David Davis

Sean points out rightly that it was today, in the summer of 1914, when Britain found herself with no choice but to enter the Great War, whose stormclouds had been gathering for some weeks. It was also the abiding tragedy of Sir Edward Grey's life (sad in other respects for him too being an unwilling and unadjusted widower, and a great and renowned trout fisherman and authority on the subject.)

He was aware, as indeed was also Paul Johnson decades later in "The Offshore Islanders", that this war would be an unmitigated disaster and a tragedy for civilisation.

As I jot today, it is now 94 years on. Since Sean's piece first saw the light of day, almost all the old men who then remembered that war have passed on. The cenotaph processions of "Old Contemptibles" were quite large in my youth. The last one, probably a gentleman called Harry Patch, is on record as wishing to decline the honour of a State Funeral when his turn finally comes. The last French soldier of ww1 died, I think, a few months ago. I'm not sure if the Germans keep records of this sad kind, but their situation is probably similar as will be that of Austria, Russia, Turkey and the others.

And thus, the Great War passes out of living history, and out of today, and into only memory, into books, Wikipedia pages, and half-remembered conversations with old men who are now dead, and whose faces fade with time. And the Second Half of that War will follow it soon, as any reader of the Daily Telegraph's splendid and uplifting obituary pages can confirm.

On the whole, it is good to be able to say that, if Anglosphere nations have tended to go to war rather a lot (and you can easily see or google many many stupidly un-thought-out socialist phrases like "Britain is the most warring nation in history") then it is because they've done it either for a principle or for the rights of another third-party nation. These are good reasons to go to war, and "do the right thing".

I'm not saying that war of itself is good: it is not: it is institutionalised destruction resported to when proper foreign policy avenues have failed - it therefore only exists as a by-product of the existence of "Big States", and all readers of this and other libertarian blogs need no reminding of what we think of "Big States" and their works.

But wars fought for noble ends are such as is what the Anglosphere has by and large tended to do: having spent a millenium gettng its own house into some sort of practical liberal-conservative order, it has an outlook that differs from all other "States'" outlooks, so far. Inside it, the State has tended to do the least harm possible consistent with "providing against preventable evils" (Enoch Powell's words, that begin his "RIVERS of BLOOD" speech.) It thus must follow that on the whole we ought to be proud of why and what for we intervened in conflicts. Now for example I have always disagreed with Sean over Iraq (2003.) To me, this was the only right and good decision Tony Blair took in his papacy principate - to support the USA after 9/11 and to offer war to people who were clearly against the West, such as the Taliban, or just wicked, such as Saddam Hussein. (The phrase "the War on Terror" is quite meaningless, since "terror" (which is to say, intellingently-directed blood-assaults on the unprotected civilians of a belligerent) is merely a weapon or tactic, and is not a corporate person or collection of individuals. It merely has a decondary function, as a trigger for an Anglo-American-Leftisto-Stalinist's excuse to set up Police States -which are even worse than ordinary ones.)   

No. The Great War was bad. But in my view, which may contrast with Sean's, it was unavoidable. It was a pity that no forward providence would or could forsee that Pte Henry Tandy, VC, of the Green Howards, would refrain from shooting a certain Cpl Hitler, at Marcoing near Cambrai, on 28th September 1918. Hitler was wounded, and Pte Tandy said long, long afterwards: "I couldn't shoot a wounded man, so I let him go." (All this must be available on google or wiki, and you can find it also in the Telegraph archives for 28th July 1997, as and when they digitize the lot.

If we had not, then probably all Europe and Eurasia would have been over-run, and subsequently ruled by the Kaiser's autistically-warped vision of what constitutes a Utopian civilisation. Would this have been a bad thing? Yes. Because another Hitler (or the same one?) or, equally bad, a Lenin (or the same one?) would then have had an even larger and more intricate State-Machine, the levers of which to pull at his will. It is not clear to me that the nascent Anglosphere in the 1920s could have stood against this leviathan, without the horrors of another war, probably quite similar to WW2 anyway.

Sorry to be so depressing, and on such a fine and sunny afternnoon too. (Al Gore eat your black heart out - you wouldn't die for these men, even if we paid you more than you earned from your silly movies.) Here's a picture of one of the main inscriptions on our war memorial here.

It says:

"REMEMBER THAT THE MEN WHOSE NAMES LIVE ON THESE WALLS DIED IN YOUTH OR PRIME THAT FUTURE GENERATIONS MIGHT INHERIT A WORLD AND A HUMAN SOCIETY MORE RIGHTEOUS AND MORE LOVING THAN THOSE BRAVE MEN AND THEIR GENERATION KNEW."

I just leave you with that thought.

http://www.seangabb.co.uk/freelife/flhtm/fl20jott.htm
I have mentioned the year 1914. I am making these loose jottings on the 4th August, 80 years to the day since our declaration of war on Germany. I know that looking at the plain statistics, we can dethrone the Great War from the place that it occupies in most liberal imaginations. Other wars have lasted longer. Others have had higher death rates, both absolutely and proportionately. On the same basis, others have consumed more wealth. I cannot say that our statist ascendency is wholly a product of the War: its roots can be traced far back into the 19th century - even into the age of high liberalism.

Yet for all this, I cannot but regard that war as the greatest of all known calamities. The only real civilisation that has existed on this planet came close to blowing itself apart: and no one but a fool can say that a full recovery has yet taken place, or be sure that one will take place.

I began this jotting with the intention of saying something smart and clever about today's anniversary. But there is nothing smart and clever to be said. When I contemplate the events that unrolled between the 28th June and the 4th August 1914, I become a child again, in the audience of a pantomime. I want to cry out to the person on stage - "Look behind you!" "Don't go there!", "He's coming for you!". But there is nobody out there to listen.

And that, perhaps, is why we are so busy commemorating the events of 1944, but have chosen very largely to overlook the still greater and more unimaginable events of 30 years' earlier.

David Davis

Now, for libertarians, the spectator-sport of watching socialists (who are of course the ultimate enemy - all other classifications: one-nation-Tories, Militant Islamists, modern TV-production-companies, UKIP, the EU, and whatever else, is merely a form of lateral stamp-collecting) tear up each other's dirty linen in public is a tremendous hoot. It makes up for all the tricoteurish cackling that conservatively-minded individuals of many liberal kinds got in 1990, when the "Tories" axed their ace of trumps and put in a droid instead.

Fraser Nelson at Coffee House thinks that the pub-fight has now extended and is about to spill out into the street.

David Rubberband has either expressly confronted the PM by implication, or has made it look like he has. There are two scenarios:-

(1) Brown will at the first opportunity demote him in a "reshuffle". This will cost, even though David Rubberband may/will bounce back some months/years down the line. this will make ZanuLaborg look even worse than it does.

(2) There will be a leadership challenge, which Brown will probably lose. If so, then I don't think people will stand for a second PM being shoehorned in without a General Election, which ZanuLaborg will probably lose. Not by 140 seats, but enough. People forget how hard it will be to overturn entrenched inertia in the many, many Rotten Boroughs in metropolitan districts.

Either way, it's fun. I've also somewhat pre-contradicted my intention to lambast those of the political/enemy class, and "management" "consultants", who constantly repeat that magic mantra-word "CHANGE". Rubberband himself either said it or implied it in the last 48 hours.

What I mean by what the commentariat and the Media world call "political" change is the kind I define as being brought about by utopian vandalism. This is not the kind which markets benignly cause to occur naturally. I fear that Rubberband meant more if the kind which socialists invariably do, and always for the worse, to whatever wretched civilisation they get their infected teeth into, is almost invarariably bad, and almost all of which is unwanted and unasked for by ordinary individuals.

There would prbably be no voters for socialism, if socialists did not go about telling people that they could have other people's stuff. Thus vast amounts of unautorised "change" would never havew taken place.

The Full Coercive Apparatus of a Police State:
Thoughts on the Dark Side of the Thatcher Decade

Sean Gabb

3rd May 1989, Published as Legal Notes No. 6, by the Libertarian Alliance,
London, 1989, ISBN 1 870614 39 9

Ten years ago (1979) I gave way to one of my rare bursts of enthusiasm. I was at the time, I'll grant, still a schoolboy; and these things are always more permissible in them than in others. But, even for a schoolboy, it was a very great burst of enthusiasm. I seriously thought that, along with Mrs Thatcher, the second dawn of classical liberalism had arrived. This was it, I thought. No more socialism. No more national decline. No more Road to Serfdom. Oh, even as lads of my age went, I was naïve.

To give praise where due, there been a loosing of market forces. Wage and price controls are gone. Exchange and credit controls are gone. There are no controls on foreign investment either way. We have a tax system designed more for collecting revenue than confiscating wealth. Most of the nationalised industries have been sold off, or made to operate on something like sound business principles. Since 1981, we've been unusually prosperous. We even had five years of lowish retail price inflation. The Government's economic record hasn't been one tenth as wonderful as I expected, or as I hear it proclaimed. It's been quite good even so. It might easily have been worse.

But the economic record isn't the only test of a government. There are all those rights that don't bring a financial return: how they are respected. And, while the Tories have supervised the building of an impressive number of Japanese car factories here, they haven't rolled back the frontiers of the State. What they have done is bring about an unprecedented concentration of power at the centre. Every one of those bodies, public or private, which used to stand between the state and its citizens has been pushed aside: local government, the press and other media, the unions, the universities - each has been humbled. And the Bar may soon be about to follow.

But all this is common knowledge. Enough already has been said about it. What I wish to do in this article is describe the new and unusual ways in which this concentrated power is being used. I shall discuss to what extent we've ceased being a nation under the rule of law.

Now, this is a grand phrase, and Tory politicians love rolling it out on grand occasions. Nine times out of ten for them, it's just a euphemism for making people do as they're told. Rather, it's the most completely effective check on State power ever yet discovered. Put as fully and exactly as I can, it requires this: that no person be arrested, or imprisoned, or fined, or by any other means harmed, except in accordance with unambiguous laws of general scope, that have been laid down in advance, that are equally binding on all, and that are nforceable only by independent courts in which the prosecution is at a procedural disadvantage. Whoever has not been, or is not in process of being, adjudged in breach of any such law is to be as free of interference by the State as a foreigner living outside its jurisdiction.

