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 Putin understands – and what Britain refuses to face – is that Europe is vulnerable in ways that matter more than tanks or troop numbers. Russia’s president does not need to defeat Nato militarily to cause chaos. As he has already shown through repeated greyzone attacks, Europe’s power grids, subsea cables, energy systems and communications networks offer targets far easier to strike, far harder to defend and politically far more disruptive. Putin’s warning this week was a reminder that Russia knows exactly where our exposed nerves lie.
– Sam Olsen (£)
“Live facial recognition cameras planned for every town centre”, reports today’s Telegraph.
Police could be given access to Britain’s passport database to catch criminals under an expansion of facial recognition technology that could be deployed in every city, town and village.
Labour is proposing that police be allowed to compare photos of crime suspects from CCTV, doorbells and dashcams against facial images on government databases, including the passports of 45 million Britons, and immigration records.
The plans are part of a Home Office consultation launched on Thursday to establish a legal framework for all police forces to use facial recognition technology to catch wanted criminals and crime suspects.
As a commenter on the UK Politics subreddit called Eldritch_Lemonade observes,
Oh look, it’s taken 3 months to go from rolling out 10 vans with facial recognition to be used in specific and targeted ways to every town in the country scanning your face constantly
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/live-facial-recognition-technology-to-catch-high-harm-offenders
That Home Office “news story” with the title “Live Facial Recognition technology to catch high-harm offenders” to which Eldritch_Lemonade linked was issued on 13 August 2025. Naughty Eldritch was exaggerating with the “three months”; it’s nearer four. A whole three months and three weeks ago the Home Office reassured us that…
The new vans will operate according to strict rules, which ensure they are only deployed when there is specific intelligence. The College of Policing has clear guidance on how the technology should be used.
These vehicles enable law enforcement to target and locate wanted criminals and suspects for the most serious crimes including sex offences, violent assaults, homicide and serious and organised crime. Forces already using LFR have used it to arrest rape, domestic abuse, knife crime and robbery suspects as well as sex offenders breaching their conditions. The technology has also been used to maintain safety at big public events.
Existing safeguards require checks only to be done against police watchlists of wanted criminals, suspects and those subject to bail or court order conditions like sex offenders. Watchlists are bespoke to every deployment, with officers following strict guidance from the College of Policing guidance when composing a list.
“I fear that today’s way of life is not our strength but has become our weakness. It has become debilitating and corrupting. The two world wars spawned an enlarged public sector that has, in the past 30 years, become the insatiable cuckoo in the next, pushing out other activities by absorbing resources, increasing debt, raising taxes, creating unproductive employments, encouraging people not to work, over-regulating while under-performing, promoting mass immigration to feed its preference for cheap labour, and destroying vital industries in the pursuit of a green fantasy. It has created dependency and encouraged irresponsibility – all the more damaging in a society that has jettisoned much of its identity and pride. I have never felt more pessimistic about our ability to change.
“Our `progressives’ still inhabit a dream-world: globalisation, `rules-based order’, open borders and the EU. They depend on perpetual public sector expansion for their existence,. This is, say Labour MPs, `in the party’s DNA’. It cannot face reality, as the recent Budget shows. The only part of the public sector not in their DNA is defence. The Liberal Democrats and Greens are even worse. A coalition of the three would be a nightmare.
“We cannot defend ourselves while the present system prevails. Hence the contempt of Trump and Putin. People have of course been saying this for years and like the boy who cried wolf, they have been ignored. Now, however, the wolf is at the door.”
– Robert Toombs, Daily Telegraph (£)
I called the author “richard” – apologies for the goof.
‘The business of funding digging journalists is important to encourage’, Andrew Marr informed the Independent in 2008. ‘It cannot be replaced by bloggers who don’t have access to politicians, who don’t have easy access to official documents, who aren’t able to buttonhole people in power.’ At the Cheltenham Literary Festival two years later, he was dismissing these online upstarts as ‘socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed young men sitting in their mother’s basements and ranting. They are very angry people.’ And there’s more: ‘So-called citizen journalism is the spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night.’
But the media world is changing. In the US, major networks are looking to online media for a lead as ratings for legacy media decline. CBS has enlisted Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News, a few short years after she was bullied out of the New York Times before she slowly built up a multi-million dollar online empire with the Free Press.
Some BBC stalwarts have, like Marr, perhaps seen where things are heading, and jumped ship to be free to express their old ideas on new media. Emily Maitlis and John Sopel created the News Agents podcast for this purpose. Oxbridge-educated Maitlis now doubles down on the smug but deluded sense of class-based superiority that has become her stock-in-trade. Never has she seemed more out of place as when she deigned to take her podcast to Clacton on the eve of the General Election last year. Nigel Farage is now Clacton’s MP.
