The Libertarian Alliance: BLOG

David Davis 

A good site, Moonbattery - go to it when you have finished with us here. it tells you even more than we can in a short time, how stupid and therefore how evil, wicked, pre-meditated and intentional, the enemies of Western liberalism really really are. I delight in the syntactical promiscuity of the English Language sometimes, in that there are so many, many words for “bad”, such as “LOW”. (A certain socialsit “peeeeeer” used this word to describe Margaret Thatcher. “LOW”. Does anybody remember that one?)

There was a repport in yetserday’s Telegraph about this new directive from the increasingly unlibertarian EU. (I like “yetserday” and “repport”, so I will leave them. Perhaps we’ll get googled by socialist-de-educated British schoolkids more. This raises a point; should blogs clear out typographical errors becuase it’s morally right, or should they leave them in in support of the increasingly sub-literate generations under State education? Discuss…..) 

They must emit only the statutory quantities of carbon dioxide etc etc etc mumble groan whinge rhubarb knickers. 

Firstly, I thought our vehicles were…er, green. (Well, sort of a drab shade, for defending the wimpish-euro-communist-Europeans against their fellow-fascists in Russia.)

Secondly, have you SEEN a modern battle?

My dear! The noise! The people! The pollution!

I don’t know what these enarques have been smoking who dreamed up this nonsense, but (1) I bet it does not apply to French/Italian/Austrian/Spanish military vehicle builders, and (2) the last thing on my mind as a Field Commander up against say the Russians (could be) or the Sudano-Iranians (may well be) is how much Carbon Dioxide my APCs are putting out. One enemy shell using modern smokeless stuff of very high detonation velocity (and say a 120mm round of bursting charge 10Kg) will exhale say 500 moles of the stuff conservatively; that’s nearly 2,000 cubic feet or about 60 cubic metres at the lowest possible blast temperature, or what the defending vehicle will exhaust in a day’s hard driving…..hopefully not in Europe but earlier in the war so outside.

Libertarianism is under attack from all sorts of angles that we did not even imagine. Could such an organisation as the LA, or this blog, have arisen if there had not been a defensible island that happened to be the birthplace of modern liberal thought? And which the continental Reiche, used to long land borders and bloody intra-land struggle as a way of living, could not immediately get at?

 Oh and I will put “socialsit” on wikipedia sometime.

http://www.haloscan.com/comments/seangabb/flc167/ I don’t propose to keep up this debate, as I have more interesting things to do. However, it won’t do for my own semi-blog to be covered in anti-semitic comments. If anyone would like to have a good laugh at poor Mr O’Farrell, be my guest. Sean

When I uploaded this the other day, something went wrong. Here it is again - complete with the only extant footage of Chris Tame’s Elvis impersonation: 

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-4471155798267551593

Regards,

Sean

1. I have just uploaded a video file of the “Libertarian World Conference 1991″. This contains rare footage of Chris R. Tame in his prime, before the clouds had gathered that darkened his final years. He is certainly at his best here! The video also shows Hubert and Rita Jongen, Tom Grey, and Alastair James, among other friends. You can view the footage here:

David Davis 

The Daily Mail, in its rather sad “two sensational-health-scares plus two sensational-advances (and all for women mostly) per week per front page” editorial policy, trumpeted today;

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/health/healthmain.html?in_article_id=496751&in_page_id=1770&ito=1490

“The mouse that can’t get cancer”.

I object to this popularly-journalized demonization of cancer - not because it’s an often painful and sometimes currently incurable condition - but because news about our progess towards its being made nugatory, such as with colds and flu for instance, has fallen into the hands of those who drive popular culture and popular-use-of-popular-media.

