Meanwhile, someone’s been reading about the Enemy Class

David Davis

Perhaps Dr Sean Gabb’s book (Culture Revolution, Culture War) and C S Lewis’s ideas about Bulverism have something in common.

Sean on Telly Yesterday

by Sean Gabb

Dear All,

I made a brief appearance yesterday on BBC1′s “The Big Question”, where I
argued that voting should not be made compulsory. Here is the relevant
footage: http://www.vimeo.com/10010978

On Saturday the 6th March 2010, I recorded a long interview with Al Gore’s
television station all about the decriminalisation of incest. Stand by for
news about where to find this.

Tomorrow morning, I shall be interviewed by BBC Radio Bristol about CCTV
cameras. I will upload the recording of this shortly after.

On the 17th March 2010, I shall be talking to Haberdashers’ Aske’s school
for boys all about libertarianism.

On the 24th April 2010, I shall be speaking at this event:

PUBLIC MEETING
FREE ADMISSION
Saturday 17th April 2010
2.30pm to 4.30pm

CARRS LANE CHURCH CENTRE
Carrs Lane, Birmingham B4 7SX
10 minutes walk from city centre New Street station.
See website http://www.carrslane.co.uk for directions

TIME FOR TRUTH
Who Speaks for the People of Britain?

In the Chair
GEORGE WEST
Chairman, Campaign for an Independent Britain

Speakers

Dr. SEAN GABB
Director The Libertarian Alliance

FIONA McEVOY
The Taxpayers Alliance, West Midlands

STUART NOTHOLT
Vice-Chairman Campaign for an Independent Britain & organiser of General
Election “Candidate 2010″

Published by The Campaign for an Independent Britain
http://www.eurosceptic.org.uk. For 35 years,CIB has led efforts to safeguard our
nation’s sovereignty. We are a democratic, independent and strictly
remaining a non-party political pressure group, supported by membership
subscriptions and donations from members of the public. Our objective is
Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union whilst maintaining trading
and friendly relations with other countries

. Enquiries 07092 857684

Daily Mail backs Gabb Russian Climategate hack hunch – official

Michael Winning

You’ve read it first here! (From our own Sean Gabb)

now it’s official, here

Libertarian Alliance and Libertarian International Conference, London 24th-25th October 2009

David Davis

As and when we arrive at the event, outer-London-parking-controls and tribulations permitting, we shall attempt to “live blog” parts of this (whatever “live-blogging” might be: I hope someone will tell us!) We are armed with laptops which I guess is a requirement, and we assume that modern trendy venues like the National Liberal Club have some kind of internet connection…

New inside look at OCR ICT education…….. …..First hand experience!

Peter Davis

I did this last year at my school, and you could just tell that this task was thought up by the government.  May I point out that the task was to create a video in Windows Movie Maker about recycling.

I think that, well yes, its fair enough that we have to make a video, as we would learn the skills to be able to do it…..But do we have to do it on ‘Recycling’?

Anyway, this was my submission for OCR nationals Unit 23. It got a very high mark, and it took me 20 minutes. I hope you enjoy it … or maybe not.

Recycling video final, video, music, WITH improvements

►

Yes, you saw it: this is what your children do in year-9 at secondary school it the UK (for foreign readers, this is 13/14 year-olds.)

Blogeditor says:-

Something to do with this stuff would have been more fun…

(…but most of the poor buggers don’t even know what these things are, let alone that they might have even existed.)

LA … The News Release on Home Education Proposals

Sean Gabb

(UPDATE1:- I see that Blogdial has picked this up – well done, please tell everyone asap. There are a lot of other outgoing links in Blogdial about this matter, which later you may care to follow. UKIP (and here too): Renegade Parent: old Gerald Warner: the Quisling-Graph for once is good and right, and this editorial too. plus links to the usual GramscoFabiaNazi Maoist lefty stuff as well, for entertainment if it were not so sinister and if the buggers did not really mean it, as they do.)

(UPDATE2:- And here’s Daniel Hannan, on how Thatcher saved Britain. That’ll get the Ballses, Ed and Yvette (she a chav or summat?) ranting.)

NEWS RELEASE FROM THE LIBERTARIAN ALLIANCE
In Association with the Libertarian International

Release Date: Thursday 11th June 2009
Release Time: Immediate

Contact Details:
Dr Sean Gabb on 07956 472 199 or via sean@libertarian.co.uk

For other contact and link details, see the foot of this message
Release url: http://www.libertarian.co.uk/news/nr075.htm

“HOME  EDUCATION  AND  THE  BRITISH  STATE :

KEEP  YOUR  HANDS  OFF  OUR  CHILDREN”

The Libertarian Alliance today denounces Ed Balls, Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families in the British Government, for taking the first steps towards what will be the outlawing of home education.

[Mr Balls has accepted a report recommending that all home educating families in England will have to register annually and demonstrate they are providing a suitable education. It further recommends that children should be forced into state schools if parents do not meet certain standards set by the education bureaucrats. See here for further information: http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/pns/DisplayPN.cgi?pn_id=2009_0105 ]

According to Sean Gabb, Director of the LA:

“The right of people to educate their children within the values of their family, their faith or their community has always been respected by the British State. Parents have been legally obliged to proved their children with an education – but have never been obliged to send them to school, or even to notify the authorities of what they intend.

“The current proposals sound moderate. The talk is of giving support, not of forbidding. But they are the first step to outlawing home education. Registration will, for the first time, let the authorities know who is educating their children at home. Once these parents are known, they will be visited and inspected to ensure that they are providing a ‘suitable’ education. What this means – though not all at once: it will take several years of salami slicing – is that parents will be hit with impossible and ever-changing health and safety rules. They will be forced to keep records in rigidly prescribed formats – records that will almost certainly demand disclosure of the race and probable sexuality of the children, and that will (if not first lost on a railway train) be shared with foreign governments and private companies. paper qualifications may be required from parents. They will eventually be forced to teach the feared and discredited National Curriculum.

“At no point will home education be made into a criminal offence – as it is in Germany and Belgium, among other European countries. Instead, it will be surrounded by so many rules and by so much supervision, that most parents who now educate at home will give up. Many who carry on will be picked off one at a time – their children conscripted into a state school for some trifling infraction of deliberately conflicting and arbitrary rules. In extreme cases, parents will have their children taken into ‘care’.

