Silencing dissenting voices. How the left threatens freedom.

A letter signed by academics calls for Cambridge University not to give Dr Noah Carl an academic position because (they state but don't evidence) Dr Carl's work is racist. Now, since I haven't read much of Dr Carl's work, it's tricky for me to know whether or not this statement is true. I am also certain that, despite what they've said in the letter they've signed, few of the 200 hundred or so academics who've said Dr Carl is racist have read any of his work either.

This seems an isolated incident but it represents a trend in our society. Intelligent people, mostly who hold left wing views of one sort of another, collect to silence dissenting views. Dr Carl is a dissenter whose failing is that he is right wing (he challenges this assertion) and researches links between intelligence, politics, race and economic development (this is a simplification). More importantly, I suspect, is that Dr Carl is a prominent and outspoken critic of leftist bias within academia and especially in his own field of sociology and social psychology. It is this criticism that lies behind the academics' letter not the essentially spurious allegations of 'pseudoscientific racism'. Right wing voices must be either silenced or placed in a carefully quarantined box labelled "dangerously wrong ideas".

Don't misunderstand me here, I don't think there's a vast conspiracy of critical theory scholars and sociologists plotting in some university common room to silence voices arguing for conservative, classical liberal or libertarian ideas. It's rather that there's a consensus that these ideas are "wrong", that people who hold them are either sinister forces or misled by sinister forces, and that rather than engage with the ideas the motives of those promoting such dangerous thoughts must be questioned or else their character smeared (sometimes both).

We see this in the "who funds you response" directed (amongst anti-foreigner and misogynist slurs) to young female voices from organisations like the Institute of Economic Affairs, Adam Smith Institute and Taxpayers' Alliance. We saw it in the damning mischaracterisation of Toby Young as an eugenicist, in the selective misquoting of Roger Scruton following his appointment to chair as government body looking at aesthetics in architecture. And we've seen it in the bizarre conspiracy theories of George Monbiot and Carole Cadwalladr - a world where well known libertarians giving money to a libertarian-inclined think tank is "dark money" and where someone turning down the offer of a deal is proof positive of their collusion with the makers of that offer.

The problem - and it is a real one - is that too many left wing people simply believe nobody can support free markets, capitalism, free speech and economic liberty without being 'shills for corporate lobbyists'. This viewpoint is now firmly embedded right across the left of politics and academia, from the mildest of Blairite establishment figures through to the communists who work for Jeremy Corbyn - people are right wing because they are making money from it or thick or 'gaslighted' by those funded by "dark money" into backing ideas against their interests.

Dissenting voices - whether it is old-fashioned conservatives like Scruton or left-libertarian ex-trots like the folk at Spiked - cannot be tolerated. Hence calls for the BBC to stop having people from the IEA or TPA ("who funds you") presenting their work - it's not about the funding, it's about the ideas they promote. These ideas - conservatism, classical liberalism, free markets, open societies, free speech - are what the newly intolerant left want to silence and attacks on motives, slurs, misrepresentation, whataboutery and orchestrated calls for sackings or no platforming are justified by the need to either silence or discredit right wing thinking.

I don't offer a resolution, more a question and something of a warning. The question is how, when the centre-left and progressive mindset is so pervasive across the media, do we create a sense of balance? By way of example, the IEA is routinely referred to as a 'right wing' think tank when its researchers appear on broadcast media, yet when people from think tanks like the IPPR appear they are seldom introduced as from a left wing think tank. This imbalance reinforces the idea that right wing is problematic in a manner that left wing isn't. It is a moderate version of the manner in which communists and fascists are treated with the former allowed space and time and the latter excluded.

The warning is that, without freely expressed voices in support of freedom, we will lose that freedom. You don't have to be a supporter of the capitalist model (many libertarians aren't) or a believer in free markets (lots of conservatives aren't) to recognise that the manner in which such voices are excluded, discredited and demonised by the dominant mainstream left, especially in academia, represents a dangerous trend and a threat to wider freedoms. If one set of voices - many essentially moderate (there's nothing remotely threatening about the work of the Mercatus Centre but George Monbiot sees it as park of his nexus of "dark money") - are excluded, it's only a short step to the exclusion of other voices. This is already happening in academia, through deliberately orchestrated actions like trying to get Dr Carl sacked and through the manner in which the training, recruitment and appointing of academics is conducted as well as by the raising of mobs to shout down dissenting voices when they appear. If we want to be free we will have to challenge this illiberal progressive mindset so the ideas of freedom are heard.

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Something happened - and that something was the free market

Man's natural state is grinding poverty:

Among economists and anthropologists, this is “settled science.” Economists left and right might bicker over minor details, but they agree that poverty is man’s natural environment. As economist Todd G. Buchholz puts it, “For most of man’s life on earth, he has lived no better on two legs than he had on four.” Nobel Prize–winning economist Douglass C. North and his colleagues write in Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History that “over the long stretch of human history before 1800, the evidence suggests that the long-run rate of growth of per capita income was very close to zero.”

For tens or thousands of years nearly all men lived in that grinding poverty. There were little flickers of light showing what was possible - in China, in Baghdad, in Florence - and then, bang, we suddenly and sustainably got rich, dragged ourselves out of poverty, and created the wonders of our modern world from dishwashers to the internet, from recorded music to space travel.

And that bang? It was the liberal enlightenment, the idea that creativity and innovation wasn't the preserve of aristocratic patronage but was for everyone. It was what we sneeringly called the middle class - whether suited banker or white van man - that made that great noise of human improvement. It wasn't government, it wasn't posh landowners, it wasn't socialism, it wasn't a cumulative process of incremental improvement - human betterment is a consequence of freedom - free speech, free enterprise, free assembly, free worship, free trade. Improvement came because we decided people shouldn't have to have permission from their 'betters' if they wanted to try something out.

So if you want to limit freedom - stop folk exchanging freely, prevent people from saying what they wish, halt people's right to gather together, limit what they can believe in and worship - any of these things and you offer future humanity a worse world. Above all, if you think free markets are a bad idea and need limiting, regulating and controlling by our betters, then you offer future generations a less wealthy, less healthy and less happy world.

