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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Where were you at 10:45 this morning? I expect some of you were attending one of the Remembrance Sunday services that take place at war memorials in towns and villages up and down the UK in order to commemorate the dead of the two world wars and other wars since then. By quarter to eleven the people attending such a service have assembled ready for the two-minute silence at eleven o’clock.
In 1987, just as it did this year, Remembrance Sunday fell on the 8th of November. At 10:45am on that day, the Provisional IRA detonated a bomb at a Remembrance Sunday parade in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland. There was no warning. Eleven people were killed at the time. Another victim died in 2000 after spending thirteen years in a coma.
This video shows how the atrocity was reported on the BBC news that evening.
One and a half minutes into the video, the newsreader, Nicholas Witchell, observes that “So far the IRA has said nothing, which is unusual”. I remember that silence, as if the bombers themselves could scarcely believe what they had done. I have read that even the IRA’s Russian and Libyan paymasters were appalled. As it said eleven minutes into the 1987 BBC report, the Soviet news agency TASS called the bombing “a barbaric act”, and film of the aftermath of the bombing was shown on Russian television.
As I said, I remember noticing at the time that a whole day went by before the IRA admitted responsibility. But in 2026 I seem to be unusual in remembering the attack at all.
Now look at his list. Black English, Asian English, Mixed English, “etc.” Every item is a prefix bolted onto English. English on its own never appears, and White English, the one I asked him about directly, is left out. I don’t think that was a slip. It’s what happens when a clever man has absorbed the official grammar of British ethnicity, the grammar in which English is not a people but a suffix, a flavour that attaches to the real categories. In that grammar the one group with no prefix is the one group that never gets named, because to name it would be to concede that it exists as a people at all rather than as the plain paper everyone else is printed on. Something that cannot, ever be allowed.
– Gawain Towler
I am not the first person to question the arrangements as they currently stand. The Labour peer and former Attorney General Lord Goldsmith wrote, in his review of UK citizenship for the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown in 2008, that “I do propose that government gives consideration to making a clear connection between citizenship and the right to vote by limiting in principle the right to vote in Westminster elections to UK citizens”, adding “it is right in principle not to give the right to vote to citizens of other countries living in the UK until they become UK citizens.” Unfortunately Gordon Brown ignored the report. So did David Cameron’s government and all its successors. But Lord Goldsmith was still correct.
– David Frost (£)
This is not a change of heart. A change of heart is permitted to an honest man, and he announces it, and he takes the consequences. This is something else. It is a man who held one view in the pub in Ashton and holds the opposite in the Berlaymont, and who will not say rejoin and will not say no, because either word would cost him somebody.
– Gawain Towler
This is today’s cartoon by Ben Jennings in the Guardian:
If you can’t see the cartoon, it shows a man and a woman in what looks like a TV studio set up for a Sunday morning political interview. The man, a toffee-nosed member of the upper classes, is saying, “Britain has already paid reparations for slavery to all those poor slave-owning families who lost out when it was abolished…”. The woman – presumably the interviewer – looks nonplussed.
The cartoon is clearly meant to suggest that the British government of the 1830s paying the slaveowners the then vast sum of twenty million pounds to free their slaves after the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act was a bad thing.
It was indeed regrettable that those who had done evil were rewarded rather than punished. But paying off the masters worked. After half a century of effort, and with a thousand caveats and complications, it freed the slaves.
I ask Mr Jennings, as I ask everyone who sneers at the fact that the British government paid off the slaveowners, what strategy they think the government should have followed to free the slaves instead?
Just telling the owners to get on and do it because Parliament said so ran the risk that, without any incentive to obey a law that would impoverish them, they would simply refuse. Then what – war? The slaves were held in the West Indies, not in Britain itself. Sending multiple fleets across thousands of miles to subdue each rebellious island and territory would have been beyond the capacities of any government in the world at that time. Civil wars, as this would have been, are particularly terrible. The war the United States fought to end slavery in that country killed a higher proportion of the people involved than almost any other war in history.
Another thing: the outcome of war can never be certain. The slaveowners in some or all of the islands might very well have fought off the overstretched government forces, establishing independent slaveowning states in which slavery might have lasted for generations more than it did in real life.
All in all, if you were a slave circa 1833 and you somehow heard about this proposal to bring freedom to you and your family at the cost of unjustly rewarding your oppressor, would you want it to go ahead?
For their part, Russian commentators and politicians today seem to have an absurdly exaggerated idea of Britain’s power, the puppet-masters behind American global domination, still pulling the strings, rather than a country run by naive humanities graduates who place our ‘international standing’ above national interests. Rabid threats to nuke London by tipsy Russian politicians are the last crumbs of dignity and self-respect we have left, for which thank you.
