Mill on Liberty – Old Review

I wrote this in 1994. I still more or less agree with it. SIG

On Liberty
John Stuart Mill
Prepared by dell from the Harvard Classics edition,
published by P.F. Collier & Son, Massachusetts, 1909
Available from gopher://gopher.panix.com/misc/referencelibrary/classicsofliterature/
First published 1859, published on-line September 1993, 281.53kb, public domain

End War by Ending the State

by David D’Amato
http://c4ss.org/?p=9610

Much has been made of last Thursday’s announcement that, as reported by the New York Times, the US Department of Defense will take its “first major step toward shrinking its budget after a decade of war.” The plan represents only a minor modification (if even that), but has been presented — by both its proponents and detractors in the US political establishment — as a veritable sea change.

Justin Raimondo on Libertarian Strategy

by Justin Raimondo
http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2012/01/libertarianism-political-action-cultural-change/#comments

To begin with, the idea that you and the rest of the “bleeding heart libertarians” on this blog are libertarians is the result of a misunderstanding. Are we really supposed to take seriously a “libertarian” who proposes licensing parents by the State? Puh-leeze.

Secondly, your “argument” in favor of the “trickle down” theory — that libertarians must convert “the intellectuals” in order to make any long lasting change — is dishonest, self-serving, and just plain false. After all, since jobs in the realm of ideas are rare and much sought after, and since most of these coveted positions are financed by money-bags with an agenda of their own (often in conflict with libertarianism), “intellectuals” are easily bribed, and the majority naturally tend to act as apologists for power. He who pays the piper calls the tune.

Third, your argument is incredibly self-serving: since you are doubtless the recipient of financial largesse from IHS, what you’re saying is: “Please don’t give any money to the Paul campaign: instead, you should give it to me.” That is your argument, boiled down to its essentials: why not come out and say it?

What has your panties in a bunch is the indisputable fact that Paul’s success is due precisely to the incredible success of the Rothbardian-Rockwellian “right wing populist” strategy which you and your fellow “bleeding hearts” despise: all those “yahoos” snot-nose Jeffrey Friedman hates are rallying around Paul’s libertarian banner! Horrors! Well, isn’t that just tough: you and your “left-libertarian” cronies don’t own the libertarian label, and never did.

“Bleeding heart libertarianism” is a device whereby a bunch of spoiled Kochotopus-funded nonentities hope to get tenure by convincing your commie colleagues in the faculty lounge that libertarianism is just another form of leftism. Well, good luck with that, because you’ll need it. In the meantime, you’ll pardon the rest of us as we ignore IHS and give our support to the Paul camaign.

Oh, and by the way: your efforts to reach out to the “left” are being surpassed by the Paul campaign, as progressives like Tom Hayden, Glen Greenwald, John Walsh, and a host of others defend Paul from the vicious attacks you and your ilk are promoting. So please

Marriage: The State v Contract and Religion

by Thomas Knapp
http://c4ss.org/?p=9447

2012′s Republican US presidential candidates are, to a man, opposed to legal recognition of same-sex marriage.

Ayn Rand, Objectivism and Anarchism

The Facts Of Reality: Logic And History In Objectivist Debates About Government
Nicholas Dykes
Philosophical Notes No. 79
ISSN 0267-7091 1 85637 609 5

An occasional publication of the Libertarian Alliance, Suite 35, 2 Lansdowne Row, Mayfair, London W1J 6HL.

© 2007: Libertarian Alliance; Nicholas Dykes.

Nicholas Dykes is a British-Canadian writer currently living in England. He is married, with two grown-up children. Besides numerous pieces for the Libertarian Alliance and journals such as Reason Papers, he is the author of Fed Up With Government? (Hereford, UK, Four Nations, 1991), the 300-page manifesto for a putative British ‘Libertarian Party’. This current essay was previously published in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 7, no. 1 (Fall 2005): pp. 79-140.

The views expressed in this publication are those of its author, and not necessarily those of the Libertarian Alliance, its Committee, Advisory Council or subscribers.

FOR LIFE, LIBERTY AND PROPERTY

A Bleeding Heart History of Libertarian Thought – Herbert Spencer

Article by Matt Zwolinski.

If you’re like most people, then the one thing you probably think you know about Herbert Spencer is that he was a “Social Darwinist.” And that one thing is wrong.

From the Arab Spring to the Fall Revolution?

by Kevin Carson
http://c4ss.org/?p=8518

Let’s start with a recap. In Summer 2010 Wikileaks published a cache of tens of thousands of top-secret State Department cables, much to the outrage and chagrin of the American national security establishment and its Amen Corner. The documents included embarrassing details on the internal corruption of a number of Arab regimes, and helped to spark a “Facebook/Twitter Revolution” in Tunisia that ended in the overthrow of the government. From there the grass-roots revolutions, in which social networking technologies played an important role, spread to Egypt and Libya and brought down those regimes. And the fires are still burning in Bahrain and Syria.

Tactical Notes 032, How Radical Is Too Radical? Anarchism as a Practical Guide to Advancing Liberty (2011), Isaac M. Morehouse and Christopher J. Nelson

Libertarians want less government. Yet many libertarians think it is fruitless to dwell for any length of time on just how limited the state should be. Even more libertarians dismiss the idea of anarchism – the ultimate limit on government – out of hand. Not only does anarchism deserve a fair hearing on theoretical, practical, and moral grounds, but it deserves to be a serious part of strategic discussions if liberty is to be advanced at all. Libertarians can disagree with statelessness as the best or logical direction of a free society, but they cannot afford to ignore it. Right or wrong, the radical idea of anarchism is an incredibly valuable tool for advancing liberty and should not be dismissed.

via Tactical Notes 032, How Radical Is Too Radical? Anarchism as a Practical Guide to Advancing Liberty (2011), Isaac M. Morehouse and Christopher J. Nelson.

“Free markets” and “free trade” as a religion, by Robert Henderson – Replies, Anyone?

Anyone fancy responding to this? An obvious response is to ask RH to define the laissez-faire religion he is attacking, and to distinguish this from corporatism, and then to ask if he knows anything about the economics of public choice and regulatory capture, or about the effects on business scale and morality brought about by infrastructure subsidies and the tax and regulatory burden….SIG

http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/?p=590

Free marketeers fancy themselves to be rational, calculating beasts. In reality, their adoration of the market is essentially religious. They believe that it will solve all economic ills, if not immediately, then in the medium to long term. Armed with this supposed objective truth, they proselytize about the moral evils and inefficiencies of public service and the wondrous efficiency and ethical outcomes of private enterprise regardless of the practical effects of their policies or the frequent misbehaviour of those in command of large private companies. Their approach is essentially that of the religious believer.