Molecular biophysicists have known for some years that there are genes which act, sort of like a “dead-man’s handle”, in cells which become what we call “neoplastic”; that is to say, cancerous. these cells have “lost” the ability to respond to ordinary chemical signals from their host body, telling them all the while ”don’t divide”. So? They divide. Then they do it again…..and again, and again, and again, and…… the result is? Cancer. Some genes exist in multicellular organisms exactly to respond to this scenario, and they shut down any such cell line. Sometimes, tragically, these genes can become broken, in the course of many many cell replications in one’s life. (That’s why cancers are often conditions of middle or old age.)

But “The mouse that can’t get cancer” is I think a premature stab for us at some confidence in the future. Let’s not get too excited in England in 2007….for…………

Gordon Brown still wants you to die painfully, for a few decades more, like his political forebears still rationed foods and petrol and clothes (even CLOTHES for f***’s sake?) for years after the War. After all, if such was available on the NHS, then rich-people would queue up for it first, and we can’t have that. 

There is no doubt that Man will beat cancer generally and in detail. It may even happen in our lifetimes. But there is also no doubt that, as soon as such treatment whatever becomes available, it will “not be available on the NHS in England”. Probably in Scotland. Most probably in Poland too.

A freer market in university research in the USA has brought this new insight about. isn’t it interestingly tragic that a thingy called “NICE” (the national institute for clinical excellence) often forbids stuff automatically to England, which is permitted to be “funded” elsewhere. Well, there’s socialism for you.

Just a usual weekly reminder for policy-makers, movers and shakers, butchers, bakers and candlestick-makers (all of whom will experience “change” - that mantra word of management consultancy - if for example bio-fuels get a throttle-grip on the planet’s food supply.)

The Libertarian Alliance’s main web page has on the left hand sidebar, under “Libertarian Alliance Publications“, about 800 items categorised under almost any social or philosphical heading you can think of over a cup of tea.

David Davis 

Australia has been in the news, as the latest Anglosphere country to vote to (a) lie back and think of England - by adopting socialism - at a time when the world is about to run out of energy and food owing to other socialists being allowed to play with toys while unsupervised by the police, and (b) to LEAVE THE WAR.

It is not clear to me, historically, that Australia ever left a war before….er, before now….or before its outcome for us and it was sure. This is a unique event, which I could not have forseen. We will of course leave it too, but then we have a shitty socialist gumment that is “avvin’-a-luff”, and knows it - even though for 500 years we have not ordinarily left wars before doing the diplomacy that was needed and that we came to do. Spain left, but it deliberately elected such a bunch of tossers, the day after the enemy blew up some trains.

Talk about “stabs in the back”, and history! What phrase was it that the embryonic NSDAP used, to describe the treatment of its nation and forces after Versailles, to leverage itself out of its dangerously moribund and unknown situation in the early 1920s? Do people really want to revisit this kind of scenario?

But today, just today (and never before) this blog got 7 hits about the title I typed above, about RvA and JS. I wrote something about “Rip Van Australia” in August (see the blog archives) and today it came home.

I have no blinking clue who searched, but I bet it was some worried Australians. Good luck to you poor bastards, you will need it I think now - and we poms are in no position to help you either from now on - just like with (not) Poland in 1939. Kyoto? Global warming as a priority? What possessed you ockers to vote for that lapdancing leftist? Were you scared into repudiating your hard-won comforts, or what?

Eschew the lights of perverted science! Be yourselves, not what the Enemy Class tells you to be!

David Davis

This sort of thing began to go on in my day. Something happened to the fascist left in the 60s; some say that sex and long hair was invented and that they never looked back,  -  others just say that the buggers were let out of their foul cages without being made to bath first, and that we subsequently lost their collars and leads. Here’s the Daily Telegrapph on last night’s shindig - I guess it was a great hoot and a night out for the hired rage-boys;

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=WLI52RGTMQZQ5QFIQMFSFFWAVCBQ0IV0;?xml=/news/2007/11/27/noxford227.xml

Perhaps after 20 years by the mid-60s, the rage-boys had forgotten who their role-models were in the Reich and the USSR, and they thought themselves to be normal humans.

