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I do not know what this woman is accused of. [UPDATE: Commenter John did know, and linked to this Mark Steyn interview and this Mail story from October 2022.] It is always possible that things will look different if ever we get to hear the full story – not that Surrey Police seem inclined to tell us. But if this is half as bad as it looks, Caroline Farrow is right: it is important – and frightening.
To save space, and to keep a sequential record of them in case they disappear, I have written out the rest of the tweets in her thread as bullet points. The following was written by Caroline Farrow, not me:
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On Monday afternoon my solicitor received a bizarre communication from Surrey police solicitors. He thought it had to do with my civil claim against them.
After some miscommunication, they sent through a bundle for a court hearing.
I am due in court tomorrow morning.
The police asked that “physical paperwork” relating to the court hearing against me in 2 days, was withheld from me.
They wanted me to go to a court hearing without access to the accusations and alleged evidence.
Surrey police have applied for a stalking protection order as a result of material I have posted on Twitter.
On page 1 of the bundle repeated misgendering is cited.
Here are the prohibitions they are seeking tomorrow morning.
I will be assigned an “offender manager”.
I will not be allowed to use any Social Media, Social Networking, Gaming, Dating (lol) site without this person’s written permission and having supplied them with usernames and passwords for all sites within 3 days.
In addition the following requirements are added:
1. Allow Police Officers to enter your registered address(es), between the hours of 8am and 8pm, to conduct a risk assessment, monitor devices, and manage compliance of the order
2. Provide your Offender Manager with any mobile, digital, or internet enabled devices for examination, review, and monitoring purposes, immediately upon request. You must also your provide your Offender Manager with any access PINs, passwords, or patterns. Examinations may be completed manually on scene, or could entail them seizing your device(s) for examination by agencies contracted by the police for that purpose. Failing to disclose the existence of a device in your possession to your Offender Manager will count as a failure to comply with this condition.
3. Re-register home address every 12 months at a Police Station (within 365 days of last registration).
4. Provide your Offender Manager with list of all mobile, digital, or internet enabled devices that you own or have access to use. The list must be provided within three days of the order being granted or within three days of any changes.
The police officer says this:
I believe that while presenting a significant interference with the respondent’s privacy rights, it is an appropriate course of action in the circumstances.
Signed by Surrey Police Superintendent
“I consider that in accordance with paragraph 2 of Article 8 of HRA, an interference by this force as a public authority is in accordance with the law and is necessary.”
I left out another condition Surrey police are asking for.
5. Possessing, owning or using more than one mobile phone and one SIM card, unless with written permission from your Offender Manager in the area that you reside. You must provide the telephone number and unique identifying numbers of all device(s) within three days of this order being granted or within three days of and supplying any changes within 3 days of any such change.
But I would not look for them first among the pilots. A survey of RAF personnel has revealed that confidence in the RAF chief and his leadership team has hit rock bottom, according to Sky News.
The figures will be a blow for Air Chief Marshal Sir Mike Wigston, who is to step down as chief of the air staff on Friday – with his career likely to be remembered by a disastrous recruitment drive to improve diversity that disadvantaged white men.
Sky News revealed this week how applicants were dismissed as “useless white male pilots” – as pressure mounted to attract women and ethnic minorities – and that the RAF had to pay £5,000 each to 31 white men who were impacted by the policy.
It only stopped when, as first revealed by Sky News last August, the then head of recruitment resigned in protest at what she deemed to be an “unlawful order” to discriminate against white men.
There was one paragraph that had me scratching my head at first:
While much criticism has been directed at Air Chief Marshal Wigston over the adverse impact of his diversity drive on white men, the survey also found that the proportion of personnel who agreed that their leaders were committed to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace had dropped 15 percentage points to 57% since 2022.
What? Was it not the RAF’s leadership’s eyes-tight-shut commitment to “creating a diverse and inclusive workplace” that caused all the trouble? Given that they put this objective before the defence of the realm, don’t they at least get credit for sincerity on that, if nothing else?
No. They do not. The RAF personnel who have ceased to believe that their leaders truly desire diversity have reason on their side. These were not the actions of idealistic dreamers; they were the acts of careerists frightened they would end up on the wrong side of a denunciation meeting.
This is the fruit of a movement that propagates itself by intimidation. Intimidation gets compliance, but ever fewer believe that the wretches who must proclaim it actually believe it.
I like the style of this guy Gaius:
Readers are invited to supply Modualwoman with a list of other nations whose cultures are nonexistent because they have been influenced by foreign persons and ideas at any point in their history. I am sure she will want to tell them this herself. While she’s at it, she can inform everyone in Britain whose ancestors came here more recently than 1714 that they are still foreigners whatever their passport says.