Like the majority of religious believers, “free marketeers and traders” are none too certain of the theology of their religion. (I am always struck by how many of them lack a grasp of even basic economic theory and are almost invariably wholly ignorant of economic history). They recite their economic catechism sublime in the concrete of their ignorance.

The religion has its roots in the first half of the 18th century when there were occasional attempts to suggest tariff reform, but the idea only became a serious political policy in the 1780s with the advent of Pitt the Younger as Prime Minister in 1784 who long toyed with “economical reform”.

The 18th century also provided the religion with its holy book, The Wealth of Nations by the Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith. This strongly argued for “free markets” and “free trade”, but Smith also recognised the demands of national security, the need for government to engage in social provision such as road building and maintenance which would not otherwise be done and, must importantly, the nature of a society and its economy. Here is Smith on the Navigation Acts: “…the Act of Navigation by diminishing the number of buyers; and we are thus likely not only to buy foreign goods dearer, but to sell our own cheaper, than if there were a more perfect freedom of trade. As defence, however, is of much more importance than opulence, the Act of Navigation is, perhaps, the wisest of all the commercial regulations of England.” (Wealth of Nations Bk IV. ch ii)

But Smith and his book suffered the fate of all those who found religions, secular or otherwise. As the decades passed Smith’s cautious approach was redrawn in the minds of his disciples to become a surgically “clean” mechanical ideology in which all that mattered was the pursuit of profit and the growth of trade and industry through the application of the “holy edicts” of open markets and comparative advantage. The disciples, like other religious believers, avidly quoted the passages from their holy book which suited their purposes and ignored those which did not. They also found a further holy text in Thomas Malthus’ Essay on Population of 1802, whose predictions, although unproven by events, could be used to demonstrate that economic expansion was vital if widespread starvation was not to occur.

The clinical, soulless and inhuman nature of the laissez faire idea as it evolved is exemplified by the English economist David Ricardo. Here is a flavour of his mindset:”Under a system of perfectly free commerce each country naturally devotes its capital and labour to such employments as are most beneficial to both. The pursuit of individual advantage is admirably connected with the universal good of the whole. By stimulating industry, and by using most efficaciously the peculiar powers bestowed by nature, it distributes labour most economically, while increasing the general mass of the production it diffuses general benefits, and binds together by one common tie of interest and intercourse the universal society of nations”. (David Ricardo in The fall of protection p 174).

The Napoleonic wars largely foiled Pitt’s wish for broad reform and placed “free trade” in suspended animation as a serious political idea until the 1820s, when cautious attempts at tariff reform again were made. But underneath the political elite was a radical class who were very much enamoured of wholesale economical reform. With the Great Reform Act of 1832 they were given their opportunity to become part of the political elite. They took it with both hands, their most notable and extreme proponents being John Bright and Richard Cobden backed by the intellectual power of David Ricardo – all three became MPs.

Within a dozen years of the first election under the Great Reform Act’s passing, Parliament had been captured by the disciples of Adam Smith and the pass on protection had been sold by of all people a Tory prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, an action which kept the Tories from power for most of the next 40 years.

Such was their religious credulity that the “free traders” advocated not merely opening up Britain’s markets, both at home and in the colonies, to nations who would allow Britain equivalent access to their markets, they advocated opening up Britain’s markets regardless of how other nations acted. The consequence was, as we have seen, disastrous for Britain.

Disraeli in a speech on 1st February 1849 cruelly dissected this insanity:” There are some who say that foreigners will not give us their production for nothing, and that therefore we have no occasion to concern ourselves as to the means and modes of repayment. There is no doubt that foreigners will not give us their goods without exchange for them; but the question is what are the terms of exchange most beneficial for us to adopt. You may glut markets, but the only effect of your attempt to struggle against the hostile tariffs by opening your ports is that you exchange more of your own labour each year for a less quantity of foreign labour, that you render British labour less efficient, that you degrade British labour, diminish profits, and, therefore, must lower wages; while philosophical enquirers have shown that you will finally effect a change in the distribution of the precious metals that must be pernicious and may be fatal to this country. It is for these reasons that all practical men are impressed with a conviction that you should adopt reciprocity as the principle of your tariff – not merely from practical experience, but as an abstract truth. This was the principle of the commercial negations at Utrecht – which were followed by Mr Pitt in his commercial negotiations at Paris – and which were wisely adopted and applied by the Cabinet of Lord Liverpool, but which were deserted flagrantly and unwisely in 1846″. (The fall of Protection pp 337/8″).

Ironically, the “free traders” make the same general errors as Marxists. They believe that everything stems from economics. For the neo-liberal the market has the same pseudo-mystical significance that the dialectic has for the Marxist. Just as the Marxist sees the dialectic working inexorably through history to an eventual state of communism (or a reversion to barbarism to be exact), so the neo-liberal believes that the market will solve any economic problem and most social ills. Neither ideology works because it ignores the reality of human nature and its sociological realisation.

The one track economic mentality of the early “free traders” is well represented by the father of J S Mill, James Mill:”The benefit which is derived from exchanging one commodity for another arises from the commodity received rather than the from the commodity given. When one country exchanges, or in other words, traffics with another, the whole of its advantage consists of the in the commodities imported. It benefits by the importation and by nothing else. A protecting duty which, if it acts at all, limits imports, must limit exports likewise, checking and restraining national industry, thus diminishing national wealth.” (The fall of protection p 174). And to Hell with any social or strategic consideration or changing economic circumstances.

After the Great War and the fall of “free trade” as public policy in 1931, the religion went underground for nearly fifty years. When it re-emerged as a political idea in the 1970s the politicians who fell under its spell were every bit as unquestioning and credulous as those of the 1840s. Tony Blair’ statement on Globalisation, ie, free trade, at the 2005 Labour Party Conference shows that it is alive and kicking today. Scorning any attempt to discuss Globalisation, Blair said of those who wished to oppose it “You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer”. (Daily Telegraph 1 10 2005.)

None of this would matter very much now if those who believe in “free markets” and “free trade” were without political power. Unfortunately, theirs is the elite ideology of the moment and the past 25 years. In Britain, the Tories may be more fanatical in their devotion to the market as panacea, but Blairite Labour have caught more than a mild dose of the disease. A good example of this is their response to house price hyperinflation where they desperately and futilely attempt remedies within the constraints of what they perceive to be “free market” disciplines rather than opting for the obvious state generated remedies such as restricting immigration, building a great deal of social housing and forcing developers to release land for building.

