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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The wedding scene from Flash Gordon:
Celebrant: “Do you, Ming the Merciless, Ruler of the Universe, take this Earthling, Dale Arden, to be your empress of the hour?”
Ming: “Of the hour, yes.”
Celebrant: “Do you promise to use her as you will?”
Ming: “Certainly.”
Celebrant: “Not to blast her into space…” [Ming gives him a warning look] “…until such time as you grow weary of her?”
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Sadiq Khan’s deputy mayor for environment pledges to curb plane trips after clocking up 40,000 air miles, the Standard reports.
Mete Coban, a 32-year-old former Hackney councillor, was appointed to the £147,769-a-year City Hall role in July that involves him leading efforts to make London “net zero” in terms of carbon emissions by 2030.
While Hackney’s cabinet member for the environment, Mr Coban was revealed to have clocked up 40,000 air miles in two years.
I didn’t know that the London Borough of Hackney had a cabinet, let alone a cabinet member for the environment with worldwide responsibilities.
He said the “majority” of trips related to his job at an organisation, My Life My Say, that aims to get young people interested in politics and democracy.
But asked by Tory assembly member Thomas Turrell at a City Hall meeting about his travel habits, Mr Coban pledged to avoid “unnecessary” flights and to “lead by example”.
He told the London Assembly’s environment comittee: “I’m very clear that the majority of those flights relate to my previous role as chief executive of My Life My Say, where we are standing up for young people across the country, but also globally, to stand up for democracy.
“I don’t make any apology for making sure I am banging the drum for young people at some of the highest institutions, including the United Nations.
The need to make speeches at “the highest institutions” located in Miami, Dubai, Guatemala, Istanbul, Washington DC and Malta allowed “High Carbon Coban”, a member of the political class, to have 40,000 unapologetic air miles before he felt obliged to say that he would “avoid” flying while in his present role. Except when flights are absolutely necessary for his work as Deputy Mayor of London for Environment and Energy, obviously.
Leftists weaponise these so-called ‘local identities’ by trying to emphasise their supposed distance from other ‘local identities’ in England. In the process of doing this, they (if only tacitly) also try to decrease the distance of these ‘local identities’, and indeed Britain as a whole, from genuinely foreign cultures: ‘a Cockney, a Brummie, and a Pakistani; all totally unique, but all Very British in their own way.’ An alternative, though slightly different, formulation of this strategy can be found in the attempt by left-wing Welsh nationalists to completely distance ‘Welsh’ from ‘English’, while readily accepting people into ‘Welshness’, no questions asked, with zero connection — ancestral or otherwise — to the British Isles as a whole. It is telling that one of the favourite pastimes of these socialist deviants is to have ethnic minorities put on a performance for them, getting them to memorise a few words of their funny language, entertaining the Welshmen while also stroking their egos. This is quite obviously unethical behaviour, although no-one has called them out for it yet.
– Pimlico Journal
I did not expect to see anything like this on a fairly mainstream site like “Conservative Woman”: “Mystery of Andrew Bridgen’s vanishing votes” (Via Sara Hoyt on Instapundit.) Andrew Bridgen, for those not familiar with him, is the former MP for North West Leicestershire. He has had a chequered career. He was expelled from the Conservative Party after criticising the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines. He then joined the Reclaim Party but resigned from it a few months later. He then lost his seat in the 2024 election – which in itself was no surprise, but the spectacular scale of his loss, dropping from 63% of the vote to 3.2%, was unusual.
I said I did not expect to see this piece on the CW website. I would not be entirely surprised if I am soon unable to see it anywhere but Twitter/X. After the US election of 2020, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter (before it was owned by Elon Musk) had a policy of deleting any discussion whatsoever of the possibility of electoral fraud. Even arguments that fraud had not been significant were censored. Most of the UK media followed suit, as it usually does.
If anyone reading this has power or influence over the censorship policies of British media organisations, I humbly beg you not to repeat that mistake. My argument does not depend on taking any view on how many votes Andrew Bridgen got in the UK election of 2024.