But to get to David Irving and Nick Griffin, two characters who seem to attract more than their fair share of spoiled tomatoes and eggs.

David Irving wants to say certain erroneous things about the Nazi holocaust in Europe. Why, I do not know, it seems an odd thing to want to devote your life to doing. Unlike the situation we have with the Global-Warm-mongering-promoters, the Holocaust’s ”History is Settled”. There is quite enough evidence for the mass slaughter in general and gas-chambers in particular, including such prosaic items as engineering-design briefs and commercial recipts for the building-costs, Zyklon-B and other materials from the firms concerned; not to mention millions of personal accounts which can’t all be simultaneous fabrications.  In a remotely free society Irving ought to be allowed to say anything he wants; indeed he has already served time in jail for saying the same things in an unfree one, the continental EU. It is probable that he says what he says and writes what he does on account of some personality problems, that make him want to seek attention. Whatever, he is probably a harmless nutter. Ranting and jumping about with placards, and disrupting debates, could make more people give his views more credence than they deserve. The best policy imho would be to ignore the fellow.

Nick Griffin is a Cambridge-educated lawyer. He is the leader of what seems to be a rather left-of-centre, corporatist party, which appeals to the electorally neglected Urban Old White Working Class, on account of its articulating their direct concerns and their externally-repressed sense of lost nationhood. His party has won and regularly now wins the odd local council seat in elections, much to the disgust of the various Nazis in power in Westminster and in the Boroughs, many of which are quite pocket-like and also rotten, specially in the inner-urban areas where he has most support. These facts are clearly what puts him Beyond The Pale for the mediarati and the Enemy Class; his views are not fashionable to hold nor politically correct. There is no evidence that a BNP government would address either the concerns of its franchise-base, or get out of interfering in the economy and civilisation any more effectively than (Ageing) Labour, the “too-New” Tories or the sLip-Dems. Griffin has next to no chance of winning any seats at Westminster in any election soon; all he can hope to do is irritate the powers-that-be by exposing their dangerous lack of support and isolation from reality. Unpalatable as his views are to the UK political establishment, there is no evidence that gagging him, and periodically putting him on trial for saying stuff, reduces his popular support.

Libertarians believe that free speech should mean just that. Not the current setup where an increasing range of views is forbidden in public, and is increasingly criticized or restricted on private premises such as the Oxford Union. Nutters and unpopular prats of all sorts should be allowed to say and write what they please - and that includes Moslem “clerics” who advocate anti-civilisational-violence and “jihad” - whatever that stuff might be. We also should be free to call them whatever names please us - such as fascist imperialists, terrorists, pretentious twats, and the like, and denounce them to the end of our strength and beyond. The laws of Libel and Slander are quite highly-developed, and perfectly capable of coping with any situation that can be imagined. The natural rights of free people in a free nation should not be abated  - either by laws which serve only to inconvenience and bind, or by rentable self-appointed mobs-for-hire of Nazi “demonstrators”.

I hope they dodn’t mess up the Union buildings too much. Though from experience there will be some clearing up of shit and stuff to do today.

POST UPDATE: 19.21 GMT. TWO searches hit us, calling up ”coal mining libertarian”, this afternoon. You can’t say we aren’t polymathic in our tastes!

David Davis 

Good one from Moonbattery here.

http://www.moonbattery.com/archives/2007/11/biofuel_idiocy_1.html#trackbacks

Read the thingy and just refer to my title.

Here is Sean Gabb doing his stuff for everyone, again!

http://www.libertarian.co.uk/multimedia/2007-11-26-freespeech-sig.mp3
 

http://www.libertarian.co.uk/multimedia/2007-11-26-freespeech-sig.mp3

Free Life Commentary,
A Personal View from
The Director of the Libertarian Alliance
Issue Number 167
21st November 2007
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Notes on a BBC Debate Between
Chris Bryant MP and Sean Gabb
by Sean Gabb

I went on the wireless yesterday morning—the 20th November—to debate freedom of speech with a Labour Member of Parliament. Apparently, the Oxford Union is holding a debate of its own about this matter, and has invited both David Irving and Nick Griffin to speak. Mr Irving, for those who do not know his name, is an historian who has at various times doubted the nature and extent of national socialist holocaust in Germany. Mr Griffin seems to have no particular opinion on the holocaust, but is leader of the main British white nationalist party. I am not sure if the two men have ever met. I do not know what they think about each other. But they have enemies in common, and these tend to place the two men into the same “fascist” category.