The usual objection to this is that it lets crime go unpunished. Everyone knows of some evidently guilty person who's gone scot free thanks to a clever lawyer. But, in judging any set of legal rules, what must be looked at isn't the effect of a single instance, but of the whole scheme through time. Where the rule of law is concerned, it is invariably true that the greater security of life and property, and the readier public acceptance of those uses of power which are made, are well worth the occasional specific inconvenience.

I'd be as bad as the people in donkey jackets hawking Socialist Worker if I blamed every violation of the rule of law on Margaret Thatcher. Faith in it was already crumbling before her father was a little boy. Nor, in every case, has she been the greatest violator. In respect of the first of these listed below, she's been so far a distinct improvement on Harold Wilson and James Callaghan: she hasn't tried fixing wages and prices by decree. But, taken as a whole, what she and her colleagues have been about these past ten years can have only one meaning. They've been hard at work, freeing the State from all constitutional restraints.

Consider:

IN ACCORDANCE WITH LAW

In the July of 1988, the Prime Minister was asked in Parliament what she thought of gazumping. In the late 1970s, when making libertarian noises was more to her taste than now, she might have answered that breaches of faith are always regrettable, but what else can one expect when the Government's monetary policy is making house prices rocket? Instead, she called on estate agents to adopt a voluntary code of conduct. If they refused,"the Government might have no alternative but to introduce statutory rules".

I know that estate agents are deeply unpopular. Having been one myself, I know that they're often deservedly so. But this apparently offhand remark is a perfect instance of what Enoch Powell calls"the rule of the Threat of Law"."Do as I tell you" a minister says."Or I shall make a law compelling you to do it - and then you'll be sorry." Usually, the person threatened does obey. Perhaps he thinks saying"No" isn't worth the effort. Perhaps he'd rather deal with a single minister than many lawyers. Perhaps he thinks the Government has a right to push him around. For whatever reason, he usually obeys.

The estate agents haven't obeyed yet. But the press has long been kow-towing to a D-Notice Committee, the orders of which have as much legal force as one of my New Year resolutions. The tobacco companies almost fall over themselves obeying the Secretary of State for Health. Early in 1987, they agreed to cut their advertising budget at sports events sponsored by them from thirty per cent to twenty per cent of the total of any one event. At the same time, they increased the size of the Government Health Warning by fifty per cent.

Calling these agreements voluntary is a sinister misuse of language. Bad in themselves, they form ready precedents for a much larger use of arbitrary power. Compared with what it was, Parliament is a joke. But, it isn't yet entirely a rubber stamp. The Commons do occasionally put the Government front bench in a sweat. The Lords can be very stubborn, even if only for a year at a time. Though we have nothing like the American Supreme Court, the Judges do see off whole Acts of Parliament when the mood takes them. Even formulae like "the decision of the Minister shall not be called into question in any court of law" have been effectively voided. But when the Government can rule simply by stating its wishes and having them complied with, there's an end to all but the most extraordinary scrutiny in Parliament, and of all scrutiny whatever by the Courts. Ministers are freed from worrying whether they're acting ultra vires, or in bad faith, or for an improper purpose, or in breach of the rules of natural justice. They can be as selectively indulgent or severe as the whim takes them. With a bit of arm-twisting, with a few nods and winks, safeguards that have taken eight hundred years to evolve can be pushed aside as easily as I delete a paragraph on my wordprocessor.

LAWS OF GENERAL SCOPE

The rule of law isn't synonymous with freedom. As a doctrine, it governs the making and enforcement of laws, not their content. An Act imposing the death penalty on every person reaching the age of sixty-five would be perfectly compatible with the rule of law. For obvious reasons, Parliament would never make any such Act. If politicians and their friends and relatives were to be exempted, of course, that would be another matter. It would also create privileges decidedly incompatible with the rule of law.

Except where the revenue is concerned - and this is a cause so lost, I'll not discuss it further - the Thatcher Government has created no explicit legal privileges. But it has made laws, in form binding on all, in essence directed against specific groups. The most scandalous of these, of course, has been section 28 of the Local Government Finance Act 1988. This bans the promotion of the teaching in any schools maintained by it of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship. True, there were Labour Councils pushing the ratepayers' money at any group with the word "gay" in its name. True, this had to be stopped. But why this alone, when there was other political funding besides? What about the funding of anti-smoking groups? These are political. I, for one, find them infinitely more offensive than a few proselytising homosexuals. What, for that matter, about the promotion of knicker sniffing, or any other minority sexual taste that the Labour left might one day care to buy into its "coalition of the disadvantaged". If a law was needed, it should have been a general prohibition laid on the funding of anything controversial beyond a certain point. Instead, a law was made, useless for any other purpose than heaping indignity on an unpopular minority of our fellow subjects.

LAWS LAID DOWN IN ADVANCE

The panic following the Hungerford Massacre made a tightening of our gun control laws inevitable. Under the Firearms (Amendment) Act 1988, it became a serious offence to own, among others, semi- automatic rifles and pump-up shotguns. It's a shame the Government gave in so readily to the panic. It's a shame there are any controls at all. But this is beside the point. Taking away the right to bear arms may be oppressive, but it isn't in itself contrary to the rule of law. Under section 21 of the Act, the Home Secretary was enabled to make a scheme of compensation for those surrendering or otherwise disposing of their newly prohibited weapons. Delegating legislation is politically dangerous, but, again, not contrary to the rule of law. Under the scheme eventually made there was to be a flat payment of £150 per gun, or a payment of fifty per cent of the average retail price of the gun in the summer of 1987. Taking property without just compensation is theft. But this I deal with below. For the moment, I'll discuss sections 21 (a) and (b) of the Act. These provide for compensation only to those owners who lawfully acquired, or contracted to acquire, their guns before the 23rd September 1987. The Act was passed in the spring and summer of 1988. Possession of the weapons prohibited under it became an offence on the 30th April 1989. No one who bought any such weapon between the 23rd September 1987 and last Sunday - as I write - was breaking the law. Anyone who did buy one has been punished as if he had.

When laws can be made tomorrow that penalise what was lawfully done yesterday, there's an entire end to limited government. The only safe course lies in anticipating what may be said, and doing it. As above, if by other means, the distinction between the law of the land and what the government wants is abolished. This much the Home Office cheerfully admits. It was known long in advance, we've been told, that certain weapons were likely to be banned. Anyone who didn't immediately take account of this has only himself to blame.

Laws ex post facto are expressly forbidden under Article I, 9:3 of the American Constitution. It used to be assumed they were equally unconstitutional here, whatever the theoretical right of Parliament to make them. The modern view is made quite plain in section 139 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988. This mainly does something rather nasty that I shall discuss below. Subsection (8), however, reads: "This section shall not have effect in relation to anything done before it comes into force". What a splendidly cool admission of the coming tyranny!

LAWS ENFORCEABLE BY THE COURTS

There's an old parliamentary device called Attainder. It's a means by which penalties - sometimes death, sometimes a fine - can be imposed without due process of law, the Bill going through Parliament like any other. Naturally, it was a device shockingly abused from beginning to end. It hasn't been used in centuries. Yet if section 21 of the new gun law isn't in effect a little Act of Attainder, I don't know what is.

The Local Gpverrnment Finance Act 1988 is the one forcing the Poll Tax on us. When I first learned I was to be put against my will on a computerised register, I couldn't believe I was awake and living in England. But, again, this is only frighteningly oppressive and politically stupid. Giving false information to the people compiling these registers is an offence, carrying fines that range from £50 to £200. Under section 23 and Schedules 3 and 11 of the Act, these fines are to be imposed by tribunals set up by the authorities collecting the Tax. Though a tribunal may at any time quash or amend its sentences, there is to be no automatic right of appeal to the proper courts. Anyone who doesn't supply every last detail wanted by the registration officers has been made subject to the penal jurisdiction of a town hall committee. But this jurisdiction will at least bear some resemblance to legal proceedings. There is worse.

Under section 27 of the Transport Act 1982 - given effect in the summer of 1986 - the Police are empowered to hand out fines to motorists whom they believe to have been speeding or committing some other traffic offence. The money involved is negligible - þ24 at the most. The principle is a disgrace. Penalties are now imposed without the ghost of due process. I'm told that, in many European countries, the Police have still wider judicial powers: they even collect the fines. But there hasn't been a properly limited government anywhere in Europe since the middle ages. Foreigners are so used to misgovernment, it's no surprise if they stand by grinning while their wallets are gone through by men in uniform. What they're willing to put up with is no precedent for us.

PROSECUTION AT A PROCEDURAL DISADVANTAGE

One of the acknowledged glories of the common law tradition is its procedural safeguards in criminal trials. An accused person is presumed innocent until found guilty. The Court is forbidden either to rely on involuntary confessions or to construe silence as an admission of guilt. In the absence of a truly voluntary confession, the prosecution must make out its whole case without assistance. Any other evidence offered by it must have been obtained without general searches or other means contrary to right or custom. For at least the graver crimes - and preferably in any matter affecting life, liberty or property - trial must be by independent Jury of the Accused's peers. I can't say that these safeguards were still securely in place before 1979. The cumulative growth of executive and, especially, of Police power has already largely eroded them. But it is true that the past ten years have seen a revolution in criminal procedure.

Consider again:

INNOCENT UNTIL PROVED GUILTY

Section 1 of the Drug Trafficking Offences Act 1986 brings into English law the penalty of the Criminal Confiscation Order. Some- one is found selling heroin, and is arrested, tried and convicted according to law. Trying to stop the sale and use of recreational drugs is oppressive in that it isn't called for on the grounds of individual or public justice. It's also dangerous by reason of the subsidy it places on all real criminal activity. But, as with the possession of weapons, this has nothing directly to do with the rule of law. It's what now follows conviction that is so outrageous. The Court may direct an inquiry of the Defendant's assets insofar as these may be the fruits of the crime of which convicted or any other similar crime and exceed £10,000. The prosecution submits a statement of assets, particularising those which it alleges to have been come by dishonestly. It's up to the defence to challenge each of these allegations. If it fails to challenge them, or doesn't chall- enge them to the Court's satisfaction, the assets are confiscated.

