More soft totalitarianism

A couple of other interesting snippets relating to illegitimate attempts by left-wingers to stifle supporters of UKIP.

Firstly, as the news of the Rotherham fostering scandal broke, came this tweet by a UKIP candidate:

Barnardo's would not allow me to be a volunteer befriender of young people leaving care when I told them I was standing for UKIP.

Of course, private organisations should be able to associate with anyone they like, but the problem is that Barnardo's are heavily funded by the government. If I recall correctly the vast majority of their funding comes directly from the state. This being the case, I think someone in the Education Department needs to have a word in Dr Barnardo's ear.

Then there is the decision of the University of Derby students union to ban all UKIP candidates. I'm less clear about the position of a university union vis-a-vis state funding, but it's still a shocking state of affairs.

Soft totalitarianism

The news this morning that a couple in Rotherham had their foster children removed from them because they were UKIP members almost defies belief.

It seems to me to be symptomatic of a much wider problem with soft totalitarianism. There are now an enormous number of views the holding of which will lead to immediate retribution from left-leaning bureaucrats, not the least of which is global warming scepticism.

Click to read more ...

Greens, scientists and bad people

Updated on Jun 2, 2011 by Bishop Hill

Updated on Jun 2, 2011 by Bishop Hill

Australian politician Peter Phelps has, in that quiet underspoken way that Australian politicians have, compared climatologists to scientists working for the Nazis.

At the heart of many scientists—but not all scientists—lies the heart of a totalitarian planner. One can see them now, beavering away, alone, unknown, in their laboratories. And now, through the great global warming swindle they can influence policy, they can set agendas, they can reach into everyone's lives; they can, like Lenin, proclaim "what must be done". While the humanities had a sort of warm-hearted, muddle-headed leftism, the sciences carry with them no such feeling for humanity. And it is not a new phenomenon. We should not forget that some of the strongest supporters of totalitarian regimes in the last century have been scientists and, in return, the State lavishes praise, money and respectability on them.

Click to read more ...

Lovelock, AGW and democracy

James Lovelock in the Guardian

One of the main obstructions to meaningful action is "modern democracy", he added. "Even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while."

Update on Mar 29, 2010 by Bishop Hill

The full transcript is here. It will make painful reading for AGW proponents.

Steiner schools

Unity has posted up one of those very, very long posts which have become his blogging trademark. Today's sermon is on the subject of Steiner schools, which Unity opposes. Wholeheartedly. The Steiner movement, and its underlying philosophical movement, Anthroposophy, are, he says, "cultish".

I don't know very much about Steiner schools but the use of the term "cultish" is a strong one, implying to most readers a degree of brainwashing and coercion of the kind that is popularly associated with, say, scientology or the Branch Davidians. In fact, Unity makes this link explicit when he say that

there are marked similarities between approaches of the Anthroposophical movement and Scientology

However, he doesn't present any actual evidence for this statement, beyond  a vague statement that Steiner schools don't teach Anthroposophy explicitly but that what they do teach is designed to prepare children to receive those beliefs. Perhaps there is more to it than that, but on the face of it this is no different to most other forms of schooling. One might equally argue that state schooling doesn't explicitly teach statism but that everything it teaches is designed to prepare children for a belief in the beneficence of the state.

Much of Unity's piece is an eye-opening exposition of the eccentric beliefs of anthroposophists - take this quote for example:

[A]ngels – the spirits closest to human beings – are seeking to create images in human astral bodies. These images are given with the intention of bringing about ‘definite conditions in the social life of the future’ related to brotherhood, religious freedom, and conscious spirituality…

Far out, man.

But so what? Is this any more eccentric than the whole water-into-wine malarkey that informs mainstream christianity, or for that matter the weirdness of any of the other mainstream religions? Many, many people have deeply irrational beliefs, and want children to be brought up in those beliefs. In a world without state education they would be able to do so.

The advent of state education has put the whip in the hands of the state and its acolytes. With the purse strings now held by the bureaucracy rather than the individual the opportunity has arisen to crush dissenting belief systems. Funding will be withdrawn from those that do not toe the line. In the case of the Steiner schools, the argument is being put forward not on the grounds that the education provided is inadequate or any other rational basis, but simply because these people are marginal and unacceptable - "cultish", in Unity's terms.

I've said it before, but I think it is worth repeating. The mindset of most of the writers at Liberal Conspiracy is not that of the liberal. It is that of the conservative. These are people who hate diversity, who despise people who don't think like they do.  They are Tories of the left.

What the LibDems want to ban

To the person who just arrived at this site searching for "Things the LibDems want to ban", you're not in a hurry are you?

Lib Dems to ban Harry Potter movie posters?

Liberal Vision, the outlet for the remaining liberals in the Lib Dems, is commendably critical of Jo Swinson who has ludicrously proposed to ban "airbrushing of models for campaigns aimed at the under-16s".

Ms Swinson is one of those MPs who has moved apparently effortlessly from full time education to Parliament, with only the briefest of appearances in the real world in between.

This explains a great deal. Only someone straight out of school could come up with quite such a ludicrous idea. For a law of this kind to work, you have to be able to define "campaign", you have to be able to define "model", you have to be able to define "airbrushing", you have to be able to define "directed at" and you have to be able to prove that the directing is at under-16s.

Can you really define "model" in such a way as to catch Kate Moss for Top Shop, but not Rupert Grint in the poster for Harry Potter and the half-blood prince? If Kate Moss turns up for the Top Shop photo shoot with a big zit on the end of her nose, do they have to leave it in the pics? It's absurd.

