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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Almost a third of Tory MPs trying to weaken tenant protection bill are landlords, the Guardian complained almost a month ago. Landlord MPs leave Gove’s rental reform bill ‘close to collapse’, the Telegraph reported yesterday.
Good for them for killing Gove’s Bill, and I care not a whit that they are doing it because killing the Bill would be good for them. Adam Smith explained all that in The Theory of Moral Sentiments:
“The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor; and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency,….they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life which would have been made had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants; and thus, without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species.”
Gove’s so-called reform would have been very bad for tenants. The Telegraph article explains a few of the many reasons why:
Critics argue that it is not only landlords who stand to lose out. The black mark on a tenant’s record following a court judgment would prevent many from finding somewhere else to live, according to another landlord Tory MP backing the amendments.
He said: “An inadvertent consequence of abolishing section 21 [no-fault evictions] is the risk of tenants who fall into arrears getting a court judgment against their name and ending up on the streets.
“Local authorities won’t help them and this will only add to the homelessness problem.
“The advantage to tenants of section 21 is that it’s no-fault, so even if they haven’t paid that won’t get written down.”
Jessica Parry, a partner at law firm Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, said that as well as increasing the risk of homelessness, forcing evictions through the courts would end up costing tenants more.
She added: “Currently, landlords just write off arrears if they evict a tenant. Now landlords will claim arrears as they’re going to court anyway.
“[Going to court] will be slow. If a tenant stops paying it could take a year to get the property back. It’s a massive risk for landlords.
“From a tenant’s point of view, there are already supply and demand issues – not enough housing – and if you put landlords off it’s only going to make that worse.”
Have you met the hate monster?
Have you met the Hate Monster?
The Hate Monster, represents that feeling some people get when they are frustrated and angry and take it out on others, because they feel like they need to show they are better than them. In other words, they commit a hate crime.
The Hate Monster loves it when you get angry. He weighs you down till you end up targeting someone, just because they look or act different to you.
When you’re feeling insecure or angry, the Hate Monster feeds on that.
Why do some people let the Hate Monster in?
We know that young men aged 18-30 are most likely to commit hate crime, particularly those from socially excluded communities who are heavily influenced by their peers.
They may have deep-rooted feelings of being socially and economically disadvantaged, combined with ideas about white-male entitlement.
Hurt people, hurt people
Committing hate crime is strongly linked to a range of risk factors including economic deprivation, adverse childhood experiences, substance abuse and under-employment. Those who grow up in abusive environments can become addicted to conflict.
Don’t let the Hate Monster rule your life
If you have committed or feel you are at risk of committing a hate crime, remember, it doesn’t make you feel better. Maybe for a moment, but in the end, you feel worse. The hate lingers. It can really mess up your life in other ways too, like when it comes to things like finding a job. A police record for hate crime is not a good look on anyone.
Go on, be good to yourself. Don’t feed the Hate Monster.
Watch award-winning stand-up, Liam Farrelly, lead a discussion about the impact of hate.
What to do if you see the hate monster
If you experience hate crime, report it.
If you are a witness to hate crime, report it.
Find out more about the different ways you can make a report.
The official hate monster video would have been perfectly acceptable for primary schools to show to pupils in their PSHE lessons. But if Police Scotland’s idea of a message for adults is “The Hate Monster loves it when you get angry”, I dread to think what the kids’ version is like…
I tawt I taw a hatey monster!
I did! I did! I taw a hatey monster!
Hatey watey monster said hatey tings. Hatey monster said bad tings ’bout all lotsa peepuw coz of pwotected kawactewistic. Hatey monster said, “They may have deep-rooted feelings of being socially and economically disadvantaged, combined with ideas about white-male entitlement.”
I have one policy on the royals: do not actively seek out information on them. I do not believe that I am going to learn anything particularly useful by following their doings.