Except that the courts administer it, this is as gross a denial of due process as any of those listed above. Taking away the proceeds of what may well be, but haven't been properly decided, criminal acts is nothing but a kind of judicial attainder. Leaving all challenges to the defence is an exact reversal of the traditional burden of proof. Everyone knows the advantage of this is in ordinary argument. A clever flat-earther stands up in company. "The earth is flat" he asserts. Someone laughs. "Prove to me that it isn't" he demands. On the defensive, he has to prove nothing himself, but only to deal with individual - and perhaps half-baked - objections. In court, it makes the job of prosecution so delightfully easy, that no one but a fool can have believed the procedure would remain confined to drug offences. Section 71 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988 extends it to cover every indictable offence.

Section 139 of this Act creates the new offence of having a knife in a public place without "good reason or lawful authority". This does away with what now evidently seems the cumbersome requirements of section 1 of the Prevention of Crime Act 1953, whereby the prosecution was put to the inconvenience of proving that any knife found was indeed an offensive weapon within the meaning of the Act, or was carried with intent to commit a crime. Now, it merely needs prove possession in public of a sharp or pointed implement that isn't a folding pocket knife with a blade of three inches or less. This done, it's up to the defence to prove "good reason or lawful authority".

The Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act came into force last March 15th. Section 9 makes it an offence to handle money for any person, "knowing or having reasonable cause to suspect that it may be used by that person for the purposes of terror- ism". This offence carries an unlimited fine or a sentence of up to fourteen years in prison. Murder, theft, intimidation - these are offences that ought probably to carry the same penalties whatever the motive behind them. But, in any case, someone who knowingly transfers or helps to transfer funds for the commission of a crime should be regarded as an accomplice, and so liable to be punished. What, however, do the words "reasonable cause to suspect" do except make a crime of stupidity? If an English bank clerk quietly takes in money for an American group called Kill A Brit For Ireland Inc., maybe he is assisting in the commission of a crime. Caught taking in money for the Patrick Sarsfield Foundation, he's in serious trouble unless he can prove his ignorance of Irish history.

This bizarre provision isn't the effect of sloppy drafting. It's deliberate Government policy. Said Douglas Hogg, justifying it in the Commons: "My feeling is that to accept an exclusionary subjective test ... would be to erect too high a hurdle for the purposes of securing convictions". It used to be a boast of the common lawyers that the purpose of English law was to secure justice, not convictions. Better that ten guilty men go free, said Blackstone, than one innocent be made to suffer. I believe I could quote Mr Hogg's own father to the same effect.

NO SELF-INCRIMINATION

The Police don't often beat confessions out of suspects. They don't often need to. At most, a few veiled threats are enough. Usually, all that's needed is sustained questioning of a suspect, alone and in the unfriendly surroundings of a Police Station. What is required, then, is that no one should be questioned without access to legal advice. In America, the courts regularly throw out indictments where the Police haven't observed this requirement to its letter. Here, section 58 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 does give an arrested person the right to consult a solicitor at any time. But, in the case of "serious arrestable offences", this right can be deferred for up to 36 hours; and the whole period of questioning between arrest and before any charge must be made can be extended to 96 hours.

A member not merely of the Bourgeoisie, but arguably also of the Establishment, I rather hope I'd be treated with the fullest, wariest respect if ever arrested. For all the Act lays down, others haven't been so lucky. In 1985, following the Broadwater Farm riots, a boy of thirteen was interrogated alone in a Police Station for three days. Wearing only underpants and a blanket, he eventually confessed to murder. He might possibly have been guilty. But the judge was so aghast, he felt he had no choice but to direct an acquittal. This, however, was a use of discretion, not, as in America, the application of a fixed rule. For lack of one, it stands to reason the Police will go on pressuring suspects too young or ill-informed to be worth being frightened of.

THE RIGHT TO SILENCE

There is an essential part of the foregoing. Just as a suspect traditionally can't be pressured into giving evidence against himself, neither does he have to risk being duped into doing so by skillful examination. Nor can his remaining silent be construed as any admission of guilt. I treat this separately, however, by reason of the current debate over its continuance.

There have been periodic clamours against the right for twenty years. It lets sophisticated criminals get away far too often, we're told. But this is the first Government to act on the clamour. In 1988, an Order was laid before Parliament allowing the Judges in Northern Ireland to make what they pleased of a suspect's silence under prior interrogation or in court. From extended Police questioning to plastic bullets, there's little tried in Ulster that doesn't eventually find its way to England. It's only ever a matter of time and opportunity.

In one part of the law, indeed, the right has already been lost in England. Under section 1 of the Criminal Justice Act 1987, the Serious Fraud Office was set up. Section 2 of the Act allows this body to require a person under investigation for serious or complex fraud, or any person who is reasonably thought to have information relevant to such a fraud, to attend before it and answer questions or furnish information. Anyone failing to comply commits an offence. Though statements made under compulsion can be used only to contradict other statements made later by the defence in court, documents surrendered may be used by the prosecution for such purposes as it may think fit. The writers of the standard commentary on this Act - Emmins & Scanlan, p. 6 - are driven to say: "Thus significant inroads are made on the privilege against self-incrimination and the maxim that `no one shall be required to be his own betrayer'."

NO GENERAL SEARCHES

The Fourth Amendement to the American Constitution is a codification of English law as stated in the various cases connected with John Wilkes. I cite the whole Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the person or things to be seized. 

I cite the relevant parts of section 19 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984:

The powers conferred by subsections (2), (3) and (4) below are exercisable by a Constable who is lawfully on any premises.(2) The Constable may seize anything which is on the premises if he has reasonable grounds for believing
(a) that it has been obtained in consequence of the commission of an offence; and
(b) that it is necessary to seize it in order to prevent it being concealed, lost, damaged, altered or destroyed ...

(3) The Constable may seize anything which is on the premises if he has reasonable grounds for believing
(a) that it is evidence in relation to an offence which he is investigating or any other offence; and
(b) that it is necessary to seize it in order to prevent it being concealed, lost, damaged, altered or destroyed.

(5) The powers conferred by this section are in addition to any power otherwise conferred 

Beyond saying the italics are mine, I don't think I need point out anything further here. Looking at these two documents one after the other, I'm left speechless. This second is the modern law of England.

MEANS CONTRARY TO RIGHT OR CUSTOM

If I testify in court, I do so under two great sanctions. First, I swear by my God or my honour, whichever I decide the greater, that I will tell the truth. Second, if caught lying, I face being prosecuted for perjury. The assumption behind this first is that I understand the difference between truth and falsehood. That behind the second is that I can be held legally responsible for what I say. Section 34 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988 provides that an accused may be convicted on the uncorroborated evidence of an unsworn child. Perhaps, as was extensively argued at the time, children are less prone to telling lies than was always assumed. Certainly - and I don't recall this being mentioned - they can, with complete personal impunity below the age of ten, have someone convicted of what are currently viewed as the most atrocious of crimes. They don't even need to appear in court, but can say all they need over closed circuit television. It was Esther Rantzen and her friends in the gutter press who demanded this denial of natural justice. But it was the Government that willingly gave in to it.

TRIAL BY JURY

This Government doesn't like Jury trials. The bloody nose it got in the Ponting trial has kept it out of the criminal courts as much as possible ever since. Also, while it didn't begin the progress towards the abolition of Juries, it has done much to hasten its speed.

1. Sections 37 and 39 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988 have made theft of a motor car and common assault and battery offences triable by magistrates alone. The excuse given for this was that Crown Courts were too overloaded for there not to be a certain shedding from the list of indictable offences. Between 1979 and 1984, we were told, indictments rose by 48 per cent. But this wasn't the only answer to the problem. There were at least two others. The first was to stop creating so many new offences. The second was to build and staff more courts. This would have been expensive. But what is expense to a Government that takes and spends upwards of £150 billion every year? If the Department of Trade and Industry was allowed to spend œ13 million last year on what was essentially Conservative propaganda, what is the objection to giving a few dozen million extra to the Lord Chancellor's Department? Which is a more basic function of the State - financing Lord Young's vanity or providing justice?

2. Section 118 of the Act abolishes the right to peremptory challenge in Jury trials. Much was said last year about how careful challenging could alter the composition of a Jury in favour of the defence - as if this were anything new and unnatural. Under the old common law, an accused had the right to challenge thirty-five Jurors without showing cause. Anyone who has looked into Howell's State Trials will know how extensively this right was used in the 17th and 18th centuries. It was there to ensure a more subtle and reliable fairness in the composition of a Jury than could be achieved by the means of showing cause to the Judge. To be fair, the right had already been substantially taken away. The number of peremptory challenges was reduced to twelve in 1925, to seven in 1948, and to three in 1977. But it has fallen, as ever, to this Government to take the decisive step, and reduce the number to zero. The prosecution, of course, keeps its old right of unlimited peremptory challenge.

CONCLUSION

If anyone wants to contest this, I'm open to argument. I really would like nothing more than to believe I'm hopelessly in the wrong and that we are returning to those values which - far beyond any mere expansion of territory or power - set this country apart from all others. But I don't think I can be accused of having misunderstood the drift of things. Whatever was promised, whatever may now be said, the Thatcher Government has brought into being the full coercive apparatus of a police state. As yet, this has had scarcely more to do than stand in reserve. Prosperity and a lingering habit of obedience have kept us sufficiently governable. But let either of these falter, and then, in their regular, familiar use, we shall see the potential of the new powers made actual.

Modern Conservatism
David Willetts
Penguin Books, London, 1992, 216 pp., £5.99
(ISBN 0 14 015477 9)

The Author of this book is the Consultant Director of the Conservative Research Department, and is a Member of Parliament. Both capacities tend to lower him in my view. I will try nonetheless to set aside my prejudice and to review his book solely on its merits.

This is an easier and a more productive task than I expected, for Mr Willetts has produced a very good book. Though in part a work of exposition, drawing on all the usual sources, old and new, it goes far beyond this limited purpose, and provides a synthesis that both persuades intellectually and provides a complete political agenda.

