Cameron

Any of the political parties in the UK that decides to try to ape Obama's "Change we need", "Change we can believe in" mantra from last year in their campaigns deserves to suffer the apparent fate in terms of popular disappointment their would be mentor is currently suffering.

Because people don't like liars.  And claiming you represent "change", or at least anything I would consider "change we need", whilst continuing to pursue those positions of power least capable, on incontrovertible historical evidence, of delivering anything like "change" will be lying.

There can be no "change" whilst the wheels of State rumble on.  Changing how the State is run for a few years does not alter the fundamentally evil reasons for which "State" was invented and which it continues to pursue, inevitably.

There are two fundamental laws of human survival:

First, there are two, and only two, means by which humanity collectively and humans as individuals can meet their needs for the stuff to maintain their lives.  The one is through working and trading with others the surplus of your own work to buy the additional things you don't produce for yourself.  This is called the economic means.  The other is to exploit the proceeds of others' work.  This is called the political means.  There can be no other way - you make it (or are given it voluntarily), or you take it (by force).

Second, human beings will always seek to meet their needs by the means that involves the least work, or disutility, to themselves.

Oh, and I'll add one for myself: if two wrongs do not make a right, three redoubles the evil, rather than redresses it.

The State was created in order to enable the political means of fulfilling the needs of one group by exploiting another.  It has always done this.  It continues to do this to this day.  There is no evidence in human history that it can do any other.  Against thousands of years of evidence, it is utterly futile to expect it to change, any time soon, or indeed ever.

If the first wrong was that of autocratic rulers and small groups of nobles exploiting everyone else in serfdom, and the second was that of the mercantilists and new industrialists able to exploit the workers the third is that of the so called "majority" to decide to take from one group to keep another.  It doesn't matter, for it to work it must all boil down to a simple formula - that the State believes that it has the right to all your produce and to decide in differing proportions at different times how much of it you may keep.  Whether that State claims its power by arms and status, by wealth and oligarchy, or by "democracy", the formula must be the same.

Lord Acton (he of "Power tends to corrupt") wrote that "It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority. For there is a reserve of latent power in the masses which, if it is called into play, the minority can seldom resist. But from the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason."

Nobody is promising, even remotely, "change" of that formula.

...or how, if we are to change the world, we'll need to change Oxford first.

When I were a lad and doing my "O" Levels, about the same time it would appear as messrs Cameron, Johnson, Balls, Gove, Milliband snr. and a whole host of others now in the upper echelons of government or headed that way, the clever boys, like me, did proper subjects, like classical and modern languages, physical sciences, mathematics, history and the like, whilst the tier who were never quite sure whether they would get five O Levels did economics, politics, business studies, technical drawing, European studies and woodwork.

When it came to deciding on what to apply for at university then, it is hardly a surprise that, apart from the "Philosophy" bit "Politics, Philosophy and Economics" or "PPE" as it is known at Oxford was a bit of an enigma around which we tended to steer a wide berth.  And I have to admit that to this day, whilst I understand more now about the importance of having economically literate people (but that does not necessarily mean schooled by the mainstream British economics academic establishment), I do not really understand why we "teach" politics.

It can't be for the people who really run the country, for the technocrats of course do things like languages for the diplomatic service, town and country planning for the Scottish Executive and things like classics for the mainstream civil service!  Even the City took more "real world" subject graduates as analysts and consultants or Computing and Mathematics nerds as traders.  So it was with great interest that I read this analysis of the networks of Oxford educated power now at or coming to the fore in the Times.  Of those who list their degree subjects, it runs 10:6 in favour of PPE against all other subjects combined.

Now, far be it from me to suggest that I was brighter than them.  They got in, I didn't.  The fact that I was the arrogant petulant little boy who refused all his tutors' advice to choose Theology at Worcester which might have got me a place and still been a "respectable" subject, but rather chose to try for English at New College in the first year they took women and the last year the bigger boys could come back and try the entry exams after their A levels certainly didn't help my chances.  One can't help wondering, however, if choosing PPE might have been an "easier" (none are "easy" routes to Oxford but in relative terms perhaps) option, and then where might I have been now?

