Musings of a Libertarian

  With the dust beginning to settle on Trump's impressive political comeback across the pond and Labour's embarrassing u-turn reaction at home, we can begin the business of taking stock and looking forward to what is ahead. Unfortunately, our Libertarian namesake in the US polled poorly. A quick browse of American Libertarian social media reveals a party divided over both policy and their choice of presidential candidate. Whatever the reasons, it was clear many would-be Libertarians voted for Trump- many party members publically endorsed him. So how Libertarian is Trump? On the face of it, considerably more so than The Democrats: Harris' proposed tax hikes were truly socialist by American standards. Tim Waltz's view that the First Amendment makes allowances for government censorship of "hate speech" and "misinformation" is in itself a prime example of the latter. Harris has labelled unregulated social media as "a threat to democracy." No Ka...

Last week The Guardian proudly announced that it was leaving Elon Musk's X, citing far-right conspiracy theories and racism, because of course The Guardian would never stoop to such lows, such as publishing a cartoon of Priti Patel as a fat cow or portraying Jewish figures with enlarged noses. Instead, The Guardian is re-focusing its social media presence on Bluesky. (X for those who have a mental health crisis every time an opposing viewpoint crosses their path.) A quick search for the term "echo chamber" on the platform brings up all the predictable tropes of the censorious left, from "we're not an echo chamber, it's just some views are not worth considering" to "we are an echo chamber, but an anti-fascist echo chamber so that's OK." All naturally interspersed with references to those remaining on X as being Nazis. A veritable haven of respectful fun and joy then. In the paper's dying days on X, the Guardian labelled the Telegraph...

Taxation is theft. As Libertarians, we knew that the moment income tax or NI “contributions” were taken out of our first pay packets. There has however, at times, been some sense of “we’re all in it together,” a degree of trauma-bonding knowing that our neighbours and colleagues have all been subject to the same state-intrusion into their bank accounts. Increasingly, a number of the population have chosen to opt out of that shared trauma, safe in the knowledge that as long as there are socialists the rest of us will be forced to pay their share. The pandemic of the workshy is in full swing. There have always been, and likely always will be, those unable to work for reasons beyond their control. We hold no ill-will toward the young, the old and the infirm. It is right that they are supported as they are unable to support themselves. However, one might be forgiven for holding ill-will towards those who choose not to work. (Be careful not to be too vocal about it though, unless you want t...

  This anti-slavery day, while the Human Trafficking Foundation (HTF) was hosting awards to raise awareness of modern slavery, our foreign secretary visited Beijing. There Mr Lammy cosied up to the Chinese Communist Party- arguably the most successful authoritarian regime on Earth. Following the meeting, a foreign office statement reassured us that Lammy had raised human rights issues and the case of British citizen Jimmy Lai's detention in Hong Kong. The statement did not make any mention of Taiwan, the same week that the People's Liberation Army surrounded the island in their latest invasion drill. What the foreign office neglected to make a song and dance about was the snubbing of former Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-Wen. The British-Taiwanese all-party parliamentary group had been due to hold talks with Ing-Wen the week before Lammy's trip to Beijing, until the foreign office politely requested its postponement to next spring. So off Lammy went for his goodwill photo opp...

  In September the long arm of The Surveillance State reached Hampshire, with a "trial" of the technology in Southampton, Winchester and Basingstoke. 322,462 citizens' faces were scanned, and 7 arrested as a result. 322,462 individuals exposed to a digital police line-up without consent, labelled as potential criminals, treated as actual criminals, for the crime of walking down the high street. This dystopian nightmare is only made possible by the fact that under Sunak the Conservatives uploaded 46 million of our passport photos to a facial recognition database, again, without consent. Following this authoritarian show of force, one of the Libertarian Party's supporters in Southampton filed a freedom of information request to the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary, asking for details on the software used, the number of false positives and how the efficacy of the technology is evaluated. The response, (attached to this article) is gobsmacking in its outright dism...