“The motive for regulation is not the safety of children or to provide them with a decent education. State schools do not – and are not intended to – provide children with a decent education. Their purpose is to indoctrinate children with the values of the Establishment. These values used to be love of Queen and Country and a perceived obligation to go and be shot at when rounded up and put into uniform. Nowadays, the values are politically correct multiculturalism.

“As for regulation as a guarantor of safety, we only need look at the nursery worker arrested this week for sexual assaults on children. Since this is a matter before the courts we make no comment on the woman’s guilt or innocence. We do note, however, that she will have been closely examined by Ofsted, and checked against all the relevant databases, and judged officially safe with children. Anyone who thinks regulation makes children safe needs his head examined.

“This current proposals will lead ultimately to a state of affairs in which children can be torn from their homes and forced into schools where they will be brainwashed into values that their parents find abhorrent – and where they will probably be kept illiterate and innumerate as these things were once measured, and where they might also be bullied into suicide or lifelong depression.

“Ed Balls, the Minister concerned, wants all this because his Government has turned Britain into a soft totalitarian state. No child – except, of course, of the rich, who can always buy their way out – must be permitted to escape the ideological apparatus of the New Labour State. Home educators are the equivalent of the Kulaks in the Soviet Union. They show too much independence. They must be destroyed.

“The Libertarian Alliance denounces Mr Balls and the Government in which he is a Minister, and calls on people everywhere – British or not, parents or not – to write to him expressing their own contempt of and opposition to this attempted mass kidnapping of our children.”

The address details for Mr Balls are as follows:

The Rt Hon Edward Michael Balls MP
Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families
Sanctuary Buildings
Great Smith Street
London SW1P 3BT
dcfs.ministers@dcfs.gsi.gov.uk

His Deputy, Delyth Morgan, can be reached as follows:

Baroness Morgan of Drefelin
Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families
Sanctuary Buildings
Great Smith Street
London SW1P 3BT
dcfs.ministers@dcfs.gsi.gov.uk

For those who think these things still matter, Mrs Morgan should be addressed in correspondence as “My Lady”

Letters should be brief. They should refer to the report “Review of Elective Home Education in England (June 2009)”
(available at http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/everychildmatters/_download/?id=6080 )

Points worth making are:

• Home education is a fundamental human right. In a free country, people are left alone to bring their children up in the values and traditions of their own communities or faith. This right has always so far been respected in Britain.
• The mainstream of research into home education is unanimous that children educated at home receive a better education than at school – even when the parents have little formal education of their own.
• The current proposals are the thin end of a wedge that will make home education impossible in practice for any but the best-educated or best-connected.
• The current proposals open homes to inspection by probably hostile officials. These officials will inevitably discriminate on the basis or race or religion or class or sex.
• Parents will be made to teach subjects that they may find abhorrent in ways that may be inappropriate to their own circumstances.
• The regulatory system will be expensive and bureaucratic. It will put children at risk by gathering information on them and then losing it.

END OF COPY

Note(s) to Editors

Dr Sean Gabb is the Director of the Libertarian Alliance. He is regarded as one of the most prominent British writers on home education. He is co-author of “Homeschooling in Full View: A Reader“, 1995. His “Home Schooling: A British Perspective” can be read at http://www.seangabb.co.uk/academic/homeschooling.htm

He can be contacted for further comment on 07956 472 199 or by email at sean@libertarian.co.uk

Extended Contact Details:

The Libertarian Alliance is Britain’s most radical free market and civil liberties policy institute. It has published over 800 articles, pamphlets and books in support of freedom and against statism in all its forms. These are freely available at http://www.libertarian.co.uk

Our postal address is

The Libertarian Alliance
Suite 35
2 Lansdowne Row
Mayfair
London W1J 6HL
Tel: 07956 472 199

Associated Organisations

The Libertarian International – http://www.libertarian.to – is a sister organisation to the Libertarian Alliance. Its mission is to coordinate various initiatives in the defence of individual liberty throughout the world.

Sean Gabb’s personal website – http://www.seangabb.co.uk – contains about a million words of writings on themes interesting to libertarians and conservatives.

Hampden Press – http://www.hampdenpress.co.uk.- the publishing house of the Libertarian Alliance.

Liberalia – http://www.liberalia.com – maintained by by LA Executive member Christian Michel, Liberalia publishes in-depth papers in French and English on libertarianism and free enterprise. It is a prime source of documentation on these issues for students and scholars.

Robert Henderson on Margaret Thatcher

Sean Gabb

          With  his  mixture  of  vaulting  intellectual  ambition  and
          howling  mediocrity  of  mind,  Lenin  is  the  MaGonagal  of
          philosophers.  (Connoisseurs  of   intellectual  incompetence
          should  browse through ‘Materialism  and  Empririo-Criticism’
          for an especial treat).   Nonetheless,  like Hitler,  the man
          possessed a certain low animal cunning and a complete absence
          of moral sense,  which qualities  permitted him to make a few
          acute  psychological and sociological  observations.  Perhaps
          the  most interesting of these is the concept of  the  useful
          idiot.

          For  Lenin  this  was the role to be  played  unwittingly  by
          simpleminded,  tenderhearted,  bourgeois dupes in preparation
          for  the   proletarian  revolution,   a  revolution   utterly
          antipathetic to simpleminded, tenderhearted bourgeois  dupes.
          But  the concept is of general political utility,  for it  is
          essentially  that of the political naif who believes  against
          all the evidence in the good intentions of those in authority
          or aspiring to authority and the rightness of their ideology.
          The useful idiot should be distinguished from the Uncle  Tom,
          the latter being a mixture of shrewd self-promoting  civility
          and  psychological  subordination.  The  useful  idiot  is  a
          self-deluding,  self-committed political adherent.

          In practice, all political movements seek their useful idiots
          and none more so than those operating within an mass elective
          system, for   no party standing for election  is ever willing
          to  tell the whole truth about its desired ends  or  intended
          means.  The best of all useful idiots are, of course,   those
          in positions of the greatest political power.