– Michael Collins with an absolutely stonking article on Spiked
Richard Hanania once wrote about how the measures of freedom calculated by NGOs like Freedom House were skewed and worthless, because they were more concerned with those interpersonal freedoms than with actual concrete liberties. What matters to most people is simply whose side you’re on, and it goes without saying that a Right-wing European regime in which police turned up at people’s doors for expressing unfashionable opinions would be roundly condemned – and rightly so.
What makes our anarcho-tyranny all the more illiberal is that no one can be entirely sure what exactly are the unfashionable opinions deemed worthy of the state’s interference. In recent years moral norms have changed so quickly that people can find themselves in trouble for saying things that were totally mainstream ten years ago. In many cases they might not even be aware about the unspoken edict that such an opinion is now verboten, and I suspect it is not a coincidence that so many of the individuals caught out by this new tyranny have some form of autism.
– Ed West
I wrote these thoughts on my Facebook page yesterday, and I have taken a few elements out and added others. Anyway, let me know what you think:
The State’s share of the total economy continues to rise, putting even more pressure on those who are still here, working, building business, etc. There are one or two decent elements in it (stamp duty suspended on new share listings in London) but the general direction is bad. Unfortunately, given the reluctance of backbench Labour MPs to accept any meaningful welfare reforms, the total public spending bill will continue to rise. So next year we could have more of the same. That means more emigration of young, ambitious people to lower-tax places such as Dubai, Australia (relatively), etc. The tax base will contract.
One element in particular – the so-called “mansion tax” levy on high-value properties – bothers me not just because of the specifics (it will gum up the real estate market, and thresholds are bound to be frozen, drawing in more over time), but because of a principle.
If I own something that is valuable, why should I pay tax on it purely for that reason? Does the imposition of such a levy equate to the State acting as a landlord, demanding a rent? I can understand the point that a property that is valuable partly because of state action should therefore bear some tax (this is the argument for land value taxes or even council taxes, although LVT is problematic); there is also some sense in taxing property owners to pay for local services (back in the 19th C, only freeholders could vote in elections, which meant they had a vested interest in frugal government).
But taxing something that is worth X, and purely for that reason, is punitive. It also means that the asset-rich/cash-poor issue arises. Some people will need to sell, or at least downsize earlier than they perhaps wanted. Some folk might rent out a room to a tenant, or take out a second mortgage to find the cash. That could have a cascade impact on property prices, perhaps undermining the point of the tax. But maybe that is the point of this tax: it is designed to push property values down. And ironically, that will mean that on death of the owner (s), the haul in inheritance tax will be lower than otherwise.
If you own your home – you have paid for it fair and square, then it is yours. Period. A tax puts the State in the position of a sort of supreme landlord.
I realise that some people will say that there is a generational wealth injustice issue here, because lots of younger adults cannot afford to buy or even rent a decent place. That’s a genuine issue. The solution, broadly, is to free up the planning system, and control net immigration. Another factor is that we must stop artificially holding down interest rates, which has enriched some people with large homes, particularly if they are leveraged.
In some ways, the situation today is the long-drawn out consequence of the 2008 financial bust and a decade-plus of very low interest rates.
I saw a few people on other social media forums saying that objectors should stop bellyaching and pay up. Apart from the oafishness of this sort of response (“do what you are told!”), it ignores the principle of absolute property ownership. Another objection I’ve seen is that lots of people have to downsize, so those affected can do so. However, this is not that easy. Who’s going to buy, particularly when stamp duties are high and taxes in general are crimping growth? Underlying liquidity in the UK housing market is weak and unlikely to improve fast, although it might pick up a bit. Some owners might rent out part of their home to make a bit of cash to cover the tax, but not all such homes are easily changeable for that purpose, and rental income is now taxed anyway. Even so, I would expect some of this to happen in the years before the measure is hopefully repealed. The new tax will not come in immediately – and might get snarled up as the general election nears (it must be held by July 2029).
Of course, people downsize their property for various reasons: their children flee the nest; people want a smaller place to look after, unlock value and buy a holiday home, travel, invest in a business or hobby, etc. it’s natural and normal. But it’s not the State’s role to force the pace on this, to create a sense of duress.
The levy on high-value homes is a form of wealth tax. Even someone who is generally favourable towards the UK government, Dan Neidle, says they are a really bad idea.
Of course, I don’t need to spell it out to the sensible Samizdata regulars that what is wanted are taxes that are as low, flat and simple as possible.