The case as stated in its opening is the familiar one. Contrary to all the imaginings of the utopian philosophers, we are fundamentally not rational beings. We cannot be perfected. We cannot be made fit for a social order based wholly on light and reason. Certainly, the modes of thought and social organisation that developed chiefly in England, and have since spread in stages throughout the world, can usually be given a powerful abstract justification. But the success - indeed, the continued existence - of these modes owes nothing to rational deliberation, and everything to an often unconscious habit. To abolish, or even to try altering these habits is to risk our enjoyment of the benefits that proceed from them. Anyone who thinks otherwise falls into demonstrable error. Anyone who proceeds from thought to action commits acts that range from the absurd to the catastrophically monstrous.

When, therefore, we come to an examine a functioning social order such as our own, our most proper attitude is one of curiosity mingled with reverence. We are not to seize on its apparent faults and reject it in favour of something else spun out of a single head. Nor, as has been most often done this century in those countries lucky enough to avoid a total reconstruction, are we to advocate sweeping reforms simply on the grounds of "modernisation" or of bringing something "into the twentieth century. We must instead try to understand the inner workings of society - to conjecture by what innumerable and infinitesimal stages the present order of things evolved to its present sophistication. This will require us to look even to those habits and institutions that rest on justifications manifestly absurd, asking whether they might not nevertheless serve a useful purpose. Then, and only then, shall we be ready to consider what deliberate changes may be necessary, and how these may best be combined with what already is. The best change is so cautious and incremental that only those directly affected notice its happening. Even the most radical, sudden change is best achieved so that within only a few years it becomes difficult to tell the old from the new.

Illustrating his case, Mr Willetts gives the usual examples of what happens when the accumulated wisdom of the past is thrown aside in some passion for immediate improvement. I will, however, give my own favourite example.

In 1911, there was an epidemic of bubonic plague in Manchuria. This was large enough to worry all the usual governments and international organisations - there were fears of a new Black Death - and so much effort was put into containment.

Now, it was soon discovered that the carriers of the fleas which in turn carried the Pasteurella pestis bacillus were marmots, large burrowing rodents who were hunted for their skins. It was also discovered that the nomadic tribesmen who had hunted marmots for centuries were largely unaffected. Mostly affected were the Chinese hunters who had just poured into Manchuria following the collapse of the Manchu dynasty and the lifting of all controls on movement into the region.

The reason for this difference was that the native hunters followed certain customary rules that tended to minimise the risk of infection. They never trapped marmots, but only shot them. If an animal moved sluggishly, it was left alone. if an entire colony showed signs of infection, the hunters would at once pack their tents and move on.

Only in 1894 had the causes of bubonic plague been identified. Before then, its means of transmission had been an absolute mystery. Yet here was a nation of illiterate nomads not only doing as the newest research might have advised them, but doing it by custom since time immemorial. Asked why they acted so, they gave the most bizarre mythological justifications that said nothing about the avoidance of infection. There was no talk of some divinely inspired ancestor whose teachings had avoided the anger of the gods, or whatever. All the evidence pointed to a long history of slight and unconscious adjustments to environment. As with a purely natural selection, there had been small revisions of habits. Those contributing to greater well-being had been copied and passed on to later generations as ritual.

Ignorant of epidemiology, the Chinese hunters were rational enough to sneer at these rituals, and to go about the business of catching their marmots in the most cost-effective manner. They died in their thousands, and sent the bacillus down the new railway lines towards the rest of humanity.1

Had the philosophy here illustrated been more generally received, the century now closing might not have been so filled with interesting events.

Yet, all this being said, there remains one obvious problem. As Mr Willetts asks,

[d]oes the conservative simply think that everything which exists is all right?[pp. 74-5]

There have always been pure conservatives, whose answer to this question would be a firm "yes", who would resist all change, no matter from what or in which direction. There have been conservative defences of slavery and suttee. There are now conservative defences of trade union privilege and of the mining communities threatened by deregulation of the market in coal. In its purest form, conservatism is nothing more than a defence of whatever is, and never mind what it is. At times, indeed, it comes oddly close to the political correctness which tells us that female circumcision is acceptable wherever established among black people.

But this kind of conservatism is only important so far as it can be manipulated by others. The most impeccably conservative thinkers and politicians have been willing on occasion to turn radical. It was, for example, largely by Tory Governments in the last century that the slave trade was put down. By bribery, by threats, and sometimes by force of arms, the rest of the world was made to give up an ancient and previously almost unquestioned custom. The politicians concerned thought nothing of opening themselves to the same charge of utopian meddling as they were laying against the English jacobins and chartists.

The usual language of conservatism presupposes an ideological underpinning of the doctrine that it advances. Above, I use the phrase a "functioning social order", and discuss the most appropriate means of achieving "such deliberate changes as may be necessary". These are my words; but this type of wording is scattered through all the great conservative classics. Whatever may be said about the unideological nature of conservatism, it is clear that most conservatives want only to conserve certain institutions. They know how to recognise a functioning social order. They are as good as any socialist or liberal at knowing what changes are necessary. It is what I like most about Mr Willetts' that he does not raise the usual smokescreen of "tory pragmatism", but explicitly looks within English conservatism for the criterion by which what ought is separated from what ought not to be conserved.

His first proposed criterion is durability. If an institution has lasted for a long time in undiminished vigour, and without great and obviously attendant disadvantages, he says, the presumption ought to be that it serves a useful purpose. For modern England, this is as an effective criterion. It allows an attack on nearly everything in our national life that is wretched and in need of drastic reconstruction. Trade union privilege, to take a standard instance, though established, dates only from 1906, and has notoriously been one of the causes of our relative economic decline.

It is not, however, generally effective. The slave trade, after all, was more anciently established than the House of Lords, and had not been attended by any obvious disadvantage for the élites by whom and in whose interests social arrangements had previously been judged. If the feelings of the enslaved were now to be considered, it was not in accordance with any criterion of durability. Nor does this in itself tell us what is a functioning social order, or allow us to tell good changes from bad in an age when change, for whatever reason, becomes necessary.

Mr Willetts' next criterion, though, is the right one. Institutions are good or bad so far as

they rely on state power. Reliance on legal enforcement is obviously not of itself wrong - any conservative understands the need for a framework of law and order - but at the very least, there has to be a presumption against intervening in arrangements reached by mutual consent. If an institution has only been able to survive by deploying such powers, then there is a real need for it to justify itself.[pp. 76-77]

To some extent, there is nothing unusual here. All Conservative politicians believe to some extent in private enterprise: it lets them bribe the lower classes without having the country decline too fast. Mr Willetts, though, has no time for this style of apologetics, or for the more aggressive corporatism that has tended to replace it. "Perhaps" he says,

the most unpleasant term in the political vocabulary is "UK Limited".[p. 133]

His own defence of the free market is more than an argument for privatising the telephone network and deregulating the opticians. He quietly suggests a cutting back of the State far beyond anything contemplated by the Thatcher Government even in its most radical mood. He suggests a thorough application of the voluntary principle in economic affairs.

Nor does he draw any artificial distinction between the economic and the personal. He stands for a rejection of the moral paternalism within the Conservative Party that has come increasingly since 1979 to determine what we may do with our own minds and bodies.

Of course, there is no explicit mention of the liberty infringement and crime expansion schemes now run by the Home Office under the various names of the "War on Drugs" and the "protection of public morals". That would have the Party bosses straight at this throat. He might be accused of classical liberalism - of having rejected the true tory path for the "shallow sophisms" of John Stuart Mill. Even worse, he might be denounced as a libertarian: and that would be the end of his career in politics.

Yet, while Mr Willetts can be described as a classical liberal, he is also undoubtedly a truer conservative than the sad, fawning creatures one mostly finds in Central Office or the Parliamentary Party. For all the great British conservative thinkers were also liberals. They taught reverence for the organic institutions of what happened to be the freest and most open society that had - or perhaps has - ever existed. Their speculations were on the growth and defence of such institutions as trial by jury, parliamentary government, and an unshackled press. It may be that some defended freedom because it existed by tradition. More commonly, though, they defended tradition because it embodied the freedom which they had learned to value on more rational grounds.

Their denunciation of ideology came in part from their knowing the weakness of unsupported abstract reasoning. In larger part, it came from a wish to deprive the collectivists and their radical dupes of a weapon of which they themselves had little need. But a hundred years of collectivist triumph have nearly shattered the organic liberalism of Old England. The case remains for moving cautiously, for seeking the latent wisdom or necessity in every institution proposed for reform - for not trying to jump straight to some Libertarian Alliance utopia. Even so, the true spirit of English conservatism now requires an explicit guiding ideology. And that ideology is classical liberal or libertarian. Those who deny this can quote the words of Burke and Salisbury, among others. But, more importantly, they miss the reasoning behind the words.

Though Mr Willetts, quite evidently, does not miss the reasoning here, his book is not equally good in all its sections. For example, his claim that

David Ricardo's economics showed that government borrowing was just taxation deferred[p. 6]

is false in the given context. Ricardo was a great explainer and systematiser, and the most apparently obvious truths have been - and are - denied by conventional wisdom. But the folly of letting the government borrow money had been fully known - had even been a commonplace of political debate - since at least the 1690s: there are precise complaints scattered through the works of Swift, Bolingbroke, Junius, Adam Smith and Burke, to name only a few objectors. I shall particularly mention David Hume's essay Of Public Credit. For if somewhat vague about that writer's epistemology, Mr Willetts has read enough of the economic writings to quote approvingly from the essay Of Money.