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It puzzles me why the left opposes free markets - they argue for most other forms of liberty

It's odd how many on the left, so keen on all sorts of social liberation, are adamantly opposed to the idea of people being economically liberated. It's hard to understand why, when the liberation of women, gay and lesbian people, and ethnic minorities get such prominence in left wing thinking, they seem unable to recognise that part of that liberation must be economic, must be the power to exchange, interact, co-operate and trade.

It seems, without conducting any sort of extensive survey, that the problem lies in two places - firstly, a sort of elitist belief that most people aren't bright enough to make their own economic decisions and therefore need guidance from experts, and secondly a sort of semi-comprehended Marxist reject of the market in preference for a wholly planned economy. In truth though, a lot of the opposition to free markets is pretty woolly - here's an example in a tweet to cabinet minister Liz Truss from Labour MP, Stella Creasey:

Except in a free market you aren’t free @trussliz because you will always end up picking up the tab for its failures - try reading the other half of adam smith about value of collaboration to securing freedom for us all …all money is after all a matter of belief

Now I'm not going to try and deconstruct Ms Creasey's Tweet (it is after all only a Tweet) except in so far as it contains several of those presumptions about free markets - they're not 'free', they 'fail', and they are exploitative. Ms Creasey also references (I assume) Adam Smith's 'other book', the Theory of Moral Sentiments. Here's a chunk from a commentary by Eamonn Butler:

As individuals, we have a natural tendency to look after ourselves. That is merely prudence. And yet as social creatures, explains Smith, we are also endowed with a natural sympathy – today we would say empathy – towards others. When we see others distressed or happy, we feel for them – albeit less strongly. Likewise, others seek our empathy and feel for us. When their feelings are particularly strong, empathy prompts them to restrain their emotions so as to bring them into line with our, less intense reactions. Gradually, as we grow from childhood to adulthood, we each learn what is and is not acceptable to other people. Morality stems from our social nature.

Smith wasn't limiting free markets but rather making the observation - at considerable length - that human beings are not just motivated by prudence, by an overriding utilitarian urge. Rather our motivations are grounded in a set of ethics of which prudence is just one - justice, temperance, faith and courage are just as important. And since our motives in a marketplace are not just self-interest, the idea that free markets exploit is wrong. As Smith put it himself:

“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”

I'm sure we can have an extensive discussion about whether or not we are ever truly free but, in more pragmatic terms, Ms Creasey's typically Fabian position is essentially that we don't have sufficient knowledge in the marketplace so are liable to manipulation and exploitation. We see such an argument put repeatedly in respect of advertising drawing on a variety of slightly sneering observers - Veblen, Packard, Klein - who argue that advertising is uniquely and corruptly persuasive especially for children and what might be called the lower orders of society. As a result, the first target of the prohibitionist is to limit, then ban, the advertising of the product they wish to ban - smoking, drinking, sugary food, gambling.

The problem with this argument is that it is, as with so many left wing critiques of classical liberalism, essentially a straw man. Nobody claims that free markets require perfect knowledge for all parties merely that there is no coercion and that the buyer and seller both secure benefit from the process of exchange. I do not need to know the price of every second hand Land Rover to be able to judge whether the price I pay to buy one provides me with a value in excess of that sum. If I'm wise, and most buyers, regardless of age or social class, are wise, then I will do more than simply buy the first of a product I encounter but even if I do this it doesn't stop the market being free.

To return to Ms Creasey, she argues that Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments is about collaboration and I assume that, in making this assertion, Ms Creasey believes that collaboration is not a feature of a free market. Now, leaving aside Smith's position that human nature is not simply about self-interest, maximising utility, it does seem odd to consider that interactions in a free market do not feature collaboration or cooperation. Is the achievement of mutual benefit through exchange not the very essence of collaboration - two humans freely interacting to the advantage of both? Yet the Fabian socialist position seems blind to all this, preferring to fall back on the idea that exchange in a marketplace is exploitative and therefore not free.

It makes absolutely no sense at all for people on the left to be so dismissive of free markets, enterprise and trade - they ought to have the same enthusiasm for such things as they do for women's rights to control their bodies, for society to see gay and lesbian people as normal, and for ethnic minorities to be treated fairly. Instead the left seeks out things - often falsely - to suggest that free markets are wrong. Most often they point to failures in highly regulated markets - financial services, energy production, transport, housing - where powerful businesses work with government to limit innovation, create rents and prevent new entrants to that market. But even when they don't, the criticism of free markets is based on an entirely vague notion of an alternative (and I'm guessing that most on the left don't want a Soviet-style planned economy).

In the end, however, the alternative to a free market is a market that isn't free. And this means either that you do not have access to that market or else that your access to directed by another party. As I wrote a while ago:

Please explain which part of the word 'free' is a bad thing? If you don't like free markets, what you want is markets that aren't free. Markets where only some privileged people can trade. Markets where someone else (usually the government) sets the price. Markets where their effectiveness is determined not by the actions of those in the market but by who is most effective at lobbying - for which read bribing, corrupting - government. If you fetter free markets (which given you always go on about the free market being "unfettered" is what you want) what you create are winners and losers, privileged and unprivileged, rather than having a system where people seek co-operation and mutual benefit. Freedom is a good thing. Free markets are a good thing. So stop lying about this and undermining the liberty of your neighbour.

And it makes no sense, given its enthusiasm for other liberties, for the left to oppose this liberty.

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Neo-puritan young people are a threat to freedom and democracy -

I am an optimist. Tomorrow, in aggregate at least, will be better than yesterday. Our knowledge grows, technology improves lives and, given a fair chance, free markets raise further thousands from abject, life-shortening and painful poverty. But I am just a little bit worried as I peer into my scratched, dull and flickering crystal ball.

Pew found that 40% of respondents ages 18-34 said they agreed that offensive statements could be outlawed.

The over-65 generation does not accurately represent our country, because they are overwhelmingly white and actually vote. So, unfortunately, we're going to have to bar them from voting.

Millennial support for populist and authoritarian candidates conforms to several recent studies showing widespread youth disaffection with the whole idea of democracy. Only about 30% of Americans born in the 1980s think it’s “essential” to live in a democracy.

These are just three examples from a host - from support for bans on drinking through fat shaming to turning genuine concerns about harassment into witch hunts led by a frothing media mob. Everywhere I look I see attacks on the fundamentals of what I see as liberal democracy. It's not merely that young people - like just about every past generation - start off foolishly believing there's a better way to improve our world than freedom and choice but that they've gone beyond this to embrace a neo-puritanism that is anti-freedom, anti-democracy and definitely anti-choice.