Final random thought: property taxes could be defended in the past when only freeholders could vote in elections, and they tended to have an incentive to vote for stuff that would protect the value of what they had, such as sewage, water supply, electrification, parks, amenities, law enforcement of various kinds, and so on. I sometimes hope, however, naively, that we could bring such an approach back. Voting ought to involve some beneficial ownership “buy-in” to one’s neighbourhood.
“It [taxes on property values] is tantamount to a quasi-authoritarian reopening of settled property rights and fundamentally reorders the relationship between the individual and the state. Her scheme begins to abolish freehold property, turning yeoman-owners into leaseholders, with politicians as the ultimate landlords. Her `high value council tax surcharge’ is best understood as a rent, to be paid to [Rachel] Reeves for the right to stay in one’s home. Labour hates ordinary landlords, but is desperate to turn the state into the most exploitative of rent collectors. It’s sub-Marxist nonsense, a form of legalised theft.”
– Allister Heath, Daily Telegraph, 27 November, on yesterday’s Autumn Budget from Rachel Reeves, UK finance minister. He’s right that things such as “mansion taxes” – which in reality raise relatively paltry sums – are about forcing owners of properties deemed to be above £X or whatever into a situation where they own them at the sufferance of the State, rather than outright. And the temptation to lower the threshold on such a tax, along with everything else, will be irresistable.
On a related point, now seems a good time to introduce readers again to an essay in defence of absolute property right ownership – rather than the idea of owning it at the sufferance of the State. The essay, “Your Dog Owns Your House”, by the late French writer and classical liberal, Anthony de Jasay, is a masterpiece.
My computer is evil, so this will be brief.
“Justice secretary wants jury trials scrapped except in most serious cases”, the BBC reports:
Justice Secretary David Lammy is proposing to massively restrict the ancient right to a jury trial by only guaranteeing it for defendants facing rape, murder, manslaughter or other cases passing a public interest test.
An internal government briefing, produced by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) for all other Whitehall departments, confirms plans to create a new tier of jury-less courts in England and Wales.
The new courts would deal with most crimes currently considered by juries in Crown Court.
But the MoJ said no final decision had been taken by the government.
The plans, obtained by BBC News, show that Lammy, who is also deputy prime minister, wants to ask Parliament to end jury trials for defendants who would be jailed for up to five years.
The proposals are an attempt to end unprecedented delays and backlogs in courts, and do not apply to Scotland or Northern Ireland.
Here is what David Lammy said about juries in 2020:
David Lammy
@DavidLammy
Jury trials are a fundamental part of our democratic settlement. Criminal trials without juries are a bad idea.
The Government need to pull their finger out and acquire empty public buildings across the country to make sure these can happen in a way that is safe.
12:20 pm · 20 Jun 2020
I strongly recommend this article by Gawain Towler about the unedifying case of traitor Nathan Gill.
In May 2020, I wrote a piece called ‘Britain’s Covid Reich’. I commented:
One of the most remarkable aspects of the creation of Britain’s Covid Reich was that even in the middle of the Government’s witless, confused and ambivalent approach to the crisis it was able to rustle up overnight many of the key ingredients of totalitarianism. The ideology and the slogans, and the continual repetition of the message with the supine assistance of broadcast media all fell into place with frightening speed. The speed with which the Great British Public acquiesced was even more alarming.
One possibility I anticipated was:
In one direction lies the complete end of everything we have ever held dear and a life literally not worth living, a mere spectral existence in a paralysed and terrified surveillance state of agoraphobics queuing up like mendicant friars for government handouts.
I thought I was going over the top when I wrote that. But that’s exactly what’s happened – hasn’t it? Back then I thought there was a more optimistic possible alternative, but I was wrong.
Few politicians, few scientists and even worse few in the so-called free press seemed to be able to understand that the measures the Government was imposing were going to leave a legacy that would, and has, set Britain back by half a century and perhaps change it permanently. Anyone who dared to stray from the state propaganda line was shot down in flames.
So it is almost beyond belief to see that the confused and contradictory Covid Inquiry has continued to ignore the impact of lockdown…
– Guy de la Bédoyère
We’re told that students perform better when exposed to “different formats”. This is fair enough in principle, though the guidelines decline to specify what these formats might be, beyond implying there will be an impressive number of them. One can already picture the future: a single course requiring essays, posters, podcasts, puppet shows and a short stop-motion film made from Play-Doh – each designed to develop the student’s confidence, creativity and capacity to perform self-expression in increasingly unhinged ways.
Next, the document warns that “Standard Academic English” (once known as “English”) is an oppressive tool that advantages “already privileged students”. The implication, apparently, is that requiring coherent writing is a form of violence.
This is the educational equivalent of a gym announcing that push-ups are discriminatory because they favour those with upper-body strength.
– Michael Rainsborough
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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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