Again, his denial of our present drift towards a police state is almost offensive. In case my readers should think that I am now letting prejudice have the better of me, I quote him at some length:

The list of constitutional reforms is quite considerable. The Data Protection Act of 1984 allows everyone access to information held about them on computer records, except for those concerning crime, tax and national security. There is a right for an individual to see his file and insist on changes if the material is incorrect. The Police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1984 gives judicial protection to journalists' notebooks. The Criminal Justice Act of 1988 sets out new, more rigorous rules on treatment of suspects, as well as allowing the press to challenge specific orders restricting their reporting. The Security Service Act of 1989 at last puts the security services on a statutory footing and in the words of the then Home Secretary "for the first time, provides a means of redress for a citizen who thinks that he has a cause for grievance against the service". The Official Secrets Act, also of 1989, strips "away the criminal law from the great bulk of official information so that budget secrets, draft White Papers on health, correspondence dealing with pension decisions will no longer be subject to an Official Secrets Act.[pp. 159-61]

Anyone who has read the Acts mentioned above, and seen their impact on the case law, will take a less complacent view. In every important respect, they enlarge the power of the State. Such guarantees as they contain of just treatment are rather closer in their effect - and, I believe, in their intent - to the paper rights enjoyed in the old Soviet Bloc than to the solid protections of life, liberty and property that we used to possess under the common law.

But Mr Willetts is a member of Parliament, and, together with wrapping his liberalism in code, turning out smug, emollient drivel of this sort is part of the price that he must pay for his seat. There was a time when no honourable Englishman would have accepted such terms. But today, it is a public duty to accept them: the country cannot be wholly ruled by traitors and buffoons.

Perhaps therefore I should ignore this great blemish on his book - just as I am ignoring his now rather funny praise of John Major as a man of vision and principle.

For the same reason, I overlook his calling Winston Churchill a "transcendently great leader"[p. 18], when everyone with a candid eye for history knows that he was a bloodthirsty old windbag who would have served England far better than he did by drinking himself to death in 1910.

Now, did reading this book dispose me more kindly to the Conservative Party? For a while, it did. It had no effect on my voting intentions. I will vote Conservative nearly regardless of what corruption and misrule I must thereby endorse: the overall result has only to be better than a Labour Government. Nevertheless, for an entire half hour after reading his book I really believed again that the Party was what I thought it was back in 1978 when I first joined it.

That is a remarkable effect for a book to have in March 1993.

Sean Gabb

Notes

1. For those interest in following this case further, its full citation can be found in the notes to Chapter 4 of William H. McNeill's Plagues and Peoples, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1977. Back to document

From Free Life, Issue 25, May 1996
ISSN: 0260 5112

Nice fantasy - but I found no messages. I finished the pamphlet convinced that it was all meant to be taken seriously. Its author has reached a new stage in his intellectual wanderings. He has lost not merely his old principles, but also any regard for the rules of composition and good faith.

For example, take, this:

...[M]arket institutions are not freestanding but come embedded in the matrices of particular cultures and their histories. [p.18]

And this:

...'[T]he market' is not a freestanding institution, the expression of unrestricted freedom and human rationality in the economic realm, but instead an abstraction from an enormous miscellany of practices and institutions having deep roots in social life.... [pp.34-35]

And this:

Market institutions, like political ones, are not detachable from their histories and parent cultures. [p.35]

And this:

...[T]he neoliberal canard that markets are freestanding social relationships, embodying individual freedom and the human propensity to trade to mutual advantage. [p.42]

Or take this:

...[T]he new global freedom of financial capital so hems in national governments as to limit severely... traditional social-democratic full- employment policies. [p.13]

And this:

...[T]he power of the international currency and bond markets is now sufficient to interdict... expansionist policies. [p.25]

And this:

At the century's end, the global mobility of capital and its power to constrain the freedom of action of sovereign states in economic policy, is vastly greater. [p.28]

And this:

Full employment cannot be promoted by aggressive deficit financing because that is now being interdicted by global bond markets.... [p.32]

And this:

...[G]lobal freedom of capital, and to an increasing degree, of labour, [Dr Gray's punctuation] restricts radically the leverage of sovereign governments in pursuing social- democratic egalitarian goals. [p.44]

These may be good points. But - as Dr Gray must have told his undergraduate students - they are not demonstrated by being thrown over and over again into a rambling stream of consciousness. All else aside, to do so invites the kind of attack that damages without needing to address any substantive issues.

The same is true with bad scholarship. Take, for example:

Macaulay's observation that the gallows and the hangman stand at the back of James Mill's utilitarian state... [p.31]

Now, this "observation" is not footnoted. I am not surprised, since I doubt it was ever made; and I am reasonably familiar with the three Edinburgh Review articles that Macaulay gave to the elder Mill's Essay on Government. But I do know this famous passage in Burke:

On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings, and which is as void of solid wisdom as it is destitute of all taste and elegance, laws are to be supported only by their own terrors, and by the concern which each individual may find in them from his own private speculations, or can spare to them from his own private interests. In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows. Nothing is left which engages the affections on the part of the commonwealth.[1]

Though I might have, I do not think I have overlooked something in Macaulay. I have read his entire published works more than once; and I have a memory that seldom lets me down. I simply believe that Dr Gray had Burke in mind, but could not be bothered to check.2

Enough of this, however. I have shown that Dr Gray needs more editorial assistance than Demos is able or willing to provide. But I prefer to concentrate on what he has to say, rather than on how badly he says it. His substantive faults are that he accepts every absurdity that has appeared in The Guardian, and that he systematically - and perhaps deliberately - confuses the meaning of words.

The first of these faults I will not discuss at length. The failure of demand management is the effect of much more than disobedient bond markets. Anyone who cannot now accept this never will. It is the second fault that most interests me. In an earlier work that I reviewed in these pages, I noted how Dr Gray claimed to be attacking the "New Right" but discussed only anarcho-capitalism. In many cases, he took arguments from Hayek without credit and used them against positions that, by default, he alleged were Hayekian.3 This time, he reverses the process. He takes almost every new right argument, and ascribes the lot to every member of the new right. This allows him to describe what are actually differences within a broad coalition as contradictions within a single philosophy. Thus, he can make fun of "us":

...[T]here arose the familiar paradox of market libertarianism, in which it generated a species of authoritarian individualism resting on the political foundations of a centralist state. [p.31]

Were we governed by market libertarians, this would be more than a stale soundbite. But we are not; and for all he denounces the "unrestrained market individualism of the 1980s" [p.14], Dr Gray is unable to argue otherwise. He ignores the Financial Services Act 1986, and the companies and money laundering legislation of that decade, and the increasing size and sophistication of the welfare state, and levels of personal taxation that no Labour Government had ever dared impose. He ignores that plain fact that, whatever their rhetoric, the Thatcher and Major Governments have been far less concerned with liberating individuals than with stopping the collapse of the corporate state they inherited in 1979. To be sure, some of their measures - ending exchange control, for instance, or deregulating the spectacle market - were libertarian. But that no more makes them into libertarians than a farmer who, for marketing reasons, closes his battery and lets his hens run free becomes a vegan.

It may be pardonable for Andrew Gamble to put out this "free market and strong state" nonsense. But he has the excuse of having been a communist all his adult life. Dr Gray, however, has written for the Libertarian Alliance, and ought to be at least aware of the savage attacks its other writers have made on things like video censorship, Clause 28, the Poll Tax, gun control, the war on drugs, identity cards, and the general shredding of the Common Law. He knows that there are libertarians who believe in free markets and fear a strong state, and that there are tories who believe in a strong state and fear free markets, and that there are others who believe something in between. To obscure this, to conflate wildly different schools of thought into one, is culpable misrepresentation.

As for his repetitive talk of "freestanding institutions", this also is delusive. If we take all his above statements - if we regard them as "freestanding" - they are plainly true. Actual markets are not separable from the societies in which they exist, but are things that arise from particular moral outlooks - these being varying degrees of respect for life, liberty and justly-acquired property. It is also true that one set of market institutions cannot be copied unchanged between societies with different moral outlooks. But this is the libertarian consensus. It is what Hayek says, and Rothbard, and both Friedmans, to name just a few. So what is Dr Gray trying to prove? That markets are inherently undesirable? He might as well use the fact that the Rhine flows west and the Danube east to disprove that water runs downhill. To argue against market reforms, it is not good enough to show that different societies have different market institutions. It is necessary to show that there are not certain regularities of human conduct that governments ignore to the disadvantage of those they rule.

Dr Gray does not show this, because it would require more ability to reason than he has lately been able to show. But he does try; and it is one of his assumptions. Look at page 48, where he deplores "those liberalisms" which

foster a legalist and constitutionalist mirage, in which the delusive certainty of legal principles is preferred to the contingencies and compromises of political practice, where a settlement among communities and ways of life, always temporary, can alone be found.

There is a tendency for these soft, Latinate words to drift through the mind without registering. But they are an argument for politicising justice - to let fewer disputes go before the judges to be decided by due process of law, and to give more discretion to people like Michael Howard. Beyond this, they show that Dr Gray has fallen into a moral nihilism that does not allow different ways of life to be compared even on instrumental grounds. For him, there are no regularities of conduct, nor universal standards of well-being. He cannot denounce female circumcision as a barbarous act, or praise limited government as a benefit to which all peoples should aspire. His view of humanity is one without any common standards of right and wrong, in which strength alone determines what rules are to be followed.

This pamphlet is formally about what social democrats should be thinking in the 1990s. All it really shows is that, having taken a stand in every other part of the political spectrum, Dr Gray is now drifting towards the "third way" national socialists. In a sense, he is already there, with his earth-worshipping mysticism. Is Demos happy about this? Are Marks and Spencer and Sainsbury's happy to continue funding an organisation that is?

To conclude, After Social Democracy is in every sense a regrettable pamphlet. It succeeds only in illustrating the cultural decline that it often laments. There was a time, I believe, when an undergraduate at Oxford would have been sent down for producing something so incoherent and feeble. Today, it seems, any tenured academic there can get it published by Demos, and have it cried up as the last thing in political wisdom.

Sean Gabb

Notes

1. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), "Everyman" edition, J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd, London, 1910, pp. 74-75.

2. I believe this partly because Burke expresses so well the charge that Dr Gray is trying to make - and partly for reasons very flattering to me. I quoted the above passage in a review of another of Dr Gray's works [Beyond the New Right: Market, Government and the Common Environment, Routledge, London, 1993, reviewed in Free Life, No.20, August 1994]. As is my custom, I sent him a copy of the review. As seems to be his custom, he ignored my invitation to reply. I now think, however, that he did read it. For I also quoted Macaulay there; and it may be that, writing in haste, Dr Gray garbled the names and quotations into the wrong order. Of course, I hope that I am wrong. Though flattering to me if true, this would be quite damning to his scholarly reputation.