          Margaret Thatcher might seem an unlikely candidate for such a
          role of useful idiot.  Was she not the Iron Lady,  the Hammer
          of the Left, the slayer of the socialist dragon?  Did she not
          speak  of turning back the tide of coloured  immigrants?  Was
          she   not  the  rock  from   which  the  European   Leviathan
          rebounded?  Did she not ensure that Britain was respected  in
          the world as she had not been since Suez? Was she not a mover
          and shaker in the nationalist cause?

          In  her own rhetorical world  she was all of these things,  a
          veritable  Gloriana who enchanted some and banally  persuaded
          many  more,   but in practical achievement she  was  none  of
          them.  This  discrepancy between fact and fancy made  her  an
          extraordinarily   useful  idiot  for  the  soldiers  of   the
          ascendent ideology of the post-war period, the sordid bigotry
          that is latterday liberal internationalism.

          In  her the  Liberal Ascendency  found a massive shield  for,
          by constantly promising what she could or would not  deliver,
          she allowed the primary  corruptions of the  post war  period
          -  immigration,  multiculturalism,  “progressive”  education,
          welfarism,  the  social work  circus,  internationalism,  the
          attachment  to  Europe  -  to not merely  continue  but  grow
          vastly whilst she

          .  whilst all the time the general public was fed a rich diet
          of lies by the agents of the Liberal Ascendency,  the  Public
          Class – that  unwholesome melange of politicians, media folk,
          educationalists,  social workers and  senior public  servants
          who  have  come  to dominate our lives  -  about  the  savage
          deprivation of funds for  education,  health  and the welfare
          state and the damage done by rampant Thatcherite  ideological
          hooliganism in all important parts of life.

          A  harsh judgement?  Well,  at the end of her reign what  did
          Britain have to show for her vaunted patriotism,  her wish to
          maintain Britain’s independence, her desire to drive back the
          state,  her  promise to end coloured  immigration?   Precious
          little is the answer.

          Her enthusiastic promotion of the Single European Act  (“It’s
          a market and markets are good”),  which she ruthlessly  drove
          through Parliament,  allowed the  eurofederalists to  greatly
          advance  their cause under the guise of acting to  produce  a
          single  market;  her “triumph”  in reducing  our  subsidy  to
          Europe  left us paying several billion a year  whilst  France
          paid next to nothing; our fishermen were sold down the river;
          farmers placed in the absurd position of not being allowed to
          produce even enough milk for British requirements; actual (as
          opposed  to  official) coloured immigration  increased;  that
          monument  to  liberal bigotry,  the  Race Relations  Act  was
          untouched,  welfare  and  health spending  rose  vastly;  the
          educational  vandals were not only allowed to sabotage  every
          serious  attempt  to overturn the progressive  disaster,  but
          were granted  a great triumph in the ending of ‘O’ levels,  a
          liberal bigot success amplified by the contemptible  bleating
          of successive education secretaries that “rising  examination
          success means rising standards”;  foreign aid continued to be
          paid  as  an  unforced  Dangeld;   major  and   strategically
          important industries either ceased to be serious  competitors
          or  ended  in  foreign  hands;  the  armed  forces  were  cut
          suicidally; local government spending rose massively

          But what of her supposed triumphs,  what of privatisation and
          the sale of council houses,  the subjection of the unions and
          the winning of the Falklands war?  Perhaps this will have the
          most  lasting effect.  However,  that is a  different  matter
          altogether from saying it was an unreservedly good thing.  We
          may  celebrate the liberation of British Telecom and BA,  but
          is it such a wonderful thing to have no major car producer or
          shipbuilder?  The  trouble with the  privatisation  of  major
          industries,   which may either be greatly reduced,  go out of
          business  or  be  taken over by foreign buyers,  is  that  it
          ignores  strategic and social welfare questions.  Ditto  free
          trade generally. Both assume that the world,  or at least the
          parts which contain our major trading partners ,  will remain
          peaceful,  stable and well disposed towards Britain for ever,
          an  absurd  assumption.  What,  for example,   would  be  the
          response  of  a  future British government  to  BMW  if  they
          decided  to  move production of all Rover models  abroad?  An
          absurd  scenario?  I don’t see why it is for BMW  might  make
          such a move for financial reasons or be directed to do so  by
          a future  aggressively nationalist  German government.

          There  is  also a moral question connected  to  privatisation
          which was never properly answered by Tories:  what right does
          the  state have to dispose by sale  of assets which are  held
          supposedly  on  behalf  of  the general  public?  This  is  a
          question  which should be as readily asked by a  conservative
          as  by  a socialist for it touches upon a  central  point  of
          democratic  political morality,  the custodianship of  public
          property. The same ends – the diminution of the state and the
          freeing of the public from seemingly perpetual losses – could
          have  been achieved by  an equitable distribution  of  shares
          free  of charge to the general public.  This would have  had,
          from  a  Thatcherite  standpoint, the additional  benefit  of
          greatly increasing share ownership.

          As for the sale of council houses,  I have never been able to
          persuade   myself  that  this  is  anything  other   than   a
          socialistic measure,  a redistribution of wealth to the poor.
          It  is  also  inequitable because it excludes  the  poor  not
          living in council property and discriminates amongst  council
          tenants  according  to  the quality and  situation  of  their
          properties  – there is a vast difference between  having  the
          right  to  purchase a detached house which is not part  of  a
          vast estate and having the right to purchase a small flat  on
          the  twentieth  floor  of  a  tower  block.   Nor  will  many
          purchasers  of leasehold right-to-buy properties be  thankful
          that they made the decision to buy, for after five years they
          are  left  at the mercy of vengeful councils which  may  levy
          what  service and repair charges they like.  Nor can many  of
          such  leaseholders  view  moving with any  equity  for  their
          chances of finding a buyer at any price, let alone that which
          they paid, are minuscule.

