From Free Life, Issue 30, May 1999
ISSN: 0260 5112

 One

Yesterday, May 1st, I attended the last hour or so of the inaugural meeting of the Independent Libertarian Party.  My job was to assist the ILP's presiding founder Antoine Clarke by introducing a note of pessimism, for Antoine doesn't want too many people to join just yet, or to expect too much when they do.  I warned of what a nasty business democratic politics can be, and what profound personal unhappiness it can cause to those who get both sentimentally optimistic and serious about it.  What really scared me, however, was the session that preceded my own little talk.  Antoine was presenting a "platform" for the ILP, consisting of 23 points of variable libertarianness and sensibleness. Despite my objections to the idea of a libertarian political party, I found myself joining in volubly from the back, and what was worse, doing so rather effectively.  Partly under my influence, Antoine's 23 points became fewer and better.  It would appear that I might make quite a successful Libertarian Partyarch.  That's how it starts.  They start by welcoming you in, and letting you do some small thing which you like to do and do quite well like making the scones or being Party Chairman or something, which in my case means interrupting when they're refining their 23 point platform.  Two years later, you're in some TV studio, saying of some utterly stupid thing that one of your richest and silliest council candidates has said, that it was: "A perfectly reasonable view for Mr Binliner to express.  I happen to know him, and I can assure you that he is an excellent candidate and will serve all the people of Grunge South with exemplary ardour" when in fact he's a twat who scarcely knows what libertarianism is (which doesn't stop him from saying that this or that new state tyranny or imposition that he has been asked about, and has agreed to, is: "what libertarianism is all about").  Just say no.

Antoine is a clever person.  Plausible, audible, good humoured, good at detail and bureaucratic intricacies.  I now believe that the ILP may do quite well, and cause quite a lot of personal misery to all those libertarians who allow themselves to be engulfed in its machinery.  It may also serve to spread libertarianism, or something approximating to it.  A libertarian party or libertarian parties were bound to be formed in Britain sooner or later.  All who do it are liable to be horribly hurt, but so what?  We libertarians defend of the right of suicidal maniacs to indulge in mountaineering, bare-knuckle fighting, bungee jumping, weird sex and so forth, thereby perhaps making foolish cadavers of themselves.  So why not libertarian party politics?  Anyway, how would we stop it?  You spread some political ideas.  Sooner or later someone was bound to make a political party out of them.  I will take my slice of any credit that results from the ILP's activities, and accept none of the blame.  So far all is amicable between the ILP and the Libertarian Alliance.  An LA mailing is in progress in my front room even as I jot, and Antoine is helping.  I hope this lasts, but such is politics that I fear it may not.

Best news lately in the wider world out there, beyond the Independent Libertarian Party, is that our British Conservative Party has recently come out against free market mass education and the shutting down of the National Health Service.  Such is the contempt in which the Conservative Party is now held that this will surely cause Respectable Opinion to realise that free market schools and free market medicine are actually rather good ideas.  To learn more about free market education, I suggest you obtain and read James Tooley's latest product from the Institute of Economic Affairs Education Unit, Studies in Education No. 7, The Global Education Industry, Lessons from Private Education in Developing Countries.  The most interesting concept contained in this piece of writing is that of the educational brand.  Opponents of free markets (a still quite numerous species) often argue that when it comes to complex services of the kind now monopolised by governments, governments must remain dominant, because otherwise customers would be confused, and unable to make sensible choices.  But just as brands enable us all to choose good disc drives and urinals, so too - and even more so - do they enable parents to choose better educational services for their children.  Big brands encourage the makers of instant coffee or bath cleaner or cars to build global reputations which they are hugely rewarded for living up to and hugely punished for falling short of, and which are hence a guarantee of approximate consumer satisfaction.  The same principle will soon be evident in education.

I've recently been helping a friend get started as a Kumon maths teacher, two afternoons a week, in Tooting.  It's just old fashioned sums really, but apparently the schools have stopped doing this, unless they are hopelessly old fashioned.  The trick with Kumon is that the sums are very easy and very numerous.  Instead of being confused by a mere handful of tough problems, Kumon children whizz through about 150 easy ones, every day, and as the weeks and months go by they get to whizz through gradually more difficult stuff, but with the same old ease and speed.  It seems to work, and costs £38 per child per month.  There's more to private sector education than posh schools for zillions of pounds a term.  Kumon is a classic educational brand, with branches like our little effort in Tooting all over the world.

More and more people are paying again, for things they've already paid for in taxes, because the government product is so bad or so insufficient.  Are they angry about this?  They could always try voting ILP.