Both the traditional Left and Right have been duped by globalisation. The Left initially welcomed globalisation as a dissolver of national sovereignty, but they are discovering by the day just how restrictive international treaties and membership of supra national groups can be. As things stand, through our membership of the EU and the World Trade Organisation treaties, no British government could introduce new socialist measures because they cannot nationalise companies, protect their own commerce and industry or even ensure that taxpayers’ money is spent in Britain with British firms. A British government can have any economic system they like provided it is largely free trade, free enterprise.

The Right are suffering the same sickness with different symptoms. They find that they are no longer masters in their own house and cannot meaningfully appeal to traditional national interests because treaties make that impossible.

But there is a significant difference between the position of the two sides. The traditional Right have simply been usurped by neo-Liberals in blue clothes: the traditional Left have been betrayed by a confusion in their ideology which has allowed their main political vehicles to be surreptitiously by the likes of Blair.

The left have historically objected to “free-trade” on the grounds that it destroys jobs and reduces wages. But what they (and especially the British Left) have rarely if ever done is walk upon the other two necessary planks in the anti-”free trade” platform: the maintenance of (1) national sovereignty and (2) a sense of national cohesion. The consequence is that the Left has been and are still struggling with two competing and mutually exclusive ends: internationalism and the material improvement of the mass of the people.

Libertarian Alliance Christmas Message 2010

What is liberty for, and why should people be free?

David Davis

Merry Christmas, ladies and gentlemen. May God rest you merry, and perhaps tight this year. Get tight while you can still afford it – for governments, specially this one, would like to think they can “combat drinking” by over-taxation, freely and cheerfully admitted to.

Well, this year, among other things, the awful and totally-unelected Gordon Brown zeppelin-thing-in-the-ether, foisted on us by Tony Blair and possibly his worst single act, imploded finally. We voted, and guess what? Nobody won, and the Government got in, again. This may be a good thing in the short term, in that the coalition can’t actually do anything to hinder people much more, let alone help. But strategically in the battle for universal individual freedom, we here are certainly no better off than before.

In fact, a little worse, for some of us like me and Sean see the Clock ticking…. We know that however relatively more slowly than before we are being marched to the living-gas-chambers of sustainable socialist greenery, and to the concentration-camps of more intricate and closer repression, the available decades of living people’s lifetimes in which they might do something to reverse The Big Modern Managerial State, are slipping away like sand in a glass. Time, literally, is running out for liberty in the UK for sure, and so it would seem also for other Anglosphere nations. I gather that you can get fined for speeding in Australia, if you are tracked by a police helicopter…I thought helicopters were foreign-policy-war-winning-weapons, for machine-gunning GramscoStaliNazi “freedom-fighters”, until I researched Australian Policing.

So, what’s wrong with liberty? Why exactly are we under assault? And given the seeming consensus ranged against individual freedom, not only among the governing Enemy-Classes of the world, but also among populations who you think should know better, what is the point of freedom? Why should people be free?

If slavery seems to make so many people happy, why should bother to resist? Why continue to accept the nonplussed opinions of our contemporaries? Why bother any more to bear their frank uncomprehension at our persistent criticism of statist ideas and outcomes? Why should we endure the perpetual status of outsiders and deranged wierdos?

We do have the comfort of course, of knowing that everyone else is mistaken. We know we are right: we also know there is objective truth, about why liberty is good, and all the alternatives are evil.

But, why is it that in the presence of large measures of individual liberty, Men seem to advance and the nett sum of human comfort – not to mention the absolute amounts of energy able to be deployed – go up? Along with life-expectancy, freedom from hunger and want for more people than before, and the like? And that the converse is true: tyrannies actually produce cars, such as the Trabant, whose specification actually _declined_ as the years went on?

The world must thus divide between those who think as we do, and those who think that progress is a zero-sum-game. We know that market-based co-operation of Men produces absolutely more wealth, able to be spread by trading and money. To do this fairly, money must be “sound”, which is to say: unable to be corrupted and debased by outsiders and agencies (such as monopoly government issuers, which see a way to “have more” to spend, on “projects” or on themselves.) We also know that we think the Enemy-Class knows that for one man to succeed, many must fail. That’s why they have abolished failure in education, schools, and increasingly, non-Olympic Sport. (They like the medals, you see, “for the People”….)

What’s wrong with liberty, as seen by our Enemy-Classes the world over, is exactly that it makes Enemy-Classes redundant. There can be no purpose in such a Class, so long as individuals can sink or swim by their own efforts and forge, or fail to forge, their own destinies, by their own considered efforts and also while happy to accept the outcomes as they fall. Furthermore, many of the Enemy-Class are against what they call “religion”. Specifically this means Judeo-Christianity, for they do not seem to be against other ones although I bet you 5p this will change, before too long, say about 5-15 years. And they’re only “against the Jews” because the “Palestinians” being exotic and phantasmal have captured the imagination of those that shape public perceptions, and also because the Holocaust has now almost faded from living memory, and Europe is returning to its traditional 16-century-old let-out of Jew-hating.

I give British Muslims until about 2025 before they suddenly find themselves physically inside real enclosures looking out, rather than outside the hegemonic-discourse-enclosure looking in. And it won’t be liberals and libertarians who put them there, it will be their erstwhile friends in the Political Enemy-Class, and they will cry “foul!” and there will be nobody left to speak for them.

As for Christmas? I always like to make the point that Liberty is not the daughter of order but its mother. For those libertarians who believe there is a God, well that’s fine, and I just remind the others that He gave Man free will, as a gift. OK, OK. We all know the concept evolved along with an ever-increasingly-ramified brain and the ability to comprehend self-hood, accumulate Memory, and use Learning, in the fulfilment of the brain’s biological brief, which is to “do what you think best in the next seconds of time, all the time, to keep us other cells alive, using what you know”.

As in 1.John i:- In the beginning was Order. Order was God, (which means God exemplified Order), and Order was “with” (which is to say “by” or “created by”) God. In other words, Order pre-existed everything observable in the Universe, which of course makes perfect sense to any good scientist. (The “science” is settled! Ha ha…) Now, we say that Liberty is Order’s mother, which is logical in a political sense and is always and everywhere shown to be true in history. This makes liberty the greatest of all gifts. So, all Men should be free, for in that state a civilisation founded on Order, freely arrived at, not needing “police”, or “cameras” or DNA datatbases, or other such low stuff, can arise.

 

I don’t like it….it’s too quiet…

Michael Winning

Not much about poor Ireland right now, perhaps the journos are all stuck in the snow.

