The Libertarian Alliance: BLOG

Today, Tony Blair left office after ten years of being the British Prime Minister and many are in a reflective mood as they consider his years in office. With the LA having the luxury of no formal line on these matters here is simply my personal take on his period at No.10.

The Good

On the good side, private healthcare, private education (including home schooling) and the private security sector have all grown during his time in office and no doubt much against his wishes. Today, there are more private hospitals, private healthcare plans and private schools thriving than when he entered office in 1997.

Similarly, I am delighted that university students now have to pay fees and that for every one state policeman there are now more than two private security guards. Away from state courts, private arbitration and mediation services likewise continue to grow.

I welcome these things because as the years go by they have a very real chance of de-coupling ever more voters from the failure of the age of high tax big government.  

A more independent Bank of England, the general advocacy of road pricing, the liberalisation of pub opening hours and the fact that even with recent tax hikes, the overall tax take of the Blair government averaged less than that of Thatcher’s are again all positive, if not remarkable features, given the parlous economic record of previous socialist administrations.

Finally, it is good that Britain seems to be less concerned with the more traditional and deeply collectivist politics of class, race and sexuality than was previously the case.

The Bad

On the bad side, taxes have not gone down. The state continues to consume some 40 per cent of national income. And not only have many billions of pounds been wasted on a greatly expanded welfare state but the regulatory burden is now reaching truly nightmarish proportions.

The British state and European super-state is increasingly involved in every facet of life and there seems little debate amongst any of our political rulers on any alternative course.

The Ugly

On the ugly side, no previous administration has overseen such a systematic dismantling of our basic civil liberties than the Blair government.  

The continual undermining of the common law and trial by jury is a disgrace.

The planned introduction of ID cards, an ever growing list of bans (such as smoking in so called public places) and an ever mounting array of politically correct and totally counter-productive initiatives – such as the war on drugs - is a nightmare. 

Finally, the continual advocacy of a deeply irrational and anti-human eco-fascism poses one of the most profound threats to liberty and freedom that mankind has ever faced.

Overall, it is a pretty mixed bag with the centre of gravity falling in the bad-to-ugly terrain. As Dr. Sean Gabb said in this excellent paper,  ever since the Thatcher decade Britain and its political class has been slowly taking us ever more into the dark side. 

What do you think about Blair and the last ten years?

Sean has, below, excoriated Tony Blair in terms that it would be hard to outdo, and has in effect cursed the man To Eternity. This is good and right. I will never forgive him his black coat and his (almost but not quite tearful) ”People’s Princess” spin-do on the morning of her death. He used it to initiate our ruin as an emotionally-bedwetting nation, and the long-term damage to us as Upstanding People will be hard to undo, if not now impossible.

Sean is right in the main; the man Blair ushered in, whether he intended or not, the most destruction of Britain’s institutions in the shortest time, of anyone in modern history. But we let him get away with it. We let him do it; nobody stopped him.

 I know that earlier this evening I have lambasted another poster on another forum for complaining about “lazy Eurosceptics” who won’t log on and sign the Telly Dailygraph’s petition about something or other. But as I told that lady, “we have not even time to scratch our bums” while trying to pay for the megasocialist state that Brown has created while under Blair’s tutelage.

But we DON’T go on and we DON’T sign, and we let them get away with it.

Democracy works if everyone, most especially the ones chosen to do the representing, respect its objectives. It is no use whatsoever to pretend it does, if the representatives are clearly out for themselves and their wallets, as is clearly now the case in all countries, and sadly increasingly this one, which invented the whole idea.

We failed as a nation, in 1997, to not vote for Blair. (Germany failed as a nation in 1933, to not vote for Hitler; the destruction that ensued should rightly be laid at the door of those voters - a billion tons of rubble first of all, a quarter of a cubic mile, cleared up by……….the Americans and the British; the tragdey was that Germany was arguably the most cultured and socialised nation in the history of the world, or so it  positioned itself via its own intellectuals and many of ours and our scientists, who knew what they spoke of.

By failing to not vote for Blair, not once but THREE times, we have got Gordon Brown, for whom nobody seems to have voted. Clearly, it does not matter to us as a nation who is in supposed “charge”, any more. (It is apparent that the Queen gave up the struggle long ago, if indeed she has ever Understood What She Was For, which I am beginning to doubt sadly.) Therefore we ought to blame ourselves for whatever now will happen, and it ought to be seen as our own fault.

The British will, sadly, never learn to not consort with socialism until they have had their noses rubbed in it ONE MORE TIME, and then, badly. Our failing historically I think is that we are as a people too human and too nice. Being good, human and nice people, who want to see the best in everyone, we fall for the false charms of shysters, doo-gooders, intellectuals with large sexual appetits, and samples of the last three who write well and play good on the telly (Blair!). All these jerks, many on the BBC, tell us how nasty and grasping we are and how we ought to give all our and everybody-else’s money to the “poor” and sundry other-African Jerks-who-Ride-In-Mercs, via sundry Jerks-who-inhabit-the UN.

We have not cared enough about how we are seen, or about our honour as a civilisation because we are the best one.  we just took it for granted, in 1918 and 1945, and went back to bed to grieve for our lost ones. (I will tell you about the Southport War Memorial Sometime.)