And my worry isn't just that I don't agree with this neo-puritan authoritarianism - whether it's the young Austrians and Germans voting for the populist Right or British and American youth embracing the left-wing equivalent. Or for that matter "centrists" wanting to limit democracy because they don't like its results. No, my worry is that democracy and liberty will be restricted by governments seeking to pander to this neo-puritanism - an ever wider definition of "hate speech", classing any heterodox behaviour or belief as anti-social, banning of books and videos, all mixed in with cults of health and the idea of the 'good person'.

This anti-liberty, anti-choice new-puritan doctrine will be used by governments to stifle debate on-line, to close down challenging (and sometimes inaccurate) platforms or websites as 'fake news', and to police private behaviour to a degree never seen before. Each of these attacks on choice and freedom will be presented as protective of young people (allowing them to grow without fear of witnessing such unpleasantries). And, as we''ve seen with the response to Jo Johnson suggesting universities should promote free speech and open debate, many authorities with smile benignly as the mob screeches and screams at the few brave enough to challenge the right-thinking of neo-puritan youth.

If there is one thing people who believe in liberty and choice should do in 2018, it is to speak out - again and again - against these affronts to the core values of our society. For all our talk of "British Values", we seem very coy at saying that free speech, free assembly and democratic choice are right at the very heart of those values. Nor should we allow these neo-puritans to indulge their cult of health, to let them tell us that somehow we are not responsible for our own bodies and that the NHS is somehow greater and more important than our rights.

This isn't a resolution - I've been challenging the attacks on liberty for some while - but, as they extend their reach, we need to make more effort to say that freedom and democracy cannot be sacrificed on the altar of youthful insecurity, disappointment or distaste. They are too damned important for that.

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It's not capitalism we need to defend, it's freedom

Every now and then I get asked about why I'm in politics and, once I've done the self-deprecating bit about how no other business would have me, I get to the crunch. I am involved because free speech, free markets, free trade and free enterprise need defending. The systems of government, the lobby groups, the business organisations, the voluntary sector and 'thinking people everywhere' all conspire to limit and restrict your and my freedom to act. Challenging this sad truth is essential.

And the problem isn't capitalism, it's government. This isn't to say that big business is innocent - the amounts spent by business on lobbying government for law changes, subsidy, new trade barriers and more regulation remind us that many large organisations really don't like the idea of freedom. So when Corbyn-loving students tell me capitalism is corrupting, I get their point - hardly a day passes without one or other example of a big business getting some sort of protectionist fix or some new regulation aimed at preventing market entry. We've known this for a long while - it's the central theme of Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations' - mercantilism, market fixing, cartels and protectionism, all those things the technocrats try to justify, prevent the growth of wealth, the opportunity for equality and the raising of people out of poverty.

I also understand how those young people are disgruntled at being 'Generation Rent', at having great fat student debt they probably won't pay off and at seeing my generation sitting snuggly on a pile of assets (but still moaning at having to use those assets to look after ourselves in our old age). But when Corbyn or other socialists try to say that these problems are some how a consequence of free markets, free trade or free enterprise, they are lying - even when they use the catch-all term of capitalism.

Housing in London is expensive because for sixty years we've run urban containment policies around the capital and for forty of those sixty years, London has generated more new jobs than it has new houses. And if you provide just six new homes for every ten new households, housing is going to get more expensive. This isn't the fault of the market, it's the fault of government for rationing the land we've got to build houses on. They call this planning and it's the basic building block of socialism - instead of having a free market, some folk in an office with a computer model decide what the price should be, how much should be made and how it should be distributed. It limits your freedom and it doesn't work.

Defending freedom is not, therefore, simply about the moral imperative of liberty but is justified for straightforward and practical reasons. Those freedoms - speech, trade, markets, enterprise - should be defended because they work, because they are the things that made us rich and, right now, are making poor people everywhere richer. The only places - North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Zimbabwe - where people are getting poorer are places where these freedoms are comprehensively rejected. Places where socialism - the planned economy - is the chosen model.

Everywhere I look freedom is under attack. Technocrats and business lobbyists saying import tariffs protect domestic business. Local councils saying limiting procurement options supports local economies. Planners saying the problem is the wrong plan not the planning itself. Farmers saying they couldn't operate without subsidy. Public health groups wanting to ban smoking in parks or to fix booze prices. Police forces calling for new powers to seemingly arrest anybody for almost anything. Housing lobbyists saying the solution is to fix rents not to build houses. Schools snatching sausage rolls from innocent children's lunchboxes. Mayors enforcing public morals by banning pretty women from advertising or drinking from the train.

And then we're told the problem is capitalism? It's not, the problem is that government - in cahoots with a bewildering lobby of charities, businesses and 'campaigners' - takes away freedoms. And we can't subdivide these freedoms - be cross about the loss of one freedom that's important to us while cheering on a ban on something we don't like. For sure some of these losses of freedom are less damaging than others but each loss - from daft rules on advertising vaping to 'Public Space Protection Orders' that make anything an official doesn't like a crime - represents a further restriction and another barrier to pleasure, enterprise or exchange.

I'm happy to defend capitalism - the idea that the rewards from business success goes to the people who put up the cash - but it's not as important as defending free markets, free trade, free enterprise and free speech. Those freedoms constrain the worst urges of business, protect us from the busybody and limit the oppressive instincts of government. We have become too glib about each new loss of freedom - even sometimes to the point of welcoming it because of the NHS or crime or community safety or, the favourite all-purpose reason, because of the children.

So let's get less hung up about whether something's owned by the people who invested, by the workforce or by the community and worry instead about those who want to take away your freedom to organise business how you want. Let's be bothered about government and business wanting to fix gas prices or food supply or where you can buy gin and lemonade. The good life we enjoy and that we'd like everyone to enjoy, was made possible by that free enterprise, by those free markets, and by that free trade. And underpinning all this is free speech - our right to speak what we see as truth, to promote our business and to challenge the assumptions and presumptions of those who govern us. Freedom matters - let's defend it.

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So long as we're not free, we need democracy

Thurber's Very Proper Gander in full flow

I like and respect many Leavers, but I’ve never shared their enthusiasm for democracy – I want liberty and prosperity, and I don’t want to trade that in just to give my stupid next-door neighbours more power over my life.

