From Free Life No 39, November 2001

Until now there have been two kinds of Free Life writings. There have been the Free Life Commentaries, all by Free Life Editor Sean Gabb, which have been posted direct to the Internet, and which may or may not later be included in the official "published" version of Free Life. And then there have been the other pieces that have been published (for the first time) in the paper version of Free Life, written not by Mr Gabb but by others. So this piece is a first. This is a Free Life piece not written by Mr Gabb, but pre-published, so to speak, on the Internet under the banner of Free Life. Perhaps others will negotiate a similar arrangement with Mr Gabb to the one I have asked for, and have got.

This arrangement solves a problem I've long had with my jottings. I have been jotting away since Free Life 23, issued in August 1995. Some of the jottings have sometimes been cut to enable those remaining to fit the space available in Free Life. I haven't liked these cuts but I have always understood that Mr Gabb has had to inflict them. Journals published on paper, or published on the Internet as if on paper, cannot expand like elastic. If only one page remained for my jottings, then only one page it had to be. But the Internet itself is more accommodating, and now my jottings can sally forth unscathed. Mr Gabb can later select this jotting but not that one, these but not those, as he sees fit, for the further accolade of being in Free Life itself, so to speak.

If you've read some of my previous jottings you may be wondering why I am making such a prima-donna-ish fuss about what are often little more than thinkings aloud. Well, consider my previous jottings, in Free Life 38. In their original form, after (1) a short jot on the absurdity of compelling teenagers to do voluntary work, these then consisted of (2) a moan about modern jazz and then of (3) a hymn of praise to my wonderful new TV, to my wonderful new DVD machine, and to my wonderful new miniature computer keyboard without which, what with my new TV and my new DVD machine, I'd have no desk space left for anything other than a non-miniature computer keyboard. Hurrah for the free market. Well, you can guess what happened. Mr Gabb is one of life's moaners, so the moaning, even if only about modern jazz instead of about the new world order, the evils of Blairism etc., stayed. But hurrahs for the free market he tends to regard as superfluous, what with the free market having supposedly "won the argument", so out went all mention of TVs and keyboards. Only the moaning remained.

By the way, putting the celebrations first and only having moans at the end didn't work. I tried that. If any cuts were required, it was still the celebrations that went and the moaning that stayed.

But one of the central purposes of my jottings is to celebrate the fruits of freedom, not just to bitch about government infringements of or attacks on it. Successful propaganda cannot only consist of complaint. There must be celebrations of a preferred alternative. Wherever freedom and the free market is allowed it results in great things, even if they are nowadays mostly, you know, things. Like DVDs and keyboards. But the subtext - and sometimes, as here, the text itself - is that if the rules followed by the DVD makers and keyboard makers (the rules of the free market) were also followed by the people offering less thinglike things, such as "security", "order", "law", "peace", "protection", "stability", even "new world order", then great new things could and would get done. The free market already supplies quite a lot of security, order, law, world order, etc., despite all the political restrictions and interferences and politically financed intrusions it is subjected to. It could supply much more.

So no (moan), I do not like my moans and hurrahs slashed down only to moans. And now (hurrah) they won't be. Hurrah also for the Internet, a fine example of a complicated and unthinglike thing, of just the sort that the opponents of the free market routinely claim that the free market can't supply, but which it has.

Re-reading earlier jottings teaches me that I should not make promises about future tasks that the Libertarian Alliance's leaders merely intend to do or hope one of us might be doing, Real Soon Now. Previously jotted promises have mostly proved empty. Only reports of actual achievements have stood the test of time, such as reports of already published publications, by the Libertarian Alliance and by others. So let me report yet again that the reason for my recent silence as a libertarian writer, and for the slowness with which the last Libertarian Alliance mailing was put together is that, with Mr Gabb's Webmasterly co-operation, I have been concentrating on putting Libertarian Alliance material on the Internet (www.libertarian.co.uk), and have now pretty much (i.e. there are about a dozen tricky ones still to do) done all of it, although so far only in Adobe Acrobat form. Not everyone likes Adobe Acrobat, and it is our hope that we will, Real Soon Now, put everything up also in html form. But now I'm straying into promise mode, which I promised myself I wouldn't. Anyway, whatever happens on the html front the Acrobat stuff is a reality.

Almost as labourious, as part of the Acrobat operation I have also reprinted (with updated information on the front cover concerning the Libertarian Alliance's personnel and Internet details) all the artwork, and it took me far longer to glue all that together than I expected. I only a few days ago finished doing this. Thus my further failure to do much else recently for the cause of liberty beyond reading Libertarian Alliance Forum e-mails, and holding my regular last Friday of the month meetings (which, thanks to me finally using an e-mail list to publicise them properly, have been going decidedly well of late).

One libertarian duty I did recently perform, however, was to attend and speak at a conference of historians in Manchester, organised by libertarian historian Steve Davies. For me this was the kind of experience which I am glad to have had, but which I did not much enjoy while it was happening. Frankly, I felt out of place. My central error was that I didn't present a paper, I merely gave a talk, which doesn't count with historians.

My personal sense of irrelevance aside, the thing had its moments. There was an interesting talk right at the start (by Blair Worden) about the way that Whiggism mutated from religious fundamentalism to what many of the readers of this would now call Gabbism. Whiggery ended the seventeenth century as violently and self-righteously puritanical disgustingness and religious mania, but then, by suppressing the nasty stuff and inventing or dragging out of obscurity lots of other stuff, it became the civilised thing that we know it as today, those of us who know of it at all. Whiggery did to itself, in other words, what we all now hope Islam will do to itself in the next few years.