But you cannot avoid finding things about them passively. In recent months the following facts have unwontedly entered my conciousness:
- The King has cancer
- The Princess of Wales was in hospital for a long time
- The Princess of Wales has not been seen in public for a long time
- The Princess of Wales issued a doctored image of herself and her children
- The claim is going round that the Princess of Wales doctored the image herself
My theory is that the Princess is extremely unwell and that the Palace is trying to cover things up. But why? Well, they can be a bit odd when it comes to Royal health. I mean the Queen one day accepting the resignation of one Prime Minister, appointing another, having a photo taken of the event with her standing upright no less and dying two days later is pretty dramatic. And is a little bit suspicious. You do get the impression that we are not being told the full story. A similar impression was given with the Queen Mother – as was – who was forever ending up in hospital with a fish bone stuck in her throat. Always – seemingly – on a Friday night.
And so with this. Do they really think that an essential part of keeping the Royal show on the road is maintaining an image of – how to put it? – invulnerability? Well, they’ve blown that when it comes to the King, so why maintain the pretense when it comes to the future Queen?
Maybe, they’re just stupid.
By the way and for what it is worth, I thought the doctoring was pretty good. So good that I couldn’t figure out what had been doctored.
Update 13/3/24 Top fact-free speculation here from Toby Young. Starts at the 57:53 mark.
The captain of the Australian women’s football team, Sam Kerr, is awaiting trial in the UK on a charge of “racially aggravated harassment” for allegedly calling a London police officer a “stupid white bastard”.
Craig Foster, a prominent former player for the Australian national team, the Socceroos, intially said that Kerr should resign if convicted, because racism is bad.
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“Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself.”
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“Craig Foster apologises to Sam Kerr after arguing her alleged remark to UK police officer was racist”, reports the Guardian.
Foster last week urged Football Australia to strip Kerr of the Matildas captaincy if the allegation was proven, to make a stand against racism. He said: “Interpersonal racism against a white person … is still racism.”
But on Saturday he explained that he had changed his mind.
“Like many, I mistakenly thought that comments that referenced any colour and were discriminatory, demeaning or hostile were a form of racism. I apologise to Sam for that mistake,” Foster wrote on X.
“Judging from the coverage, comments and conversations we’re all having, every day, there were major gaps in knowledge about how to deal with situations where the descriptor ‘white’ is used in a derogatory way.
“As many experts and leading anti-racism groups have pointed out, interpersonal comments can be offensive, abusive or inappropriate, however, racism can only be perpetrated against a marginalised person or group, which anti-racism frameworks are specifically designed to protect.”
Four points:
1) Anyone believe Craig Foster’s claim that he thought calling someone a “white bastard” was racist until “experts and leading anti-racism groups” told him otherwise? His apology was so obviously made under pressure that it came across almost as parody.
2) Calling someone a “white bastard” is racist. Obviously.
3) Calling someone a “white bastard” is not “racially aggravated harassment”. It was just words. It must be annoying being a cop and having people insult you quite often, but the only difference between this and a thousand other drunken outbursts is that the presence of the word “white” enabled the cop concerned to slap a ridiculous charge on Kerr.
4) I have a low opinion of the conduct of all of Sam Kerr, Craig Foster and the police officer.
There is something special about this government having enacted some of the most socialist policies of any UK government ever and still being loathed as right wing Tories.
In doing this, they have alienated many of those who would normally vote for them and failed to attract any of those who would never vote for them.
Hence they are deservedly in deep shit.
– Hugh Osmond
I have voted for the Conservative Party in every election since 1979 bar one (I voted Brexit Party in the final Euro elections). However, I have told anyone who asks that I will be voting Reform in the next general election.
This often provokes a response along the lines of: “Reform cannot win, all that does is let Labour in.”
To which my reply is: “Yes, I know. But you clearly misunderstand my motives. If Reform wins a few seats, that’s great. But getting some Reform MPs in Westminster in the next general election is not why I am voting for them, that would just be the cherry on top. I am voting Reform because I don’t just want the ‘Conservatives’ to lose, I want them to be utterly destroyed. I want the ‘Conservatives’ as currently understood to be completely discredited, to collapse, to end. And the beauty of it is, Reform can do that to the Tories without winning a single seat themselves.”
As G.K. Chesterton aptly put it:
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.