What follows isn't about the recent EU referendum although, like much discussion and debate right now, it is inevitably framed by the issues surrounding our vote to leave the EU. The quotation above is from Sam Bowman, the Executive Director of the Adam Smith Institute and it cuts to the heart of what I think will prove the dominant division in politics for the coming generations - the debate about democracy and its purposes. We will have a bickering coalition of collectivists and populists arguing that democracy is pretty much everything opposed by an equally troubled combination of technocrats and libertarians to tell us democracy is an anachronism.

In some respects, the argument for more democracy is akin to the argument for more railways - a nineteenth century solution to twenty-first century problems. yet, at the same time, we are vocal in our support for "having a say", "being consulted" - for votes, elections and polling. Public opinion, far more than evidence, ideology or reason is the driver of political decision-making - Sam Bowman's "stupid next-door neighbours" really are as important to what government's do as are the wise minds in Sam's think tank.

The advocate of democracy pipes up here - we're all equal in the eyes of the law and we all should have an equal say. This is the 'end of politics' envisioned by UKIP's Douglas Carswell:

Douglas Carswell, a British member of parliament, likens traditional politics to HMV, a chain of British record shops that went bust, in a world where people are used to calling up whatever music they want whenever they want via Spotify, a popular digital music-streaming service.

For Carswell, political systems of representative democracy are legacy systems, clunky, unresponsive, corrupt and not well-liked. We need, Carswell would argue, to embrace technology to create an iDemocracy filled with referendums, instant consultations and dispersed decision-making. It isn't democracy that is failing and out-of-date but the institutions of representative democracy - parliaments, parties, election days and preening politicians. Release democracy from these constraints and it will flourish, will once again capture Rousseau's 'general will' as the flow of information from and between people allows a fluid, data-driven iGovernment.

But is it so simple? Here's John Naughton reviewing historian Yuval Noah Harari’s new book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow:

...modern society is organised round a combination of individualism, human rights, democracy and the free market. And each of these foundations is being eaten away by 21st-century science and technology. The life sciences are undermining the individualism so celebrated by the humanist tradition with research suggesting that “the free individual is just a fictional tale concocted by an assembly of biochemical algorithms”.

We don't have to accept Harari's argument to recognise that, as every science fiction reader will tell you, for every optimistic technological future there's a frightening dystopia. Carswell's web-enabled democracy sits at odds to Harari's world - one more like H G Wells 'Time Machine' than a happy world of progress. Using that metaphor of nineteenth century technology beloved of so many tech writers, Harari depresses us with:

“the train of progress is again pulling out of the station – and this will probably be the last train ever to leave the station called Homo sapiens. Those who miss this train will never get a second chance. In order to get a seat on it, you need to understand 21st century technology, and in particular the powers of biotechnology and computer algorithms.”

So which is it to be, Harari's world of Morlocks and Eloi or Carswell's liberated world filled with empowered citizens actively engaged in the new democracy through a new politics? Cynics, the wise ones at least, will recognise in Harari's world the realisation of that part of post-democracy we'd call technocracy. This is government by experts informed by ever more sophisticated 'Big Data' analyses. A world where there is no ideology merely data-driven answers to questions posed by the experts. A world where, if Harari and many others are right, the expert won't even be human. Public opinion plays no role in this decision-making other than as one imput to the expert system.

What we have is Hari Seldon's psychohistory, the idea that everything can be boiled down to a set of equations - algorhithms as we'd call them today:

“It is the first lesson you must unlearn. The Seldon Plan is neither complete nor correct. Instead, it is merely the best that could be done at the time. Over a dozen generations of men have pored over these equations, worked at them, taken them apart to the last decimal place, and put them together again. They’ve done more than that. They’ve watched nearly four hundred years pass and against the predictions and equations, they’ve checked reality, and they have learned.”

Although part of me suspects Gordon Dickson's Final Encyclopaedia is a better analogy, the lesson here is that there's just too much to know, that every model is a simplification and every trawl through 'Big Data' only touches a tiny part of the potential evidence. For all its wonders, technocracy does not provide the answers - the more we know, the more we're aware of what we don't know (unless, of course, you're a macroeconomist). And technocracy without democracy gets uncomfortably close to fascism even though its advocates do not see this problem and persist with ideas like basic income, depoliticised public services, industrial strategies and the belief that the economy can be directed from a room in the central bank.

There are two distinct responses to the EU referendum result. One is to reject the idea of referendums - to put Carswell's iDemocracy firmly back in its tin and screw the lid down really tightly. The other is to observe that the experts - the technocracy - were out-of-touch, unable to express their understanding other than through a patronising appeal to authority: "I'm an expert and you should therefore agree with me". The experts were not 'of the people' and, if the direction of technogical advance Harari describes is rights, future experts may not be people at all.

All this takes us back to Sam Bowman's quote where he rejects democracy in favour of "liberty and prosperity" and expresses the liberal view that his next-door neighbour (stupid or otherwise) should not have any power over his life. In some ways this libertarian viewpoint isn't set out often enough. Anyone who took an introductory course in political science will have pondered the essential conflict between freedom and democracy. Most usually this is dealt with by adopting the constitionalist view that liberties enshrined in law act as a check on the essential tyranny of democracy - the 55-45 or 52-48 problem.

By accepting liberties, whether we call them constitutional or human rights, our liberal democracy qualifies democracy and, as S E Finer put it, recognises that government is limited, society is pluralistic and that there is no "objective science of society or of morals". I take this as meaning that, when the chips are down, liberty trumps democracy. Just because you've 50% plus one behind you doesn't mean you can run me out of town on a rail. Nor, as Bowman hints, can you take decisions that damage my interests especially if they cause me harm.

The problem is that, while we nod in the direction of liberty, when faced with its realities we favour democracy. We see this in the debate around what is called "hate speech", in the French government banning the burka, and in a host of interventions designed to promote order at the expense of pleasure (because the majority disapprove of that particular pleasure). Perhaps because of its essential nature, our politics shouts more loudly about democracy than about freedom meaning that, too often, we lose the core idea of a government limited by the exercise of that freedom.

This, in a roundabout way, gets us to the problem with Sam Bowman's decision to vote to stay in the EU. As I noted at the start, we're not really concerned with the rights and wrongs of that vote but the real issue is whether the EU is liberal or technocratic. Bowman suggests the former because the institution insists on free movement of people and prevents the use of tax receipts to subsidise private business (there may be other examples but these are the two Bowman cites).