There was also an excellent talk by Peter Riley about Kropotkin. Peter provided me with some of my few truly pleasurable moments at the conference, by being willing to argue with me about this and that and much else besides. I missed the talk given by Paul Mulvey on Josiah Wedgwood, but his conversation revealed him to be (a) another very intelligent libertarian academic whom (b) I'd never before heard of. E-mail contact is, I hope, being re-established even as I jot.

My thanks to the Steve Davies household for putting me up for the duration, and for the communal dinner they shared with me on the evening of my arrival, which was like a real-life episode of Coronation Street. It was good also to read some of Steve's books, in particular one called Bowling Alone, by Edward Putnam, which I've been wanting to look at for some time, and which is about the "collapse of community" we've been suffering from in the last few decades. Although Nigel Ashford, also present on day two of the conference, said it's all nonsense, what collapse?, etc. Come to think of it I actually enjoyed myself quite a lot, especially when, on day two - the third and last day of my stay - it finally stopped raining.

But now here's a weird thing. Here were all these historians, reading papers to each other about history - haystack burning in Cornwall, people trying to stab King George the Something-or-Other in his carriage, early twentieth century feminism, the Bolshevik front origins of the National Council for Civil Liberties, you name it - and there'd been this huge eruption of history just a couple of days earlier right in their faces, on worldwide television. (The conference dates were September 13-14.) Yet they hardly gave these dramas an official mention. It was as if President Bush had said on the afternoon of September 11: well, these things happen, what can you do?, just keep on keeping on I guess. These historians just kept on, talking about whatever they'd fixed to talk about. Odd.

The misprint file associated with the last Libertarian Alliance mailing was more than usually dramatic. The worst blunder was in one of Roderick Moore's pieces. LA subscribers among you may recall that I inserted some slightly tetchy introductory notes to a couple of Moore pieces, to the effect that Mr Moore, not being a mainstream libertarian, shouldn't write as if his own views were the views of "us". (He dissents on sex and drugs, and is also a relentless EUrophobe, which most British libertarians are also, but this is not the same thing as libertarianism.) I expected a Moore response, and sure enough a letter soon arrived in the spiderishly accurate Moore handwriting, and I thought here we go. But there was no mention of my intros in Mr Moore's letter. His complaint was very different:

Thank you for the latest mailing, but could I just draw your attention to a small but important point on p. 4 of Historical Notes No. 39. The figures for the share of the vote gained by fascists in Britain and Germany [ie now, not before WW2 - BM] should be 3.2% and 0.1%, not 32% and 01%. I don't want to be "beastly to the Germans", and it gives a misleading impression to say that nearly a third of them voted for fascism. Could you please alter it in future printings.

I also unleashed (aided by LA Director Dr Chris R. Tame) confusion about the spelling of Thomas Babington ("Babbington" being wrong) Macaulay.

And, I got in a twist about a couple of members of the House of Lords by calling Earl Howe, or the Earl of Howe or whatever the hell he's called, Lord Howe of Aberfan - ie, I mistakenly assumed that the Conservative front bench spokesman for health in the House of Lords was the former Sir Geoffrey Howe, rather than some other old geezer.

My first reaction was to blame myself and to apologise profusely to Tim Evans and Helen Govett, whose Legal Notes No. 36 (Big Mother's Deadly New World: How The Government Is Going To Destroy Patient's Health Records And Kill People) was thus disfigured. Mature reflection, however, caused me to re-realise (for I have long known the truth of the jotting that follows) the truth.

Which is: that the real culprits are the stupid twats themselves who occupy the House of Lords, for insisting on all calling themselves "Lords". This results in all manner of confusions and mistaken identities, for which, as I say, the rest of us are still inclined to blame ourselves rather than to go around at least verbally skewering the true culprits.

When Sir Geoffrey Howe MP stopped being an MP - a Member of Parliament - and became a member of the House of Lords, he should have become not "Lord Howe of Aberfan" but "Sir Geoffrey Howe MHL". And the same goes for Kevin Drudge MP who mutates into Lord Drudge of Somewhere-Nice-I-Once-Went-To-On-Holiday, and who thus becomes indistinguishable from his elder brother, the former Barry Drudge MP who is now Lord Drudge of AnotherSpot-With-A-Nice-Sounding-Name, and their uncle Lord Drudge of Some-Other-Stupid-Place-Of-No-Possible-Relevance, to say nothing of John Drudge (now Lord Drudge of Yet-Another-Bloody-Place) who is of a quite different political persuasion and no relation whatever to the other Drudges. And this is not even to mention the Earl of Drudge, whose ancestors got their Earlship fair and square by burning monasteries.

The hereditaries should keep their titles, if only because a lot of them aren't any longer MHLs and this would clarify the distinction perfectly. But the rest of them? Bollocks. We should simply call them all by their real names and shower contempt on them whenever they try this Lord Drudge of X crap. Kevin Drudge MHL. Sir Geoffrey Howe MHL. Barry Drudge MHL. Fiona Blairbabe MHL. Sir David Failed-Tory-Minister MHL. Simon Lobbyfodder QC MHL. Justin Idiot-Liberal MHL. This way, all who care can keep track of these people and continue to jeer at them accurately for their past stupidities, duplicities and non-achievements. (Which, by the way, is why lots of the non-hereditaries would hate what I'm saying. Tough.)

The nice thing is that this is one of those changes that we can all just do. No Act of Parliament is needed, any more than you need an Act of Parliament to allow you to muddle up "infer" and "imply" or to use the word "cool" as an entire sentence meaning "this is now agreed and is satisfactory". You agree? Of course you do. Cool. Do it.