          As  someone who is old enough to remember the  Wilson,  Heath
          and  Callaghan years I have no illusion of exactly how  awful
          the  unions  were when they had real power.  What  I  am  not
          convinced  of  is the prime position granted  in  Thatcherite
          hagiography  to  her union reforms. In 1979 two  things  were
          already apparent: full employment was likely to be a thing of
          the  past and many union members had a  sufficient   material
          stake  in  the country to not welcome frequent  strikes.  Had
          full employment returned in the Thatcher years it is dubious

          But what of her clients, the Liberal Ascendency?  Would  they
          not be dismayed by much of what she did?  Well,  by the  time
          Margaret  Thatcher  came to power liberals had  really   lost
          whatever interest they had ever had in state ownership or the
          genuine   improvement of the worker’s lot.  What they  really
          cared about was destroying  They had  new clients,  the  vast
          numbers  of  coloured immigrants and their  children,  women,
          homosexuals,  the  disabled,  In short,  all those  who  were
          dysfunctional,  or could be made to feel  dysfunctional,   in
          terms  of British society.  They had new areas of  power  and
          distinction,  social work,  education, the civil service ,the
          mass   media  to  which  they  added,   after  securing   the
          ideological high ground,  the ancient delights of politics.

          I can hear the cry,  but was not Margaret Thatcher undone  by
          circumstances?  In  some  degree  that  is  of  course  true,
          particularly in her early years as prime minister.   Had  she
          been  a single term prime minister it would have been a  fair
          excuse.   But the thing to remember about the woman  is  that
          she  was prime minister for eleven years.  Where she  can  be
          utterly condemned is in her failure to ensure that she had  a
          cast iron  majority of like minded ministers in cabinet.  Not
          to  have  done that by the beginning of her second  term  was
          stupid;  to fail to do it at any time in her premiership  was
          both scarcely credible and unforgivable.  To leave Europe  in
          1979  can reasonably be seen to be a pipe  dream  considering
          the  state  of the Tory hierarchy  and  indeed  parliamentary
          party  at  that time.  But to arrive in 1990 at  a  situation
          where  not only was Britain still being  taken for a mug  but
          to be forced into the absurdity of the ERM. Dear God! She was
          so  weak  that  she  was  unable  to  prevent  the  effective
          sacking  of  a  favourite  cabinet  minister  by  the  German
          Chancellor.

          Think of her major cabinet appointments. She ensured that the
          Foreign  Office remained in the hands of men (Howe and  Hurd)
          who  were both ardent Europhiles and willing tools of the  FO
          culture,  the Chancellorship was entrusted to first Howe  and
          then Lawson who was also firmly committed to Europe. The Home
          Office sat in the laps of the social liberals Whitelaw,  Hurd
          and  Baker,  Education was given to Baker and  Clarke.  Those
          appointments  alone  ensured  that little would  be  done  to
          attack the things which liberals held sacred.

          What would be a fair summation? She is that most dangerous of
          incompetents, a proactive incompetent.

          She is one of those strange creatures who appear  charismatic
          when  placed in the supreme position but vaguely  absurd  and
          curiously  insubstantial  in any other state.  I  remember  a
          Radio  4   interview  between Michael Chalton   and  Margaret
          Thatcher  in  which  Chalton  was  speaking  in   his   usual
          coherent  but intellectually sophisticated  manner.  Thatcher
          failed  to answer many of his questions but this was not  for
          the usual reason of political evasiveness:  rather she failed
          because  she  patently did not understand what he was  saying
          and  produced  some  extraordinary non sequiturs  by  way  of
          reply. There is also her performance at Oxford where she took
          a  Second in a subject (chemistry) which lends itself to  the
          achievement  of  a  first  by  any  undergraduate  of  normal
          intelligence. ?

New Libertarian blog just spotted

Hat tip Brian Micklethwait.

Here’s Life, Liberty and proper tea. He even linked to us here – a famous and well-under-reported speech by Sean Gabb about British conservatism!

Libertarian Alliance Meetings

Sean Gabb

1) This is short notice, but there will be a Libertarian Alliance meeting on Monday the 9th March 2009, starting at 7:00pm. The meeting will be in the upstairs room at The Coach and Horses on Great Marlborough Street, Soho, London. To find out who the speaker will be, and to ask any further questions, send e-mail to David McDonagh mcdonagh10@yahoo.com

2) The Chris R. Tame Memorial Lecture will take place on Tuesday 17th March 2009 between 6.30pm and 8.30pm at the National Liberal Club, One Whitehall Place, London SW1 (nearest tube Embankment). Professor Kevin Dowd will speak on “Lessons from the Financial Crisis: A Libertarian Perspective”. For further details, contact Tim Evans tim@libertarian.co.uk

3> Here is a video of my speech to the Marlborough Group on the 22nd February 2009. In this, I take issue with those who claim that British law and the British Constitution have been breached by New Labour. Constitutional lawyers like Michael Shrimpton are wholly correct that whatever goes through Parliament has the force of law. He is also right that the Queen cannot be held to have broken her coronation oath – any Act that conflicts with the words of her oath are taken to have altered the meaning of the oath. My reply is to ask “so what?” The law and Constitution exist to enable ordinary people to live in peace and freedom. They draw their legitimacy from the extent to which they achieve this purpose. When they stop achieving this purpose, or when they begin to frustrate this purpose, they become illegitimate, and can rightly then be overthrown and replaced. Where the Monarchy is concerned, I argue that, whatever the lawyers may claim, there is a contract with us. We agreed in 1688 to regard these people as the Lord’s Anointed, and they agreed to respect our rights, and also to protect them. Since the present Queen has broken her side of the bargain, she had no right to our deference. This speech was given in the heart of England to a meeting of rather elderly conservatives. There was barely a single person there who had not been made by circumstances into a fan of Oliver Cromwell. Here is the speech link:

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-1760896777516663004

4> My speech to the Oxford Union on the 26th February 2009 went very well. I will write a full report of this in the next week or so, but am very busy at present.

Best wishes,

 

Sean

Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism: Sean Gabb Remarks on My Org Theory Book

Kevin Carson

Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism: Sean Gabb Remarks on My Org Theory Book

fakecharities.org has been noticed by charitable trough-piggers themselves. That was quick….

…..and shows that they must have been waiting, pooing their pants in fright, to get rumbled by someone. God, how slow can bloggers be sometimes? (But    _IF_    you go here, you will see that the Libertarian Alliance’s duty-Chimpanzee-Type-Writing-Shift for 2004 (in the unheated Nissen-hut, not the other one) had indeed spotted ASH already!) (And if you go here, we have a raft of ancient writings about fake-charity and its iniquities, or even real charity, and its role in a liberal civilisation.)