The problem is that these examples may not be the consequence of a commitment to freedom but rather a happy correlation between technocracy and liberalism. Such correlations are - as this note from Noah Smith tells us - pretty rare. Smith sets out a series of things he calls "free-market ideology" that, on reading, are all central elements of the currently dominant technocratic view - the weight of regulation's touch, the faux-privatisation of public services, public-private health systems and controlling monopolies. What matters isn't whether Smith is right but rather that he identifies the flaw in the technocratic ideal that 'Big Data' and the prophets of evidence-based policy have promised.

Bowman proposes supporting an undemocratic technocracy because, currently, it protects some freedoms he values. In the context of the recent referendum this makes sense - UK government is not significantly less technocratic except that, unlike the EU, it is more susceptible to democracy. And right now that democratic pressure is populist, it is Bowman's 'stupid next-door neighbour' demanding that something is done about the demons (and their witches) that infect our society. The result being the moral of Thurber's ' Very Proper Gander':

Anybody who you or your wife thinks is going to overthrow the government by violence must be driven out of the country.

Right now the main reason for having democracy is the scale of government and that this government does not respond to free choices made in a free market. In the UK government spends about £4 in every £10, it is a behemoth that dominates our society and economy simply because of its size. In other liberal democracies the governmental whale is even larger. We can, and rightly do, celebrate Tax Freedom Day when we start earning for ourselves not the government but this doesn't change the fact that the only brake on the desire of government to grow larger is the existence of democracy.

Until we are able to realise that those things we assume can only be provided by government - schools, roads, hospitals, drains, welfare - don't have to be provided by government, we need to keep that democracy and accept that sometimes Sam Bowman's neighbours get too much say over Sam's life. This is probably wrong but, until the case for libertarianism and a voluntary society is accepted, we really have no other way of keeping the Mr Creosote that is government from overeating.

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It's not for the left to decide what is freedom

Freedom... we're talking bout your freedom
Freedom to choose what you do with your body
Freedom to believe what you like
Freedom for brothers to love one another
Freedom for black and white
Freedom from harassment, intimidation
Freedom for the mother and wife
Freedom from Big Brother's interrogation
Freedom to live your own life...

A chunk of lyrics from Tom Robinson's 'Power in the Darkness', a song that became a sort of anthem for Rock Against Racism and the birth - or was it a rebirth - for Britain's cultural left. And, you know, I can't disagree with a word in that mantra, that statement of freedoms. As a child of '70s South London the events and culture of Rock Against Racism couldn't be avoided - at school badges sprouted, the radio echoed to a different set of musical sounds, there was a strut about Brixton, West Norwood and Crystal Palace that hadn't been there before.

Yesterday I went to the opening at Bradford's Impressions Gallery of an exhibition of Syd Shelton's photographs of the Rock Against Racism days along with my friend and former colleague, Huw Jones, who sort of famously features in the exhibition as (in his words) the 'token white' in the world's only Asian punk band - Alien Kulture. Now bear in mind that I'm a Tory, indeed I joined the Conservative Party as a teenager in 1976 almost in the teeth of this anti-establishment rock and roll sentiment. Even now, in an audience of now older Rock Against Racism aficionados I'm pretty much an exception. So Sid Shelton can - albeit a little hesitantly - include the Conservative Party in the parade of today's wrongness and racism.

All of which takes me to those lyrics and why they matter to me. Too often we forget that freedom - free speech and free choice - is central to our idea of civilisation. Indeed we trap ourselves in mealy-mouthed justifications of restrictions of speech or choice, always for good reasons never simply to oppress. It's not just concepts like 'hate speech', safe spaces or no platform but also the idea of preventing imports, the demonising of free enterprise and the banning of others' pleasures because we deem them unpleasant, unhealthy or unsightly.

Speech is central to this and we live in a society where the desire to prevent other voices is at risk of being institutionalised. Just as back in the 1970s the voices of black and Asian minorities weren't heard (and still fight for space), today there's a voicelessness about what some call the 'traditional working class'. Don't get me wrong, there's still plenty of racism out there (and that 'traditional working class' is no averse to a bit of it) but there's also a sense of a new excluded group - that 'traditional working class'.

In its slightly clunky sociologist way, The Guardian has spotted this problem. Here's Lisa McKenzie (whose from the same Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire mining communities where my grandfather started life) talking about the issues:

Over the past 30 years there has been a sustained attack on working-class people, their identities, their work and their culture by Westminster politics and the media bubble around it. Consequently they have stopped listening to politicians and to Westminster and they are doing what every politician fears: they are using their own experiences in judging what is working for and against them.

In the last few weeks of the campaign the rhetoric has ramped up and the blame game started. If we leave the EU it will be the fault of the “stupid”, “ignorant”, and “racist” working class. Whenever working-class people have tried to talk about the effects of immigration on their lives, shouting “backward” and “racist” has become a middle-class pastime.

This analysis - reflecting the patronising, dismissive, even uncomfortable response of us middle-class professionals (regardless of our politics) to that traditional working class - cuts close to the bone of the issue. We don't talk about why boys from a white working class background do worst at school and are least likely to go to university, we don't look at how angry many of these pretty ordinary Britons feel left behind and we don't ask the impact of ignoring their culture in favour of a mish-mash of the elite's Britishness with assorted imported cultures. The idea of Englishness is seen as a problem - we are perhaps the only place where many observers see flying the national flag as an act of racist provocation or, in some ways worse, being ignorant and common.

As many readers will know, I have pretty liberal views on immigration but even I can see why many ordinary people are agitated by it. Yes some of the ways in which it's discussed can sound racist but get underneath that and you'll find a real set of concerns that have little to do with a fear of foreigners - frets about homes and schools, worries over jobs, the loss of community facilities like the pub and the post office, isolation, bad policing and a sort of feeling that lots is being done for some other people and nothing for you and yours.

Although Rock Against Racism started with the thoughts of mostly white middle class musicians, anger at the racism of the music establishment, it opened the door to a bunch of working class performers and, in the Ska revival, the first black-white musical fusion (as opposed to appropriation) since the height of the jazz era. It's right that we recall what happened back then but we also need to heed the words from Power in the Darkness and raise the banners of freedom again. Not just in the continuing opposition to racism but in liberating ordinary people from the oppression of the modern state with its nannying, its obsession with supposed anti-social behaviour, its demonising of pleasure and its desire to police your speech, your movement and your choices.