When “Stop the Steal” and similar Facebook groups with hundreds of thousands of members were deleted overnight after the American election of 2020, what effect do you think it had on the beliefs of members of those groups? Do you think they concluded that since they could no longer discuss their suspicions, those suspicions must be groundless?
Of course it had the opposite effect. A majority of US voters think it is “likely” that cheating affected the outcome of the 2020 election. That includes 45% of Democrats. The censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story and of the hypothesis that the Covid-19 virus leaked from a laboratory (the first of which is no longer contested and the second of which is accepted as a probable hypothesis by the US and UK governments) only reinforced this.
Censorship destroys trust, and the loss of trust is not limited to the subject being censored. Once people know they are being censored in one thing, they inevitably ask, “What else aren’t they telling us?”
And they can work out that if all accusations of a particular crime are censored, it makes it more likely that that crime will be committed in future.
Related posts here, here and here. In fact, that entire category of “Deleted by the Woke Media” is related.
Edit 25th September: The man who replaced Andrew Bridgen as Conservative candidate in North West Leicestershire, Craig Smith, has responded strongly to the Conservative Woman piece:
Mr Bridgen seems to overestimate the weight of any candidate’s personal vote. In elections most people vote for the party with a personal vote of – somewhere around – a couple of thousand votes for the candidate themselves. It’s arguably why I did marginally better than Conservative candidates in demographically similar constituencies elsewhere, because I had something of a personal vote as a truly local candidate. A personal vote is why Mr Bridgen received around 1,500 votes. To provide Mr Bridgen with a similar example to his own in 2015 Rochdale’s MP, Simon Danczuk, then standing for Labour received 20,961 votes. In 2017, expelled from Labour and and standing as an independent he received 883 votes. Using Mr Danczuk as a base Mr Bridgen could argue that he outstripped expectations!
Mr Smith goes on to say that of course he was not happy with the result – he lost to Labour – but he is convinced it was fair. He then makes some quite detailed observations about electoral procedures, both in general and specifically for that constituency. I thought he came across well. His use of Simon Danczuk in Rochdale as a comparator for assessing whether it is credible for an MP expelled from their party to have such a large drop in votes was reasonable.
That is how it should be done. That is how it should have been done in the US. Don’t forbid discussion, contribute to it. I repeat my plea for there to be no censorship of the claim that the election was rigged against Mr Bridgen.
“Cambridgeshire council admits to discrimination after a woman was labelled transphobic for criticism of a ‘gender-fluid’ dachshund”, reports the Telegraph, with relish.
Tim Sigsworth’s report says that:
A lesbian social worker was harassed by her colleagues after making “non-inclusive and transphobic” comments about a co-worker’s “gender-neutral” dog, a tribunal ruled.
Elizabeth Pitt, who worked for Cambridgeshire county council, was awarded £63,000 after bosses reprimanded her for expressing gender-critical views at a meeting of the authority’s LGBT+ employee group.
She had disagreed with a male colleague who claimed his dachshund was “gender-fluid” and that he put a dress on the dog to provoke “debate about gender” in January 2023.
Ms Pitt, 62, was formally disciplined by management after complaints were made accusing her of making “non-inclusive and transphobic” remarks.
However, the council later admitted liability for direct discrimination on the grounds of her beliefs.
I am glad that Ms Pitt won her case, but how did we get to a state of affairs where a county council actually believed that one of their employees taking a less than respectful view of another employee putting a dress on his wee dog and declaring it to be “gender-fluid” had had a “detrimental impact on the mental health and well-being of the complainants”?