When Wokes and Racists Actually Agree on Everything.
When you lose the big match, try to get the result declared void and run the match again. If you can’t get a rematch, try another game entirely and say that’s the one that matters.
“Citizens’ juries can help fix democracy”, writes Martin Wolf in the Financial Times.
Elections are necessary. But unbridled majoritarianism is a disaster. A successful liberal democracy requires constraining institutions: independent oversight over elections, an independent judiciary and an independent bureaucracy. But are they enough? No.
Thus far, I agree with him. For a moment I thought he was going to defend the rights of individuals against the tyranny of the majority. At one point in his life he would have done.
In my book, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, I follow the Australian economist Nicholas Gruen in arguing for the addition of citizens’ assemblies or citizens’ juries. These would insert an important element of ancient Greek democracy into the parliamentary tradition.
There are two arguments for introducing sortition (lottery) into the political process. First, these assemblies would be more representative than professional politicians can ever be.
If your aim is to bypass professional politicians and improve representation, there is a better way than that to do it. With this method you don’t have to worry about how well or badly your representatives represent the population in terms of age, class, sex, race and so on. You can have perfect representation by cutting out the middleman and asking the voters themselves. It’s called a referendum. We have had several. The only slight caveat is that people expect the government to abide by them.
Second, it would temper the impact of political campaigning, nowadays made more distorting by the arts of advertising and the algorithms of social media.
A modest way to do this is to introduce citizens’ juries to advise on contentious issues. These juries would be time-limited, compensated for their time and be advised by experts.
Experts chosen by you.
One of the best examples was on the vexed topic of abortion in Ireland. A deliberative assembly of 100 people, made up of one appointed chair and 99 ordinary people chosen by lot, was established in 2016. It advised the Irish parliament on abortion (coming out in favour of “repeal and replace” of the ban then in force), and on the question to be put to the people in a referendum.
There are other difficult issues that might be (or might have been) handled in such a way: carbon taxation; nuclear power; and immigration. In these cases, a citizens’ jury would be empanelled to listen to witnesses and discuss the issues in depth. There is evidence that such a citizens’ jury would have come to a different decision on Brexit
Who could have seen that coming?
than in the referendum, since Leavers will change their minds in response to the evidence.
Evidence supplied by you.
This fad for citizen’s juries started six years, eleven months and ten days ago and will last as long as they can avoid convening one to give its verdict on what to do with illegal immigrants. With astute management, that might be years. We might be able to celebrate the triumph of the shiny new Citizen’s Juries and the abolition of the nasty, bigoted old sort of jury simultaneously.
“In that lies the unspoken truth about the English and protesting. Reader, we are crap at it. The French shut down Paris, lose lives, and burn down municipal buildings in protest at a raise in the pension age, all we can manage are posh girls mucking around with soup, blue-haired Oxford undergrads sticking themselves to a floor, or railwayman who now openly admit a year of strikes has been pointless.”
– William Atkinson.
Alice Coleman, geographer whose study of failed council estates impressed Mrs Thatcher – obituary
Alice Coleman, who has died aged 99, was a professor of geography at King’s College London whose book Utopia on Trial (1985), in which she launched a scathing attack on post-war high-rise housing estates, so impressed the prime minister Margaret Thatcher that she was given a five-year, £50 million contract to put her ideas into practice.
Her book, inspired by the American architect Oscar Newman’s seminal study Defensible Space: Crime Prevention Through Urban Design (1972), was based on a “design disadvantagement survey” in which she and a team of researchers surveyed blocks of flats, containing more than 100,000 dwellings in total, with the objective of mapping “lapses in civilised behaviour” (litter, graffiti, vandalism, pollution by excrement, and family breakdown leading to children being placed in care) against design features (number of floors per block, dwellings per block, dwellings per entrance, and so on).
She detected correlations between levels of crime and antisocial behaviour and the design of estates and, in her book, advanced the provocative thesis that badly-designed social housing schemes “breed antisocial people”. Change the design, she argued, and crime and antisocial behaviour would dramatically drop.
Le Corbusier’s vision of a “Radiant City” of tower blocks surrounded by parkland was, she wrote, the “great Utopian blunder”. Taken forward in Britain by an unholy alliance of planners and civil servants, it had been “conceived in compassion” but was “essentially a device for treating people like children, first by denying them the right to choose their own kind of housing, and then by choosing for them disastrous designs that create a needless sense of social failure”.
I saw Professor Coleman speak at a Libertarian Alliance event once. My memories of the time and place are foggy – late 1980s or early 1990s and somewhere near Holborn, I think – but I remember her and what she said very well. Not because she was a good speaker. On the contrary, she was difficult to hear and seemed nervous. But somehow that made her message all the more powerful. She was not there for fun; she was there to say things that urgently needed to be said. I still have the copy of Utopia on Trial that I bought that day.