David Davis

The Landed Underclass notes today that Charity Finance (whatever that is for) has logged the existence of fakecharities.org, a site set up by the estimable Devil, to expose and monitor the use of public funds directly by “charities”.  

The “charities” named in fakecharities.org are almost entirely engaged in fake lobbying: lobbying, it may be added, for mainly liberty-restricting ends such as more persecution of smokers, alcohol-likers, drivers, people who enjoy tasty food such as burgers and chips, other kinds of poor people, and suchlike.

Libertarians of all kinds will know that under liberal or what we call “free” societies, history shows the greatest rate of expansion of private charity. This is contrasted with the situation of charities under a Big State, which forcibly confiscates so much of people’s resources that charities actually suffer and attenuate. The only way they can survive is to actually abdicate their caring role in favour of the Big State tkaing it over, and than “caring” on behalf of “the people”. Naturally, the “charities” which then do best out of the pig-trough are those with the most Statist ends themselves. Small charities which actually do charity may survive in odd niches and localities, such as this one: but those which don’t trough-pig mega with the sharpest elbows will eventually go down.

Of course, this is what a Big State wants.

Or you could have a charity like this one, which not only has been doing something supremely useful for many decades, but takes no money from Big States.

Good old piece by Sean Gabb, about the vulnerable connections between advertising and liberty

Here.

Nice Canadian comments on Sean Gabb’s speech to Conservative-Future

David Davis

Here. This chap is a Canadian conservative: I have always hoped that there would be some of these.

More on Sean Gabb speech to Conservative-Future: trenchant comment

David Davis

I take the liberty of using this comment (freely available on the thread for this post) as a new post:-

And here’s me been trying to impose a commenting moratorium on myself. Oh well, here I go again.

Sean’s prescription for what to do when power is gained, while perhaps or perhaps not perfect in the detail, is a good one, and is the kind of thought experiment which may bring one temporary cheer. However it does not (nor, one must absolutely acknowledge attempt to) answer the question of how such a position may be gained. As such it is much like discussing which stars to visit in a starship, while ignoring the hard problem, which is how to build a warp drive.

The problem is that by not discussing in the same breath the gaining of that position, we overlook the fundamentally recursive nature of the discussion. If a government of libertarians, or of “the right” (I dispute that label, but let us let it pass for now) or of “real conservatives” (I dispute that even more as I said before) has gained office in our thought experiment, then the war is already won. That which should be done by such government then becomes a trifle, as it will have the authority to do whatever it wishes.

Unless it has gained power by subterfuge, rather than gained office by honest campaigning, this imaginary government has already told the populace that it will slash government to ribbons, immediately leave the EU, abolish the BBC, hound the enemy out of local government, strangle all the quangos and so on. It can only thus gain office if it has the support of the majority of those citizens who care. To achieve that, it must have gained a cultural hegemony and, more significantly a moral hegemony.

It will have become moral to support small government and immoral to support big government. It will have become moral to support tax cuts, to despise the enemy class, and so on.

To achieve the initial conditions for such a libertian cultural revolution, the public morality must have already become libertarian, rather than the current secular evangelical statism.

This is the Hard Problem, and it would seem at this juncture to be entirely intractable, since altering the moral hegemony requires cultural hegemony, while the cultural hegemony is driven by the moral hegemony.

What is oft mistakenly believed is that the statists/Left/whatever invaded the institutions- government, education etc, from outside. This is not true. There were always socialists inside the elite; indeed it is an elite project and always was. We, on the other hand, have no insiders; and the defenders against whom we wish to move are entirely alert to the possibility of any counterhegemonic entryism and are thus able to nullify it before it gains purchase. The Hard Problem is thus profoundly hard. 

Sean Gabb Gets It Right, And Oh So Wrong. | I am Keith Neilson

Comment from Blogmaster:- I should have said that this is the post which Keith Neilson comments on below. The original post was a stormer, which has mightily upset certain Tories in the UK.

Sean Gabb Gets It Right, And Oh So Wrong. | I am Keith Neilson

Sean Gabb at the Oxford Union, 26th February 2009

Thursday, 26th February 2009…a date to watch, for some fireworks…..

At The Oxford Union,

Dr Sean Gabb of the Libertarian Alliance

shall oppose the following  motion:-

“This House Would Restrict The Free Speech of Extremists”.

Sean Gabb: Speech to Conservative Future

Groan:- I don’t know what that smiley is doing there, but I can’t remove it. It’s none of my doing.

UPDATE3 lease read this response-post, and _in particular_ the comment posted thereupon by an informed member of the blogateriat.

UPDATE2:- Here’s Sean Gabb’s thoughts earlier this year on holocaust denial, a hot subject.

Earlier comment from Blogmaster just after main post filed:-

(1) A direct link from the young Conservatives, who were kind enough to report the event charitably, is here.

(2)  This post by Sean is not for the faint-hearted: that is to say, those who may quail when the real assaults finally come. The prognosis for liberty in the UK is not currently good, and may not get better.

I have just read this on another forum, and would have published it unilaterally had not Sean Gabb done so already. You will find, on reading down, that the floor-response to Sean’s address was not as positive as a rational person would have hoped from today’s Tories, in Britain, embattled as they seem not to realise – or else prefer not to know, and pretend that all will be well if only they take power.

I think we can expect that, on ZanuNewLieborg being thrown out, as they will be, but not decisively (as we fear) then the British Conservative Party will remain a less certain but still definite enemy of individual liberty. this was not always the case as Sean points out. But it is now.

Free Life Commentary,
A Personal View from
The Director of the Libertarian Alliance
Issue Number 181
16th February 2009
Linking url: http://www.seangabb.co.uk/flcomm/flc181.htm

Text of a Speech to Conservative Future,
Given in The Old Star Public House, Westminster,
Monday the 16th February 2009
by Sean Gabb

I’d like to begin by praising your courage in having me here tonight to speak to you. I am the Director of an organisation that tried hard during the 1980s to take over the youth movement of the Conservative Party. The Libertarian Alliance provided a home and other support for Marc-Henri Glendenning, David Hoile and Douglas Smith, among others, when it looked as if libertarians might do the same to the Conservative Party as the Trotskyites nearly did to the Labour Party. Sadly, our efforts failed. Since then, the Conservative Party has become more watchful of people like us. It has also, I must say, made itself progressively less worth trying to take over.