The future of modelling under the LibDems

New in the blogroll

Liberal Vision are liberal LibDems. It's not an oxymoron after all. ;-)

On localism

Chris Dillow wonders if people aren't disposed to a truly liberal society, their preferences being distorted by cognitive biases - for example that they might prefer the devil they know to the devil they don't, or that they might see only the benefits of a step in an authoritarian direction but not the hidden costs.

His points are not obviously wrong, but I do wonder if the importance of what he is saying is a function more of the kind of society we have become in the last twenty years than a reflection of the way things have to be.

As the British state has become more and more centralised, it has become virtually impossible for meaningful experiments into different ways of running society to be undertaken. Everything has to be processed by the Whitehall machine with its wide array of British Leyland minds struggling to deal with any idea not rooted in 1940s economic thinking.

Innovation has been well and truly stifled.

In a society where innovation in ways of running things are so difficult, the problems which Chris Dillow identifies are made so much the worse. Rather than having to persuade a majority of people somewhere to overcome their cognitive biases, it is necessary to persuade a majority of people everywhere. In practice it doesn't happen.

It's the same in America, where the constitutional guarantees of federalism and individual sovereignty have been undermined by the Supreme Court leaving the ninth and tenth amendments as mere words that hold no fear for the executive and the legislature alike.

I was therefore interested to see this attempt to add a whole new bill to the constitution, rolling back decades of judicial undermining of American federalism. It remains to be seen if it will amount to anything, but it at least provides a modicum of hope for our transatlantic cousins.

For us in the UK, with our (mainly) unwritten constitution, this sort of grand rewriting of the rules is, of course, not possible. We simply have to choose a government that will devolve power downwards.

I think we could be waiting a long time.

The left and liberalism

People often criticise the writers on Liberal Conspiracy for their lack of liberalism. "Socialist Conspiracy" would be a better title, they say.

It's hard not to agree since they are so keen on state control - "the absolute authority of the state" as one of their writers put it - and their apparent abhorrence of anyone being able to do anything without their behaviour being "regulated".

I've always struggled to understand the connection between the left and liberalism, so I found this article interesting. Its conclusion that the left is grounded in liberalism, but is trying to move away from it explains a great deal about our current predicament.

In this sense, modern conservatism has always been liberal, and there is nothing particularly contradictory about the fact that ... conservatives are the defenders of classical liberalism... There is also nothing terribly surprising about the way in which the modern left, in the effort to progress beyond liberalism, has often undermined and attacked liberalism.

Nazis versus libertarians

There's an interesting post and a good comments thread over at Letters from a Tory. It will be of interest to my home educating readers.

Clause 28 revisited

The whole Clause 28 debate is being revisited over at The Times, where a London primary school has been teaching children about homosexuality, including a trip to a "pink" version of Romeo and Juliet entitled "Romeo and Julian". (Conspiracy theorist hat on again: would they do this just to provoke a reaction from the Tories? - surely not.)

The readers are predictably unimpressed, nay outraged, and have been taking their offspring out of class in protest. For this outrage, we learn, parents are to be prosecuted. Free societies are wonderful things aren't they?

I can almost hear the sound of Clause 28 being dusted off in Conservative associations around the country. I wonder though if Cameron's Cuddly Conservatives have actually got the balls to bring Clause 28 in again, but fortunately there is a liberal alternative of dealing with this issue. That's the good news. The bad news is that Cameron's Cuddly Conservatives probably haven't the cojones to go through with this idea either.

Still, for what it's worth, here it is.

Privatise the schools. All of them. Bring vouchers if you must. Repeal the National Curriculum in its entirety. Fire the LEAs or whatever they are called nowadays. Then simply allow schools to differentiate themselves on their approach to education, including sex education. Some schools want to buy season tickets to Romeo and Julian, others will not mention homosexuality at all. Some will do heterosexuality in primary and homosexuality in secondary, others may choose to do things completely differently. Who knows what will happen? It depends completely on what parents want for their children.

It's impeccably liberal.

Oh, there is another problem with it of course. The education system is run by people who think that what parents want for their children is secondary to what the state wants - which is to say what the educational bureaucracy wants. Children, they believe should be taught to think like bureaucrats, which is to say rarely, uncreatively and only in a progessive, left wing manner.

Getting round the smoking ban

Taking Liberties:

Hawke and Hunter has only been open a few months but the owners have created a "smoking room" that is even better than Boisdale's famous cigar terrace in London. It has its own bar, comfortable furniture, tropical plants and no shortage of heaters.

I still hate smoke, so I don't suppose I'd go, but you can't help applauding.

Free movement and democracy

The must-read article today is Janet Daley in the Telegraph, wondering if the EU chickens aren't coming home to roost.

What the strikers at the Lindsey oil refinery (and their brother supporters in Nottinghamshire and Kent) have discovered is the real meaning of the fine print in those treaties, and the significance of those European court judgments whose interpretation they left to EU obsessives: it is now illegal – illegal – for the government of an EU country to put the needs and concerns of its own population first. It would, for example, be against European law to do what Frank Field has sensibly suggested and reintroduce a system of "work permits" for EU nationals who wished to apply for jobs here.

It's an interesting moral dilemma for liberals when an undemocratic body like the EU has put in place laws that are liberal in nature. Democracy is likely to give us protectionism and economic depression. Of course under a liberal constitution, movement of labour would not be subject to democratic control anyway, but a liberal constitution being about as likely as Gordon Brown winning the next election, the most likely outcome is that democracy will win out.

It's a worrying prospect.

Guardian fantasy land

Iain Dale points out that the US state now employs more people than manufacturing.

Meanwhile, over at the Graun, Jonathan Freedland gushes in the general direction of Barack Obama and welcomes the end of what he calls the 30-year grip of the notion of limited government.

It seems clear then that Freedland is living in la-la land, like so many of his colleagues. Is there actually anyone at the Guardian with even the slightest idea of what happens in the real world?