The Telegraph obituary reports that not long after Margaret Thatcher’s downfall, Professor Coleman quit as an adviser to the government. Recalling the circumstances of her departure later, she said that civil servants “continually put obstacles in her path”, and that the new Environment Secretary, Michael Heseltine, did not wish to see any project with Margaret Thatcher’s name on it succeed. Given what happened after Brexit, I do not find either assertion hard to believe.
Nonetheless, I think the Telegraph obituary underestimates her influence and overestimates how much it mattered that she did not leave garlanded with flowers. As a quote attributed to both Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan goes, “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.” Some people contribute most to a cause by being the person who shifts the Overton Window. Alice Coleman moved the mainstream. Her achievement was to make her findings about the inhumanity of utopian architecture into background knowledge.
And how cool was this:
In 1960 Alice Coleman decided to update the national land-utilisation survey first conducted by Sir Dudley Stamp before the war, and recruited a team of some 3,000 volunteers to gather the information. With no funding available, she spent some £65,000 of her own money on the exercise. Although, due to lack of resources, less than 15 per cent of the country was covered with a published map, she reported some of the key results of her research.
“Labour willing to force pension plans to invest in £50bn ‘growth fund’”, reports the Financial Times.
Labour is prepared to force pension funds to invest in a proposed £50bn “future growth fund”, as the party aims to boost the amount of capital available for fast-growing UK companies.
Rachel Reeves, shadow chancellor, said she did not believe Labour would need to mandate retirement schemes to invest in the new fund because of the goodwill in the sector, but added: “Nothing is off the table.”
Speaking to the Financial Times on a three-day visit to the US, she said she also wanted to accelerate the merger of smaller UK pension funds so as to consolidate a fragmented market.
Reeves, who visited the New York Stock Exchange on Monday, said she wanted to change the culture of Britain’s savings industry, unleashing homegrown funds that could persuade UK companies to list in London.
She also wants pension funds to work alongside the state-owned British Business Bank to improve the UK’s “start up, scale up” landscape, with Labour warning that the country is trying to do “capitalism without capital”.
Reeves said: “A lack of confidence in Britain’s economy has led to too many businesses leaving our shores.”
Confidence in the British economy is not likely to be improved by the woman who will probably be the next Chancellor of the Exchequer announcing that she has so little confidence that pension funds will invest in it voluntarily that she thinking about making them do it by force. It would be unfair to call this the Walter Ulbricht strategy. Unlike Comrade Ulbricht, who said “No one has the intention of erecting a wall!”, Ms Reeves has sportingly given pension funds warning of her intentions so they can get out before the wall goes up.
Investments can go down as well as up. The record of the state in “picking winners” is particularly poor. British workers are not going to be happy bunnies if their pensions lose value because a Labour government forced them to put some of their pot into risky start-ups that venture capitalists wouldn’t touch.
The SNP’s plan should worry us all. Juryless rape trials will set a dangerous precedent. This elite suspicion of the public could erode the right to trial by jury in other cases, too. After all, if members of the public are assumed to be incapable of taking jury duty seriously in rape trials, then why allow us to be jurors at all?
Scotland’s lawyers are right. This is indeed ‘a deeply troubling attack’ on the criminal-justice system. Women must not allow justice to be destroyed in our name.
– Ella Whelan
England came fourth out of the 43 countries that tested children of the same age in the Progress International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), announces the government. Singapore, Hong Kong, Russia, England. Yes, dear highly literate Samizdata readers, your own reading skills have not failed you. English schoolchildren are the fourth best readers in the world and the best in Western Europe.
Pinching myself, I offer my sincere congratulations to England’s teachers and to the Department of Education, in particular Nick Gibb MP, the Minister of State for Schools. Mr Gibb is serving the third of three non-contiguous stints in this ministerial role. That suggests he is genuinely interested in education, and indeed his Wikipedia biography says “Gibb is a longstanding advocate of synthetic phonics as a method of teaching children to read”. He himself says, “Our obsession with phonics has worked”.
Tomorrow I will get back to calling the teachers “the Blob” and the government “the government” in a voice that suggests I can think of no worse insult. Today, I give credit where credit is due. For British education nerds, this is like our own little 1989. OK, perhaps that is over the top, but a wall that seemed no more than slightly cracked as recently as January 2022 has finally fallen. By the “wall”, I mean the side in the so-called “Reading Wars” that wasn’t phonics. The Not!Phonics side has had many names, “Look and Say”, “Whole Word”, “Whole Language”, and most recently “Balanced Literacy”. That last name was an attempt to paper over the cracks in the wall. Or perhaps, since I am allowed more than one metaphor, it was a deliberate breach in the wall of a dam, done in an failed attempt to stop the whole damn dam wall collapsing.
