You’ll have heard may of the lines before, but there’s some new stuff. The full video (for members) or audio (for all) can he enjoyed at the i² website.

Also see a transcript of a recent interview at Bloomberg.

At a time when the English Monarchy is facing more threats than for three centuries, from inside its own polity, yet it pulls a rabbit out of a hat, and we may survive. Its Principal male Heir, a popular and good-looking, and by all accounts, a sound intelligent young man (who has been to Sandhurst and may get the Sword of Honour, which is no mean thing I can tell you, and the Army is one of the last unvandalised institutions which is fair and upright) has got a “nice middle-class girl” for his girlfriend, whom he “met at Uni”, which is what they all aspire to do now. Yes, the English monarchy may, yet, triumph again, over changing habits and mores, re-inventing itself to stay the head of this curious, brilliant, yet just now I fear, sleeping, nation. This time, the sleep “may” have been “criminally induced” by its present “Nazi masters”, rather than form outside. I could stomach the EU if its “directives” were enforced locally with the same spirit and zeal that they seem to be on the continental mainland, which is not much – but there is of course another agenda at work in the UK, by our home-Nazis, who have been educated in the past 20 years+ under a curriculum which I intend to dissect in my rducation posts here.

Even without their Godwin Award, the last two sentences are exquisite.

[Yes, it's an old post but it's linked to from the current front page]

The Libertarian Party has been a big disappointment. For decades, the Libertarian Alliance had been pamphleting away, rising above party politics, seeing itself in a position comparable to that of socialists in 1870. It was the long road, making the argument, winning one mind at a time, arguing against every new restriction on our freedoms, from the seat belt ban in the 1980s to the ban on smoking in public places.

That particular ban had a surprising and temporary effect in the pub I was drinking in at the time. It came in during the summer so it was no hardship to migrate outside to the smoking shack. But in there, unprecedentedly, people found they were facing, across the table, each other. Conversation ensued. Politics came up. There were some surprisingly well-informed people sitting round the table but nobody – not one single person – had even heard of libertarianism.

That was the effect of a quarter century of LA campaigning: doodly squat. Nobody had even heard of them. Around that pub table, they’d have been pushing at an open door, a majority even wanted firearms to be legalised. But the LA hadn’t even turned up, for these people.

So the launch of LPUK was good news, now there was a political party to spread the word. After all, what would be the point of forming a political party if you weren’t going to do party politics?

I don’t know the answer to that question, but someone in LPUK must, because that’s what they’ve done.

Political parties aren’t think tanks. Doctrinal purity is a handicap. What matters, the only thing that matters, is having an effect, moving something in the right direction. Not everything, that’s not going to happen, but something. And then something else. For a new party with a philosophy very different from any other in mainstream politics, this means getting the thin end of a wedge in somewhere, finding things that will strike a chord with people, that will be an open door, when pushed against.

So LPUK announced its first manifesto promise: to legalise firearms. Not every pub is a rural one like my former local; not every table has several gun owners sitting round it. I agree with this policy and I’ve tried arguing it with people. It’s a hard one to get through, there are so many reflexive objections, it takes time. It’s not an open door.

Was the tactical intention to cause a fuss? Did they think the press release would be taken notice of? If so, they didn’t take into account the number of crank press releases that are received every day. Legalising firearms? People we’ve never heard of? Bin it.

But was there even a tactical intention, or was this an expression of doctrinal purity? I ask because the notorious car crash of an interview between Chris Mounsey and Andrew Neill suggests no forethought at all. It wasn’t so much that Mounsey made such a ham fist of it, it was the obvious fact that they hadn’t even considered the possibility that his blog would come up in the conversation.

Any group of people who were actually serious about making a political challenge would have planned for that interview. They would have thought about the hard questions and come up with broadcast-friendly ways to handle them effectively.