It says over at Conservative Home blog (HOward Flight, he of the comments about paying the underclass to beget more labour voters) that Germany might leave the Euro. I can’t see a problem myself, the Merkel-Hilda just has to say the word. I think most of “her” people are baying quietly for he to do it.

Conservatives ought to know better by now

David Davis

Over at Guido’s place, someone called Tim Yeo, described as a “Conservative”, writes in the Guardian about increasing spending on “green” projects, such as windfarms and the like.

There is nothhing intrinsically bad about writing pieces for the Guardian, if that gets your rocks off for you. However, most liberals in the classical sense are more like classical conservatives than Guardian readers and contributors tend to be: they are also more skeptical than not, about the next neopastoralist-fad-religion such as GreeNazism.

Yeo of course, as you shall see, takes  one position where the placing of wind-farms is concerned if it benefits his pocket, and quite another where it will affect him personally regarding a particular one. This is standard GramscoStaliNazi behaviour and has been seen on countless occasions to date, in others.

I do not view these people while wearing quite the same charity-tinted glasses through which dear Sean Gabb looks, when he talks of the Enemy-Class. The extent of his magnanimity towards them astonishes me. To my mind, there can be no really useful place for many of the “top people” in this group, once an approximately libertarian civilisation emerges and becomes self-sustaining.

Perhaps the British State wants pubs to close

David Davis

h/t VelvetGloveIronFist

I’m not a conspiracy-theorist – really, honest, guv! But you wonder about the juxtaposition of the increasing rate of pub closures, coupled with a nationwide smoking ban in buildings used by the public and also with the feeling that “they” don’t want you to be able to plot gainst them and whinge about them to your friends, in places where “they” can’t bug you easily.

The pub closure stats make astonishing reading.

Here’s even more statistics from the same place.

Should libertarians be anti-capitalist today? « Cork Irish

 by David Webb

Should libertarians be anti-capitalist today?

Filed under: conservative politics — admin @ 9:37 pm

I am a convinced supporter of Dr Sean Gabb’s Libertarian Alliance, and will remain so. But I am not sure he is right to argue that libertarians should reposition themselves as opponents of capitalism, in particular, opposing limited liability companies, and the preferential advantages the limited company format gives to big business. It strikes me as a wheeze, an attempt to strike a left-wing pose, or what would be seen as one, in a context where many libertarian views are seen as either right-wing, or a cover for those who are right-wing.

Firstly, the UK in particular does well out of large companies. BP would have been a good example a while ago, but appears likely to fall foul of the US administration’s interpretation of US laws in such a way that BP, a limited liability company, is unable to pay what had appeared to be the maximum of US$75m in liability for oil companies beset by an oil spill. The City of London and large pharmaceutical, financial services and defence companies form the mainstay of British Big Business–to a large extent, we are still living off our former imperial glory (sadly one with Nineveh and Tyre these days), and the advent of a era of cottage industry small businesses would be profoundly negative for the medium-term outlook of the UK economy. Second, I would react with alarm to the idea that I should be held personally responsible for losses of a company I held shares in–another related point that Dr Gabb has encouraged discussion on. The joint-stock company format has allowed millions of small private investors to piggyback on the growth of the larger companies and make provision for their futures, and I think libertarians should see that as positive. The alternative is dependence on state pensions financed out of taxation.

Part of what Sean Gabb seems to be getting at is that the joint-stock corporation means that bourgeois capitalism is no longer with us. This fact complicates a lot of arguments that libertarians make: for example, where libertarians support freedom of association and therefore the right of a business to refuse the custom of anyone, for any reason (including race, sexual orientation, etc), what if the managers of the business do not personally own the business? What right is it of them to pursue these kinds of agenda when they do not even own the business concerned? If we supported freedom of association only where a business was owner-managed, as with a corner shop or a bed-and-breakfast guesthouse, we could end up supporting freedom only in certain circumstances, only at the margins of society.

I was impressed by the arguments of the late Sam Francis in the US, that a new managerial elite had effectively replaced the former bourgeoisie. In a development not anticipated by Karl Marx, the progression from feudalism to capitalism has been succeeded, not by a progression from capitalism to communism, but from capitalism to managerialism, obviating much of the Marxian doctrines. As corporations grew larger, owner management became rarer, and in fact impossible. Even where a business remains in the hands of the original family founders, they require personnel directors and many other similar managers to run the business for them. The joint-stock company further diluted the control of the original entrepreneurs, who in most cases sold up, to the extent that individual entrepreneurs no longer control significant parts of the economy today. There are no capitalists left.

With ownership so diffuse, managers control the economy today. This answers the essential question that Lenin asked of political economy, “Who, Whom?” The key point of political analysis is to work out who the elite is and who the governed are. The capitalist-style analyses of the socialist left are simply wrong, in that they give the wrong answer to “Who, Whom?” as there are no capitalists. What there are are managers in a technocratic economy-state. Sam Francis pointed out that all institutions are run by the same people today. A civil servant can leave for the private sector and take up a managerial job, and then move on to a managerial job in the church, and then move on to a similar job in the defence industry, and then into politics. The public sector, the private sector, the churches, the charities–these are run by a mobile elite flitting between them. Church finance directors are not deeply religious people who do the job out of faith, but rather finance directors who have had a number of posts elsewhere and demand six-figure salaries for running the finances of a church. Personnel directors of charities are not people who are seeking to work with the disadvantaged, but personnel directors who have worked elsewhere and demand large salaries and pensions, to be paid directly from sums raised ostensibly for charitable deeds. The same type of people are doing everything.

The bureaucratisation of the economy is aided by causes such as “anti-racism”, “multi-culturalism”, “health and safety” and “the environment”. These causes are the justification for the employment of technocrats. Even private companies have to employ large phalanxes of people whose jobs are essentially political. (In fact, abolishing limited liability would simply diminish risk-taking, and lead to the development of more technocratic jobs in the area of risk management. Whole departments of functionaries handling risk would be born in every private enterprise.) It seems that a large proportion of the private sector is directly dependent on government policy (not just companies that benefit from government contracts, but the semi-quangoized charities that depend on public handouts, and many other niche technocratic roles–think of the people who produce the Energy Performance Certificates for houses being sold or the people whose jobs depend on the exorbitant fees charged to check the criminal records of teachers and nursery nurses: their roles have been invented as an act of public policy, although performing no useful role).

It is worth asking what we can do about the managerial elite. Opposing limited liability seems to position libertarians as anti-capitalists, without addressing the argument that a new public-private managerial elite has replaced those capitalists. There are big businesses around today, but the problem is not that they are big, or even particularly predatory in behaviour, but that they have been captured by functionaries, technocrats who staff layers of middle and upper management that are strictly unnecessary. Big business needs to survive, because otherwise we would not be able to invest in these companies, and the average person would remain dependent on the state to provide for his long-term future. We need instead to think of anti-technocratic policies to cut down on the bureaucratic behaviour of functionaries in both public and private sectors.

