D J Webb
I’ve just watched Sean Gabb’s excellent speech at http://www.libertarian.co.uk/?q=node/265
I agree fully with his comments about England in 1981, when I was 12.
Even without a full libertarian polity, going back to the way things were in 1981 would be a great advance. Thatcherism was so much better than the warmed-up Blairism we have now.
- no council tax (the rates were applied then – only paid by those who benefited from land prices)
- very few controls on speech then: the Black ‘n’ White Minstrels and Benny Hill were on the TV. The constant “offence hunt” had not established itself in the culture then
- moral panics had not become the norm: no trawling through possible sexual offences 50 years previously
- policemen seemed more honest and less aggressive to the public then
- no environmental panic
- hardly any CCTV cameras
We clearly didn’t know we were born!
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Well 1881 was quite free market (although not as free market as say 1870) – at least in Kettering which did not have a School Board till 1891 (when they became compulsory). But 1981?
The property tax (the “rates”) hit everyone – I remember my father (the owner of a small shop) being hit hard by vast increase in the rates (to help pay for the new council owned shopping centre, which competed with him, – and to rebuild it when it was found the drains were no good).
Mr Webb seems to have a Henry George (i.e. David Ricardo) view of land – that was refuted by Frank Fetter over a century ago.
As for 1981 generally……
The failure of the Mrs Thatcher government to reduce taxes and government spending in 1979 (indeed as Enoch Powell pointed out at the time – government spending and overall taxation massively INCEASED in 1979) and total failure to reform the labour market (to take back the powers government legislation, dating all the way back to 1875 and 1906 has given to the unions – but which had got much worse with later legislation and so on) had led to the world recession being much worse in Britain than in other countries – and mass unemployment.
It is quite true that later on the government of Mrs Thatcher got a grip on government spending and taxes (at least to some extent) and did do some real labour market reform – but not by 1981.
1981 was a dreadful time in Britain – a time of mass unemployment (when people who really did want to work just could not find jobs) and massive recession.
Still Mr Webb was not alive at the time – so I should not blame him too much for not knowing about the period.
On the P.C. point (or “Critical Theory” as I am told we now have to call it) – yes it was not so bad in 1981 as it is now, but Mrs Thatcher had not been able to keep the implied promise to get rid of the Thought Police (the “race relations industry” and so on).
The key date for this (the end of Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Association, as principles, in this country) was 1965.
Black and white Minstrels last shown in 1978. Thing bout 1981-the traditional boring British Sunday and limited licensing hours still there. I could,however,watch a sex film by putting a coin in the slot.
God yes, the misery of the British sunday.
I remember fully knowing real White Ethnic British Males, wearing jackets and ties and pinstripes, being part of the “KEEP SUNDAY SPECIAL” campaign. Does anyone else remember these blokes? They were really quite normal,and used to fondle women just as I did then. I wonder what happened to them?
They also would wear Barbour jackets and stuff, just as I did, then, trying to be a member of their group, perhaps to “get better women”. Perhpas the strategy was “get better women and then shops will close on Sundays” – or maybe it was “if shops close on Sundays, then you will get better women”. I do not know really.
Ian B might have an answer here, to this conundrum.
I suspect such men, who supported the KSS campaign, crawled under their stones after they got divorced and their wives took the house, the kids, and half their income and pensions. It’s actually, from a cynical point of view, a very clever way the state has had of demotivating opposition to the state. The way feminism has been implemented has literally cut the ***** from between the legs of the white male heterosexual would-be opponents of the state. Rising suicide rates among men between 30 and 49 — the highest-risk suicide group in society — reflect this too. And when people are driven to suicide, it can only mean they have been made to feel failures and cannot conceive of any way of mounting a political response. The cherry or the icing on top is that many “libertarians” support the state’s dogged promotion of novel lifestyles. The less we understand what they’re doing, the more likely they are to be successful!
Despite Paul’s points, I think 1981 *felt* considerably more free than we do now, and I think it genuinely was. One example is that back then it was still considered inappropriate for information given to one government department to be shared with others, whereas profligate sharing of and mining such data is now the norm. People at that time still used to say that old cliché “it’s a free country” without the irony that would be obligatory now. People still felt they had rights.
Regarding my own libertarian interests, it is also worth noting that censorship then- though in many ways draconian- applied to producers rather than consumers, that is it was a production or commerce offence rather than a possession offence, meaning that back then the merest allegation of sexual wrongdoing didn’t empower the police to tear your home apart and confiscate anything they chose in the search for porn they can portray as “extreme” to a court.
Then there are the money laundering laws, smoking bans (and other anti-smoker legislation) and the rest of the public health hysteria (which form of fat is verboten this year?, the anti-terrorism “security state” and militarised police force, local police patrolling pubs to prevent “vertical drinking”, ASBOs, internal exile of “suspects” who are never charged, the secret family courts, hyper-injunctions…
I cannot begin to imagine what is vertical drinking. Do you have to lie down? Do they put a funnel in your mouth then? And then you have to swallow the lot? Vertical drinking sounds scary and I don’t think I would let the State do it to me.