I did say that I would come here and be rude to you. But that would be a poor thanks for your hospitality. Besides, while your party leadership has consistently ignored my advice during the past twelve years – and has, in consequence, been out of office during this time – there is no point in dwelling on what might have been. We are where we are, and I think it would be useful for me very briefly to outline my advice to a future Conservative Government.

Now, this is not advice to the Government that looks set to be formed within the next year or so my David Cameron. I may be wrong. It is possible that Mr Cameron is a much cleverer and more Machiavellian man that I have ever thought him, and that he plans to make radical changes once in office. But I do not think he is. I think what little he is promising to do is the very most that he will do. In any event, he is doing nothing to acquire the mandate without which radical change would lack legitimacy. And so this is advice that I offer to some future government of conservatives, rather than to any prospective Conservative Government. It may even be a government formed by the people in this room.

My first piece of advice is to understand the nature of your enemy. If you come into government, you will be in at least the same position as Ramsay MacDonald, when he formed the first Labour Government in the 1920s. He faced an Establishment that was broadly conservative. The administration, the media, the universities, big business – all were hostile to what it was believed he wanted to do. The first Labour Governments were in office, but not fully in power, as they were not accepted by the people with whom and through whom they had to rule the country. To a lesser degree, Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson faced the same constraints. A future Conservative Government will find much the same.

Over the past few generations, a new Establishment or ruling class has emerged in this country. It is a loose coalition of politicians, bureaucrats, educators, media people and associated business interests. These are people who derive income and status from an enlarged and activist state. They have been turning this country into a soft-totalitarian police state. They are not always friendly to a Labour Government. But their natural political home is the Labour Party. They will accept a Conservative Government on sufferance – but only so long as it works within a system that robs ordinary people of their wealth and their freedom. They will never consent to what should be the Conservative strategy of bringing about an irreversible transfer of power from the State back into the hands or ordinary people.

A Cameron Government, as I have said, seems willing to try coexistence with the Establishment. The Thatcher Government set out to fight and defeat an earlier and less confident version of the Establishment – but only on those fronts where its policies were most resisted. It won numerous battles, but, we can now see, it lost the war. For example, I well remember the battle over abolition of the Greater London Council. This appeared at the time a success. But I am not aware of one bureaucrat who lost his job at the GLC who was not at once re-employed by one of the London Boroughs or by some other agency of the State. And we know that Ken Livingstone was eventually restored to power in London.

If you want to win the battle for this country, you need to take advice from the Marxists. These are people whose ends were evil where not impossible. But they were experts in the means to their ends. They knew more than we have ever thought about the seizure and retention of power. I therefore say this to you. If you ever do come to power, and if you want to bring about the irreversible transfer of power to ordinary people, you should take to heart what Marx said in 1871, after the failure of the Paris Commune: �the next attempt of the French Revolution will be no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to smash it, and this is the precondition for every real people�s revolution�.�

The meaning of this is that you should not try to work with the Establishment. You should not try to jolly it along. You should not try fighting it on narrow fronts. You must regard it as the enemy, and you must smash it.

On the first day of your government, you should close down the BBC. You should take it off air. You should disclaim its copyrights. You should throw all its staff into the street. You should not try to privatise the BBC. This would simply be to transfer the voice of your enemy from the public to the private sector, where it might be more effective in its opposition. You must shut it down – and shut it down at once. You should do the same with much of the administration. The Foreign Office, much of the Home Office, the Commission for Racial Equality, anything to do with health and safety and planning and child protection – I mean much of the public sector – these should be shut down. If at the end of your first month in power, you have not shut down half of the State, you are failing. If you have shut down half the State, you have made a step in the right direction, and are ready for still further cuts.

Let me emphasise that the purpose of these cuts would not be to save money for the taxpayers or lift an immense weight of bureaucracy from their backs – though they would do this. The purpose is to destroy the Establishment before it can destroy you. You must tear up the web of power and personal connections that make these people effective as an opposition to radical change. If you do this, you will face no more clamour than if you moved slowly and half-heartedly. Again, I remember to campaign against the Thatcher “cuts”. There were no cuts, except in the rate of growth of state spending. You would never have thought this from the the torrent of protests that rolled in from the Establishment and its clients. And so my advice is to go ahead and make real cuts – and be prepared to set the police on anyone who dares riot against you.

I fail to see how you would face any electoral problems with this approach. Most Conservative voters would welcome tax cuts and a return to freedom. As for those who lost their jobs, they do not, nor ever will, vote Conservative.

Following from this, however, I advise you to leave large areas of the welfare state alone. It is regrettable, but most people in this country do like the idea of healthcare free at the point of use, and of free education, and of pensions and unemployment benefit. These must go in the long term. But they must be retained in the short term to maintain electoral support. Their cost and methods of provision should be examined. But cutting welfare provision would be politically unwise in the early days of our revolution.

I have already spoken longer than I intended. But one more point is worth making. This is that we need to look again at our constitutional arrangements. The British Constitution has always been a fancy dress ball at which ordinary people were not really welcome, but which served to protect the life, liberty and property of ordinary people. Some parts of this fancy dress ball continue, but they no longer serve their old purpose. They are a fig leaf for an increasingly grim administrative despotism. I was, until recently, a committed monarchist. I now have to admit that the Queen has spent the past half century breaking her Coronation Oath at every opportunity. The only documents she has ever seemed reluctant to sign are personal cheques. Conservatives need to remember that our tradition extends not only through Edmund Burke to the Cavaliers, but also through Tom Paine to Oliver Cromwell. We live in an age where it is necessary to be radical to be conservative.

But I have now spoken quite long enough, and I am sure you have much to say in response. I therefore thank you again for your indulgence in having invited me and the politeness with which you have heard me.

[A combination of silence and faint applause]

Comment 1: You accuse the Conservatives of having ignored you for twelve years. From what you have just said, it is a good thing you were ignored. Under David Cameron’s leadership, we have a Conservative Party that is now positively desired by the people. Your advice is and would have been a recipe for permanent opposition.

Response: I disagree. There is no positive desire for a Conservative Government. If there were, the polls would be showing a consistent fifty point lead or something. What we have is a Labour Government that is so dreadful that I have trouble thinking what could be worse.