Chris Bryant is the Labour Member of Parliament for Rhondda. He believes that the Oxford Union should withdraw its invitation from two such allegedly wicked men. I was called on by the BBC to put the case against him.

I think the idea was that Mr Bryant should attack freedom of speech and I should defend it. But Mr Bryant was too clever to allow the debate to run in this course. He insisted that Messrs Irving and Griffin should have the right to speak their minds in places like Hyde Park, but that the Oxford Union should not pollute itself with their company. On the face of things, then, he was not arguing for censorship—no more than I might be if I advised you not to invite the Seventh Day Adventists into your house. Of course, his argument was only on the face of things. We live in a country where the old boundaries between state and voluntary activity have been so blurred by subsidy and regulation and deals behind the curtain, that advice is fast becoming the same as instruction. And Mr Bryant would not really defend the right of these two men to speak in Hyde Park. Any meeting they called there would be banned under the Public Order Act 1986. If the meeting were allowed to go ahead, all the speeches would be filmed by the police, and the speakers would face criminal charges under the various terrorism and racial hatred laws brought in since 1997. I do not suppose Mr Bryant would hurry forward to criticise any of this.

But he was making a clever point. To answer him would require more time than was available. So, having heard him out, I decided to go on the attack. I thanked him for his “defence” for freedom of speech, then denounced him for criticising men who were not his moral inferiors. Mr Bryant, I told the listeners, had voted for identity cards, for ninety day imprisonment without trial or charge, and for a war with Iraq that had so far killed 650,000 people. He had no right to call anyone a fascist.

It took thirty seconds and was very easily done. I reduced the man to spluttering rage. He spent the rest of the debate trying to defend his voting record, while insisting that some of his best friends had been murdered by Generals Franco and Pinochet. My answer to this one was: “Then you should know better”. That really upset him, and gave the presenter an excuse to deliver a good kicking of her own.

I recorded the debate and have put in on the Multimedia Page of the Libertarian Alliance Website. You can find it here:

http://www.libertarian.co.uk/multimedia/2007-11-20-bryant-sig.mp3

But what makes this debate worth noting is not that I was rather witty or cruel. It is notable so far as it shows how easy it has become to reveal the moral bankruptcy of our ruling class.

Mr Bryant is a typical member of this class. At Oxford, he was a member of the Conservative Association. He next took holy orders in the Church of England, becoming first a curate and then a youth chaplain. After this, he joined the Labour Party and got a job at the BBC. In 2001, he was sent into Parliament for the pocket borough of Rhondda—a place where a Labour candidate would be elected even if it were a dead cat. His most public achievement since then has been to put up semi-nude pictures of himself on a website to assist his search for male company.

I am a few years older than Mr Bryant, and I attended not Oxford but York University. Even so, I know his sort. He belongs to a class and generation of people who combine endless moral superiority with bossiness. All through the 1980s and 1990s, they recited their mantra of contempt for anyone who was not one of them. When they came into their own, they said, they would make England into a kinder, gentler country. Their order would be more tolerant, more inclusive, more open and more accountable. Once they had dropped their commitment to socialist economics, they even promised it would be no less economically efficient.