I would like to severely cut down on the numbers going to university, as the universities have largely been remade as factories producing pro-managerial wannabe technocrats. The promotion of cultural agendas such as anti-racism and multi-culturalism should be criminalised–in the private sector as well as the public sector. It should simply be a criminal offence for companies to spend any money on political propaganda on cultural issues to their workers. There should be no public financial support for charities. There should be a clear distinction between the public and private sectors: I would argue that anyone whose livelihood depends on the public purse should not have the right to vote or stand for Parliament. This would severely cut down the pro-managerial electorate, and clarify that people who work in the public sector are our servants, and not the other way round. All consultancy work for the public sector should be banned, as should advertising by public-sector bodies. All public-sector workers should be limited to maximum salary of £50K. While consultants in the NHS and others should earn more–this should be facilitated by the privatisation of the health sector. If headteachers of failing schools hope to earn sixfigure salaries, they should do so in the private sector, where they would have to work to attract pupils. We could reintroduce annual parliaments (the norm in the Middle Ages) and ban political parties from funding candidates’ election campaigns. All policies should be designed with an eye on preventing control by the managerial elite.

The easy part is cutting down the public sector. The difficulty comes with the private sector: once the owner-managers of the bourgeois era have gone, are we condemned to technocratic management for ever? I would argue that many of the technocratic posts in the private sector have been created by government regulation, and by eliminating the regulation and reducing the availability of graduates, we could reverse the quangoization of the private sector. Countries like Japan and China have big businesses and limited liability, but have not seen the cultural trends of the Western countries, such as multi-culturalism, simply because there has been no attempt to delegitimize national identity in those countries–and if we economically disarm ourselves by opposing big business, we will find that the Far Eastern countries end up becoming our new masters. However, given that we have the cultural problem of self-righteousness among the middle class, and the Far Eastern countries do not, something has to be done to try to counteract it. Could we introduce compulsory John Lewis-style workers’ democracy into joint-stock companies, seeing as their managers do not actually own the companies? Maybe managers adopting a technocratic style could be “recalled” by their staff members? Ultimately, a society’s culture is not just a function of the size of its businesses or something like limited liability, but a product of political discussion, the broadcast media, the schools and the churches. It is these that are driving trends in the private business sector today and not the other way round, and so the restoration of our culture can only begin by sorting out the political parties, the media, schools and churches.

 

Should libertarians be anti-capitalist today? « Cork Irish

101 Years Ago – G.K. Chesterton on Home Rule

Christopher Houseman

Although he wrote the following passage in 1909 about the United Kingdom and the question of Irish Home Rule, G.K. Chesterton might just as well have written it about the EU and UKIP. Enjoy:

union is no more a good thing in itself than separation is a good thing in itself. To have a party in favour of union and a party in favour of separation, is as absurd as to have a party in favour of going upstairs and a party in favour of going downstairs. The question is not whether we go up or down stairs, but where we are going to, and what we are going for? Union is strength; union is also weakness. It is a good thing to harness two horses to a cart; but it is not a good thing to try and turn two hansom cabs into one four-wheeler. Turning ten nations into one empire may happen to be as feasible as turning ten shillings into one half-sovereign. Also it may happen to be as preposterous as turning ten terriers into one mastiff. The question in all cases is not a question of union or absence of union, but of identity or absence of identity.
Chesterton, G. K. (2010). Heretics (255). Bellingham, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc.

Chesterton wrote the above in the context of correcting the idea that older politicians like Gladstone were idealists whereas newer ones like Joseph Chamberlain were materialists. In fact, he noted, the real difference between them was that Gladstone thought of his ideals as things he would like to change reality to resemble, whereas Chamberlain thought his ideals simply described the way things were in any case.

Truly, there is nothing new under the sun.

…that GCSE stuff’s not a “science paper”…THIS is a Science paper!

David Davis

A little time ago I published a recommended High School Science test paper, designed to better prepare those who were planning to pursue Natural Sciences of all kinds at a “University”. It’s been revisedf a little:-

Improved science paper for GCSE, devised by David Davis for the Libertarian Alliance, a free-market, civil liberties and Classical liberal education think-tank and publishing house in London, originally issued in Sept 2009.

PAPER ONE

TIME ALLOWED: THREE HOURS

1                                            Estimate the DC current, flowing in a one-turn copper coil which follows the earth’s equator, which would cancel the Earth’s magnetic field at either pole. (Take the horizontal component of field at lat 86^o 30` N and longitude approx 30^o W to be 0.18 gauss: vertical component = 0.9 gauss. State the relationship between the c.g.s Gauss unit and the MKS Telsa unit.)

2                                            Calculate the cross-sectional area of a square copper turn, smoothed and unblacked but not polished, and fully suspended, whose surface temperature will not exceed 800 K in dry air temperature of 310 K. Assume the specific conductivity of the supports to ground as being 0.2 Joule m-2 sec-1. If the young’s Modulus of the supporting material is 50GPa, calculate the minimum cross-sectional area of each support assuming you place one every five metres of copper conductor. State how many supports will need to be ordered to circle the Earth at your designated line, and, in still air, their minimum height to prevent the ground temperature rising more than 5 K.

3                                            Calculate the gravitational field strength existing between the Milky Way and a hypothetical galaxy 13 billion LY away. Use 2E42 Kg for the mass of the Milky Way: make an informed estimate of the mass of your further galaxy, stating clearly any assumptions you have made. Using your figures thus obtained, and your informed estimate of the mass of Galaxy M31 whose data regarding mass, position and relative speed you already will know, decide where approximately to place your spacecraft so that the resultant vector of gravitational forces from the three galaxies on it is zero, assuming no other interactions.

4                                            Estimate the cross-sectional area of each of two Duct-tape fixtures, (tape is of 48mm width and 0.5mm thickness) applied always parallel to the direction of force, which would be required to separate reliably two opposite charges of 1C each at a distance of one meter in free Space. (Young’s Modulus of Duck Tape is assumed to be 4E9 Pa.)

5                                            Estimate the number of moles of human DNA on the Earth as of now, its total estimated mass, and the molar mass of human DNA. (Assume that one haploid human genome, complete, = 1 molecule. Also assume that the mean volume of all human cells is about 1.9 picoLitres.)