For all her flaws, Liz Truss was the last chance to save the party, to actually nudge it in kinda sorta the right direction. But she was defenestrated with indecent haste, proving that whilst the Tories were once a ‘broad church’, that is no longer the case. The Blue Blairite Wets will tolerate no challenge to the orthodoxy, that of an ever deeper technocratic regulatory police state, albeit one in which the technocrats are self-referential buffoons, the regulations are self-defeating, and the police are partisan, cowardly and inept. For there to ever again be an actual small-c conservative party in the UK, the capital-C ‘Conservatives’ need to burn, only then is there any chance something better can arise from the ashes, a movement to correct those mistakes the Tories rejoiced in preserving.
A Tory voter declining to vote in the next general election sends a message: “I am disgusted.”
A Tory voter voting for Reform in the next general election sends a slightly different message: “I am disgusted and fuck you.”
Even if by some highly improbable miracle Sunak/Hunt & their coterie of Blue Blairites snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, things will continue to get worse, and root causes of that will not change one iota. Why? Because the direction of travel is exactly what Sunak, Hunt, Starmer etc all agree on and want. They all want a technocratic regulatory state & that’s what we have, a technocratic regulatory state.
Under Labour, it will just become much more obvious, the rainbow makeup brighter, the clown shoes they are destined to keep tripping over more polished, particularly given they will have a triple digit majority. We must end the fiction that the fraudulently named Conservative Party circa 2025 is an alternative to Labour as opposed to much the same thing, just more lubricated and with a better wine list. They had a big majority and could have systematically attacked and undone what Blair did, but they did nothing, because a critical mass of the Tory grandees don’t actually want to. Blair is one of them. What will it take for the last Tory loyalists to see that? Probably nothing and I can easily imagine the photogenic but inane Penny “women-with-cocks” Mordaunt becoming leader when Sunak rides off into the sunset.
We passed the point of no return the day Truss was deposed, that was when we went over the cliff edge. We are a nation of Wile E. Coyotes and a great many of us have yet to look down to grasp the truth. It is pointless and counter productive to call for the brakes to be applied because we are mid-air, there are no brakes. The only thing we don’t know is how long it will take us to hit the bottom. We just need to start thinking about how to survive the impact and what comes next after that.
Starmer, we are told over and over again, is just ‘a normal bloke’ who likes to play football and wants Britain to be well run. He’s just a bland technocrat who rejects divisive ideological narratives in favour of sound government.
But, in truth, Keir Starmer and the people around him do have a radical vision of politics and our democracy. It’s a vision of a country where people who think and act like them are in power forever and where the populist revolts against the new elite which erupted over the last decade, through UKIP, Brexit, the Brexit Party, and then the reassertion of popular sovereignty in 2019, are made impossible.
Labour want to do this by taking political power away from elected governments and giving much more of it to an assortment of unelected civil servants, regional assemblies and spurious quangos.
– Matt Goodwin
In political theory, an idea that got going in the 18th Century was that of the “social contract”, and to this day, writers can sometimes raise the idea that there is an implicit/explicit “deal” that we enter into (stay with me, dear reader) to give up certain qualities or freedom of action in return to some greater overall result. An example used to justify the “Nightwatchman State” of minarchist dreams might be the “contract” in which citizens give up the ability to go after criminals, or those they think are criminals, and instead submit to the powers of policemen and women to do this, or to sub-contract this role to approved private police, etc, and with all the due process of a legal system (details don’t matter, it could have juries, or not, investigative magistrates, or not). The police, so the argument goes, go after suspected wrongdoers and also deter wrongdoing, and the citizens pay a tax to the police, and the territory in which this operates is safer and more tranquil than would otherwise be the case. (Not all liberals/libertarians like the social contract theory, such as Jacob Levy. Robert Nozick did not show much time for it in his Anarchy, State and Utopia, if I recall.)
Well, like all contracts, there can be a point at which one side has so abandoned its side of the deal that the contract loses its legitimacy.
Example from today’s Daily Telegraph (£):
Police have failed to solve a single burglary in nearly half of all neighbourhoods in England and Wales in the past three years despite pledging to attend the scene of every domestic break-in to boost detection rates.
It’s unsurprising that those who can afford it are buying more elaborate security, that domestic household insurance rates are rising fast, and so on. As with the dysfunctional National Health Service, I wonder at what point the penny drops on a lot of the public that they are being defrauded on this “contract”, and demand change?