Because their intentions were so pure, no moral failing or evidence of hypocrisy could be held against them. Look at Mr Bryant’s search for male company. When the newspapers showed us a man in ill-preserved middle age posing like a model from an underwear catalogue, his friends put round the word that he was the victim of an “anti-gay” witch hunt. When it was said that, regardless of sexual taste, he should have behaved with more dignity, we were reminded that the 1950s were over and we now lived in “Cool Britannia”. Attacks on his support, and that of his class, for the European Union were thrown back as accusations of “xenophobia” and “extremist tendencies”. Rising evidence of corruption and administrative incompetence were brushed aside.

But there comes a point when the truth is both undeniable and hurtful. After ten years of domination by these people, we have now reached that point. It is useful to rub noses in the daily scandal. At the moment, Mr Bryant and his class are presiding over the negligent loss of 25 million names and identification data. Tomorrow, it will be something else. But there is always some more or less credible excuse to get them out of permanent trouble. The real stick to use against them is three bloody wars and a police state at home. They promised us neither of these things. But that is what they have delivered.

I wish they had been more like the people they always said they were. But one advantage of their not having been so is their plain embarrassment. We do not live in the world that they promised us, and perhaps that they did vaguely want. We live in a world where they are looking and sounding and behaving just like their parodic notion of the old ruling class.

I called Mr Bryant a fascist. He took vast offence at the word. I may yet receive a letter from his solicitor. But after ten years of rule by him and his class, what other political term fits him better?

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

David Davis 

England lose to Croatia. I’m not personally surprised, since a small, historically-pushed-about nation will play footy with more warlike ferocity than us, specially against the game’s inventor. And specially now, when the prime raison-d’etre of Premiership players for English sides is to be famous, so as to have enough dosh to serially-shack-up with female slebs, and then cause themselves and the slebs to be photographed while doing aspects of this thing. The public packaging is all; the game is merely a means of collecting the money.

The English bureaucracy “loses” a record of 25 million people’s personal data. Again, the outer packaging of the State is all; the need to retain such data, losing it notwithstanding, is again merely a means of collecting the money, so the State and its class can feel like slebs at our expense, just like the footy-players.

(Data protection? ITEM! The State loses our identities, and yet, yet…..yesterday, I could not legally be handed, for nothing, a non-working but spinnable HARD DISK, by a computer shop that only wanted to be shot of it. I wanted it for dissassembling and teaching purposes….but……the Data Protection Act apparently states that it has to have a nail hammered through it, or similar gross structural damage so it does not spin and the platters are fractured. Did anybody else know that? It surprised me. Perhaps that shopkeeper had just not taken a shine to me?)

But the reaction to the two events is different. Useless wimpish Steve McLaren though it was not (even coupled with his generally lack-lustre effect on our game) a resigning matter, but the Football-Powers-That-Be (I have no clue what they are called) had the grace to show the door to the silly man. However, useless wimpish Alastair Darling is still impersonating a Chancellor of the Exchequer of some place or other, at this time of writing. Perhaps there is no over-arching body that can call time on him?

What happened to “The People”? Has it been dissolved and a more pliable one elected?

Perhaps this is what the Wireless Tele Vision is actually, finally for?

Free Life Commentary,
A Personal View from
The Director of the Libertarian Alliance
Issue Number 166
21st November 2007
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David Davis 

It’s no use just sitting here and dubbing Socialist governments who lack Full-Terror-Police “incompetent tossers”, “wankers“, “can’t run a whelk-stall”, “wouldn’t trust them to mow the lawn”, or anything else the bolgosphere has come up with in the last 20 hours. It won’t make the underlying menace go away any faster.

Despite having no fully-evolved Terror-Police (aka AUBERON WAUGH) they do have an effective monopoly of force, and so there is nothing that can be done to make them behave properly in this scenario and do the right thing, since they “don’t do resignations”, we have no guns, and we can’t get the Queen to call an election as she’s busy. Poor blameless Paul Gray, the head of HMRC, has indeed done the right thing, and hopefully for him and his family he will therefore, not lacking some trace of integrity, get offered another job somewhere in the fullness of time - even though he seemingly coked up over Tax-”Credits” (whatever those may be…..sounds like a tautology to me.)Human nature, deriving from God, is thus of course boundless in its ability to spot thugs and shysters, and Gray is clearly not one of these evil things. (It also explains why nobody votes in the UK any more - if everybody slurping slime at the trough of the State is in it for the dosh and the Mercs-4-Jerks, and you can’t dislodge them, what’s the point?)