But what intrigues me, given, as I say, the penchant for relegating the O Level (and subsequently A Level) in things like Politics and Economics to the second tier boys, why did so many of these folk now reaching the zenith of power choose that course?  The article in the Times to which that graphic is linked makes the point that here wasn't a group of young men plotting their way to high office, but one does have to wonder what their school careers officers had predicted for them embarking on such a discipline.  I somehow doubt that they saw themselves as potential Nobel economists!

Moreover, the worrying question for me is why on earth we seem to acquiesce in electing people like this who appear, for all the world, to have decided at the earliest stages of their lives to aim for political power?  It seems to me that if we are to have political power at all, it ought to be vested only in those who have demonstrated the least desire for it.  As Milton Friedman once put it, "[democratic] government is an institution whereby the people with the greatest drive to get power over their fellow men get into the position of controlling them".

And most worrying of all is how all these people seem to come out the same.  There may be nuances of difference between them, though it is interesting to see how some of them were what one might call political whores during their student days, chopping and changing political affiliation, or even being more than one thing at the same time.  Even today it seems quite difficult to find much to differentiate between politics and economics academe at Oxford, and elsewhere in Britain.  Have we, as Hoppe and others say, got to the point where the intellectuals in such disciplines are so captured by the prevailing statist, and even within that more or less social democratic version of statist, worldview that the cycle of political education to power and thence to a new generation of would be politicians is merely churning out the same vaguely left of centre, always collectivist mudpie that is modern political "choice"?

We certainly appear to have more Marxian influenced types in the newer universities, but we seem to have precious few, anywhere, really promoting proper, old fashioned, liberalism, classical, individualist anarchist or whatever.  Surely, if we are to break that cycle of mudpie middle of the road managerial ideology free politics we need to have people planting the seed of radicalism in our younger generation?  Or maybe that's the point - maybe, if someone has decided aged 18, that they want to know about politics and power and how to get it, they are precisely not the people who will be receptive to anything but that which gains them that power ten, twenty years down the line.  If so, it is the duty of the rest of us to deny them that power at any opportunity.

There is ... an impression that if actual recessions [as in "state power receding" not economic recessions. Ed.] do not come about by themselves, they may be brought about by the expedient of voting one party out and another one in. This idea rests upon certain assumptions that experience has shown to be unsound; the first one being that the power of the ballot is what republican political theory makes it out to be, and that therefore the electorate has an effective choice in the matter. It is a matter of open and notorious fact that nothing like this is true. Our nominally republican system is actually built on an imperial model, with our professional politicians standing in the place of the praetorian guards; they meet from time to time, decide what can be “got away with,” and how, and who is to do it; and the electorate votes according to their prescriptions. Under these conditions it is easy to provide the appearance of any desired concession of State power, without the reality; our history shows innumerable instances of very easy dealing with problems in practical politics much more difficult than that. One may remark that in this connexion also the notoriously baseless assumption that party-designations connote principles, and that party-pledges imply performance. Moreover, underlying these assumptions and all others that faith in “political action” contemplates, is the assumption that the interests of the State and the interests of society are, at least theoretically, identical; whereas in theory they are directly opposed, and this opposition invariably declares itself in practice to the precise extent that circumstances permit. However, without pursuing these matters further at the moment, it is probably enough to observe here that in the nature of things the exercise of personal government, the control of a huge and growing bureaucracy, and the management of an enormous mass of subsidized voting-power, are as agreeable to one stripe of politician as they are to another. Presumably they interest a Republican or a Progressive as much as they do a Democrat, Communist, Farmer- Labourite, Socialist, or whatever a politician may, for electioneering purposes, see fit to call himself. This was demonstrated in the local campaigns of 1934 by the practical attitude of politicians who represented nominal opposition parties. It is now being further demonstrated by the derisible haste that the leaders of the official opposition are making towards what they call “reorganization” of their party. One may well be inattentive to their words; their actions, however, mean simply that the recent accretions of State power are here to stay, and that they are aware of it; and that, such being the case, they are preparing to dispose themselves most advantageously in a contest for their control and management. This is all that “reorganization” of the Republican party means, and all it is meant to mean; and this is in itself quite enough to show that any expectation of an essential change of regime through a change of party-administration is illusory. On the contrary, it is clear that whatever party-competition we shall see hereafter will be on the same terms as heretofore. It will be a competition for control and management, and it would naturally issue in still closer centralization, still further extension of the bureaucratic principle, and still larger concessions to subsidized voting-power. This course would be strictly historical, and is furthermore to be expected as lying in the nature of things, as it so obviously does.

