BBRU lurches back to life in 2011.

 

The great drama of our time is the moral, political and psychological battle around the limits (or not) on collectivist action as expressed through formal state power. Most postings submitted to BBRU bear on this in one way or the other:

 

Either the state should be doing more (or less), or whatever it’s doing it’s doing badly. And where lies the scope for simple private teamwork to solve problems? Is there any ‘private’ space at all these days anyway? What about personal responsibility? If you have a problem, should the state snap into action to solve it? And whatever outcome you favour, who pays for it - and how?

 

Let’s start this time with the links to writing on overtly ‘feminist’ themes, many uneasily pessimistic where the human condition is concerned.

 

Thus FemAcadem, who indeed blogs in a confused, exploratory feminist kinda way but makes a solid point in looking at the lurid reporting of murders of attractive young women:

 

This fetishisation of female victims of violence is not only objectifying and insulting to women, it can also have negative effects on male victims of crime, whose suffering is often ignored by the media and the public – they’re apparently just not sexy enough.

 

Cath Elliott (inter alia unapologetic feminist, and a trade union activist) once again has too much to say for herself when analysing the (for her) vile rapist intent of a man who ‘initiates sex’ when his girlfriend is asleep. Is she saying that if the girlfriend ‘initiates sex’ when the man is asleep, she too is committing a criminal offence? Boo. Hiss.

 

Kate Smurthwaite seems to think that the state is obliged to send the police straight out every time a woman feels uneasy after dark. But maybe they were already busy protecting women under the 2008 Criminal Justice and Immigration Act (s.63) which makes it an offence to possess any "explicit and realistic" image that depicts certain violent or life-threatening acts in what is deemed to be a sexual context. As the UK’s smartest blogger Heresy Corner points out, don’t carry clips from old Hammer horror films around on your iPhone in happy modern Britain or you can get arrested:

 

… stills taken from a Hammer film - to say nothing of more recent (and much more realistic) mainstream horror - even if passed by the BBFC might well form the basis of a prosecution if the police or CPS believe that the picture or sequence was extracted "for the purpose of sexual arousal".

Should circles of women green activists be, hem, penetrated rather too deeply by undercover (sic) police spies? A very British Dude firmly says no – it’s not fair on the policemen concerned to subject them to such ghastly dangers.

 

And what about the state’s ingenious ways of getting people on a Sex Offender’s register when they have done nothing of a sexual nature?

 

Almost nothing sums up the state v individual battle more than the issue of drugs. Some former state police professionals oppose the whole ‘war against drugs’ thing. Devil’s Kitchen pores over the rival arguments, to reach a terse conclusion:

 

It is not the state's job to tell me what I may or may not do with my own body, you authoritarian bastard! It is my body, not yours.

The state wisely nags us to use public transport to help save the planet. Hurrah! Yet somehow the result is unpleasantly overcrowded trains in a badly run system.

 

And so we turn with a sigh to bloggers who write directly about British Politics. Collectivists v The Rest – battle is joined.

 

Is the core issue that we all are just not innately left-wing enough, so the collectivists grab state institutions and use force to bludgeon us into submission? Extreme (but not fanatical) Stumbling and Mumbling thinks so:

 

The brute fact is that there is no public demand for liberal socialist policies. Voters don’t want worker ownership, a citizens’ basic income, a liberal immigration policy, steeper inheritance taxes or many other items on the left’s wish list. I’ll grant that there is some demand for higher taxes on the rich, but I fear this is arises less from socialist ideals than from the same motive as hostility towards paedophiles and immigrants - a hatred of people who are different.

 

Counting Cats likewise fears that we are Doomed unless we can free ourselves from collectivist control of education.

 

After lamenting Australia’s floods Brian Barder (always there for us to defend unpopular causes) comes out in favour of Ed Balls:

 

It’s hard to think of any front-rank politician better qualified by forensic skills, economic expertise, and practical experience at the centre of power, to expose these monumental Tory-LibDem lies than Ed Balls.  The lies must be comprehensively exposed and the fundamental dishonesty, the breath-taking opportunism, of the liars brought home to the electorate, if Labour is ever to regain the respect for economic competence that it had earned and deserved during more than a decade in office…. 

 

Well, it’s a view. If you want to expose supposed lies, opportunism and fundamental dishonesty, bring in a true expert. Maybe one reason why Liberal Conspiracy is leaving the Labour Party – let everyone else in that shameful organisation follow this fine example.

 

Here is Brian back on safer dry ground, casting a beady professional eye over the latest so-called revelations about Labour/Libya/Megrahi:

It’s a sound rule of diplomacy not to make demands of another government which have no prospect whatever of succeeding; such demands can only give the impression of misjudgement and misunderstanding on the part of the demandeur.