Here is an explicitly libertarian take on policing.
Slightly off-topic from policing, is a reminder of this book from more than a decade ago, by Joyce Lee Malcolm, about the UK, US, and the very different approaches to handguns and self defence over the decades.
Fourteen years in government and what have the British Conservative Party got to show for it? The highest tax burden since World War II, radical anti-freedom green policies, and critical race and gender theory being applied throughout all institutions.
Some simply blame this all on government incompetence. Others doubt the politicians actually believe what they’re advocating and suspect they are just doing it to appease special-interest groups. While these may play a part in it, one largely overlooked factor is that the British government itself is funding left-wing activism.
– Jess Gill
Nothing to see here sir, please move along:
From Richard Tice’s X/Twitter feed. Tice is leader of Reform, the right-of-centre party started a few years ago:
To suggest that a parliamentary election in this country has not been truly free and fair is a very serious allegation indeed.
Unfortunately however, the behaviour of certain candidates and their supporters in this contest fell very far short of this our traditional democratic standards. What we have witnessed and experienced in Rochdale is deeply disturbing.
In recent weeks, Reform UK’s candidate and campaign team has:
– been subjected to death threats
– suffered vile racist abuse
– been refused entry to hustings in a public building
– had to be relocated for their own safety
– suffered daily intimidation and slurs
In one incident, Reform UK business supporters were threatened with a firebomb attack if they distributed our leaflets. Menacing behaviour was a feature of the entire campaign, including outside polling stations on the day of the election itself. In this ugliest of contests, we are also concerned by the sudden increase in the size of the postal vote, which has jumped from 14,000 to some 23,000 in this constituency since the last general election.
The results of the Rochdale by-election should act as a stark wake up call to those in power – and the entire electorate. This is Britain. We are supposed to be a beacon of democracy. This shameful contest has been more characteristic of a failed state.
Unless something dramatic changes, our fear is that it will be repeated in dozens of constituencies across the UK at the general election. By Christmas, we face the prospect of numerous extremist anti-Semitic lawmakers in the House of Commons.
I thought the existence of voter ID was supposed to render the need for postal voting less necessary, or something. I have performed jury duty in London, and I recall that I had to submit a fair amount of information in order to be eligible. Voting is, or should be, a serious business.
The UK prime minister, Rishi Sunak, did something he should have done a long time ago about where public life in this country is going.
The new Rochdale MP, George Galloway, is one of those PT Barnum chancers in public life who has a most interesting history, as demonstrated by this Reuters (yes, Reuters) story about his involvement in Iraq.
Rochdale has, in a way, sent a guttersnipe to Westminster, bad even by the often flaky standards of MPs.
It is commonly said that the problem for the Tories is that they don’t know what they stand for. There is a certain element of truth in this: the Parliamentary party is an almost absurdly broad spectrum comprising at one extreme people who wouldn’t have looked out of place in one of Tony Blair’s cabinets, and on the other, traditional religious conservatives – with an awful lot of Thatcherites, One Nationers, old-fashioned ‘shire Tories’, ‘wets’ and libertarians in the middle. But the bigger problem, it seems to me, is that the Tories don’t really know what they stand against. This is a particular problem for the Tory party in particular, which since the early 20th century has had the main raison d’etre of keeping Labour out of power. In order to do this, it should go without saying, you have to know what Labour stand for, and provide a clearly discernible alternative. That is the Tory party’s main duty, but it is badly shirking it.
Some readers of this substack will raise their eyebrows at the idea that the Tory party’s existence is mainly justified on the basis of keeping Labour out, so let me explain. And let me make no bones about it: while I have plenty of time for Labour voters (I come after all from dyed-in-the-wool Labour-voting stock) and even some Labour politicians, I despise the Labour Party and more or less everything it stands for. I don’t think there is an institution in contemporary Britain which exerts a more baleful influence. And this is because it is imbued with – indeed, it is the very political manifestation of – what Dostoyevsky might have called the morality of the Grand Inquisitor: a morality that positions itself always against freedom and agency in the name of comfort and ignorance.
– David McGrogan.
Read the whole thing. I heartily commend this article to you and suggest subscribing to David McGrogan’s substack.
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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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