When I read this account, I was surprised to find out that it happened as late as January 2023. Poor old Cambridgeshire County Council, puffing to keep up with trends that more with-it London bodies like the Royal Academy of Arts dropped in 2021. But the greater question is how and why this particular form of absurdity swept round the developed world so quickly. The wave is receding now, less quickly than it arose, but still very fast in historical terms. The “dropped in 2021” link describes how the Royal Academy of Arts abruptly withdrew the work of the textile artist Jess de Wahls from sale in its gift shop because she said “humans can not change sex”. After bad publicity, it backtracked. There is a certain irony about the way that progressive artists such as Ms de Wahls (“Her work is part of a movement to depict vagina and vulva in art”) spent their whole lives changing cultural norms with such success that their vulva-themed embroideries ended up in the Royal Academy gift shop, a development which might have surprised Sir Joshua Reynolds, only to see the wind change against them in an instant. Why did that particular memo go around in 2020? It wasn’t directly related to Black Lives Matter, but maybe that movement had something to do with it.
Politicians of all stripes like to talk about “sustainability” – although I’ve noticed that some of the enthusiasm for this when it comes to the “green” angle has been dented by rising energy costs and worries about how we keep the lights on when the wind does not blow and sun does not shine. The realities of how to produce energy when fossil fuels are off the table and nuclear is not taken seriously are going to bite us, and hard, in the years to come.
Even so, sustainability is a useful word, and it is a shame that it gets tainted as the word “liberal” does by association with bad ideas. (The same goes for “progressive”, while we are at it.)
Well, one point I come across in my day job in covering business and finance is how family-owned/run firms can often show superior returns, when compounded over time, and be more robust, and more sustainable, than those that don’t have a family connection. That’s not cheesy sentimentality about how a business is better when Grandad, Mum and the cousins are around. (There can be very tricky succession and control issues with families; wealth advisors often earn big bucks advising families in how to resolve conflicts. And we’ve all seen Dallas.) Even so, for all the caveats, family businesses are important. They employ millions of people. In countries such as Germany and Italy, family-run firms have been the norm; the fashion houses, specialist sportscar firms, and many others, have deep and long family connections. Same goes for agriculture and food, for example. Here is some UK family business data that shows how big these firms are, in aggregate.
Well, it seems that one thing that the UK government is thinking of is ending the business property and agriculture reliefs from inheritance tax. At present, the tax – 40 per cent above a “nil-rate” threshold of £325,000 – does not hit if you inherit a family business, including a farm. In the US, such tax is called Estate Tax, and thresholds are far higher than in the UK.
But apparently, Rachel Reeves, the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, is considering sweeping some of these reliefs away. It means family businesses where the stake in a business are high might get broken up and sold, such as to corporations and private equity firms, when a founder or business holder dies. Family-run farms will be a one-generation gig. And corporates, sovereign wealth funds and big groups such as pension funds will consolidate their ownership of business, including the land. Wealth becomes more centrally concentrated, not more dispersed. This seems a very paradoxical outcome from a supposedly egalitarian government. Maybe Ms Reeves does not understand this point or is indifferent to it.
However, ignorance is only part of it, I think. There’s a general hostility towards inheritance of any kind in our culture today, from my impression. There is a lot of the “tall poppy” mindset around. Years of central bank QE also inflated asset prices, and certain groups did well, but that’s not really what is going on, in my view, because things such as QE are too abstract for the average voter.
I think resentments are given more respect today, when in fact they should be called out. I think we allow jealousy of others’ good fortune to be given the time of day, when in the past that would be seen as a bad thing.
There are many good, consequentialist reasons why this dislike has bad outcomes when used as a motor for public policy, but there are important moral arguments against this attack on inheritance: the rights of those of those who own the property and want to give it to this or that cause are being violated. If I want to give my sons and daughters a business, or a 400-acre farm, for example, that’s my affair, period. Whether those persons “deserve” what I give them, in the eyes of some sort of social justice advocate, is irrelevant. If economics is not a zero-sum game, such demands for redistribution are just thieving.
What inheritance taxes do, at root, is make it clear that ownership of wealth and control of it is at the sufferance of the State. The justifications of insisting on this servile relationship may vary – sometimes by reference to the flawed ideas such as those of a Thomas Piketty – but the underlying position remains.
