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In the 1970s you couldn't turn the radio or the television on without a Sociologist popping up. The new concrete universities fell over themselves offering Sociology degrees, thousands of students read the same half-dozen entry level textbooks then available and academic reputations were built on more-radical-than-thou self publicity. Although many did become social workers of one variety or another, many more became civil servants. The discipline was universally left-wing in the UK; the credo of sociology was based on the power of the State and the right of the State to regulate other people's lives based on the sound scientific principles of Sociology. But there was a problem. Real scientists (of whom there were still a few about in the 1970s) denied that it was a science at all, and placed it firmly in the arts / humanities schools. The term 'social science' was therefore coined, meaning stuff that couldn't be verified by independent experimentation, but that claimed scientific credentials nonetheless.
And so it was to a large extent across the Atlantic. UCLA and Sociology went together like pork and beans. Except the Americans produced the curiosity that never survived in Britain; a right-wing sociologist. Robert Nisbet was schooled on Edmund Burke and de Tocqueville rather than Max Weber or Karl Marx. And he had the temerity to write
The greatest single revolution of the last century in the political sphere has been the transfer of effective power over human lives from the constitutionally visible offices of government, the nominally sovereign offices, to the vast network that has been brought into being in the name of protection of the people from their exploiters. It is this kind of power that Justice Brandeis warned against in a decision nearly half a century ago: "Experience should teach us to be most on guard to protect liberty when the governments' purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachments by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."
In fact, if there's one essay I would urge you to read this year, if you're not already familiar with it, it's Nisbet's 1976 "The New Despotism". Not only does it stand the test of time, but it sets out clearly, succinctly and unambiguously the ideals and the threats that are more significant than ever and that have brought many true Liberals together on 'Orphans of Liberty'.
As for sociology, it is so equated with the evils of Rousseau, Marx, Central Statism and the tyranny of Welfarism backed by the law (see Booker's various columns) that it's out of tune with both Blue Labour and Blond's Red Tories, both of which movements are communitarian rather than Statist, local rather than central, horizontal rather than vertical in approach.
From the 'Mail' today :-
For three years, Mrs Palmer kept a detailed diary on his activities – including sessions in his garden hot tub with women, and when he had sex in his bedroom. In one of her notes, she wrote: ‘I saw Mr Collins in his hot tub with two women. He said “get your t**s out, b****”.’ In her diary, she also recorded when women stayed overnight with Mr Collins. And she noted the comings and goings of male visitors, some of whom ‘wore baseball caps’. 'I could hear Mr Collins in his hot tub,’ she said. ‘The music changed to panpipes to which Mr Collins was occasionally shouting “Oh yes, oh yes”.’
Mr Collins, who is on incapacity benefit, was fined £100 for breaching the noise abatement order, and faces a further bill of £365 in legal costs after failing in an appeal.
Update
In publishing Mrs Palmer's and Mr Collins' addresses (12 and 14 St Julian Grove, Colchester respectively) the Mail has probably ensured an anonymous supply of interesting electrical appliances for Mrs Palmer and a stream of intrigued female callers for Mr Collins - so win-win, really.
As an amateur architectural historian one of the most fascinating aspects of our evolution has been the way we have slept in England over the centuries. From everyone curled up on the floor of the Hall, to the Solar, a tiny separate room for the Lord and his family, to the early modern adoption of two separate rooms for parents and for offspring (with servants on the floor), to the hugger-mugger jammed in 18th century of strangers sharing beds, to the Victorians' exact hierarchy of spaces and sharing our social progress has been mirrored by our sleeping arrangements. In the last century scientific socialism, in the Parker-Morris report, tabled out the State's allocation of sleeping space to the people; one person needed a dwelling of 33m2 with one bedroom, two persons needed a slightly larger dwelling with one bedroom. And so on. It was a space rationing system that would have been familiar to those in the Soviet gulags, and completely alien to the notion of private ownership and choice.