What I object to in all this is that Tom Robinson's presentation of freedom deliberately excludes the right in politics. Millions of ordinary people who will all put their marker down as supporters of freedom and choice are told by the left that their idea of freedom has no place because that freedom includes expropriation of assets, the belittling of wealth and success, and the sustaining of the state as an agent of oppression through advocating punitive taxation.

I'll stand side-by-side with anyone opposing racism, supporting gay rights or making the case for free speech. But when people want to deny the freedom to succeed, to limit the availability of pleasure and to attack the choice that's central to our consumer society then I'll be on the other side of the barricade defending liberty from attack. And when - as we see from the middle-class left time and again - you're dismissive, rude or condemning of the words some ordinary Briton expresses, when you seek to close down what they say because it offends you, then you have become the enemy of freedom. An enemy of the ideals Tom Robinson set out in those lyrics I quoted.

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You want less corruption? You need smaller not bigger government for that.

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This is what we must guard against yet is exactly what those who take the 'who will build the roads' line on government.




Government must be limited - in its size and in its powers - to prevent it becoming a protection racket for the select few, for the connected and powerful. I am always aghast when I see those concerned with corruption who see the solution in giving more power to politicians and the officials they appoint. They attack those like me who believe in small government and are blind to how the rules, taxes and controls they love are meat and drink to the powerful.

If you want a fairer society, if you want a less corrupt society then you should reject the idea of big government, high taxes and constricting regulation. Support freedom not authority folks.

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The problem with Jeremy Corbyn is his values not just his policies

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So what is my problem with Jeremy Corbyn asks the wise man? Why, when I normally eschew personal criticism, do I focus so much on Corbyn's image and rhetoric rather than the substance of his policies?

I thought I'd try and explain that it's a matter of values. Rather than posting this picture and article, I'll explain that Corbyn's personal values embrace violence, reject personal freedom, oppose choice and reject individual responsibility.

Vicariously enjoying violence is not an unusual trait in politicians (from right and left) and especially male politicians. Whether it's the image of "a ballot paper in this hand and an Armalite in the other", Mussolini's fetishing of uniforms or John McDonnell's 'colourful use of language', politicians like violence. We're forever "attacking", "fighting for", and proposing "wars against".

What is especially galling about Corbyn is that, while embracing Sinn Fein/PIRA and assorted violent men from the middle east, he claims that this revelling in violent politics is done for the cause of 'peace', to 'stop war'. Such posturing is excusable in a 20 year-old student activist but demonstrates a sad lack of maturity in a 65 year-old professional politician aspiring to national leadership. Yet Corbyn has shown - right up to today - that his values embrace political violence and make no distinction between this and legitimate acts of self-defence by recognised nation states.

But then Corbyn also fails to recognise the idea of individual freedom:

Corbyn says that he supports the repeal of the anti-union laws introduced in the 1980s (“Yes, I do”) , which prohibited flying pickets and solidarity strike action.

This includes the reintroduction of the closed shop - the acme of collectivist systems - and (back to his relationship with violence) the sort of intimidation we saw all too often prior to the protections granted by those union laws.

Increasingly, those branded “scabs” by the strikers were targeted both at work and at home: windows were smashed, paint thrown at doors, some were even assaulted in the street. One who defied the pickets to go into Hawthorn coke works told The Northern Echo: “The more intimidation I get, the more determined I will be to stand up to them.”.

The message - one Corbyn still endorses - is that if you reject the 'collective will', you will be intimidated, pressured and attacked for that decision. If, and it seems they are, these are Jeremy Corbyn's values and the values of his sort of Labour Party I feel entirely justified in criticising.

And Corbyn's collectivism leads to him also rejecting choice and responsibility:

... Corbyn was one of first MPs to call for a smoking ban (in 1989). He has demanded ‘education and regulation’ — including bans on adverts — to try to wean British kids off junk food. He sees mankind as a pox on the planet (humans are ‘obscene, perverted, cruel, uncivilised’, said a parliamentary motion he signed).

This viewpoint - that we are blowing around in the hurricane of international capitalism incapable of making real choices or controlling our lives - is a common one on the left (and not so left) but when it is wedded to collectivist groupthink and the celebrating of political violence it forms a value system verging on the evil. And I know that is a strong word but if you think violence in the prosecution of political ends is fine, reject the idea of humans as individuals with free will and promote the idea that we are all victims of a shadowy entity called 'capitalism' or 'neoliberalism' then I struggle to think of a better word.

It doesn't matter how soft spoken you are, how nice your allotment is or which football team you can exchange banter about, if your values reject freedom and rejoice in violence I will have a problem with you. I hope - for the sake of the Labour Party and British democracy - that Corbyn's values, expressed again and again through his four decades as an activist and MP, turn out to be just words. But until this is demonstrated, I shall condemn those values and the man who espouses them.

But to return to the Brighton bomb. I have friends who were there that day. And while I understand the need to find peace and sustain that peace, I cannot find it in my heart to excuse murdering people in a political cause or people who acted as useful idiots and cheerleaders for those undertaking that political violence.

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Trolls (both kinds) are both necessary and important

Trolls (non-internet version)

A bunch of people who have a platform to say what they want (and mostly don't) have decided that we need something akin to an ASBO for Twitter:

A group of MPs has called for people spreading abuse on social media websites to be slapped with an 'internet Asbo' which would ban them from using Facebook and Twitter.

Introducing such a scheme would make it open season on anybody sailing close to the wind - what starts with 'anti-semitism' soon becomes 'Islamaphobia' then slowly extends to people who say the wrong things about women or think it just fine to hunt and kill foxes. Particular attention will be paid to people who are 'anonymous' with much prurient chuntering about 'vile, internet trolls' and so forth.

Nothing is served by this process. The law is pretty clear on threats, racism and homophobia, there really isn't any need to extend this to encompass some sort of ban (a frankly unenforceable ban as it happens) on people using social media because they said the wrong sort of stuff.

So without wanting to labour the point, here's why anonymous internet trolls are important:

He runs a Facebook and Twitter account in Persian using a fictional character to parody the religious politics of Iran's imams and mullahs. BBC Trending spoke to the man behind Ayatollah Tanasoli - which can be translated as "Ayatollah Genitals" or "Ayatollah Penis."