Their blog is, at the moment, filled with posts about the difficulties the leader-elect is facing as a consequence of a business dispute. Who cares? Really? Maybe there’s a powerful story there, but I’m buggered if I can see it through the mounds of verbiage. There’s nothing crisp, soundbittten, memorable. This isn’t serious.

Why, though? Far from being a cause for despondency, the coalition should be energising. First, great! Fantastic! Labour isn’t in power, there’s talk of a repeal bill, some tightening of expenditure. Brilliant. Don’t carp because they’re not libertarians. Of course they’re not libertarians, they didn’t say they were. Oh, I know Cameron used the word, but he’s also progressive and traditional. He’s whatever’s right at the time. And that’s an asset for a politician. LPUK doesn’t have to be like that, but it does have to move in that world as a shark, rather than as a snack for Andrew Neill.

More importantly, perhaps, the coalition does disenfranchise a lot of libertarian-minded people and, if they have confidence in their arguments, LPUK should be confident they can persuade others who are not yet so minded. It’s an opportunity. There’s a vacancy, for a political party that represents classical liberalism and libertarianism because, just as all political parties are coalitions, that’s the coalition LPUK needs to forge. I think it’s, potentially, a big one.

It ain’t going to happen at the moment, though. LPUK needs a complete change of approach. It needs to be calculating, prepared, rehearsed. It needs to pick targets and these will often be local issues. There are also some national ones – how about championing the thousands made insolvent by tax every year? Why not learn tactics from Greenpeace? Why not take the whole thing seriously?

Hirst campaigned, and won, so it’s not surprising he celebrated. Lighting a spliff on video while on licence might have been a mistake, but he is presumeably calculating that nobody can prove there was cannabis in it. Bravado, I expect he’s planning to call it.

Dale is worried that prisoners’ votes could sway results in marginal Parliamentary seats. Maybe. If so, it’ll be likely that the sway will be in the direction of Dale’s Conservatives; prisoners are a reactionary bunch.

I’m glad this has happened. I’d like the franchise to be genuinely universal. Lunatics, prisoners – even members of the House of Lords – should all have the vote. This is for two reasons.

First, the principle that the only reason the state can claim any kind of jurisdiction over any individual is that they have a vote. It’s extraordinary that libertarian and liberal conservatives can miss that point.

Secondly, and more practically, we need constitutional structures for when things go wrong as much as when they go right. Totalitarian states around the world make a practice of imprisoning dissidents, or of declaring them to be mad. A universal franchise would be some small innocculation against the ability of the state to make the inconvenient invisible.

The anti-hate demonstrators back away and one woman shouts “I think he’s gay”, which is a bit off-script for a left wing demonstrator.

They’ve been bussed in. Watch, it’s fascinating:

“When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.” Intervention by armed civilians on the spot aborts hundreds of crimes a year in the United States, and thousands more could be prevented if there were more of us. Carrying is not just a survival tactic for me; it’s a service, a net benefit to my neighbors and my nation and my civilization, and I feel good about that.

The Earl of Caithness [...]

With regard to the sale of glasses, I must reiterate that medical opinion is firm that the wrong glasses cannot cause any damage to adult eyes. It is also a fact that most people will be aware if their glasses are incorrect in some way. Faced with these facts. we feel able to relax the total ban on sales of glasses other than by qualified opticians. This does not mean we favour or encourage wrong dispensing. Indeed, the clause makes it a statutory requirement that glasses sold by non-opticians would have to conform to the prescription given by a doctor or ophthalmic optician. We believe that glasses, like most other products, need to be safe and serviceable. However, requiring glasses to be correct does not mean that we need to legislate upon those who can sell them. Many products which are potentially more dangerous than glasses are sold and used.

As an example, I invite your Lordships to look upwards, because you are content to sit under a roof held up by scaffolding. No one has advocated a scaffolders’ Bill or a scaffolding council to restrict scaffolding to those registered. I do not want to tempt fate but I believe your Lordships face a greater risk from the scaffolding falling down than from unqualified dispensers. In such cases, safeguards are attached to the products or workmanship not to the sellers.