Instead by spending too much time meekly trying to pay the Merk-Jerks’ imposts, and the other imposts imposed by the home-Jerks (like “property taxes” eg the “rates”) and not instead opposing them and their ridiculous notions by force or any political weapon to hand (see political correctness for an example - how IN HELL could we, triumphant in 1989, allowed ANYONE to get away with that as a public intellectual property, for God’s sake ?????) we have allowed ourselves to think that people like Brown and Blair are good people.

Instead, people like TAKI had a great party to celebrate the end of communism……….he ought to be ashamed of being such an intelligent man and yet not seeing what the bastards would be up to behind his yacht, and planning for it instead of whingeing later.

It’s easy to say all this in hindsight. But the British have got the gumment they now deserve, by going to sleep on the job. Ah, the “job”! That thing. They forgot what the job was, which was, is, and will be, to teach the rest of the world How To Live.

We got Bliar first, and now we have got Brown (I think it means “dead” in junky-speak, as in “brown-bread”) because we were asleep. Sometime, but not now, I will try to analyse why we went to sleep. but I still will find it in my heart to blame the socialists who wooed us with sirn-siongs of Utopia, because we are nice and kind.

We, liberalism’s students, Are Here To Teach The World How To Live (we ought to begin to say so in so many words) and there is nothing shameful in that destiny. Radical Islam and Socialism, tragically and erroneously for all sorts of reasons, both think the same thing, and are both entirely and totally irrelevant to the problem, as they are not part of the solution in either case, both having signally failed to provide working examples of civilisatiobs which solve the everyday probelms of real humans. 

This is a picture of my younger child, picking Copernicus’s nose.

The statue is in Olsztyn, Poland, and was put up even under the Communists. Copernicus, of course you will all remember, was he that by observation and mathematical reasoning decided that it would all fit the facts better, if the Earth and the observable planets all went round the Sun rather than otherwise. He arranged for his work to be published about when he died, rather than face a dawn visit by Armed Police and a subsequent hot reception in public somewhere, at an embarrassing moment for him.

It is highly improbable that the soon-to-be-deified founders of the EU, or moreover those “deeply respected scholars” who follow that dead non-white male dark-age desert war-lord whose name escapes me, will allow the statues of their greatest heroes to be so handled and associated with. Indeed, it is even less likely that the said war-lord’s instructions will even allow statues of him to be erected at all. (This is extremely strange and will be explored by me later.)

But the thought-advances of those dead white male philosphers about five centuries ago have so astonishingly enhanced the lives of everyone, and unlike the manifestos of the EUrocrats or the DNWM war-lord, are based on observation and truth. Combined with the power and rise of an Island polity that sought to limit what a State could do - in the teeth of hard and relentless opposition from Europe - and make it responsive to those it taxed for its existence, science brought individual freedom along with betterment of everyone’s condition.

The advance of  collectivism, whether it be by structures imposed by our own Enemy Class in Britain or by our sworn enemies in the EU who cannot ever forgive us for how we saved them from themselves, or by force from outside via the current disarmingly frank and self-avowed enemies of The West, can only succeed in the end if Science is eliminated. We have got beyond the point now where it can be; Chindia makes more scientists per year, trained in the best traditions, than the West owns, and the remainder of the Anglosphere is sufficiently isolated geographically to survive a bit longer.

The internal UK Enemy Class Gauleiters have currently got their fingers on the windpipe of the English GCSE Science syllabuses, and have turned next year’s GCSE exams into a parade of “politically-correct” discussions of PSHE and “citizenship” issues, with not a calculation in sight.

I’m sure our enemies would not allow the children of refuseniks, or indeed anybody at all, to pick the noses of their heroes’ statues.

So on the whole the outlook is bright, although the enemies may yet succeed in destroying the cradle of the civilisation that made them anachronistic and irrelevant. We have to ask whether this matters in the long term; in my more depressed moments I think not.

Free Life Commentary,
A Personal View from
The Director of the Libertarian Alliance
Issue Number 162
27th June 2007
postCount(’flc162′);Comments| postCountTB(’flc162′); Trackback Tony Blair: The Traitor Departs
by Sean Gabb

As I write, Tony Blair is about to stop being Prime Minister. I have waited ten years to see this day. I will celebrate later today by opening a bottle of champagne. In the meantime, I will make the briefest possible farewell to the man.

I am told Mr Blair has a heart condition. I hope this kills him within five years, and that no day between now and then will be other than filled with pain. I hope that fears of being arrested as a war criminal will keep him from seeing anywhere nice in Europe again. I hope that his lecture tours of America will be ruined by popular demonstrations against him and by the tort lawyers. I hope his new job as an envoy in the Levant will end in bitter disappointment. I hope his business ventures will all end in disaster. I hope that death, when it comes, will find a man broken in body and soul.

Of course, he could not have completed the transformation of England into a panopticon police state without the collaboration of an entire political class, and the indifference of the human sheep in the street. Nor could he have taken us so disgracefully to war but for the greed and stupidity of all around him, and for the moral cowardice of the chiefs of staff. But for ten years, he was in charge of things, and he did more than anyone else to drive them forward. It is only fitting that he should receive the greater part of the moral blame.

I have done with the man. I wish him dead, but only after much suffering. Better still, I wish he had never been born.

NB - Sean Gabb’s new book, Cultural Revolution, Culture War: How Conservatives Lost England, and How to Get It Back, can be downloaded free from http://tinyurl.com/34e2o3. You can help by contributing to publishing and distribution costs