To see what the wall looked like in the days of its Krushchev period, discredited but still seemingly impregnable, read this 1998 paper that Brian Micklethwait originally wrote for the Libertarian Alliance: “On the Harm Done by Look-and-say: A Reaction to Bonnie Macmillan’s Why Schoolchildren Can’t Read”, and this one written in 2002: “The Failure of Politics and the Pull of Freedom: Reflections on the Work of the Reading Reform Foundation.” I wish I could ask Brian what he thinks about this now, but thanks to the Brian Micklethwait Archive you can see what he thought about it then, and be reminded that truth stays true. Read those two papers and you will know most of what you need to know about the battle that raged across the Anglosphere over how to teach children to read, including these cynical words of wisdom:
The phonics-persons have pretty much proved their case, probably even in the eyes of many of the look-and-say people. But the look-and-say “experts” at the DfES are in an arkward position. (The inverted commas around “experts” being there because these people don’t know things which are true, they “know” things which are untrue.) Suppose their bad techniques are completely swept away and completely replaced by completely good ones. The teaching of literacy in schools would leap forward. A mass of seemingly “complex” problems, like the recent huge rise in “dyslexia”, the spiralling cost of “special needs” education, and the general inability of several generations of people to learn how to spell, will be revealed as not so complex after all. These problems will be revealed to all as having been caused by the government’s own literacy “experts”. Thus it is that even – especially – those “experts” who have been completely convinced of the wrongness of their own former opinions now face a huge, career-saving incentive to perpetuate their follies as much as they can, to disguise the enormity of the disaster they have caused.
*
That would have been a fine, dramatic line with which to end the post, but I must add → Continue reading: English children ranked fourth in international reading test. Yes, really.
“Making it harder to evict residents is only likely to make it harder to rent. Landlords will inevitably be more selective about who they offer properties to and charge higher rents when they cannot quickly evict bad tenants. That is likely to disproportionately hurt those who are poorer, younger, and from minority communities.”
– Matthew Lesh, of the Institute of Economic Affairs, commenting on measures by the current “Conservative” government, to make it more difficult for landlords to evict tenants in certain cases (there appears to be some issue about the details). The impact is the same as making it harder to fire workers. Other things being equal, fewer people get hired. (Look at Italy, where firing people is hard and produces bizarre effects.)
The inverted quotes around “Conservative” are, as you might guess, there for a reason.
I worry when I read stories like the business secretary Kemi Badenoch complaining that she cannot deliver her party’s manifesto plans to scrap all EU laws due to Whitehall intransigence. It makes me wonder who exactly is in charge of public policy: elected ministers or their unelected officials?
There is an attitude among senior officials that they know better than these’ here-today-gone-tomorrow’ ministers. The old dictum of ‘advisers advise, ministers decide’ seems reversed. We have unintentionally ended up with a self-propagating bureaucracy who are either averse to change, or who feel they are above the democratic decision-making process.
– Eamonn Butler
‘Government insulation scheme ruined my home’ is the headline of this BBC piece about a man who says his flat has been ruined by black mould caused by a government “green” insulation scheme. The words “insulation” and “home” could be replaced by many other words and the headline would still hold.
Although the piece describes Blaan Paterson as a “homeowner”, it seems from the text that his ex-council flat is still under the control of South Lanarkshire Council to some extent. He insists he was signed up to the Universal Home Insulation Scheme (UHIS) in 2011 without his consent.
Things done by governments to people without their consent often turn out badly.
Things done by governments for people who grab them with both hands under the impression that they are getting a free benefit often turn out badly, too. “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth”, goes the proverb. Buyers have an incentive to think carefully about whether a proposed purchase is wise before they commit their money. Recipients of free stuff don’t. The incentives on government contractors not to think about whether insulation is right for a particular property are also strong.
Tom Woolley, a semi-retired professor of architecture, has been highlighting “cavity wall insulation disasters” for a number of years.
He has also advised pressure group Cavity Insulation Victims’ Alliance (CIVALLI), which has given evidence at the UK Parliament and Welsh Assembly.
He told BBC Scotland: “The problem with filling up the cavity either with glass fibre and perhaps, to a lesser extent, polystyrene is that it stops the building ‘breathing’.
“Vapour collecting in the building or dampness that gets into the walls can’t escape because it’s blocked up by this stuff.
“It tends to lead to dampness and mould inside the houses. We have plenty of evidence of this. I would say there are hundreds of thousands of examples of this throughout the UK.”
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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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