Tanasoli has 20,000 likes on Facebook and 7,000 followers on Twitter - not enormous numbers but significant for Iran, where many people are afraid of openly aligning themselves with scathing satire and criticism.

How long do you think this man could do this if - as some of our MPs think - they shouldn't be allowed to stay anonymous on social media? Perhaps those ayatollahs, famed as they are for tolerance and understanding, would just laugh off the lewd micky-taking from Tanasoli. Or more likely he'd find himself languishing in jail awaiting one of the creatively vicious punishments the ayatollahs are wont to enjoy?

So next time you're "offended" be a "troll", stick to crying or moaning and try to avoid calling for them to be banned, locked up and punished. Even in our (supposedly) open and liberal democracy having folk who sit behind the mask of anonymity and tell us we've got no clothes on is an essential part of the freedom that we cackle on about so much. Let's grow a pair and keep it that way, eh?

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“As civilization becomes more and more complex, individual freedom is more and more restricted.”

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Not a new quotation there but one from Benito Mussolini that Joel Kotkin cites in writing about what might be called the new authoritarianism. Joel makes one really telling observation about modern government:

When liberals abandon liberal principles, we lose one of the most important brakes on expanding central power. As we can see already in California and other places, decisions on virtually everything about how we live – from transportation, to housing and, most particularly, how we generate energy – are increasingly being made not by our elected representatives but through the administrative bureaucracy. The notion of “checks and balances,” of getting buy-in from the opposition and dissenters in your own party, means little to those who have found the “truth” and are determined to impose it on everyone else.

Here in Europe we are familiar with this process - I've called it the new fascism in the past, others call it technocracy but it is essentially taking us away from the idea of plural democracy and towards the world of Plato's guardians. I note also that Tim Worstall writes on the same point too:

There’s a reasonably common worldview out there, I think it would be fair to say this of Ezra Klein and the crew over at Vox, of the New York Times editorial board, that if we put all the bright people in government and then they told us what to do that the world would be a better place. 

As Kotkin put it, the liberals have abandoned liberal principles. They cannot countenance the idea that voters might reject their carefully crafted solutions to the perceived problems of modern civilization and create systems that remove democratic accountablity from government and replace it with the authority of the expert. This problem is not a problem just of the left - we see the same technocratic approaches from the British Home Office, in the creation of business-led local partnerships and in the exclusion of effective democratic oversight from important areas of public administration. There has always been a preference for the backroom fix in much of government but what we now see is that fix becoming institutionalised.

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Values? The one that really matters is freedom...

Queueing for bread - socialist values in action

This is a pretty typical framing of a left wing values statement - from Julian Dobson:

And that brings us back to values. Do we want a society that turns competitiveness into a totem, blames individuals for social problems and judges success on earnings and rates of return? Or are we looking for something more inclusive and creative, places that recognise the value generated by people’s imagination and relationships and passion for the common good? 

And the typical slightly green, middle-class leftie will feel a little shudder of affirmation through the bones at this statement. Absolutely, our lefty might say, this statement clearly separates the uncaring, individualist from the caring, sharing collectivist. They might add little mutterings about 'trickle down' or 'profits' before smiling again as the high plateau of collaborative, cooperative glory comes into view.

The problem with all this is that it is a delusion, a deliberate self-deception. All this enthusiasts for ending the dark and evil neo-liberal world and ignorant of its central truth - that far more than the state-directed, protectionist systems our caring lefties aspire to create, free market systems are absolutely about inclusion, creativity, passion value generation, imagination and mutual benefit. The secret lies in that magic word 'free' and it is all that freedom that gave us the wealth to ponder such matters as 'values'.

Once the matter of values was something for priests and philosophers. Most ordinary people - and this still stands for a great deal of today's world - were way too busy keeping body and soul together to bother about what it all meant. Then something happened. It wasn't a planned economy, it was a spark of liberty that set us free. And we became free because the trap of subsistence was removed, we could lift our head up from the daily drudge and think about those values, about what we thought the world should be like.

And the match that ignited those flames of freedom wasn't a law, it was capitalism, the liberal enlightenment that opened up trade and allowed business to innovate, to create and to transform - in just a few decades - the entire world.When the likes of Julian Dobson paint free markets in negative terms, when they demonise the idea of choice by talking about competition as a negative, and when they dismiss individual material success as somehow distasteful or exploitative, what these people do is build a mighty man of straw, a grand lie.

This lie is essential to socialism - without that mighty straw man representing capitalism's sins the logic of the left collapses into the terrible reality of a place where people queue for seven hours to buy some flour and some milk. This, rather than sunlit uplands, is the consequence of that focus on the "common good" - for there is no common good other than that determined by the interactions, transactions and exchanges of the people. And the best way to get those mutual benefits isn't through committees, co-operatives and regulations but through free exchanges in a free market. That is why the left must make a demon of liberty because they can't admit that free choice, free exchange and free speech is the best road to a good society, to a place where those values they prattle on about are met for everyone.

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Freedom or security? Is this really the choice?

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It's OK folks, I'm not going to recycle that Ben Franklin quote but you'll all have noticed that the government, the possible next government and perhaps the last government too (not to mention governments in Europe and the USA) are all very keen to tell you that them having the power to stick their neb into any and every part of our lives is necessary for reasons of 'national security'.

You see, dear reader, some British people have decided that living in Birmingham or Billericay is dull and have headed off to Syria or some other part of the middle east to join in the excitingly murderous civil wars going on round there. These young folk are, in the jargon of today, "radicalised" and represent a serious existential threat to our civilisation and to that nebulous but convenient thing, 'national security'.

"It is the first duty of government to protect our national security and to act quickly when that security is compromised. As events in Iraq and Syria demonstrate, now is not the time to be scaling back on our ability to keep our people safe."

Now I rather understand why Prime Ministers are wont to say this sort of thing - after all when there is some sort of terrorist incident they're the ones who have to front up the government's response and deal with the media's inevitable "you didn't do enough" line.  And there are some British people fighting out there in the middle east who may well return to the UK puffed up with their radicalised ideas ready to do terrible things. It's not clear how many there are out there - some reports suggest 700 and other reports also suggest that a couple of hundred or so are already back in the UK.

