The rejection of liberty in favour of 'rational' planning goes back a long way. The following is a quote from the Introduction to a book entitled The Great Victorians, published in 1932.
Up to a few years ago we were too near the Victorians to get any nourishment from them. In a sense we were in the same mood as the early leaders of the Reformation, who could see nothing but faults in the system that had reared them. [...] Even before the war, England was being led out of the land of laissez-faire economics and into the land of scientific planning. Since then laissez-faire has been definitely abandoned. Spiritually we have left the old Churches long ago, and are busily building the new.*
'Scientific planning', which was to prove popular with a range of intellectuals from H.G. Wells to Bertrand Russell, soon turned out to have a dark side, as Hayek warned twelve years later:
In order to achieve their ends the planners must create power — power over men wielded by other men — of a magnitude never before known. Their success will depend on the extent to which they achieve such power. Democracy is an obstacle to this suppression of freedom which the centralized direction of economic activity requires. Hence arises the clash between planning and democracy.**
* Massingham (ed.), The Great Victorians, Pelican Books, 1937.
** Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (condensed version), Readers Digest, April 1945.
Here's a debut novel that deserves more attention: See Her Run by Peggy Townsend.
Quirky and full of atmosphere, it's a mystery thriller that generates edginess while being low on violence or horror.
A heroine who is cool, without being annoying.
With exotic looks; at one point she's described as looking like the secret lovechild of Amy Winehouse and Alice Cooper.
Plus, it's set in Frisco, probably the hippest city on the planet.
The follow-up is already out: The Thin Edge, also very readable.
I have (as requested) received a postal form for exercising my right to vote. However, I am not clear about the nature of the election.
On the face of it, I am being invited to choose a representative who will sit in the European Parliament. I am not certain how much influence an MEP has. The European Parliament may seem to echo, in concept, the UK Parliament and other, similar European bodies, but the analogy is an imperfect one. The European Parliament does not have legislative initiative, and very much plays second fiddle to the European Commission.
Irrespective of question marks over the pointfulness of MEP elections in the first place, it is not clear to what extent this particular one is simply about selecting an MEP. The 2019 European election was not supposed to take place in Britain at all, being obviated by our exiting the EU. This exit has not happened and it now seems uncertain whether it ever will.
Now that the election is having to take place after all, some of the campaign literature seems to be suggesting that its real purpose is to send a signal about which British party at Westminster one prefers — for the purpose of delivering Brexit, or possibly of preventing it.
There is also a suggestion that the election could be used to send a signal of somewhat larger scope: a kind of protest vote at the failure of the political class to act in accordance with the electorate's wishes — primarily in relation to Brexit, but perhaps also with regard to social and economic policy in general.
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Any colour, so long as it's left
What should one do if an ideology, to which one does not subscribe, has become so dominant that one’s own viewpoint ceases to receive significant representation? You could either (a) buckle under and change your views; or (b) accept you have become a minority which will be increasingly marginalised.
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I dislike being wrong, so I rarely make predictions. But I believe it is now unlikely that Brexit will happen. And it now seems clear that, in spite of its apparent dance of ineptitude, the House of Commons may have had a coherent strategy all along:
1. Dither, prevaricate and wrongfoot one another, in a way that ensures no exit route is agreed.
2. Continue in this manner for a sufficient number of years until:
3. A stage is reached when it starts to seem unreasonable not to hold a second referendum, given that the composition and viewpoint of the electorate can no longer be presumed to be the same. (Perhaps 4-5 years after the original one?)
Here is the important bit:
4. Before the second referendum takes place, ensure the outcome of 2016 can never be repeated, by changing the legislation.
• We must bear in mind that most of Westminster profoundly disagrees with the result of the referendum. Most MPs seem fairly convinced that leaving the EU would be wrong.
And judging by this Report from the Media/Culture/etc Committee (see sections 4 to 6) MPs are of the view that the result was obtained by foul means, not fair. This impression is reinforced by the recent movie Brexit: The Uncivil War. If the movie is to be believed, the Vote Leave campaign used dodgy methods involving the internet, including innovative approaches such as "microtargeting". (At least they are presented in the movie as being dodgy.) The Committee’s Report also raises a question mark over the £425K Leave campaign spend by Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party. Then of course there is the conspiracy-theory hypothesis that Russia contributed millions to the LeaveEU campaign (see para 260-267).
• The government this week proposed legislation to police the internet, issuing a White Paper on "Online Harms". This would make internet companies legally responsible for "harmful" content. Directors of companies like Google and Facebook could be hit with substantial fines, and even criminal penalties, if they fail to remove content that falls foul of the rules.
Much of the proposal is ostensibly aimed at relatively uncontroversial areas, such as grooming, bullying, suicide and so forth. But what is being rolled into this is something far more vague: preventing "disinformation", an ill-defined term.