The argument seems to say that you don’t really ever own anything absolutely and control it. You have to defer to the crowd if it, and its elected representatives, wants your stuff, however virtuously you acquired it in the first place. It is only one step from saying that because we don’t “deserve” our brains or bodies, that we don’t have grounds for objecting to other coercive measures to take the fruits of our mental and physical labour, either at source, or when we die. (The dystopian novel, Facial Justice, by LP Hartley, shows where this leads when it comes to beauty and physical appearance.)
I see little by way of fundamental critiques of this assault on inheritance of honestly acquired wealth. The Tories, now in opposition, don’t really take the discussion to this level; neither do other supposedly more conservative parties in other parts of the world. But the monstrosity of what attacks on inheritance amount to needs to be more widely remarked on than it is.
On the subject of the family and why protecting it is subversive of overweening authority, I can recommend this book, The Subversive Family, by former Downing Street policy unit figure and journalist/novelist Ferdinand Mount. He’s deeply influenced by the Origins of English Individualism, by Alan Macfarlane, for example.
On a more prosaic level, the ever-widening burden of tax in much of the developed world, and particularly in the UK, means that even people who are not by any means well off are going to learn about the joys of inheritance tax and all that goes with it. That might ultimately shift the needle against the tax. But a lot of hard work in changing attitudes is also needed.
The big political story in Britain at the moment is the Labour Prime Minister accepting free clothes on behalf of his wife from a benefactor – an act that the cruel – and cruelly funny it must be said – have thought worthy of ridicule.
But would you know it! A hundred years ago (where I live) the big story is also the Labour Prime Minister accepting free stuff from a benefactor. In James Ramsay MacDonald’s case the free stuff is a car (a Daimler no less) and the means to maintain it. At this point things take a turn for the better for Keir Starmer’s predecessor. The benefactor, a Sir Alexander Grant happens to be an old friend of MacDonald’s and also happens to be a biscuit millionaire. Sir Alexander claims that he was moved to his act of unbidden generosity when he heard that MacDonald was travelling around London by Underground Railway which he felt was tiring him out and undermining his efficiency. I suppose the equivalent today would be if his modern-day counterpart had discovered that Sir Keir and Lady Starmer were wandering about in garments made of sack cloth.
By the way, I am not sure what travelling around on the London Underground says about Ramsay MacDonald but I can’t help feeling that it says a lot about the society of the time.
 Hello Jim, got a new motor?
“The overwhelming issue facing any UK government is: what do we stop doing? Governments over the last two decades have pretended, especially to the media, that they can tackle any issue that either journalists or lobby groups get upset about. But that is patently impossible within current resources of people, money & political consent.
So what we get are nonsensical policies to ban advertising of junk food – who knows what that is – online or before the evening watershed. Lots of people waste large amounts of time trying to write & interpret regulations that won’t have the slightest impact on the problem of obesity. This is all displacement activity for governments that are clueless and utterly incompetent. All the signs are that the current government is doomed, both because of the personality of the Prime Minister and the inclinations of his party. Since any outsider can read the runes, why would anyone commit money to underpin economic growth without being heavily bribed to do so? That is not a viable way of turning the ship of state around.”
I came across this comment, by a person called Gordon Hughes, in the UnHerd website article about the problems in the current UK government civil service machine and cabinet structure, and thought it was so good and incisive that I take the liberty of sharing it here.
Also, I take the opportunity for another plug for a book that I recommend about how a lot of people, including journalists, seem to think about everything today: Seeing Like A State, by James C Scott.
‘The system is the problem, not people’: how a radical food group spread round the world
Incredible Edible’s guerrilla gardening movement encourages people to take food-growing – and more – into their own hands
Pam Warhurst insists she’s no anarchist. Nevertheless, the founder of Incredible Edible, a food-focused guerrilla gardening movement, wants the state to get out of people’s way.
