private provision, even within a system free to the user, by 71 to 16 per cent.
Every MP grasps that housebuilding has not kept up with population growth for 40 years. So where are all the new towns that keep being proposed? It turns out that voters (by 49 to 30 per cent) don’t want them.
We are in a vicious circle. As things deteriorate, voters become angry, and blame the political class. MPs lose whatever lingering legitimacy they had, and become even less able to propose unpopular policies.
and
Consider, for example, the idea that rent controls reduce the number of available properties and so drive up rents. It is not obvious, but a few minutes’ thought reveals that, if people cannot make a profit by letting out their homes, they will not do it.
Or consider the idea that you become more secure by buying what you need from around the world rather than by manufacturing it at home. Again, it seems counterintuitive, but we apply that principle to our own lives. Indeed, it is precisely the important things – food, clothing, housing – that we purchase from specialists rather than trying to make them ourselves.
Consider, above all, the idea that cutting the tax rate might encourage more economic activity and so generate more tax revenue. This must, if you think about it, be true. A tax rate of 100 per cent would mean zero revenue, since people would not work for nothing, so it is simply a question of finding where the optimum rate is.
At present, though, voters instead favour any tax that they think will fall on other people. For example, a wealth tax – a textbook example of a levy that drives entrepreneurs away and reduces revenue – is backed by an extraordinary 75 per cent of voters, with just 12 per cent opposed. In the current climate, almost no one in public life is prepared to tell 75 per cent that they are wrong.
Yet it is precisely the counter-intuitive truths that can be profitably taught. That was what Ralph Harris did in the 1950s and 1960s; and it is what I shall be doing from 1 June, when I take over as the director of the IEA.
“Basically my philosophy is Austrian School economics” – at 21:12 in this interview between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Rupert Lowe. How refreshing to see a media interview in which neither participant is an idiot.
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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