3. For details, see note 1. above.

Free Life Commentary,
an independent journal of comment
published on the Internet
Issue Number 99
9th April 2003
http://www.seangabb.co.uk/flcomm/flc099.htm

Neville Chamberlain, Appeasement and the British Road to War
Frank McDonagh
Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 1998, 196pp, £14.99 (pbk)
ISBN 0 7190 4382 X
Reviewed by Sean Gabb

I read through this book during my lunch break today, sat in an unusually warm and sunny Kensington park. An old man saw the cover with its bold title and rather nice line drawing of Chamberlain. "Neville Chamberlain?" He said to me with an accusing stare. "What a wanker he was." I thought of putting the book down and starting an argument about the realities of British foreign policy before 1940. But lunch breaks for me are far too unusual for wasting on argument with someone who would only start ranting about Saddam Hussein and plastic shredders or whatever—and I get quite enough of that from the Internet. So I smiled and carried on reading.

His reaction, though, was no more than the conventional wisdom. Despite more than 30 years of revisionist scholarship, Neville Chamberlain is still seen by the world exactly as those in and around the first Churchill Government wanted him to be seen. That view is of a weak and confused man out of his depth in the snakepit of European politics. With his rolled umbrella and wing collar, he blundered round Europe in the late 1930s, deceived at every point by bad men of greater intelligence, but hoping that he could settle German demands for territory as peacefully as he might settle a strike in a Birmingham button factory. In the process, he refused to let the country re-arm sufficiently to face the inevitable conflict in defence of liberal civilisation. His name has become shorthand for weakness and self-delusion in foreign policy. "Appeaser" has become one of the ultimate insults in political debate throughout the English-speaking world; and every argument over the present war with Iraq must include some slighting reference to Neville Chamberlain and some lavish praise of Winston Churchill, his apparently more realistic and courageous antithesis.

In fact, this view of Chamberlain has largely disappeared from the scholarly literature. What we have instead is a cool understanding of the limitations of British power in a changing and increasingly hostile world. This book expresses the view briefly yet fully, and it gives useful extracts in support from contemporary documents, and contains a good bibliography for further reading. As such, it is an excellent introduction to the subject for students and for those simply interested in the approach to the greatest war ever fought by this country and the last in which it entered as a primary belligerent.

And that is all I will say about the book. I am reviewing it simply as an excuse for writing more about British foreign policy - this time from the perspective of the 1930s.

Undoubtedly, the Great War had been a disaster for this country. It was an act of stupidity to enter it, and even more stupid not to try for a negotiated settlement in 1916. It had killed nearly a million men, and left many more maimed. Its financial cost had been immense, requiring heavy taxes and a devaluation of Sterling, and a tenfold increase in the national debt. It had also distorted patterns of investment. The vast overseas portfolio built up during the previous generations had been partly liquidated and replaced by heavy indebtedness to American interests. Internally, capital had diverted into an unsustainable expansion of heavy industry—areas in which the country had for some time been losing its comparative advantage, and the products of which could no longer be readily sold in an increasingly fragmented and economically hostile world market. The years before 1914 were not some long, golden summer. But to those looking back from the years after 1918, that is how they often seemed.

But while disastrous, the Great War had not for us been a catastrophe. It was, if in various ways, for Germany, France, Russia and Turkey—but not for us. It had not been fought on our territory. Nor had it been followed by any serious challenge to the established order. Though these did not at all justify the heavy costs, it had even been attended by certain benefits. Germany and Russia and Turkey were destroyed by defeat and revolution. France was prostrate. The United States had briefly emerged as an active great power, only to return to a determined isolationism. In terms of naval supremacy and imperial security, the country was restored to something like the position it had enjoyed after Waterloo. And, while taking the German colonies was of no value, the despoiling of Turkey had given us control over the Middle East and its increasingly important oil reserves.

By 1920, it was clear that the Great War had ripped holes in the financial web that had once bound the world to the City of London. There could be no exact return to the position of 1914. But, if it had shaken the foundations of British power, the War had not undermined them. Something like the old position could still be restored. It was necessary to make a complex and difficult set of changes. At home, it was necessary to cut taxes and spending back towards the levels of 1914, and to force down the price level to the point where the gold standard could be restored at the old parity. At the same time, the over-expansion of heavy industry had to be reversed, so that labour and capital could flow into the more productive new sectors—cars, chemicals, electricals, general light engineering, and so forth.

In the Empire, it was necessary to reduce the commitment to India —returning to something like the system of indirect rule used before the Mutiny—and to shift the balance of imperial interest to the now more valuable Middle East. Outside the Empire, it was necessary to restore as much as possible of the old financial and trading system.

Any one of these required much effort and some luck to achieve. Astonishingly, most of them had been achieved after a fashion by the 1930s. The Great Depression had put an end for the moment to hard money and free trade, but caused little harm overall to the domestic economy. The unemployment and other hardships were mostly confined to the declining heavy industries. From the Midlands down, the country was enjoying a steady increase of output and living standards. Indeed, looked at from about 1935, the Great Depression seemed to serve British world interests rather well.

After 1918, the only potential challenger was the United States. Its size and wealth appeared to place it beyond all hope of competition. If it wanted to outbuild the Royal Navy, it could. However, its prevailing constitutional and moral order made a challenge unlikely. Though it might take an occasional interest outside the Americas, it was essentially isolationist. Though it might have the cash to challenge British primacy, it lacked the will. It had been tricked into the Great War to serve British interests. Now, it had largely withdrawn. The Great Depression seemed to confirm its impotence. The general collapse of its economy after 1931, and the emergence of mass unemployment—averaging, I think, around 35 million—threw it proportionately into a scale of suffering quite unknown in this country. Moreover, the election of Franklin Roosevelt had opened it to a departure from economic orthodoxy that opinion in this country rightly saw as likely to keep it in depression for as far ahead as could reasonably be seen.

All this country needed to consolidate the recovery was time - time for the new arrangements at home and abroad to take full effect. What had to be avoided at all costs was another big war. That would destroy all the cautious but solid progress made since the removal of Lloyd George from power in 1922. The Treaty of Locarno had got us out of all practical European connections after 1925—the guarantee to both France and Germany was in effect a guarantee to neither, as it justified a refusal to enter into close military relations with either. The League of Nations was a useful means of imposing British will elsewhere in the world where it was no longer convenient to act unilaterally.

By 1935, the country had never in living memory enjoyed such profound home and imperial security, or spent so little of the national income on defence. Let all this continue, and by 1960, the financial and strategic costs of the Great War would have scarred over as surely as those of the Napoleonic wars had a century before.

This is the background against which Adolf Hitler was viewed by this country's ruling class. There is no need, I think, to argue that he was a thoroughly bad man. He turned Germany into a semi-socialist police state, and tainted with his embrace what had previously been one of the homelands of liberal civilisation. However, I share the official perception of his early years that he was no threat to this country. His published writings and speeches at the time, and his private conversations made available after his death, all point to a settled ambition. This was to expand German power deep into Eastern Europe. He wanted to gather up the Germanic fragments of the Habsburg Empire under his own rule, and to conquer large colonies of settlement for the German people in Poland and western Russia. That was the consistent purpose of his foreign policy in the east. In the west, his only declared and perceptible aim was to reach a settlement with Britain that would give him a free hand in the east.

Yes, we are told endlessly that his eastern policy was just his first step to conquering the world. Give him Poland and Western Russia and their great resources, the claim goes, and give him the lack of an enemy to the east—Soviet Russia being destroyed—and he would surely turn eventually on Britain. I suppose he might have. But he might also have died his hair green, or applied to join a kibbutz, or had an early sex change operation. In deciding what someone might have done in circumstances different from those he actually faced, we can say nothing for sure. If we want to say anything at all, we can only do so in the light of his stated or revealed intentions. For Hitler, there is no evidence that his ambitions stretched to a conquest or even a humbling of Britain.

He had a sincere, if not always well informed, admiration of Britain and the British Empire. He respected our victory in the Great War, and wanted to avoid another conflict. He did not share the desire of other German nationalists for a return of the lost German colonies. He had no interest in naval construction, and went out of his way to condemn the naval race that had poisoned Anglo-German relations after 1898. He signed a naval agreement with us in 1935, and I think this is the only treaty he ever made that he took care to observe. When the Arabs rose against us in Palestine, they sent emissaries to him in Berlin, seeking financial support. Since they were all good anti-semites, one might have thought they would reach a deal. But Hitler refused all help, declaring in effect that he would not lift a finger against white rule over the coloured races.

It is possible that victory in the east would have raised his ambitions in the west. We cannot be sure that it would not. But neither can we assume that he would have been any more successful in his invasion of Russia than he actually was after June 1941. Without facing us, he would not have had to divide his forces between France, North Africa and the Balkans. At the same time, he would not have had forces hardened in those wars, or the record of invincibility that for a while silenced his internal critics. And the Russian winters would have been no less ruinous of invaders than it had always been before. He would probably have taken Moscow and Leningrad. But I do not know how much further into the Eurasian landmass he could have reached. He would have faced much the same war of attrition with the partisans, and would probably have had to keep a vast army of occupation in the east before it could be made safe for German settlement. He might well have been able to present no threat of any kind to the west. His only contact with us might have been endless requests for loans, and complaints at our unwillingness to join his crusade against Bolshevism.

Even otherwise, he would have dominated much the same area as Stalin did after 1945, and done so at a comparative disadvantage. Most obviously, he was not the acknowledge head of an international conspiracy to spread his rule. He had no bands of committed followers stirring up trouble everywhere from China to Peru. As its name suggests, national socialism was not an ideology for export. It was an ideology of Aryan domination. Even in other Aryan countries, it had little following. Oswald Mosley made a big noise in this country for a while, but never came close to electoral significance. Under Soviet rule after 1945, the Slavs of Eastern Europe went into their factories and film studios and, for a while, worked with something like unforced gratitude for their masters. Under Hitler, they had to be coerced from the start.