There’s lots of advice for Ed Miliband these days. The Daily Maybe peers into the darkness:

 

So mist like is his appearance that you see the Coalition forces growing more and more disconcerted at the lack of opposition. Like children camping they can't work out if there's a monster out there or not. They turn on their torches, they start at a snapping twig, they start to argue, "Look, there is no Labour Party, it doesn't exist!" The other child starts crying, "Labour are out there and they're going to eat us raw!"

 

Retro Woman gushes forth a mighty stream of (un)consciousness for Ed M’s benefit, part of which pertains to the curious notion of size:

 

Part of the problem is our size. We are a much smaller generation than our parents and grand parents. On the one side this is good because with population booms in the 1950s, and 1960s it has meant an overpopulation problem we are less likely to contribute to. But on a social and political side this is not good because whenever politicians have to decide whether it is better to cater to the middle aged and elderly which is a massive constituency, or to act in our best interests they will ere to the larger group of voters who have clearly forgotten how hard it is as a young person to get ahead in the world, and the ability to strike out into the world is more difficult than ever, regardless of whether one has a degree or not.  

Moving quickly on, Heresy Corner (again) demolishes the phoney and incoherent radicalism of UK Uncut:

 

Yet by choosing tax-avoidance as its Big Issue, the group expresses an abiding and paradoxical attachment to the conventional political institutions, a belief that if the state is no longer central then at least it should be, that its irrelevance is something to be regretted, because the best way to restore balance to politics and to society is to make sure that politicians get More Of Our Money.

 

What does the state do when it grabs all that money of ours? Tim Worstall reminds us of the familiar Whitehall end-of-financial-year splurge. Not to forget the outlandish cost of a new bridge in Scotland. Lone wolf Neil Craig also howls in despair at the BBC – and calls for action:

 

If somebody not only defends a licence fee prosecution of the BBC but counter sues for previous year's payments they would also be able to call a number of top executives & Trust members & make them testify, under oath, how the decisions to censor everything from the weather to NATO police's Crimes Against Humanity were taken. That opens whole new cans of worms. I suspect it would go viral online, though unmentioned by the MSM. 

 

P J Byrne wonders if it would be possible to move away from brute force and rely instead much more on voluntary contributions to collective causes:

The idea that a lumbering centralized state is necessary for the protection of the working class is the consequence of using an antiquated theory outside its proper context, of examining 21st-century problems through a 19th-century lens, and those who employ it are blinded to liberal possibilities for a fairer, freer, and more prosperous society. To be sure, though, if anything like a libertarian state is ever going to work, it will need many more people like Toby Ord.

Madsen Pirie hopes that the Coalition sticks to its supposedly radical policies.

 

Down at the so-called grass-roots, what does purposeful shared action for Big Society aims look like in real life?

 

Something like this determined attempt to save the empty Station Master’s house in Wivenhoe? Or small museums such as the obscure Church Farmhouse Museum in Hendon:

 

It costs £130,000 a year to run but attracts only 8000 visitors, which isn't seen as cost-effective by Brian Coleman and his slashing councillors. They argue that scarce funds needs to go to frontline services rather than optional heritage, and will be proposing closure at an Executive meeting on February 14th…

 

But some cuts are needed to nudge us back in the general direction of sanity:

These were the people who told us to believe in the Force Activity Survey when we all knew it was nonsense. It has since been abolished... And most grievous of all, these are the people who refused to stop spending time and resources gathering statistics for the very targets the new government abolished back in June 2010.

I am glad that the cuts will thwart their plans for real power at senior rank.

What should we (not) know about what the state is up to? Here is a thoughtful piece by Crooked Timber on Wikileaks:

 

… it is redefining the boundary between facts that ‘everybody’ (for political elite values of ‘everybody’) knows but that are non-actionable in the public space, because they are not publicly confirmable, and facts that are both perceived as politically salient and confirmable, and hence are legitimate ‘news.’

 

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Let’s wrap up with some extra brisk writing which pulls things together for us.

 

David Thompson helpfully reviews assorted ravings from the Guardian month by month in 2010.

 

Archbishop Cranmer is unimpressed with Mehdi Hasan’s assertion that Jesus was a lefty:

 

 His is a crass and superficial piece, manifesting a caricature grasp of ‘the left’ and ‘the right’, quite ignorant of Christian theology and oblivious of 2000 years of socio-political history.

 

Mark Pack writes thoughtfully about ‘smaller, simpler, faster’ and social media (with special reference to the Ark Royal) and about the Glorious Revolution of 1688: something for President Mubarak to mull over:

 

… whether or not the crucial early stage of revolutions is when the existing establishment starts to break down existing power structures in its own desire to bring about change – but thereby also opening up the possibility of a different form of change replacing the establishment.

 

And, very finally, British Dude gets right to the bottom of Australian sporting dominance. 

 

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Someone may or may not do the next BBRU. If you have any links to suggest or views on the value of the whole enterprise, please send them to britblog @ gmail dot com