[In a private conversation before my speech, I said that the Labour Party had turned out to be about as bad in government as the Green Party or the British National Party or Sinn Fein.]

There are two ways of doing politics. One is to listen to focus groups and opinion polls, and offer the people what they claim to want. The other is to stand up and tell them what they ought to want, and to keep arguing until the people agree that they want it, or until it is shown not to be worth wanting. I think I know what sort of politicians will run the next Conservative Government. What sort of politicians do you want to be?

Comment 2 [from an Irishman]: What you are saying means that the country would be without protection against obvious evils. With no child protection services, children would be abused and murdered. Without planning controls, the countryside would soon be covered with concrete. Without planning controls, cities like Manchester would be far less attractive places.

I will also say, as an Irishman, that I am offended by your reference to Oliver Cromwell, who was a murderer and tyrant. You cannot approve of this man.

Response: You have been taken in by the Establishment’s propaganda. This is to insist that we live with vast structures of oppression, or that we must accept the evils they are alleged to curb. I say that that these structures do not curb any evils, but instead create evils of their own. We have, for example, seventy thousand social workers in this country. They appear to have done a consistently rotten job at protecting the few children who need protecting. instead, they are taking children away from grandparents to give to strangers, and are setting the police onto dissenting ministers who allow their children to climb onto the roof. None of this should be surprising. The Children Act and other laws have created a bureaucratic sausage machine that must somehow be filled. I say let it be destroyed along with all else that is evil in our system of government.

[What I might have said, but was too polite to say: As for Oliver Cromwell, he was one of the greatest Englishmen who ever lived. It is partly thanks to him that we have just had around three centuries of freedom and political stability. When you refer to his actions in Ireland, you are repeating Fenian propaganda. What he did in Ireland has been exaggerated by the enemies of England, and in any event was in keeping with the customs of war universally admitted in his own time. If you want to throw an offended fit every time an Englishman in London praises an English hero to other Englishmen, you should consider moving to Dublin where all the letter boxes have been painted a reassuring green, and your own national sensitivities never need be offended again.]

Comment 3: All you speak about is winning and the destruction of enemies. Yet you are willing to consider keeping the welfare state. You are nothing but an unprincipled trouble maker. Thank God the Conservative Party no longer has any place for people like you.

Response: If we were facing the sort of Labour Government we had under Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson, you would be right. However, we have an Establishment that has already given us the beginnings of a totalitarian police state. Today, for example, the authorities will start collecting details of every telephone call, text and e-mail sent in this country. Children are about to have their details stuffed into a giant database that will enable them to be monitored by the authorities until they are adults – and probably through their entire lives. We live in a country were privacy is being abolished. Speech is increasingly unfree. The police are out of control. Everything is getting rapidly worse, and it is easy to see the end state that is desired, or total control.

If a government of radical conservatives ever does take power, it will have one attempt at saving this country. That means radical and focussed actions from day one. Anything less than this, and it will fail. I am suggesting a revolution – but this is really a counter-revolution against what has already been proceeding for at least one generation. If we are to beat the heirs of Marx, we must learn from Marx himself.

Comment 4: You are wasting our time with all this radical preaching. People do not want to hear about how they are oppressed by the Establishment, and how this must be destroyed. What they want to hear is that taxes are too high, that the money is being wasted, and that there are ways to protect essential public services with lower taxes. That is why the Taxpayers’ Alliance has been so much more prominent than the Libertarian Alliance. We must have nothing to do with the ranting lunatics of the Libertarian Alliance.

Response: You may have a desire for electoral success that I do not share. But I am the better politician. All debate is perceived as taking place on a spectrum that has a centre and two extremes. If the Libertarian Alliance did not exist, the relevant spectrum would simply reconfigure itself with the Taxpayers’ Alliance at one extreme, and the centre would be still less attractive than it now is. Since most people consciously take centrist positions, it is in your interest – regardless of whether I am right – to say what I do. It makes you and your friends moderate in relation to me.

[At this point, some unfortunate woman began screeching that I was a fascist, and the debate came to an end.]

[I normally like to comment on these events once I have described them. I think, however, the above stands by itself.]

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/34e2o3

Labour “Peers” and “cash for law changes”: the buggers get off.

Of course they will: whatever did we suppose?

David Davis

There are two nations now – firstly, the one the Enemy Class inhabits (see Dr Sean Gabb’s site for further clarification of these buggers) into which there is Active Transport of money, up a very very steep Concentration Gradient.

And then there is the one they chain us in  – fenced in by cameras, terror-police and DNA databases, where the money is produced, and from which it is extracted, as if we are their farm animals.

At least Old Holborn has said something about this sad matter. Everybody else seems as bored as we are.

Sean Gabb on the BBC re Carol Thatcher

http://www.libertarian.co.uk/multimedia/2009-02-04-sig-thatcher.mp3

Should the BBC have sacked Carol Thatcher because she said in a private conversation that someone looked like a golliwog? No, says Sean Gabb, Director of the Libertarian Alliance.  Jo Brand was investigated by the police for allegedly inciting violence on BBC 1 against her political opponents. Carol Thatcher used a word. One gets the sack, the other the BBC’s unconditional support. But, then, Jo Brand is part of the New Labour Establishment. Carol Thatcher is the daughter of a Prime Minister who still makes the ruling class shudder.

Sean Gabb: Another Rant about the Recession

Free Life Commentary,
A Personal View from
The Director of the Libertarian Alliance
Issue Number 179
28th January 2009
Linking url: http://www.seangabb.co.uk/flcomm/flc.179

The Car Industry Bail Out:
Are There no Politicians Now Who Understand Economics?
by Sean Gabb

The British Government has just announced what may be £2,000 million of subsidies for the car industry in this country. Responses to the announcement range from gratitude that jobs and manufacturing capacity are to be saved to complaints that the subsidies do not go far enough. My reading and viewing may not be comprehensive, but I have seen nothing in the mainstream media denouncing the subsidies as at best politically motivated – much of the car industry being located in constituencies held by Labour – and at worst economically illiterate. Since the first grounds of denunciation ought, after nearly twelve years of these people, to be self-evident, I will devote myself here to the second.