This lot has now shown itself for what it really is. First, through destroying or trying to destroy all our institutions that made us a unique and important nation, and secondly through staggering incompetence of intergalactic proportions. Just read the headlines…. (later aditing - ed.)

It is a bunch of people who have never known how to do anything except “career politics”. They are advised by another bunch of people who have never known anything except how to be “career bureaucrats” - the rot started, incidentally, to set in here in the UK in the early-70s when “the brightest” graduates at my University would sit the “Civil Service” (as it was universally known - one was expected simply to know, via the “form”, what this meant, and nod sagely while genuflecting towards the “sitter”) as a matter of course.

Compounding these errors, this bunch has as its friends and “special advisers” and Quangocrats, others who do no really useful work whatever - and who, if they were less successful at self-promotion than they currently are, would be reduced to plugging away in the blogosphere for no money. At least then nobody would listen to them or take them seriously, which would be a blessing!!!!! (The average blog has less than 0.007 reader per day, and that includes GUIDO and other biggies.)

If and when, revolution or no, a “new settlement” can be agreed, then it’s high time that there was thought to be no such thing as a “career” in “politics” or “public service”. Amateurs have driven the world from the Renaissance onwards, which was when it suddenly began to matter to the universe that there was such a place as this Earth. Even the Romans thought you couldn’t be a Senator until you’d become quite old AND done useful stuff besides. this made all Rpman senators effectively amateurs. Later, “Amateur Radio” types, that is to say, geeks; from about 1904 onwards, virtually invented all of the applied forms of all granted-for-taken communications methods that you and I use today. (We “did” satellites-type-stuff, before Rupert Murdoch was a gleam in his OWN eye…..and we were using the Moon! The Moon did not amplify signals, but its reflectivity extablished the principle that satellite comms could be done……Even “wireless  tele-vision” was pioneered in the 40s; that is what hams called it.)

I don’t think a Libertarian Party would allow people to be candidates for selection, until they’d done the Roman bit first either. This is not by any means a full solution to the strategic problem of how you get the right people to serve in a Minimal State, but it could be a start. Get the professionals in, which is to say the amateurs.

UK immigration is higher on the political agenda than at any time I can remember since my childhood.

I grew up in Gravesend in the 1970’s and witnessed National Front marches where supporters were outnumbered by the local Sikh community who turned up on masse to beat down an ignorant minority.

In the 1979 general election my father voted for the National Front. Confused? maybe. A racist? possibly. Let down by the main political parties and swept along with the politics of the day that used immigration as a scapegoat to confront difficult political and economic questions? most definitely.

So in 2007 racism towards Asians has been replaced by eastern Europeans. The prime minister, Gordon Brown, himself has led from the front by demanding “British jobs for British workers.”

The tide has turned. I fear British politics is amidst a sea change and racism is about to hit centre stage, again.

I read an interesting article on the Independent Online today by Stephen King (managing director of economics at HSBC) Football, Migration & the Blame Game.

King quoted Liverpool and England football captain, Steven Gerrard speaking at the England football team press conference last week. Speaking about foreigner players playing in England he said:

“Something has got to happen otherwise there will be more and more foreigners and they will take over.”

More alarming was Reading manager Steve Coppell’s levelled comment: “There is a big danger that we stop producing quality young kids because of the amount of foreigners in the game. If foreigners do take over completely, it will affect the national team even worse than maybe it is now.”

Coppell is an intelligent, level-headed man who I have no doubt is not making a racist statement here. However, my concern is not so much of the comments themselves, as this is football and not politics. But how these simple comments can and will be taken completely out of context to fuel racial hatred.