Granted, his economic policies were less insanely destructive. At the same time, the expectations of his people were higher, and they had been less frightened by his tyranny out of expressing them. And he was a socialist. If he had presided over a recovery from the Great Depression, that recovery was running into trouble after 1938. Inflation could only be hidden by wage and price controls, and was evidenced instead by shortages of consumer goods—see, for example, how the German forces sent into the Czechlands in March 1939 stripped the shops in Prague bare of things like razor blades and overcoats. Not all the frenzied rhetoric in the world could have saved Hitler's revolution from running out of steam after 1940. It was only the war that kept up a semblance of prosperity into the middle of the decade.

A German domination of the east might have involved us eventually in a cold war. But ours would have been an unexhausted, unbankrupted, unhumiliated Britain and British Empire. There would have been no American support. Neither though would there have been need of any.

There are two further points to be made against me. The first was made by a friend last week, as we sat arguing over what I have just written. Suppose, he asked, Hitler had not only failed to conquer Russia, but had lost. Suppose Stalin had all by himself beaten Hitler and conquered all the way to Germany. Would this not have been worse for us? There would have been no limit to the prestige of Communism, and every Comintern agitator throughout the world would have had a glorious time against liberal civilisation. At least in the real war, the victory was shared between us and them.

I have no answer to this point. It requires more detailed understanding than I have of the relative balance of forces in hypothetical circumstances between Russia and Germany. But while it strikes me as reasonable to say that Hitler might not have won very easily, I find it hard to believe that he could have lost to Stalin.

The second point is the atrocities committed by the Germans. These are often used as justification for going to war. Do I not care about these? My answer is that I do not think they were grounds in themselves for war. An individual has all manner of moral responsibilities, and looking to these will by no means be always in his own interest. A government, however, is a trustee of the nation to which it is accountable, and must look only to the interests of that nation. It would be wrong for our government to visit positive evils on foreigners. It would be right for it to perform such good offices for them as did not involve much cost to us. But it has neither the duty nor the right to go about the world acting as some knight errant, putting down the bad and raising the good. When we talk about the British Government, the adjective is at least as important as the noun.

It must also be said that the worst atrocities were committed towards the end of a general war, and do not seem to have been long premeditated. They happened at a time in which fear of defeat and a misplaced desire for revenge had extinguished the usual moral feeling, and in places far removed from the battlefields that most attracted western curiosity. I have no doubt that an invasion of Russia after about 1943 would have resulted in great atrocities. But I do doubt if these would have been so bloody as the ones actually on record.

Of course, we cannot be definite on what would have happened had there been no outbreak of war in 1939. But the worst I can imagine for us is no worse than did happen after 1945. And it could easily have been better.

This being so, it was not our business if Hitler wanted to tear up the 1919 settlement in the east. It involved us in dangers that can only now be demonstrated behind a mass of subjunctives. Nor, to be fair, was there anything we could have done to stop him. Our guarantee to Poland was a nonsense, bearing in mind our lack of ability to send help. Even if we had—as is often urged—intervened to stop the remilitarisation of the Rhineland, or the union with Austria, or the occupation of the Sudentenland, we probably had not the military power to enforce our will, even against a Hitler weaker than he became. Nor would there have been the public support at home or abroad to legitimise such pre-emptive actions.

And so the policy of Neville Chamberlain was neither cowardly not absurd. It reflected the realities of British power and British interests at that time. I do not accept the accusations of some American conservatives that Winston Churchill was equal to Hitler or Stalin in his infamy. They are angry that he got their country into a war from which it emerged supreme abroad but ruined in its constitutional and moral order at home. I sympathise with this complaint. But he was in every sense a better person.

Even so, did ruin this country. He did so because he never understood the true foundations of British greatness. He saw that splash of red on the map of the world, and never realised that he was looking only at the effect, not at the cause. His ambition was "to make the old dog sit up and wag its tail". In fact, what he wanted for us before 1940, and what he did to us after, was the equivalent of making an invalid get up from his bed and dance too soon after an operation. He brought on the collapse that the Great War had only threatened. He undermined the foundations of our greatness abroad, and at home acted as the front man for a socialist revolution. For five years, he dressed and spoke and acted as if the traditional order was safe in his hand—while quietly behind his back it was taxed and regulated and smeared out of existence. "Why worry? We've had a Labour Government since 1940" was the comment of one observer after the 1945 general election.

All considered, the 20^th century as it actually ran was not too bad for this country. We did not lose any big wars, or have a revolution or civil war. We did not even suffer a real economic or financial collapse. Within a few years of each of the two big wars, we had recovered our old living standards in full and were making rapid continued progress. We ended the century as the third or fourth richest and the second most powerful country in the world. We are even remarkably free in practice to live as we please. We did far better than I think we deserved. But it could have been better still. If only we had kept out of those dreadful wars and remained masters of our own fate, the whole world, I have no doubt, would have been a better place.

http://www.seangabb.co.uk/flcomm/flc173.htm
Free Life Commentary,
A Personal View from
The Director of the Libertarian Alliance
Issue Number 173
4th July 2008

The Third Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society,
Bodrum, May 2008:
A Brief Record
by Sean Gabb

I dreamed last night of the Hotel Karia Princess in Bodrum. I do this perhaps once a week. Last night, though, the dream was unusually vivid. I was walking down the stone steps from the Migros supermarket, a bag in each hand. On my left, at the foot of the step, the taxi drivers were gossiping loud in Turkish and chain smoking. The sun beat down on me from overhead. I could smell the dust of the road and of the aromatic plants all around. Directly across the road, the Hotel shimmered vast and white.

I cannot remember going in through the revolving doors into the cool, marble interior. But as I write, I can imagine the smiles of the reception staff, and the endless loop of the Third Movement of Mozart�s Jupiter Symphony, and being called over by Paul Gottfried checking his e-mail, or Justin Raimondo, or by one of the semi-permanent German guests.

It is now two years since my first conference there with the Property and Freedom Society. I got the e-mailed invitation out of the blue from Hans-Hermann Hoppe. How he found me and why he wanted me I have never thought to ask him. But his conference was set to happen in the middle of my summer term, and I was minded at first to send a polite refusal. But I discussed it with Chris Tame as he sat in his hospital bed waiting for death.

"You�ve got to go, Sean" he had said, looking up from the list of attendees. "Whatever people say about him—and, let's face it, all his enemies are envious windf*ck*rs who don't like us either—Hoppe is the Big Man of the Movement. Now Rothbard is gone, he�s it." He brushed aside my whines about teaching commitments, and sent me off to book my ticket.

And so, just over two years ago—after a journey that involved the failed theft of my wallet at Heathrow, and a most civilised encounter with a Turkish customs official who found Chris� Swiss Army knife in my camera bag: the Heathrow machines had failed to spot that!—I found myself sat with Hans beside the Hotel swimming pool, sipping chemical cola and discussing the failed war in Iraq.

Since I wrote at some length about the first Property and Freedom Society Conference, I will avoid repeating myself. But I was back for the second—this time with Mrs Gabb. And I wrote about that one too. This year, I was back for the third—this time not just with Mrs Gabb, but also with the Baby Bear.

And it was an astonishingly good time. I will try not to say more than I already have about the Hotel, beyond that it is the sort of place you read about in novels or—always with nostalgia for what is long past—in the memoirs of people who are or soon will be dead. Bodrum can be a hectic place come June. As the temperature goes about the hundred mark, so the population rises from 30,000 Turks to around two million tourists. Within the Hotel, though, all is quiet; all is ordered; all is, without ostentation, civilised.

The Turkish State, sad to say, had this year decided to flash its European credentials by forbidding smoking in enclosed public spaces. And, to my surprise, the police were showing a certain zeal in enforcing the ban. But when you are used to lighting up outside in the high thirties and the pouring rain of London at any time of year, stepping out into the gardens for a cigarette is hardly worth a moan.

It may be the venue—though I doubt it—but I do believe the Property and Freedom Society is an indispensable part of what Americans call the paleo-libertarian movement. If you think libertarianism is defined by wanting to privatise the paving stones while mouthing politically correct platitudes, these gatherings are not for you. These conferences provide a time and a place where nothing is off limits. There are no forbidden subjects, no polite suggestions that whatever is being loudly debated over dinner by the swimming pool might be "inappropriate". The only rule is the obvious one—that you listen to the other side before making reply.

These are conferences where social conservatives sit down with anarcho-libertarians, where Czechs and Chinese discuss where history went wrong, where English is the preferred language, but a knowledge of half a dozen other languages will frequently come in handy.

They are also conferences useful for what everyone nowadays describes blandly as networking, but what the old Marxists, with a more sinister and accurate turn of phrase, called "cadre building". It is in Bodrum, every May, that the connections and ideas that will be the future of the libertarian movement are first to be perceived.

I will not bother summarising the actual conference speeches. This year, I made video recordings of everything, and have already uploaded it all to Google Video. Of all the sessions, though, I think most people enjoyed the debate over Ron Paul and what he means to the wider Movement outside America—particularly within Europe. Justin Raimondo and Robert Groezinger were particularly eloquent on this.

My own favourite speech was John Lott on guns.  I live in a country, where gun ownership has been made into a crime except for the police and the very rich, and where being caught with a peashooter will probably soon carry the same prison sentence as rape. I liked the relentless piling up of cases and the statistical analyses. I will use them myself the next time I go on television to talk about guns. Should I also say that, however degraded it may have become, I am part of a culture that has more respect for proven fact than for elegant hypotheses?

Hans was profound on the nature of the State. Paul Gottfried was at his venomous best about the roots in American Protestantism of political correctness. Mustafa Akyol and Peter Mentzel were interesting on Turkish and late Ottoman history. I was quite good on the nature of financial markets in the ancient world. But, as said, all the speeches are recorded, and—allowances being made for the air conditioning and the public address system—are pretty well recorded.

Let me return to the cadre building. I knew we were in for a good conference when Paul Gottfried walked into the hotel lobby, his bags carried behind him. He threw a benevolent glance at the Baby Bear and then demanded of me the aorist of χαίρω.