...twas always thus.

So, Cameron's been dallying with the rich and powerful from around the globe, giving them lectures on the new Compassionate Conservative's Critique of Corrupted Capitalism. He's obviously not heard of Briggs Armstrong, whom I highlighted earlier in the week, let alone understood the libertarian criticism of corporate welfare, influence through regulators and legislators.

Ironic really, since it seems to me that Davos is itself the supreme example of how when the power of individuals or corporations reaches a critical mass, they can get almost unlimited, and private, access to those who can make even their wildest dreams come true - governments, those territorial monopolies on the granting of privilege to those who can afford to lobby them.

No, wait, perhaps that's unfair. Maybe Dave the Decent was standing there deliberately disclaiming the whole ethos of government past and warning those boondoggling politicians and corporations that he's going to do it differently; that they should not expect to turn to a Conservative government for favourable legislation or government contracts.

The problem is, governments could no more, as DC puts it, "create vibrant, local economies" whilst wielding the very power that destroys them but drives people like him and his political elite ilk and whilst they are in hock to the very interests that want to overpower those local economies. But he makes an even more fundamental mistake, if he really believes, as he says about his travels behind the iron curtain that "democracy delivered people from half a century of despair, and capitalism - its economic agent - offered hope for a better future". Capitalism is not the agent of democracy.

Democracy, at least the vast structured remote democracy we have today is the corruptor of capitalism, the very thing that by its actions creates the problems of "markets without morality...globalisation without competition...and wealth without fairness...[that]... all adds up to capitalism without a conscience" that Dave wants to use his power to "put right".

What Cameron, and so many politicians, call "broken capitalism" is broken because of its symbiotic relationship with state power. Where the "winners have taken it all" which I would not dispute happens in spades, it is because of the barriers to competition erected over centuries by state governments favouring their own, and especially those with the means and incentive to influence them - usually those very winners.

Wherever we look in this economic crisis we see people in power wanting to tweak the prevailing system a little, despite all the evidence that it has continually failed to deliver the real competition that true free markets need to spread wealth more easily and equitably, and that when it does fail, it is those at the bottom of the pile who repeatedly pay the price. But they only want to tweak it so far. So far that they can keep most of their power, yet persuade us poor mugs they have "done something".

Cameron has one thing to say with which I agree...that "People could rise up, grab opportunities with both hands and make a better life for themselves." Okay, it wasn't a suggestion on his part, but it is on mine. Now is the time of which David Hume wrote two and a half centuries ago, the time when "rust may grow to the springs of the most accurate political machine, and disorder its motions."

It's time for change, governments and their corporate welfare pseudo-capitalism have failed us too often, we no longer need to stand up only against those who would profit from their influence, but also from those who grant that influence access to power - the state itself.

...to think that, in a few short weeks , it looks possible that party activists of all political colours will be expected to trudge the streets once again asking people to believe a lot of spin, unachievable promises and heartfelt apologies and vote for for a "change", or maybe that should just be "vote, for a change".

Actually, I tell a lie, it doesn't completely overwhelm me. Sometimes there is a little frisson of excitement at the possibility that the people of Britain might just once collectively call time on this comfy carousel of political clap-trap. Just say no! as the song went...

No, Gordon! No, Dave! No, Jack, Hillary, Harriet or whoever! No, not even you Nick!

We've had quite enough for these past decades, nay centuries, of being shunted up the gary glitter by folk who think they know better than us but whose ambitions so clearly exceed their abilities.

What would happen if we all got up one "Good Morning" Polling Day and simply voted "no"? At what point would the Westminster clique conclude they had completely lost our confidence and call a halt to their corruption and crookery? Or at what point can we refuse, with impunity, to submit to their authority?