Indeed, as Lord Monson confirmed, wearing the reading glasses I was selling was a fairly safe busniess:

Lord Monson

My Lords, is the noble Lord, Lord Cullen, aware that at this very moment I am wearing a pair of Mr. Risdon’s glasses which cost me £8.50; and that they are perfectly satisfactory in every way?

Monson was (and remains) the head of the Society for Individual Freedom.

I recommend the site strongly. Libertarianism gets associated with ZaNuLieBore crapola far too often and the Irish Libs are serious and thoughtful explorers of this seam of political thought.

(See also the Oxford Libertarian Society for serious libertarian thinking, often in the form of video lectures by visiting academics).

I could point to a number of examples of the idea I’m thinking of, from various prominent Libertarians, but Obnoxio posted about this recently and summed up the argument as well as anyone has:

A constitutional monarchy is not the endgame objective of any Libertarian. It is profoundly unlibertarian that someone can rule over you by accident of birth. However, through happy accident, it transpires that having a ruling monarch that is required to give assent to laws, along with two strong chambers of debate is a pretty good mix for reasonable governance in a democratic, rather than an anarchic state.

I could criticise this on principle, but the strongest objection, I think, is what you might call reality-based. The last time Royal Assent was given in person was in 1854. The last time Royal Assent was refused was in 1707/8. The Queen does not give Royal Assent to Acts of Parliament. The process of an Act getting Royal Assent is entirely automatic. It happens in name alone.

As a republican, I ought to welcome the idea that the monarch should try to withhold assent. In the furore that followed, if there weren’t an abdication, Parliament would simply pass legislation underlining its authority, effectively undermining or even removing the monarch from this theoretical constitutional position. That’s what they have done in the past when something similar happened. And in the event of an abdication today, we’d have Charles, the Cretinous Dauphin, on the throne – and a more powerful argument for republicanism would be impossible to make.

But as one on the libertarian wing of politics, I find such arguments depressing. I like Obo’s postings a lot, but this argument reveals, I think, a shaky understanding not just of the history of the Royal Assent, but also of the way we have reached our present constitutional arrangements.

Initially, we had Kings. Kings did not, at first, govern autocratically, but instead did so in Council with the important magnates of the land. When a King, John, was felt to be taking the wrong counsels, those of nobles not from England, and to be levying taxes without their consent, the Barons forced him to sign Magna Carta. Parliament could be said to have had its roots in that document and very rapidly came to consist of two chambers, Lords and Commons, who met to give their consent to taxation proposals.

That’s how things stayed for a couple of centuries, until a monarch who believed himself possessed of a Divine Right to rule unhindered by Parliament, refused to accept Parliament’s restrictions on his proposed taxes. This led to civil war and though the short-lived Republic was replaced by Charles II, the idea that Parliament should have influence over policy, and not just taxation, had taken root. Four years after Charles’s death, the Bill of Rights enshrined this idea in English Law. At that time, you might have been able to argue that there was a balance of powers in England. But this situation began, rapidly, to change. The Bill of Rights was signed in 1689, the last refusal of Royal Assent, as I have noted above, was just eight years later. Power was shifting to Parliament. Within Parliament, it started to shift to the Commons.

The mistake is to forget we have not had a fixed constitution, but rather a process of change. We haven’t had adequate checks and balances of power in this country for centuries, if ever.

Obo is right to feel we should have such a system. But if we are to start from where we actually are, rather than root our ideas in Golden Ageism, I can see only one direction in which we can move if we are to have a balanced government. That is to a constitutional republic, one in which the constitution limits the scope of government and distributes power between institutions. British experience during the Enlightenment allowed an almost perfect Liberal constitution to be drawn up, by British people. At least, by people who were either born here or who had until a year or two previously considered themselves to be British.

It is the American Constitution, and I recommend it to this House.