Foreigners are already being blamed for the England football team’s failures. The influx of foreign players is stopping our white English lads from playing for the top English clubs! Does it not have anything to do with foreign players being more skillful?

Firstly, as a football fan, I want to watch the best players in the world play. I’m not interested in watching white players, black players, English players or Polish players. I simply watch the beautiful game because I love the game of football.

Secondly, to any stupid, ignoramus who you hear using the argument that the England football team is failing to win football games because of the amount of foreign players in the English Premiership, ask them why it was that England failed to qualify for the 1974 and 1978 World Cup!

David Davis 

I don’t know, do you? I mean, don’t socialists have more or less the same dietary requirements as ordinary people?

David Davis 

You can listen to the Sound-Wireless spiel here:

http://www.libertarian.co.uk/multimedia/2007-11-20-bryant-sig.mp3 

The thing starts well, seemingly. Mr Bryant appears initially to favour total free speech absolutely.

Then……….. hmmmmmmm ……… strangely, he tries to pretend that the Oxford Union is somehow different from other places where these two supposed ne’er-do-wells in the headline could speak about their allegedly “extremist” views.  They should “not be given a platform”, and Luke Tryl the President is seemingly in Bryant’s eyes merely executing a sort of PR stunt.

I have sat in the place in my youth, and even spoken fleetingly in debates. So I can’t personally see the moral-philosophic difference between the Oxford Union, Speaker’s Corner, and the public bar of the Blue Anchor round the corner from here.

Sean Gabb is at his corrosively logical best here. Strangely, even the female radio-presenter seems to lean slightly to his point of view, a phenomenon that Gabb does not often experience in his broadcasting career. Bryant ends up being called a fascist, which is quite amusing in a kind of way, bearing in mind he voted for ID cards to be ultimately compulsory for British People; a curiously and wickedly illiberal idea, redolent of the Third Reich and other fascist states such as the USSR and many in Europe today.

David Davis 

The Sunday Telegraph carried in its business setcion a thingy saying “new ad curbs would slash TV income.” The gist is that proposed “controls” (it’s “for the children” of course) and a 9pm “watershed” for ads for the next things this gumment disapproves of will lower the share prices of the TV contractors further, and “cost the advertising industry” £250million.

ALL THE BLASTED STUPID MYOPIC BUGGERS, collecting their salaries for the now, HAVE MISSED THE POINT. They are heading for disaster, rather fast.

They will go the way of the cigarette manufacturers in the last century, as they will not make this fight a fight about individual freedom and censorship, which is actually what it is.

In a market-civilisation, advertising is essential to individual liberty. Advertising a good product, or one which people want, ensures its success. Advertising a bad product causes it to be garotted fast and relatively painlessly, except for the maker who chiefly suffers, but that’s freedom for you.

Socialists and other Nazis can’t take this at all. They are so hung up on “planning” and direction of masses of people that they just can’t see that successful advetising means there has to have been a successful and wanted product, which people, er, wanted. If they did not want it, they would not buy it. They even teach my students that “advertising makes people buy things they don’t want or need.” Yes, they do, in England, in 2007. It’s difficult to combat except one-2-one, when you can use logic and reason, but you can do it, slowly. (But that’s not enough.)

Many of you here know the pre-capitalist societies of Central and Eastern Europe pre-1989. There was by then little or no advertising - notwithstanding that there were rather few goods available anyway. This was not the fault of producers, who were not allowed. Totalitarian societies are characterized by the lack of goods and info thereof, and the plethora of State glorification of their leaders and “parties”. We are heading that way rather quickly in England.