“The biggest obstacle is the inability of people in elected positions to cede power to the grassroots,” she says.
[…]
Her big idea is guerrilla gardening – with a twist. Where guerrilla gardeners subvert urban spaces by reintroducing nature, Incredible Edible’s growers go one step further: planting food on public land and then inviting all-comers to take it and eat.
I doubt this idea would scale up, but if growing food to give to others gives people pleasure, go for it. I cannot bring myself to feel outraged about the odd unauthorised carrot in a municipal flowerbed. And long have I waited to see lines like those I have put in bold type appear in the pages of the Guardian:
But as much as Warhurst’s idea has simplicity and wholesomeness, it also has a radical streak. At its heart, Incredible Edible is about hijacking public spaces – spaces nominally owned by communities, and paid for through their taxes, but administered and jealously guarded by public authorities.
And that is where Incredible Edible meets its biggest challenge: the dead hand of the state.
In a previous post – borrowing from C.S. Lewis – I used the word “unconciliatory” to describe Sir Keir Starmer, and I increasingly find it the most appropriate one when thinking about the tenor of governance to which we are now subject. Labour’s victory in the 2024 election was artificial and its well of support is ankle-deep; since only one in five of the electorate actually voted for the party it was already unpopular at the very point of taking office. Politicians who were not thoroughgoing mediocrities would, finding themselves in such a position, be prudent. They would recognise their priorities to be consolidation, calmness and concession – their aim would be to lay stable foundations for future governance with quiet competence. But the current crop do not really understand the word ‘prudence’, or like it. So we are patently not going to get that. We are instead going to get a programme of improvement imposed upon us from above: eat your greens, do your press-ups, and do as nanny says (oh, and hand over your pocket money while you’re at it).
This will all unravel very quickly. People will not get with the programme, because people never really do, and certainly not when it has been designed by those they actively mistrust and sense have nothing but disdain for them. And therefore, in short order, as the truth dawns on the Government that the people are not on board with its plan of action, the sense of disappointment it feels is going to turn to rage. This will in turn have the inevitable result, as the rage becomes nakedly apparent, that the population will start to kick back – mulishly, and hard.
– David McGrogan
I highly commending this article, read the whole thing.
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
Have I or have I not done anything different here? I don’t suppose they will be exhuming William Shakespeare any time soon, but what she said was no worse than this. It was words, nothing more. We are now firmly in an authoritarian police state. A substantial custodial sentence for hurty words is the kind of thing we thought was confined to the old Soviet Union, but it looks as if the ghost of that monstrosity is alive and well in modern Britain.
– Longrider
Tommy Robinson being interviewed by Jordan Peterson presents me with pair of people I am not predisposed to like. But set aside Robinson’s thesis about Islam in the UK for a moment, which you can agree with or not, I contend what the state does to try and shut him down is actually the critical issue. Indeed, I would say if even a small fraction of what he says about security services is true, we have rocketed past the point where normal politics can be relied upon for redress and remedy. Watch and listen with an open mind. We are not heading towards a police state, we are well and truly in one.
Starmer has also always been happy to be accused of running a ‘nanny state’. Much of the agenda that he and his Health Secretary Wes Streeting have revealed more widely for the NHS borders on that, with a focus on preventive healthcare rather than waiting until a patient needs acute (and more expensive) treatment. But an interesting question is whether the new government would have gone for this kind of ban had the Tories not already suggested it. As Katy explains here, the fact that Rishi Sunak championed the move first has made it much easier for Labour to take steps to crack down on smoking more generally. It is, she says, plausible that this approach could be extended to fast food and alcohol consumption. In fact, it wouldn’t make much sense if Starmer talks about the cost to the NHS of smoking but takes no action on obesity, even if that problem is far more complex than the relatively easy win of making it harder to smoke cigarettes.
And it will be much harder for the Conservatives to argue against those further moves because they were the ones who started all this off – in legislative terms, at least.
– The Spectator
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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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