We are continually told at present – which is somewhat more than usual – how government spending had created, or will create, so many jobs. Therefore, the immense expansion of the British State since 1997 has created three hundred thousand jobs or whatever. Some deplore this because most of those employed can be expected to vote Labour. Hardly anyone denies there has been a net addition to the number of employed. The same reasoning underlies all discussion of how we are to get through the recession on which we have now started.

The truth is, however, that government spending does not so much create as displace employment. Every pound spent by the Government must first be taken from the people, who cannot then spend it for themselves. If the money is taken is taken through taxes, it exactly reduces the ability of the people to spend or invest it for themselves as they wish, or to save it for transfer, via the banking system, for others to spend or invest as they wish. If the money is borrowed, it again exactly reduces the amount of money that the people can borrow to spend or invest.

It is more complex if the money is printed by the Government – or, more likely nowadays, borrowed from the banks in a fractional reserve system. But if its effects are often hard to trace until after the event, inflation is no less a tax than any other means of providing money to governments. It may reduce the actual purchasing power of money left in the hands of the people. Given the downward pressure on manufacturing costs we have seen during the past generation, inflation will at best reduce the potential purchasing power of money that already exists.

This being so, the argument that government spending creates employment relies on a blindness to the concept of opportunity cost – that every pound spent on paying one salary is a pound less to spend on another salary. Put more simply, it is a case of what Bastiat described as “what is seen and what is not seen”. We see the jobs created by the Government in it “regeneration” projects. We do not see the jobs that would otherwise have been created to supply things that people actually would have bought had the money been left in their own pockets.

For the past six months, the argument has been reinforced by the claim that government spending is needed to make up for a disinclination by others to spend or invest. This being so, it will not be a zero sum game, but will create net employment. There is no doubt that there has been a deflation. People are borrowing less and saving more. The banks have been increasing their financial reserves. But it does not follow from this admission that government spending is needed to make up the deficiency. The fall in spending is not the cause of the problems we face, but is a symptom.

For perhaps the past decade, many central banks in the rich world have kept interest rates below the level needed to balance the supply of savings and the demand for loans. When other prices are forced below their equilibrium – rent control, for example – the result is shortages. In the fractional reserve system that we nowadays have, however, pushing interest rates below their equilibrium has simply enabled the commercial banks to create money out of nothing. In the past, this would have led almost at once to price increases. This time, with most consumer goods made in countries where supply curves are very elastic, and with exchange rates only loosely related in the short term to the financing of foreign trade, and with financial and property markets able to absorb what long seemed to be limitless amounts of money, the result was a speculative bubble, in which consumer prices hardly rose, and in which most of us were persuaded that we were growing richer.

These bubbles never last. The new money is brought into being through bank lending that cannot continue forever. There comes a point where people have taken as much debt as they can service, or  where they have invested on the basis of trends that stop rising. It is then that some event that would otherwise have been overlooked becomes the excuse for a panic. The bubble bursts. Net borrowing turns negative. Prices of overbid assets fall. Prices of securities fall to the value of their underlying assets – assuming there are any that can be identified. Much investment in new capacity is shown to have been unwise.

On this reasoning, the present fall in spending is not an event in itself that needs to be and can be cured by higher government spending. What we now have is really part of a cycle that began with the artificial lowering of interest rates, and that will end with the liquidation of the unwise investments and the correction in asset prices. The British Government’s policy of trying to halt the deflation with higher spending and even lower interest rates cannot do better than lengthen the cycle during its unpleasant phase. It also increases the size of the State – which already takes far too much of our money and spends it on things we would never buy given a free choice.

But I return to the bail out of the car industry. This is not a case of limiting collateral damage. The car industry is not a fundamentally sound victim of circumstances. It is instead one of those sectors in which unwise investments were made. There is no shortage of finance for businesses that really are considered sound. Even I still receive one or two pre-approved loan offers from banks I never knew existed. If the car companies cannot borrow to maintain their working capital, it is because no one believes in their fundamental soundness. Even at the height of the boom, it was claimed that there were too many car makers, given present and future demand for cars. There will now be several years when hardly anyone with an ounce of common sense will spend money unless he must on a new car. No one seems to care if estate agents all over the country are losing their jobs. If car workers are now to lose their jobs, it is for the same reason.

Of course, there are things the Government could do and ought to do to help the car industry. These are all negative. For the past twelve years, it has been running propaganda campaigns and piling taxes and regulations that have tended to make driving less attractive than it might otherwise have been. These propaganda campaigns should be ended. The road excise and petrol duties should be cut. The cameras and yellow and red lines should be taken away. The police officers now deployed to harass drivers should be dismissed – there being, in any event, more policemen than needed to enforce the laws of a free country.

I move back now to the general difficulties we face. With increasing desperation, Gordon Brown is denouncing anyone who questions his policy of inflation as wanting to do nothing. Well, doing nothing at all would be an improvement on what he has been doing. However, there are things the Government could do. None of it would take us back straightaway to the prosperity we have lost. But it would shorten and moderate the pain that stands between us and recovery. I suggest the following:

• The Government should balance its budget – and do so not by increasing taxes, but by spending less. This would tend to restore confidence to markets that are presently working on the assumption of a soft pound, and where default on the national debt is no longer thought impossible.
• The Government should force all banks that have limited liability to reveal their true financial position. This would not be an interference in their private affairs, as limited liability is a privilege bringing responsibilities that may be varied as thought reasonable. This would again tend to restore confidence, and it would do more than printing money has to persuade the banks to start lending to each other.
• The Government should return to a fully convertible gold standard. Unless otherwise contracted, it should be regarded as fraud for a banker to take a deposit and not have sufficient reserves to redeem it at once on demand. This would prevent the periodic explosions of credit that are behind the trade cycle.
• Of course, the Government should also abolish income tax, valued added tax and excise duties. If this does not cut the tax burden by three quarters, it should abolish some other taxes. To keep the budget balanced, it should also cut spending.

I could go on, making more and more claims unlikely ever to be conceded by the British Government or any other. But the first two, plus a few cuts, would go far to shortening the recession. Sadly, even these will not be tried – not at least until the Keynesian remedies everyone wants have been tested to destruction.

Further Reading:

Murray Rothbard, America’s Great Depression
Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson
Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Credit Creation or Financial Intermediation?: Fractional-reserve Banking in a Growing Economy

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/34e2o3