Ignore human gametes in this answer, but also estimate the total number of human gametes present on the planet at any moment. Use your knowledge of human population trends and age-band-statistics to derive as accurate an estimate for this number as possible, differentiating male from female gametes. State the assumptions you have made about the relative frequency of each gamete.

6                                            Calculate the reduction in heat capacity of the Gulf Stream over a calendar year, caused by a wind farm of 10,000 turbines directly in the path of the airstreams above it at latitude 55^oN, each turbine having an installed generating output of 100Kw, at a height of 100M and operating at a 16% duty cycle. Use your own knowledge of geography, natural climate movements, astronomy, the heat capacities of water and moist air. (You may assume that the Sun’s radiated power output is about 3.92E26 Watts and is deemed for this question to be constant.) Estimate the extra mass, surface area and volume of North Polar ice that would build up in the Barents, Norwegian and Greenland Seas in one year, assuming that no other areas are affected, as a result of this set of turbines. (For quickness of solution, assume polar ice above latitude 65 radiates IR into space at 25 Watts/M² at all temperatures above 230K.) Specific heat capacity of water in liquid phase = 4.18KJ per Kg per degree K.

7                                            You are to deliver a shell weighing 1.5 imperial tons, at a range of 60 miles, from a barrel of diameter 460mm, at a target at the same elevation as the emplacement. (g = 9.81m/s²) Devise a suitable mathematical model from which the answers could be derived, and then calculate, in no particular order:

(a)   The barrel length

(b)  The time of flight

(c)  The maximum height reached by the projectile

(d)  The required muzzle velocity at 40^o barrel elevation

(e)   The mean gas pressure (assume uniform) in the barrel

(f)    The acceleration of the projectile in the barrel

(g)  The muzzle velocity (you may neglect air resistance for this question.)

8                                            Calculate the number of 25Kg sacks of rice that would be required, and also the total volume of rice grains in cubic miles, if the Great King had been able to grant the wish of the Resident-Court-Mathematician who had invented Chess for him. The inventor asked for “one grain of rice on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, eight on the fourth, sixteen on the fifth…..”. Assume a grain of rice is a cylinder of length 7mm and diameter 1.25mm and that they pack approximately efficiently. State your grain-packing-density assumptions in your answer.

If the sacks used above are made of polythene, and must be 850 microns thick, estimate the area of film to be manufactured including excess cutting-flash needed on the packing lines, this amount’s mass, and the number of barrels of Saudi Heavy Crude that may have been used to make it. Use your knowledge of thermal cracking procedures, the mean composition of linear alkanes in Saudi heavy Crude, and also of the average mass of a “barrel” and how much of this is realistically convertible into monomers for this question’s use. Density of polythene (MDPE type) is about 0.932 g/cm³.

9   Calculate the rate of change of mean global temperature, stating in which direction it will move, if unbroken polar ice caps cover the Earth down to latitudes 50 North and 50 South. Assume the boundary is a straight line in both cases. State what percentage (to 3sf) of the earth’s current land area would have to be moved by tectonic drifting to be below latitudes 50N/50S, to bring about the cooling you have calculated.

Govt deficits – prevention is cheaper than repetition

Christopher Houseman

Courtesy of the Blazing Torches blog, I notice that the Germans are less than happy to be faced with the latest pay-as-you-go instalment to rent Greek membership of the Euro – and I can’t say I blame them.

The following is reproduced in an expanded form courtesy of a Facebook poster.

Given that the majority of my countrymen still can’t bear the thought of life without a “democratic” state to pick everybody else’s pockets on their behalf, I suggest a simple solution to prevent a repetition of this crisis once we’re out of the current mess.

A new law which stipulates that if, in any given year in peacetime, government debt exceeds 35 per cent of national income in the previous year, the following sanctions will apply. [Apparently, British governments consistently fail to raise more than about 38 per cent of national income in taxes regardless of who they are or what laws they pass].

- MP’s to face loss of pension rights, expulsion from parliament, and personal hereditary financial liability for voting in excess spending and/or failing to initiate and support a vote of no confidence in the government of the day. MP’s liability shall be limited to the excess over the debt ceiling, divided by the total number of MPs who voted in favour of the offending expenditure.

- Govt ministers to face the above plus charges of treason for carrying out such reckless borrowing.

- MP’s and ministers to face the Govt ministerial penalties described above if they try to provoke or vote for a war in order to evade the provisions of this law. Guilt to be established by publication of diaries, emails, letters, state documents, phone call transcripts, etc. followed by a referendum. Since they claim to speak for the nation in such matters, MP’s can likewise answer to the entire nation by this means. What could be more “democratic”?

By hereditary liability I mean that MPs’ descendants will inherit any outstanding financial liability on the death of any political leader convicted under the above law. Our children will all inherit these debts atm, so why shouldn’t theirs?

Doesn’t clean up the current mess, but would certainly discourage any attempt to repeat it… and any attempt to repeal such a law would result in the currency getting hammered in the markets. Likewise, I suppose any realistic attempt to lower the debt ceiling over time by means of amendments to the law would be rewarded in the markets.

Sadly, I don’t think anyone will have the guts to really tighten personal accountability of MPs and ministers in any form.

A friend of the original Facebook poster of this comment agreed, with the words “Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas”.

All too true with regard to our glorious leaders – but remind me, why did so many people vote in the recent elections? Perhaps somebody told them to pay no attention to the man in Number 10 in the Bernard Matthews mask…

Libertarian Alliance Comment on Election Result

Sean Gabb, Director, Libertarian Alliance

This was not a general election in which a distinctively libertarian force was likely to win power. There was also no chance of a win for traditionalist conservatives. We were not seriously consulted on the European Union, the American alliance, immigration, multiculturalism, drugs, due process civil liberties, the response to alleged man-made climate change, the dominance of big business corporatism, and many other issues of great importance. Instead, given the electoral system we have, we had a choice between difference emphases within a single consensus.

I chose to vote Conservative because, on balance, I believed that the Labour Party was the most likely to turn the country into a naked police state. I am glad that Labour lost. At the same time, I am glad that the Conservatives did not win an overall majority. Given that anything short of a huge and unmanageable majority would have given David Cameron all reason to suppose he was the Anointed One, a hung Parliament is the best outcome.

A Con-Lib pact or whatever sort will not address the issues mentioned above. But it probably will abolish identity cards and the database state that it fronts. It will probably not “regulate” home education. It may rein in the Police and the bureaucracy. Even if the country does not become a better place, it may not grow worse as fast as it would under a Labour Government.