However, fools such as Andrew Rawnsley and George Monbiot who still believe it's the business of the State to regulate how many bedrooms each of us has are still spawning the fatuous rubbish in our newspaper columns. Rawnsley in today's Observer calls for more housebuilding to get the young onto the property ladder, and offers the following asinine comment;
In just one year, 1953, Harold Macmillan presided over the construction of 300,000 new homes. He understood that a property-owning democracy could not be realised unless there were enough properties.
And there was me thinking he was just urgently replacing the housing stock destroyed by German bombing.
Monbiot honestly can't understand why, between 2003 and 2008, there was a 45% increase in the number of under-occupied houses; 37% of dwellings, nearly all owner-occupied, are now officially classed as under-occupied. Monbiot agonises;
Why is this happening? I've spent the past few days wading through official figures to try to find out. None of the most obvious explanations appear to fit.
Well George, try this. Over this period the government, planners and housebuilders delivered dense developments with large numbers of studios and one-bedroom flats because that's what the demographics suggested the rationing-system should produce. Then they insisted that a third of them be occupied by bad neighbours - as social housing. Young homebuyers aren't stupid. They realised that such properties were a poor investment, losing value immediately on purchase, and hard to resell when the lifts were full of social housing piss and the stairwells full of social housing crack-foil. So they shunned them. They were bought instead by first-time buy-to-letters cashing in on high rents and easy Housing Benefit. Many of these developments therefore became instant slums, and discouraged even more young buyers from investing in them. What they bought instead were two and three bedroom homes, many older, away from social housing, and that were decent investments. In many areas the price of an older two-bed property was equivalent to that of a new studio - a no-brainer, one would have thought. The surge in under-occupancy, in other words, was a direct result of attempts to distort the housing market through planning controls and land rationing and of social engineering experiments.
To 'correct' this, Monbiot wants more social engineering in the form of taxing those with empty bedrooms and Rawnsley simply imagines we're still not building enough studios and one-bedroom flats. Silly targets such as those adopted by Boris that are based on the number of dwellings rather than the number of bedrooms also encourage the distortion of the market and the creation of new ghettoes. It's bedrooms that count.
1. The State is utterly useless at providing national-scale homogeneous institutional social care; either it's unacceptably substandard or so expensive as to be unaffordable. Neither the NHS nor Whitehall's 'local agents' the councils can do so economically or efficiently
2. The State's pet private corporations - Crapita, G4S, Southern Cross and the rest - are utterly useless at providing national-scale homogeneous institutional social care; either it's unacceptably substandard or so expensive as to be unaffordable. None of the big national scale private corporations can do so economically or efficiently.
Polly buys into (2) above but denies (1). Cameron buys into (1) above but denies (2). Anyone else with any sense recognises the truth of both, perhaps with some isolated exceptions.
Statists will now put their fingers in their ears, close their eyes and go 'nyah nyah nyah'. For there is a solution - and it's local. In fact it was working prior to the introduction of the National Insurance Act a century ago - a mixture of strong horizontal family and community ties, private insurance, friendly societies, mutuals and suchlike. How long do you think it will take for them to get it?
If this new strain of E Coli escapes into pandemic proportions then the users of London's buses and tubes will be amongst the first affected. E Coli is transmitted in exactly the same way as the Winter Vomiting Bug - in minute particles of human faeces left on poles, doors and grab-rails by people who don't wash their hands properly after using the lavatory. And London's full of 'em. Even if the source of the bug on salad crops is identified and contained, those already infected will be transmitters unless they too are isolated.
And paradoxically, this is a good opportunity for British farmers and growers to sell to the public directly rather than through the big supermarkets - the Tesco salads counter will be shunned for the next week or so as fear of Mediterranean muck takes hold. Torrential downpours recently in Extremadura have no doubt contaminated stored water with human sewage and animal manure, which has then been carelessly used to wash or water the salad crops, whilst in the South of France a record drought has seen draconian restrictions on water use.
So the answer seems to be don't boil the lettuce as long as it's British, but do wear gloves on the bus.