And then, how do we create a new, bottom up, rather than up its own arse, democracy? This has much to commend it.

This posting has been a very long time in the making. In fact, as is usual, I've been more than normally ponderous about our political system since the local elections and it has prevented me doing anything else. I wanted to be careful about what I say, lest I be seen simply as having sour grapes at having lost - but I hope you will see that far from it, I am hopeful of achieving more, and for others moreover, outside the formal government structure than inside it.

I have fallen out of love with democracy; at least the corrupt, broken, power-hungry, centralizing, suffocating, nanny state, infantilizing political game we seem to have wandered into at some point.

Whether it's Labour's desperation to beat me that made them put out a leaflet that can only have been intended to damage my personal standing and reputation negligible though it may be already, the various tit-for-tat accusations that ran right through the Crewe by-election and the London mayoral elections, Westminster's divorce from the rest of the country as regards how much they get to spend of our money feathering their personal nests and how much we should know about it, it stinks.

I was watching again the "Open Minds" interview with Milton Friedman the other day and when it was put to him, as in J S Mill's formulation, that democratic government is the way in which we put good, ungreedy and unselfish people in charge to prevent bad, greedy and selfish people from taking over his response was simple: "government is an institution whereby the people with the greatest drive to get power over their fellow men get into the position of controlling them".

And who can argue, in the system we now have. The prize is enormous. Whoever lies his or her way to number 10 has the prospect of controlling nearly half of our entire national income. The mechanism of getting the top jobs is a sham - none of them in my opinion are competent to claim more wisdom than sixty million others of us that makes them able to take such a responsibility and they're only ever elected by a few thousand of those sixty million. Even in local government, tied up as it may be in red tape and Whitehall edicts, still the unscrupulous seem to make it to the top - look at Oxford Labour's own little lotacracy.

Tony Blair seemed to think he was virtually messianic, and now he believes apparently that he can solve all the world's problems now that he is no longer encumbered with such a small salary as the UK Prime Minister and the petty problems of Britain. But it doesn't matter who it is, Blair may have brought it to a head but neither Brown, Cameron, Clegg, Blair or whoever else may come next, has the capacity or competence to decide so much for so many.

And I don't think that I can suffer under this system much longer. If I was a young Muslim I'd probably be rounded up and accused of being "radicalised". Well I am radicalised. Radicalised and angry. It's a good job they've imposed a ban on unauthorized demonstrations outside of parliament, else I would hire a bunch of JCBs and lead a crowd to dismantle the Palace of Westminster stone by stone and cast its occupants into the river and hope they all wash up somewhere halfway up the Amazon where they would not be found for half a millennium - well actually I probably wouldn't, because I don't have that sort of courage, but I curse Guy Fawkes for having failed his opportunity!

In the local elections, nearly 70% of people did not vote. Even in generals, nearly 40% didn't vote last time. The Libertarian Party believes that this is a vast pool of voters who would readily switch to their, and my, image of a new Britain, with renewed freedoms and less state intervention. But I'm a Liberal, if not especially a Democrat, and my party is one of the three larger parties the LPUK blames for the lack of imagination in political discourse that has created this situation. And indeed, our regular flirtations with vaguely socialist redistribution policies rather than liberal level playing field policies, do seem to make us bed-pals with the two conservative parties trying to maintain their duopoly. Do I have to make that leap into the unknown of the Libertarian Party in order to have some hope for change? Or can I pursue change, with a reasonable hope of getting it, through a party so deeply embedded in the political "game" as the Lib Dems?

In 1745 David Hume suggested that one day we may come to the conclusion that our current system of government needs complete overhaul. I for one have reached that point. And David Hume's prescription in the "Idea of the Perfect Commonwealth" seems to me to be vastly superior to the decrepit institutions and structures we currently have to endure. I'm not sure any of the current setup is salvageable. That current setup is coercive, corrupt and centralized. It is now clear, more than ever before, as Rousseau said, "The English think they are free. They are free only during the election of members of parliament."