Above all, a majority Labour Government would have fixed the system to keep itself in power forever. It would have used its own creatures in the Police and the bureaucracy to harass and perhaps even to murder its opponents. A Con-Lib pact will do none of these things. It will allow a free and fair election at the end of its term, in which some distinctively libertarian or traditionalist force may have a better chance of making its voice heard.

Richard Littlejohn understands the GramscoFabiaNazi mind

David Davis

He has to: he must attend more than one drinks-potty a week with the bastards. But it does shine through.

“Wait for Us to Fail, Then Vote BNP” The Conservative Hidden Agenda?

Free Life Commentary,
A Personal View from
The Director of the Libertarian Alliance
Issue Number 192
28th April 2010
Linking url: http://www.seangabb.co.uk/flcomm/flc192.htm
Available for debate on LA Blog at  
“Wait for Us to Fail, Then Vote BNP!”
The Conservative Hidden Agenda?
By Sean Gabb 

I think we can all agree that the Conservative campaign in this election has never been more than uninspiring. We have a Labour Government that has come close to bankrupting the country and to destroying it politically. It is run by a collection of unindicted war criminals and traitors, who have plainly been hard at work for the past decade enriching themselves on a scale unknown since the 18^th century. All this, and the Conservatives are trying hard to avoid a hung parliament in which Labour may be able to carry on with Liberal Democrat support. 

This could be the effect of incompetence and general dishonesty. In part, I am sure it is. However, there may be another explanation, and I feel the time has come for me to make my own small offering in the election campaign. 

On Monday the 5^th March 2007, I had coffee with someone I will call XYZ, and who was and still may be an associate of David Cameron. Why he wanted to see me, and why he thought it might be useful to tell me all this, I have never been able to explain. I can only say that the meeting did happen – it happened, I might add, in the hotel where Andrew Gilligan had his meetings with the unfortunate David Kelly! Afterwards, as is my custom, I made a record of the meeting in my diary. 

Started in 1977, and kept since 1991 in various computer formats, this diary has become a confession of my doings as scandalous or simply bizarre as anything in the novels of Richard Blake. When he was alive, Chris Tame used to lecture me on the value of taking a tape recorder into such conversations. I always refused his advice. Taping conversations is dishonourable. Anyone of intelligence will know that he is being recorded. And recordings are actually less useful for any legitimate purpose than written accounts made shortly after the event. They are certainly less useful practice for the analytical faculties. You may respond that writing out private conversations is as dishonourable as taping them. You are welcome to your opinion, but I do not share it. Where would history be without such accounts of what was said? Or you might say that it is dishonourable to publish such accounts while the relevant parties are alive. You may be right here. On the other hand, where written accounts are concerned, it is always open to an embarrassed party to deny that the conversation took place, or to insist that he was seriously misrepresented. 

But this is a digression brought on by the triumph of self-importance over the promptings of conscience. Without further attempts to justify myself, what I give below is the relevant diary entry, edited only to maintain a reasonable anonymity for the person I met. 

The Diary Entry 

Meeting with XYZ, The Charing Cross Hotel, Monday the 5^th March 2007. 

[After some small talk irrelevant to this entry, XYZ moves to an explanation of the Conservative strategy] 

XYZ – The central fact of this nation is that its political and media classes are rotten to the core. These classes are made up of ageing radicals who’ve spent the past 30 years marching through the institutions, and of younger apparatchiks who don’t fully believe, but who accept the framework within which they operate. And it’s worse than this. A fish rots from the head down, and the rot in this nation has spread deep into the body. Key parts of the electorate may not consciously have embraced the statist and green and politically correct ideologies of the Establishment. But they have been desensitised to them. They regard any alternative as eccentric or even alarming. 

SIG – This is, of course, your fault. You did nothing when you were in office about the capture of ideological hegemony by these people. You have certainly been the only political force able to make any serious challenge to it since 1997. You have entirely failed to do this. We are now a couple of years from yet another election in which you will take part as outsiders. 

XYZ – You may be right, but that doesn’t change things now. What matters is that a Conservative Party that talks openly about a conservative agenda will be ruined by the Establishment. It will also not be believed even by the uncorrupted parts of the electorate – these have been lied to too often. Our only option is to announce a superficial acceptance of the new order of things. We must become as politically correct as everyone else. We must embrace blacks and gays and the public sector. We must give the Establishment no excuse for destroying us. This has succeeded so far as the Conservatives are now accepted as the next Government. 

SIG – And you suppose that lying your way into office will give you a mandate for radical change? If you run as “Blue Labour”, that is how everyone will expect you to behave in office. Besides, I’ve seen no evidence that your friends are as clever as you doubtless are. Very few people can consistently say one thing while believing something else. The problem with any hidden agenda is that it gets forgotten. I saw this with all those Tory Boy politicians who drifted through the libertarian movement in the 1980s. Perhaps they did believe all their early protestations of libertarian purity. Long before they’d crawled their way over broken glass into Parliament, they’d come to believe all the authoritarian platitudes that had been the price of success. I don’t believe what you are saying is a credible strategy for doing more than getting yourself and your friends back into office. 

XYZ – I’m not talking about a political coup. The next Conservative Government may do some of the necessary work of restoration. It will do this by undoing much of the centralisation of the past quarter century. [He refers at this point to a deeply unpleasant argument we had over dinner in May 1989. He accepts the critique of the centralisation and constitutional vandalism of the Thatcher and Major Governments, but tries to justify all this as a failed but honourable Leninist strategy of trying to smash the left. He accepts that this strategy was a failure and that it needs to be reversed.] 

XYZ – Giving control of police forces to locally elected chiefs will ensure that some parts of the country will escape the political correctness of central government. There will be no scaling back of the police state, but it might be used more for its alleged purpose of fighting what everyone regards as actual crime. This means that safe Labour areas will continue their descent into the gutter. But places like Kent and Surrey will be allowed to save themselves to some extent. 

XYZ – Taxes will be cut—but only by a division of the fruits of economic growth with continued high spending on health and education. 

XYZ – All else will be done by engineering circumstances in which radical action will seem to have been forced on an unwilling Conservative Government. For example, the European issue will be settled by a strategy that beings with all the Majorite “heart of Europe” rhetoric. Our Government will make solidly Europhile noises, and will give way on matters that cause outrage within the wider Movement. However, we will then engineer a crisis in Brussels, where we are bullied into accepting what we say is unacceptable. The crisis will proceed to the point where we announce we have no choice but to call a referendum on continued membership. And there will be unacceptable demands from Brussels – that is how these things work. We can portray ourselves as forced by circumstances into actions that we find unwelcome but also unavoidable. 

SIG – And suppose the people do not vote for withdrawal? 