It means drinking standing up, which Plod thinks causes fights…
David, I had forgotten all about that speech. Many thanks for reminding me that I made it.
I agree with Ian that 1981 was, on the whole, a more free time to be alive than the present. Certainly, if you told the wrong people you were about to have a gay sex orgy, the pigs would smash your front door in. But you could have a gun. You could get diet pills out of your doctor. You weren’t watched all the time. You could deal in large amounts of cash – you could buy a new car with cash, and even a house, and no one gave you a second look. You could say almost whatever you liked about public affairs. You could smoke and drink and eat as you pleased. If you ran a business, you had to pay your taxes, and often to defer to stupid trade union bosses, but were otherwise lightly regulated. You still felt that you were living in the political order brought about in the struggles of the 17th century.
All that has now gone, mostly replaced by “rights” that are good for everything but securing your life and property against the State.
Indeed, we live nowadays in a world where technological improvement has given us the ability to make better use of a diminishing number of genuine rights. I am not sure if this will continue.
It’s a good speech. I could not help pondering while listening that our Parliamentary system seems to be rapidly plunging into absolute illegitimacy at this very time.
Er, I haven’t actually listened to it, so can’t remember what I said. I like reading what I’ve written, but hate watching and listening to myself, because I’m just so much better in writing.
On the matter you raise, I agree that we are approaching a crisis of legitimacy. Back in 1981, MHT pulled the plug out of the economy. She was hated for it, but the majority even of those affected never thought the system as a whole was thereby delegitimised. Unless they were somehow connected with Irish matters, Government Ministers went about without bodyguards – I used to watch Douglas Hurd take a morning walk in St James’ Park, not a pig in sight. The law was still mostly respected.
Next time things get bad, the authorities will have nothing to rely on but various kinds of threat.
I keep trying to write a long introduction to my revised Culture War book, but am continually diverted into more fiction. Something I eventually will discuss, however, is the total redundancy of traditionalist conservatism. Even in form, there is no longer any going back. Since 1997 – perhaps since 1979 – we have had a longer and more peaceful taste of what the French had in the early 1790s. The bonds have been snapped. Whatever comes next, once our own Jacobins have been kicked back, must be an explicitly new creation.
Yes, it seems trying to recreate the past won’t work. The monarchy, the church and even the Union itself are all well past their sell-by dates. It’s just not clear to me how you create a society without common bonds – or if you can do so by citing those bonds clearly as heritage and not as living culture.
I don’t think there’s ever any going back. The people trying to go back are different to the people who lived before, because they are products of experiences that have happened since. This is why religious or social fundamentalism always ends up as pastiche; as with the current Islamics whose attempt to return to the Islamic past is simply a Renaissance Faire with added decapitations. It’s always a matter of trying to influence where we go next.
Anyway, I may be a little too enthusiastic about the illegitimacy since I’m immersed in some lectures on the early modern period on YouTube and just last night it was the start of the Civil War. But I cannot help but see a similar crisis engulfing the Parliament at the moment, as what they have wrought with Devolution finally bites them back. I know I am prone to describe the 1640s crisis as a religious struggle, but of course another way to see it is a point where the Institutions were faced with an intractable internal contradiction over the separation of powers. Are we in such a condition where something has to give, again? I think we may be.
It is ahistorical in the extreme to compare England in the 1640s to England today. I don’t think there is anything to learn from such a comparison.
Well, we have a Puritan infested Parliament, for a start…
🙂
No, we don’t. It is ahistorical to compare the Puritans of the 17th century with anyone in England today. In fact, what we have is a Parliament full of people whose views are almost diametrically opposed to those of the Puritans of the 17th century, but after a gap of nearly four centuries, it would be unusual to expect too many links in political views.
I disagree.
The traditional family Sunday was wonderful. As I have stated, the family is right at the centre of any culture that is free from the state. In fact, we need to bring back the family Sunday.
I hated Sundays when I was a boy – nothing on telly, and greens for lunch.
Oh, but there was. Songs Of Praise and Stars On f***ing Sunday. Oh, the horror. And sunday tea, with its sad, soggy lettuce leaf always in attendance. Oh, the trauma.
Jessica Yates had his moments – especially when his extracurricular activities came to light. And don’t forget Gracie Fields, who managed to outlive her voice by about a generation.
Catching up with homework while watching John Wayne movies on the BBC…
We can do that without having to shut all physical trading down. it was such a pain: in some places you couldn’t even get petrol.
About seven years ago, the last time we drove into Wales (beautiful place) in Sunday, Wales was closed. Even the MacDonald’s in some service station that agreed to sell us some petrol, was closed. Wales is not noticeably less socialist today, or more “family-oriented” than England. In fact the reverse, I would say.
Someone has put this one up:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E60hNWURcu0
Worth a watch.
That’ll take far too long and I have to go to bed like normal people. Can anyone summarize it?
You should have been around in nineteen ‘sixty one’, then you’d have known the real England – and real freedom.The 1980s, and Thatcher, were a disaster for much of the country. You must be a southerner to have enjoyed them both.