Many of you over about 45 years of age will recognise the object below as a British Thornton slide rule - the tool we used in school immediately prior to the introduction of the Casio electronic calculator to do advanced maths. Calculus, logs, cosines and the rest were figured by lining up points on the sliding centre bar and reading the answering figure from the cursor hairline. You can buy them on eBay for under a tenner. No batteries, no electronics and therefore immune from EM radiation, showerproof and therefore a useful aid in the boatyard, it earns its place alongside the kerosene pressure lanterns, the Cat 'C' first aid kit and the British Berkefeld water filter in the land grab-bag.
Except you may also need your reading glasses or a small magnifier these days to see the tiny figures. Grrr.
As Dick Puddlecote warns, the days of the poster advertising alcohol are numbered, so if your telephone takes pictures you may wish to snap one of the current saturation-advertising posters from the makers of Wifebeater™ selling an apple-flavoured alcohol product. This may be the last time we see a public twenty-foot poster extolling the virtues of an alcoholic beverage (think of the children!) so it's a double shame that what's being advertised is, frankly, horsepiss.
It's not 'Cidre' in my book if it contains only 50% by volume of fermented apple juice at 3% ABV and 50% by volume of water, industrial ethanol and apple flavouring to bring the whole up to 4.5% ABV. And the fatuous claim by Wifebeater™ that it 'contains 70% hand picked apples' means only that 30% of the apples used in making the 50% of the drink that's cider were machine-picked. And given the surplus of East European apple-pickers not much of a claim, frankly. The product's main rival for the Summer, Magners, also 4.5%, is little better - 75% of each bottle is made from commercial apple juice concentrate, sugar and water.
The only real cider is one made wholly of crushed apples and nothing else, fermented with the natural fruit yeasts and matured for, ooh, at least a week in an oak barrel. At £2 a litre and sod the Revenue. And just as the miserablists' anti-tobacco campaign has seen a growing trend for people to grow their own (and yes I was ahead of my time here when I grew a full crop of Nicotiana Tabaccum from seed in the garden of my cottage in Needham Market in 1978, though my ignorance of the curing process left me with 4kg of snuff ) so I suspect will the advance of the joyless Drink Stasi on the alcohol industry see the rediscovery of small-scale neighbourhood production.
I've no idea whether Dan Cruikshank is one of the dozens of the self-important with superinjunctions in place, but we have an acquaintance in common and as a result I rarely watch his programmes. I did catch briefly a few minutes of Cruikshank on Wentworth Woodhouse, though, best known to me not for its marble floors but as an example of the spite of Socialism. The Fitzwilliams of Wentworth Woodhouse were enlightened mine-owners, deeply concerned with the welfare of their employees and their families in an old-fashioned paternalistic manner, active investors in the community, local leaders, and rooted amongst the people of the area. In short, they were everything that Statist socialists loathed. Manny Shinwell, lauded as a saint by the left, was actually a bitter, bigoted and thoroughly nasty little shit shot-through with all the cruelties of communism. As coal minister in an act of class-war spite he ordered the opening of a new open-cast coal mine to destroy the Fitzwilliams' estate, to mine 'right up to their back door'. In vain did the local miners and the Yorkshire NUM protest to Clement Atlee that the Fitzwilliams were OK, and rather popular actually. In vain did the NCB tell Shinwell that the coal was of poor quality and not worth mining. The excavators and wagons moved in and destroyed the estate. If I ever come across Shinwell's grave I'll happily piss on his bones.
And so to Blackpool. 'Fracking' for shale gas near Blackpool has been suspended as scientists suspect that the process has caused two minor earthquakes in the town. Shinwell of course would have shrugged and been happy to bury Blackpool and its residents under six feet of rubble in the cause of 'socialist progress' but he and his kind are no longer in power. Whatever your views of the value of Blackpool, this is good news for our respect for private property. It has rightly usually been a difficult, prolonged and expensive process in the UK to over-ride individual property rights to build a new rail line, motorway or airport, but to see the benefits of such obstacles you only have to look at North Korea, East Germany, Cuba or Russia to see how ephemeral and valueless are the results of the vindictive destruction of property for the sake of demonstrating the State's ownership of everything.