ID cards, the surveillance state, the lost war on drugs, the uneven playing field allowing monopolization and exploitation, drinking on the tube, detention without charge, foreign wars in support of oil hungry allies, petty bureaucrats spying on our every move, raiding our bins, taxing us through the nose. Is this what J S Mill was suggesting? Our parliamentary system was created in times when communications were difficult. Yet even then they took less power to themselves than now, when we are all a phone call or internet connection away from forging links with millions of other individuals on this planet.

The time has come for mutualism instead of representative government. People getting together either locally or in geographically dispersed interest groups focussing on particular problems in those communities. Refusing to accept that all the answers can come from a clunking fist in London or his puppets in the Town Hall.

But how do we do that, without turning spin into revolution?

And so, having linked, I may as well cite The Daily Pundit who writes about the number of NuTory candidates who were once NuLabour members. But it's not so much their political backgrounds that I want to take issue with - to me the interchangeability of such political favours merely highlights that both parties are really merely sibling subsidiaries of the post-Thatcher Managerial Clique.

No, what I'm more interested in is how a serious political party, claiming to be democrats of some sort, and on the one hand with its leader wanting to hold "public primaries" for some of its candidates, selects its candidates through some sort of appointed committee and without an all-member vote in the consitutency or jurisdiction concerned.

It's not just the successor to Doris that was selected this way, but apparently the Judas Karim for the North West Euro-Parliament list. No wonder the latter thought his chances better with the Tories if he really only needed to butter up a few committee members rather than reach out to the activists and members.

This workfair business...can anyone answer me a question:

If there are jobs that need doing, someone should be employed to do them.  Are people at the end of their two years on JSA simply being herded into compulsory minimum wage jobs then - in which case they may be miserable with the job they get but they would, by definition, no longer be on benefit?  Or would they still be getting benefit rates, just being made to "do something" (anything?) to "earn" their benefits?

Obviously I don't like this idea.  Citizens Income would solve all of this without any potential stigma that might be associated with a sort of "community service order" for benefits.  To me it all just demonstrates that there aren't really any new ideas coming out of the Tories (or anyone else for that matter!) on welfare, just that "something must be done and this is something".

So, we're going to get to hear later today what Dave means by "localism":

BBC NEWS | Politics | Tories offer votes on council tax:

Councils should hold referendums if they want to bring in "high" council tax increases, Tory leader David Cameron is due to say. If people voted against a rise, they would get a rebate the following year, he will add in a speech in east London. This would replace the current system of central government "capping" bills in England and Wales...Mr Cameron is expected to say he wants to improve "democratic accountability".

Under the plan, there would be a "trigger threshold", above which councils would have to hold a referendum. In England this would be set by Parliament, with the Welsh National Assembly deciding the level for Wales. Bills sent out to households would ask whether they supported any "excessive" increase, with a referendum form attached. In his speech in east London, Mr Cameron will say: "All politicians in opposition talk about giving more power to local councils. But all governments seem to end up centralising power.

Right - so how are we going to reverse that, I wonder? Oh yes, we'll decide at Westminster what's excessive and force local government to hold a referendum. Like that's decentralizing? Not only that, but a post hoc referendum which will, it appears, do nothing to tell a local authority what it ought and ought not to be spending money on, and after the budget is set.

It seems to me that this is a man making a bid for power on behalf of his party. Power which, in this country, will allow him more or less to do as he pleases with local government. And yet not only is he not making any visible attempt actually to do something about what he describes as and the Taxpayers' Alliance found in summer polling to be the most hated tax, but he's taking the current system and adding another layer of Westminster control over it.

Dave, it's this simple - you cannot make local government more accountable without making it raise more of its own money. The very fact that your Westminster cronies set the levels of central funding that goes to councils means that council up and down the country have to make up for shortfalls with disproportionate council tax changes. If you want to set them, and local people, free, you need to trust them to raise their money and trust local people to boot them out of power at local elections on the whole of their record.

This has got to be one of the most inept, unimaginative, populist policy pronouncements yet from Dave, displaying a fundamental misunderstanding of something he has repeatedly said is at the centre of Tory policy - localism. I do hope the speech is better than the press release.