– Ed West
The ASI published a paper that recommended the wholesale privatization of local government services, starting with bin collection. Thatcher liked it so much that she had it photocopied 10,000 times and sent a copy to every Conservative councillor in Britain.
Thatcher didn’t like the word ‘privatization’, because it sounded new and strange. She wanted to call it denationalisation. But we pointed out that we were going to apply it to industries that had never been nationalised in the first place. We still insisted on spelling it with a ‘z’ to make it look like something new.
The first to go was Cable and Wireless, then BP, but the first big public flotation was of the Post Office telephone service, a state monopoly. Rather than sell it to a private company, the government decided to sell it to everyone, with a flotation in which the public were invited to apply for shares. To keep the telephone workers on side, they were offered 200 free shares if they bought 200. The union ran a hostile campaign showing a telephone cable being cut with scissors, but 96% of the workforce took the money instead.
– Madsen Pirie, recalling how Margaret Thatcher turned things around.
The subject of public disorder seems strangely topical, as I’m writing as rioting in France quietens down. Events in Paris and elsewhere have, inevitably, prompted a number of “what if?” comparisons with the UK. Our tradition of protest is significantly different from that of continental Europe, but that doesn’t mean we can afford to be complacent. On the other hand, nor is it necessarily a reason for panicky chief constables and sly mandarins to litigate for mega-forces, national police services and gendarmeries.
– Dominic Adler, discussing Blighty’s recent history of crowds kicking off. Part 1 is here, Part 2 is here.
One is we’ve just let state spending drift up too high. It’s 10 percentage points higher as a share of GDP than it was in the early Blair era. That in itself is enough to take 1% off growth, probably. Second, the markets are all gummed up. All our markets of all kinds are simply gummed up, over-regulated massively compared to where we were 20 or 30 years ago. The third bit of it, I think, is less economic and more cultural. I think it’s about the erosion of the sense of the British nation state’s political project – that we are all one country together, all pulling in the same sort of direction.
– David Frost
“What comes next: A fairer approach to primary assessment” is a paper by the Institute for Public Policy Research, a progressive think tank.
Here’s the IPPR’s own summary of its report:
We set out four recommendations for immediate implementation from the 2027/28 academic year.
Recommendation 1: The Department for Education should establish an independent ‘statutory accessibility and bias audit’ for all key stage 2 assessments.
Recommendation 2: The Department for Education should remove the Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar (SPaG) test.
Recommendation 3: The Department for Education should change how results are published and reported by:
– ending the publication of school-level key stage 2 results, which would also end the publication of school-level league tables
– using rolling averages (for instance, three- or five-year averages) of attainment data from the department and from Ofsted for internal monitoring and inspection.
Recommendation 4: The Department for Education should introduce a competency framework for pupil results in place of scaled scores.
However, reform must go further to build a truly equitable system that properly supports disadvantaged pupils. Therefore, we also set out a further recommendation to act as the foundation of a longer-term, more significant reform to primary school assessment.
Recommendation 5: The Department for Education should introduce a random sampling approach to assessment across years 3–6.
Emphasis added.
“Protester wears burqa to deny concealing identity”, reports the BBC:
A protester has appeared in court wearing a burqa to deny a charge of wearing the Islamic religious garment to conceal his identity during a Hampshire protest.
Timothy Miller, 76, of Sherwood Avenue in Hedge End, Southampton, was arrested in relation to the anti-migrant and anti-racism demonstrations in Portsmouth city centre on 12 September.
During the hearing at Portsmouth Magistrates’ Court on Wednesday, he lifted the veil while holding a black handbag as he confirmed his identity.
The handbag was a nice touch.
When asked how he pleaded, Miller replied: “As I am in every police camera, I am not guilty”.
A pleasing paradox. Agree or disagree with his politics, Mr Miller has given a masterclass in the application of Saul Alinksy’s Rules for Radicals, numbers four, five and six:
4. “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”
5. “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. There is no defense. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.”
6. “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.”
Dominic Green of the Washington Examiner supplies more detail,
A female police officer confronted Miller about his clothing. “It’s because I’m converting to Islam and I’m gender-fluid,” Miller explained, waving a beefy and boldly exposed hand with feminine grace. “I’m not here to make trouble.”
Once you realise part of Patriot Platform’s operating model is that of a parapolitical soap opera, with feuds, beefs and big characters… it starts to make more sense. And, ofc, this type of politics turns on making a pound note, as Tommy Robinson’s many detractors have shown. And I’m hardly Nick Lowles, but evidence is evidence. There’s an entire ecosystem of influencers, “auditors” and YouTubers making a living peddling ragebait. The police? They’re extras in Danny Tommo’s ongoing structured reality TV show.
– Dominic Adler
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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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