In about 1980 I was asked with a good friend, now a succesful London IP lawyer, to draft a case for tobacco advertising, courtesy of Peter Marsh, of Allen Brady and Marsh, for whom I worked at that time. (Rod Allen died recently.) This would be presented to a committee of marketing directors of the major tobacco companies, in support of their opposition to an ad-ban. My friend and I came up with a liberal (I would not go so far as to say Libertarian) defence of any advertising including that for tobacco products, based on the fact that control of information, or its suppression, amounted to censorship. We said that if the product was legal to make and sell and own, then people who made it ought to be allowed to speak well of it. Any encroachment on their ability to do so would amount to suppression of free speech, and oculd not be tolerated in a free Market-Civilisation. Thatcher was young, FOREST was young, and they might just have got away with it while the enemy-class flank was unguarded.

Instead, the report was blown out. They said “we can’t get away with this”. They decided to try and contradict the medical evidence about lung cancer (not possible to do) and also to try to say “advertising is all about getting the consumer to switch brands”…”we can switch them to “lower tar” brands!”

I and my friend said we would recommend this plan if they took it up as they wanted to, as a recipe for utter disaster, and ultimate defeat by the State.

The rest, as they say, is history. (Our recommendations were not adopted, although dear Peter Marsh endorsed every word.)

So, now that smoking is almost outlawed, people, espeically  poor people, drink heavily and eat nice-tasting food from hot-food-joints, to help distance themselves from the eternal hellfire of safety-socialism for a few minutes or hours more. The state-sponsored prevalence of post-Christian atheism means that they can’t expect anything after this life (the gumment says so) and nobody believes all those Moslems about all those virgins anyway, and half of the poor buggers are also non-virgin women and certainly not lesbians as they have children, so where do they go to, then? Hell? 

So there is only tobacco (where still allowed) burgers and chips, and drink.  Gambling will stop when they poor-buggers all run out of money, and as the state is bust there won’t be able to be a “weekly lucky chance benefit payment” scheme (to keep it running) masterminded by that man whose name I can’t remember but who is described as a “Chancellor of an Exchequer”.

There is talk that the “industry” will “work with” the gumment. That, alas, is what happened last time.

Those who do not learn from history will be condemned to repeat it.

Here are Brian Micklethwait and Antoine Clarke talking all about my new book:

http://brianmicklethwait.signal100.com/podcast/2007-10-06-brian-and-antoine-22.mp3

Here is the book:

http://tinyurl.com/34e2o3

“Culture revolution; Culture War. How the conservatives lost England, and how to get it back.”

 And here is a comment on the podcast from David Robert Gibson:

“Well said. I have downloaded the mp3 then listened to it twice. Initially, I thought how civilised it was, and I liked their approval of Sean’s individualistic approach to libertarianism, and of his recent writing about Epicurus - a worthy subject and one of the greatest philosophers. However, I became a tad *alarmed* - Brian and Antoine gave me the impression of
belonging to the cigar and brandy chattering class school of politics. They disagreed with Sean’s notion of the ruling class, what I call The Regime, looking upon our rulers as mere unco-ordinated incompetents floundering around for a way to compensate for the failure of the Communist economic ideals of their youth, to replace them with the social equivalent. They are probably in part correct, but this world is not a university debating society - out in the real world people get hurt, and even those who don’t directly are, I think like me, developing a growing sense of anomie. Our culture is no longer our own, but rather a plaything for the increasingly interventionist Regime to inflict whatever fashionable Leftist, and
lucrative, scheme they choose, and the imported multi-culturalism, which Brian and Antoine appear to welcome, is a *central* part of that deconstruction. The Enemy Class, as Sean rightly calls them, are not a bunch of Hippies, they have vast power and wealth - our power and wealth - and they are *co-ordinated* in their plan to re-engineer this country. They steal from us to fund it, and they will imprison and kill us if we resist. We should not regard them complacently!

“My hatred of modernist culture is not mere idealism but, rather, visceral, and I would love to see a return of much, not all, of traditional English life. That is why I find Sean’s conservative libertarianism both refreshing and comforting. He and I may not agree on everything, but we are not mesmerised by the fashionable notion that if something is new or foreign it
must be better. No! - the way culture is, it is almost certainly worse. Freedo