"Εχαίρα? Εχαίρον?" I hazarded. He gave a contemptuous sniff that I really should investigate, and asked if I could help him connect to the Internet. Over dinner, he went into full flow—in two languages denouncing the Germans for their gutless historical masochism. Perhaps they were to blame for 1939: it is at least arguable. But 1914? he sneered. That was at most a no fault car crash. And some Germans are even blaming themselves for 1870!

Then there was Justin Raimondo. I first discovered his writings during the Iraq War, when large stretches of the British and American libertarian movements had come together and agreed what fine things maiming and killing and torturing were when called "assisted regime change". It was good to find someone even more forthright in his condemnation than I was of the neo-imperialist project. I rather envied the fear and loathing I discovered he could inspire in all the right people. I greatly admired his biography of Murray Rothbard—it is a model of how to summarise and judge the life of a turbulent intellectual. Now we were together in Bodrum, there was all the time in the world for getting to know each other, and for argument and debate.

Narrating all that we covered in ten days as we puffed away in the open would take a short novel. But one recurring argument was over the coming Presidential elections in America. Justin supports Barak Obama, which is fair enough, bearing in mind the only alternatives at the time were a geriatric warmonger and a venomous old harpy. But he also believed Mr Obama could win. I accept I know little of America, but I was unable to agree. "Whatever they tell the pollsters" I kept insisting, "the American people will not vote in sufficient numbers to elect a black man as President. Our only hope of avoiding war with Iran is for the money to run out in Washington."

Another discussion that stays prominent in my memory is towards the end of the conference. It was late, and there just a few of us sat at a table beside the swimming pool with G�l�in Imre, the owner of the Hotel—since last year, she has been G�l�in Hoppe. After a general conversation, we focussed on happiness. Rather, we focussed on why so many people in the rich world appear to be unhappy. Most people no longer die at absurdly young ages. Most people do not bury half their children cough and sweat their way to early graves. We all have enough to eat. We have soap and water and warm clothes. We have an endless succession of shiny electronic toys to divert us. In another decade or so, what we have now will doubtless seem as inadequate as MSDOS and video cassettes now do to us. But we already live in something approximating the utopia of the early twentieth century science fiction writers.

So why so much unhappiness? Why are the streets of every Western city teeming with plainly bored and aimless sheep of every age and condition? Was it always this way? We agreed that it probably was not. Most of us were old enough to remember a time when there seemed to be more quiet contentment, even though there was much less in the material sense to be contented with.

No one thought to raise the silly old argument that wealth and happiness are and must be inversely related. I can understand that the rich have generally tried to impose, and the poor have too often taken comfort in, the belief that three meals a day and the chance of living past thirty five are to be pitied rather then envied. But I see no reason whatever for sharing the belief. Certainly, some of the people round that table were rather well off, and were not obviously unhappy. Speaking for myself, I have been moderately embarrassed in the financial sense, and moderately comfortable; and I know which state for me is more conducive to happiness.

We did briefly touch on whether mass enrichment has been accompanied by a loss of freedom and of identity. Very few people may want to do any of the things that have been banned over the past century. But everyone is in some sense aware of the immense structures of guardianship that shapes our lives. And everyone to some extent has noticed the rise of a new and utterly malevolent ruling class, that enriches and privileges itself behind a palisade of words about "equality" and "diversity" and "tolerance".

What more interested us, however, was whether happiness in the long term is not so much about bodily pleasures and material consumption as about being able to follow some self-chosen mission. What mission each person might choose will depend on his inclinations and general abilities. For one, it might be bringing up children in a respectable family home, or building a successful business. For another, it might be collecting classifying every species of butterfly in the Falkland Islands. For someone else, it might be understanding and opposing the ambitions of our new ruling class. Whatever mission is chosen, it gives meaning to life. Anything short of catastrophic failure gives some protection against becoming just another of those depressed, apathetic sheep in the street.

Nothing novel here, of course. But it was a good conversation, in good company. And it was a conversation this part of the world must have heard many times before. The cities of Asia Minor seem to have been places where Epicurus and his philosophy were always particularly honoured.

Yes, it always for me comes back to the ancient world. Modern Turkey, the Ottoman Empire and Byzantium all have much to commend them. But I can never go to the Mediterranean without feeling the endlessly renewed thrill of realisation that it was here where the human race went through the first of its two great enlightenments; and that this particular enlightenment was wholly spontaneous. Miletus, the birthplace of scientific rationalism, is just a drive up the coast. Cos is a ferry ride away. Barely anything remains in modern Bodrum of Halicarnassus. But you can stand on the beach at sunrise, and ask if it was here that Herodotus once stood, looking out to sea and wondering what lay beyond the horizon....

There is much else I could mention about the conference and its attendant comforts—the belly dancers, the boat trips, the visit to Ephesus, and the opportunity for sitting down with intelligent Turks to discuss what it is really like to live in the most dynamic and interesting country in the whole Mediterranean. But I will not do more than mention these things. If you are really interested, contact Professor Hoppe, and try to find out for yourself.

And so, for the third time running, I commend the Bodrum conference of the Property and Freedom Society. Any libertarian or conservative who has not managed to secure an invitation at least once is very much to be pitied.

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

Honestly! The sheer bloodyminded brass neck the blasted man has! One recalls the Scottish jokes we use to be allowed to tell, that hinted at a certain parsimoniousness in their national character....like the one about how you can tell you are flying over Scotland....(I'm sure the Scots are not like that really; only the leftist politicians among them.)

Here we have a government, riding around in armoured Jaguars, pilfering the public purse to the extent of an extra £50,000-odd per head per year, for "expenses" and "home improvements", then having the immortal crust to vote themselves a large pay rise, and then....lecturing us to stop wasting food?

Perhaps this is a form of transferred admonition: I'm sure the psychologists and head-bashers would have a word for it. He wants, really, to berate the bloddy foreigners for something or other, but can't get away with that 'coz that funny little man at the Foreigners Office would "brief against" him.

Firstly, about food in the modern world of a first-world-industrial nation:-

(1) We have never had it so good - or at least until recently. In the 60s, I learned with pride that Britain "IS THE MOST EFFICIENT MECHANISED FARM IN THE WORLD", with wheat yields in tons per acre that were double those of North America (held up as a model continent too); also with livestock densities and tonnages of shipped butchered meat higher than anywhere except the USA (and much of it "local!) OK so the Greens have made this go out of the window while our back was turned, along with their murdering Pol-pot-ist chums peddling destructive education syllabuses containing Gramsco-Marxian-Sartre-ist nonsense and other falsehoods, but since capitalism does survive here, just, despite efforts to the contrary, we are still able to spend only about 9% of our net income on food and live, indeed fairly well.

(2) The madness of "sell-by" and "eat-by" dates, coupled with the Gramsco-Marxian effect on public understanding of science (see above) has made today's UK population hypersensitive to the most innocuous Daily Mail headline about the latest "food scare". Otherwise sane people routinely throw away stuff which could easily keep another day (soft fruit), a week (cheeses, meats - some of which taste even better if a bit high), a month even (most frozen foods) - and I'm being rather conservative here. The mere mention of "E Coli" (99% of Daily Mail readers probably don't know what it is or where it lives.) No wonder they throw away so much food: they have not been given the information with which to trust their common sense, and they listen to false gods in the absence of real ones, which are the facts and the people's subsequent ability to decide what to do for the best, when faced with the "Fridge That Time Forgot".

(3) A few days ago, local (that is to say, a British) Stalinist EU bureaucrats, ordered a market trader to destroy (or send back to the supplier) 50,000 Kiwi Fruit that were "undersized", in the interests of "consumer protection. He was NOT even allowed to GIVE them away to schools, hospices or even poor-people who could not pay, on pain of a criminal conviction. Gordon Brown should look to the beam in his own eye first, before taking out the mote in our eye.

(4) In 2000 and 2001, Brown's august predecessor had nearly 9 million healthy animals, in England mostly, slaughtered and burnt. This was on account of the slight risk that some of them had contracted foot-and-mouth disease, for which vaccination in the UK was forbidden by the very same government's DEFRA (the Department for Ending Farming and Rural Affairs). Yes, foot-and-mouth would cause a fall in animal tonnage yield, and probably make a prodicer miss his delivery-date of cuts of known wieght to a supermarket, but why not let the Market sort it all out?

So Gordon is going to the G8, then? Here's what he could berate the others for:-

(a) Russia: for being an authoritarian one-party state dressed up as a liberal pluralist democracy, which tyrannises secessionist ethnic minorities, and uses its vicelike grip on Europe's energy-windpipe to make smaller nations comply with its foreign policy.

(b) The USA: for going soft on the war on terror the war against Western civilisation, and for even thinking of entertaining the possibility of electing one of a pair of democratic Marxist Presidents, rather than someone else.

(c) Germany, for trying to pretend that the EU unitary state constitution Lisbon Treaty is still a goer.

(d) France, which is to say, West Germany, likewise.

(e) Canada, for even thinking of allowing the rise of Show-Trials in Stalinist Courts "Human Rights Commissions", one of which recently tried to ruin Mark Steyn, Ezra Levant and McLeans, for simply saying something in a publication.

He ought to have a go at the other ones too, about something, but I can't think what right now. I'll email him while he's on the plane.

Finally, he ought to have a go at the UN, for continuing, via the hegemony of its Bandung generation, the generation of oceans of blood, mountains ranges of sorrow, and millions of corpses, which we of the West still try to clear up today. this is caused by its fanatical and continual espousal of monarching pre-humanist tyranny, at the expense of the lives and prospects of billions of people.

Finally, he should say that the Green Terror is over, that Al Gore will be pensioned off to a mud hut in Nigeria, where his carbon footprint can be low, and that all the money we were going to spend ratifying Kyoto will be diverted to providing clean drinking water for all people on the planet, for ever.

But he won't, will he.

Fellow Europeans! Do not go there! Do NOT take on the Irish!

Even we, the English, can't subdue them although we foolishly tried, so we have honourably let them go. They are our brothers and sisters, after all. (You could be, too: get rid of your political elites and we will interview you....) 

Do the same!

For your lives!

David Davis