Disinformation
7.25 When the internet is deliberately used to spread false or misleading information, it can harm us in many different ways, encouraging us to make decisions that could damage our health, undermining our respect and tolerance for each other and confusing our understanding of what is happening in the wider world. It can also damage our trust in our democratic institutions, including Parliament. [...]
7.27 Companies will need to take proportionate and proactive measures to [...] minimise the spread of misleading and harmful disinformation [...]
7.31 Importantly, the code of practice that addresses disinformation will ensure the focus is on protecting users from harm, not judging what is true or not. There will be difficult judgement calls associated with this. [...]
Unless we see a lot more in the way of defining and narrowing the "disinformation" concept, there are likely to be many ways of criticising the government, or querying services such as state education and medicine, that could potentially be caught. Consider all the possible statements or opinions that might be interpreted as:
- giving "misleading information" which might
- "encourage" us to make decisions that "could damage our health" (alternative health websites?), or
- "could undermine our respect for each other", or
- "confuse our understanding of what is happening in the wider world", or
- "damage our trust in our democratic institutions" (might these include the NHS, or the state education system?).
What if I want to argue that economic forecasts, e.g. by the Bank of England, may well be incorrect, because they have often been incorrect before? Or that compulsory state education is harmful and should be abolished? Or that a doctor should not necessarily be trusted, because NHS doctors are influenced by a concealed public-interest agenda?
The beauty of the new regime is that the government would not be responsible for controlling content, so that any immediate blame for restricting free speech would fall on the relevant internet company. Google can already remove blogs it doesn’t like, without warning. All it would take is a quiet word in the ear of a Google executive, and several dozen freelance writers might wake up to find their blogs no longer existed.
If in any doubt, which option is a Google executive likely to pick, faced with the risk of criminal liability and jail?
• The Online Harms White Paper does not go into the issue of political campaigning in any detail. However, the aforementioned Committee Report supports
the recommendation from the [Information Commissioner’s Office] that inferred data should be as protected under the law as personal information. Protections of privacy law should be extended beyond personal information to include models used to make inferences about an individual. We recommend that the Government studies the way in which the protections of privacy law can be expanded to include models that are used to make inferences about individuals, in particular during political campaigning. [Link added.]
I am no internet expert, but I imagine this is getting at microtargeting, and I suspect it means we will soon see proposed legislation about online campaigning.
• Few people with status give us (Oxford Forum) any kind of support, even a costless link from their website or blog. It is therefore hard to know what the position of the elite is towards us – even those members of it who are supposedly swimming against the current. Many of them, I imagine, simply pretend we don’t exist. Thus we go on operating on a shoestring budget.
Of course, if the Brexit movie gives a realistic picture, the attitude of Conservatives (even conservative ones) to mavericks is highly ambivalent. For most Conservatives, a cosy relationship with the establishment – even if only a tiny subsection of the establishment – seems to be paramount; they would sooner convert to leftism than start associating with dissidents.
In the end we shall make thoughtcrime impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.
So the phrase "cultural Marxism", to mean the presence of Marxist ways of thinking in academic and other cultural output, is perfectly natural and potentially useful.
The fact that the phrase appears to be popular with a certain type of antisemitic conspiracy theorist is regrettable, but irrelevant to whether the phrase is legitimate. In the 1970s, terrorist group Red Army Faction appropriated the term "urban guerilla" to justify murdering people, without this resulting in the term becoming taboo.
Yet there seem to be elements among the Left who want to prohibit use of the words "cultural Marxism" altogether, and are willing to use the strategy of guilt-by-association to achieve their end.
Conservative MP Suella Braverman recently made a legitimate reference to cultural Marxism in its non-conspiracy sense. It was clear no antisemitic implication was intended. For journalists from the Guardian and the Independent to report this as if it verged on the shockingly offensive is disgraceful and irresponsible.
As often seems to be the case these days, free-speech-opponents react to extremism by wanting to penalise non-extremists. Perhaps those on the Left who like to exercise censorship should consider the possibility that by making it difficult to express any viewpoint that deviates from theirs, they are partly responsible for the very extremism they claim to deplore. There are many reasons why a viewpoint becomes expressed in the form of extremism, but one of them is surely an unwillingness to give space to non-extremist versions. The more that schools, universities and the media try to banish conservative and libertarian viewpoints, the more we are likely to see grotesquely distorted versions of those viewpoints appear on dodgy websites and other underground platforms.
Mrs Braverman was brave, and correct, to use the phrase "cultural Marxism". The right way to 'de-Nazify' the phrase is not to ban it but to employ it freely in its natural sense.
I urge readers to do the same. Discuss the topic of cultural Marxism (i.e. the possible presence of Marxist ideology in contemporary culture) freely, without being influenced by potential disapproval. Argue that it does not exist, or argue that it does. But don't submit to the scare tactics of the Left. Use your right to free speech — or lose it.
Among ideologies, Marxism should arguably be regarded as on a par with Nazism. It is responsible for death, torture and suffering on a comparable scale. If it is rife in universities, or embedded in the mindset of media folk, we ought to know about it.