So it seems eminently sensible for the security forces to keep an eye on these chaps so as to make sure they aren't up to nefarious stuff that threatens our security. This is what we employ spies to do, I think. But those spies have all the powers and systems they need to keep tabs on a relatively small number of dodgy radicalised men who've been out to Syria on some sort of jihad. I don't see how the ability to monitor people who have done nothing wrong and are doing nothing wrong adds to our security.

This intrusion makes us less secure. It doesn't make us safer from the terrorist or the murderer but it provides government with the means to interfere in the lives of innocent people. This is the world of micro-chipped waste bins, covert surveillance of parents, the use of anti-social behaviour orders to effect social control and the preference for the banning of anything that makes the police or security services have to do their core job of protecting us.

We are less secure because an ever widening collection of anonymous officials can order investigations, gather data and take action to enforce a mountain of controls and regulations. Everything from the smoking ban in pubs and the use of curfew orders on drinking through to legislation on speech that is so broadly written as to allow the authorities to arrest almost anyone on whatever pretext they want. And all this intervention in our lives is done to protect us, to prevent offence and to make sure that we all comply with the latest iteration of equalities-speak dreamt up by those with an interest in extending its scope.

For sure the government won't be earwigging you calling the local kebab shop for a delivery of doner and chips. Nor will they be routinely opening your post or giggling at your inane text messages. But they are giving themselves the power to do these things should they wish to. All on the basis of 'national security', a term so ill-defined as to place little or no limit on the scope of the security services and police.

If we are to have changes to surveillance rules and to give secret agencies powers to make greater use of such powers then this needs to be accompanied by two other significant additions - much greater openness and transparency from the security agencies and strong guarantees of free speech in legislation. Conducting a review of laws created for a pre-internet age does make some sense but this should not be undertaken without a wider public understanding of what any new rules might mean. Simply saying something akin to "look at the scary terrorist man with a beard" as the basis for new rules isn't right and gives me little comfort that my freedoms - especially my right to an opinion you may disagree with - will be protected.

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Freedom, choice, Nigel Farage and the unpleasantness of The Guardian

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The nannying fussbuckets have been in full cry what with plain packs, banning smoking on hospital grounds and the, almost certainly untrue, estimate that 600 children a day start smoking. Indeed the good thinking folk who advocate that public health is good for us are bouncing around all chipper as government slips down the slope to a controlled, constrained and, incidentally, crime-filled future of health intervention.

This brings me to an especially unpleasant piece of ad hominem in The Guardian. Don't get me wrong, I think Nigel Farage has become something of a self-parody, a sort of avatar for the pub know-all but this attack is unpleasant and incorrect in equal measure:

Nigel Farage's cigarettes are often depicted as one of the most appealing things about him. To date, his deployment of crafty or, occasionally, cheeky ciggies, while all around him conform to public health advice, has been a remarkably well-received token of his libertarian vision.

So the article begins, continuing in this vein with the author (in her left-wing nastiness) seeking to imply that not only does Nigel want us all to die but that this is the essence of 'libertarianism'. The word is used in almost every paragraph until the author realises her argument is pretty thin and decides to deepen it by invoking 'Godwin's Law'  - suggesting that Nigel is really a 'fascist' (on the basis of a couple of uncorroborated stories about his youth).

What depresses me most isn't that The Guardian is publishing an attack on Nigel Farage that is so shallow as to be almost dried up but that the basis of this attack is that he is a libertarian. Not just because - as his party's policies on immigration and gay marriage show - Nigel is anything but a 'libertarian' but because the author suggests that there is something terrible about a belief in personal choice.

And this is the divide. The Guardian and its friends (that, in this matter, include The Daily Mail) do not believe in personal choice and personal consequence. They believe - completely without evidence - that the dark evil of Big Tobacco, The Drinks Industry, The Food Industry and their accomplices in Advertising are combining to force children into smoking, drinking and eating the sort of food a Guardian reader would never allow in the house (far too common).

The truth of this is that Nigel Farage thinks you should be able to drink, eat and smoke legal products without being ostracised, taxed to the hilt or banned. However, he doesn't think people should be able to marry who they wish or that freedom includes free movement.

The Guardian, on the other hand is fine on the marrying bit but doesn't think working-class people are able to make choices about drinking smoking or eating and should be told what to do. The Guardian is also opposed to free movement - especially in Cuba.

Given a forced choice, I'd back Nigel over The Guardian. But there must be a better choice than between 'nanny knows best' social democracy and the slightly xenophobic world vision of Nigel Farage? I read and hear people saying the right things - some right, some left, some muzzy middle - about choice and freedom (that they are rights not privileges granted us by some benign authority) but see too little of this arriving in public policy. There I just see more reasons to interfere with choice and freedom, more of the man in Whitehall knowing best, more regulation, more tax.

And the result is less choice, less freedom, less opportunity and more poverty.

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...they do want the government to fix prices in their favour though...

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We believe in freedom of speech and artistic expression. We don’t believe in mindless censorship.

This is the wonderful Brew Dog, of course, speaking about the Advertising Standards Authority. So it's a shame that their view on minimum pricing is so illiberal and self-serving:

The proposals will mean that the multi-national corporate hammerheads no longer allowed to discount their liquid cardboard to embarrassingly pathetic levels it will act to level the playing field in the off trade. Craft brewers can’t, and shouldn’t, discount their beers and sustain losses. With less of a price differential now in the off trade between industrial and craft beer it will be far easier for the consumer to trade up to awesome craft brews

So much for believing in choice and freedom (although I love the beer).

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The proposals will mean that the multi-national corporate hammerheads no longer allowed to discount their liquid cardboard to embarrassingly pathetic levels it will act to level the playing field in the off trade. Craft brewers can’t, and shouldn’t, discount their beers and sustain losses. With less of a price differential now in the off trade between industrial and craft beer it will be far easier for the consumer to trade up to awesome craft brews. - See more at: http://www.brewdog.com/blog-article/brewdog-backs-minimum-pricing#sthash.gFpG6bsC.dpuf

“We believe in freedom of speech and artistic expression. We don’t believe in mindless censorship.
Read more at http://www.thedrum.com/news/2013/07/24/brewdog-responds-asa-those-mother-fukers-don-t-have-any-jurisdiction-over-us#0zmcl8rJoPq3WzuD.99