XYZ – Then we face facts. If we can’t engineer a vote for withdrawal – not even in our own carefully chosen circumstances – we’ve lost. 

XYZ – We will tackle illegal immigration in the same way. Already, there are calls from within the Establishment for an amnesty of all the illegals. If granted, this will add at least ten million Labour voters to the electorate, and we shall be lost forever. In office, we will do nothing to check these calls. At last, we will give way to them – but only after calling a referendum. We will announce that a measure so bold and so unpredictable in its effect must be put to the people, not decided within the Establishment. We will then produce a ballot paper with a range of options. One of these will be for a complete amnesty. Another will be the rounding up and expulsion of all the illegals. Our Government will insist of having these options included on the ballot paper, and will then be scrupulously neutral during the campaign. We are sure that 80 per cent of the electorate will vote for expulsion. This will give the necessary mandate for getting them out. There will be room for exceptions so that the Establishment is not able to seize on the usual hard cases and discredit the whole policy. But that is our real policy on immigration. 

XYZ – Again, we expect something like an 80 per cent vote for expulsion. That will give us the mandate to force the bureaucracy into ruthless action. It also gives us the excuse for ruthless action when the lefty complaints begin. 

SIG – Even supposing I wanted any of this, I don’t believe a word you are saying. You forget everything Chris Tame and I were told in the 1980s about how the State could be scaled back by taking advantages of its own inner contradictions. All we got was a more efficient state. Why should I take any of what you are saying as more than self-delusion to lubricate a Tory sell-out to the ideological hegemony of the left? 

XYZ – Look, it may fail. If, however, the next Conservative Government does nothing good, that still moves the argument forward. At the moment, most of our people are anaesthetised by a decade of prosperity and by the vague belief that all problems created by Labour can be sorted out by voting Conservative next time, or by voting UKIP. A Conservative failure will be a shot of cold water in the face. It will force people to make serious choices they don’t presently think are necessary. 

SIG – The purpose of voting UKIP is mostly to put pressure on a Conservative leadership that understands no other argument than measuring the haemorrhage of its core vote. Indeed, it shows no sign of having understood that argument. 

XYZ – Sean, UKIP has imploded. [He refers to an expenses dispute with the Electoral Commission that appeared set to bankrupt the UK Independence Party: this conversation took place two years before the UKIP victories in the 2009 European elections.] This attack was not wholly an outside job. The Electoral Commission bent over backwards to avoid taking the action it did. The problem is that the UKIP leadership is generally arrogant and shambolic. The party is not a serious alternative to the Tories – we never lose large numbers of votes to it in any election that matters. But the impending collapse of UKIP is to be welcomed in terms of short term electoral advantage. Our loss of votes to it is not critical, but is annoying. More importantly, that – plus your anticipated Tory failure in government – clears the way for what may be the next step in British politics. 

SIG – This being another two decades of useless Conservative Governments? 

XYZ – No. The UKIP collapse is good in the long term so far as it allows the BNP to move further into the political running. UKIP is a useful safety valve. But its leaders are too stupid – or too controlled – to present any serious threat to the Establishment. The [British National Party] is different. It can’t be smashed. The Establishment has tried and failed. Its leaders have known each other for decades, and are used to working together in ways the UKIP leadership and activists could never manage. It cannot advance far at the moment because the Conservatives stand in its way. If the next Conservative Government is the sort of failure you believe it will be, we shall be pushed aside, and the path will be clear for the BNP. 

SIG – So that’s your argument. We keep our mouths shut while your people lie their way into office. If they mess up, the way is cleared for the BNP to do the job for you? 

Comment 

That is what XYZ told me. You can be sure this is not a verbatim record of our conversation. It is a summary, made on the same evening, of a long conversation that went back on itself and over itself, and covered several other issues. It is possible that I misunderstood what was said to me. It is possible that I missed something out, and that this is a seriously unbalanced account of what was said. But I have been keeping a diary since I was a boy; and several million words of narrative have given me the ability to record events and conversations with acknowledged accuracy. What I give above is the essence of what I was told. 

Now, I will say nothing about the morality of what was said. The real question is what was its meaning? I do not believe I am, or was, a person of sufficient importance to deserve this kind of private briefing. All else aside, I am not sure why I should have been thought to require a promise of what amounts to ethnic cleansing. But, once we move into this sort of backroom intrigue, the range of explanations can be endless. 

One possibility is that I was being used as a conduit for propaganda that the Conservative leadership was not able to make for itself. Perhaps I was supposed to publish all this at the time as part of an effort to reconcile the core vote to a strategy that has never been popular. Or perhaps I was supposed to publish it to further some private intrigue around David Cameron. Or perhaps XYZ wanted to spend an evening telling me falsehoods of which he hoped thereby to persuade himself. Was I simply the most convenient excuse for a guilty monologue? I could fill whole pages with speculations that go nowhere. I did not make the conversation public at the time. It was, indeed, the inspiration for my book Cultural Revolution, Culture War, published a few months later. This should be read as my extended response to the conversation. 

All I can say now is that the Conservative leadership has spent the past three years of relentlessly accepting the present order of things. I think this conversation was before David Cameron’s embrace of Polly Toynbee. It was certainly before his announcements of – so far unrequited – love for the BBC and the National Health Service. This might really be the Conservative hidden agenda. 

If, however, it is the hidden agenda, it is not working. As said, its principals may already have gone native: they may have come to believe their own propaganda. And it does seem that, even otherwise, it has failed. The proposed victims of the strategy have not been sufficiently lulled into acceptance of a Conservative victory; and the Conservative core vote has not held up in the manner required. The Conservatives are just over a week away from an election that they should win more convincingly than the Liberals won in 1906, and there is a serious chance that they will lose. 

Why am I publishing this now? It may explain what the Conservatives are really about. Otherwise, though, the conversation did take place. XYZ was at the time a person of some importance in the Conservative leadership. This makes the conversation of some historical importance. I am not fully aware of the arguments that took place within the Conservative leadership before David Cameron had made himself entirely supreme. But, even if I cannot say anything of who was putting it or of its weight, what I recorded in 2007 may have been one of those arguments. Oh – and it may get me a footnote in one of the more scholarly histories of our age. 

Of course, I refuse to discuss the identity of XYZ. I will ignore any private questions. If anyone puts names to me in public, my response will be “No comment”. And, of course, all the other many sensitive conversations I have recorded over the years will remain confidential. Some of them, after all, might be embarrassing to me! 

NB—Sean Gabb’s book, Cultural Revolution, Culture War: How Conservatives Lost England, and How to Get It Back, can be downloaded for free from http://tinyurl.com/ya4pzuh