Do not give in to evil,
but proceed ever more boldly against it.

I am delighted that Wycombe Youth Action was successful in its application to the Transition Fund, which acts as a Big Society funding mechanism. The project received £93,000 to help young people from the ages of 13 to 25 in more positive activities that they may not otherwise have the opportunity to do.

The Transition Fund was announced last year as part of the Spending Review. So far it has committed £17 million for 201 charities; however there is £90million still available which will be announced from April 2011 onwards.

I would urge other civil society organisations in Wycombe who need additional funding to visit the website www.fundingcentral.org.uk for further information.

As Paul Burstow, Care Services Minister, has said:

Central Government can’t do everything people want in their communities – local people are better placed than officials or Ministers in Whitehall to know what their communities need. This is about a new relationship between the state and citizens, where citizens hold more power than ever before.

The Government is also setting up a Big Society Bank which will provide capital for the voluntary sector.

These are just the first steps to rekindle that mutual co-operation between individuals which typified British society. After the continued encroachment of the State over the past 100 years, we have seen a steady erosion of civil society. This is why we must reclaim local provisions and decision making.  In the long term, we need to de-politicise charitable funding but, in the meantime, the Government is seeking to drive a transition towards social responsibility, not state control. We should make the most of it.

I congratulate Wycombe Youth Action on their achievements and I wish them well with their extra funding.

Via BT ruling could open pension claim floodgates – Telegraph:

Taxpayers could be on the hook for tens of billions of pounds to cover a string of privatised companies’ pension schemes after the precedent set by BT’s landmark “crown guarantee” victory.

What next, I wonder?

Between the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Adam Smith Institute, The TaxPayers’ Alliance and The Cobden Centre, it is pretty clear that the British State owes trillions of pounds.

Yes, trillions of pounds. Somewhere between £4,800,000,000,000 and £7,900,000,000,000. That is, up to about £300,000 for every household in Britain.

Much of this comprises unfunded pension liabilities, so default or inflation would be particularly wicked.

Worse, even funded pension schemes hold government debt, meaning that private pension schemes also rely on the State.  Vast swathes of the population are relying on someone else being taxed later.

The idea that the State can underwrite BT’s pension scheme is a denial of the facts. And yet, as Disraeli wrote, “Despair is the conclusion of fools.”

If we are to find a hopeful path between denial and despair, then, sooner or later, we must reinvent this country. We must stop lending to the State and start saving by investing in productive activity. Everyone who can is going to have to seek to live at their own expense. The State will have to get out of the way and let the entrepreneurs – and that is all of us – turn our fortunes around by searching creatively for opportunities to produce value for others.

The keys are these:

• Peace – a consistent doctrine of non-aggression.
• The family as the basic building block of society, not the State.
• Equality before the law, not after it.
• Freedom from arbitrary government – the classical Rule of Law.
• Property – the unity of ownership and control.

No doubt we must rediscover virtue too, but the law cannot deliver that.

A forthcoming Channel 4 documentary will explain our situation and make the case for the reinvention of Britain. I contributed a substantial interview, although I do not know the extent to which it will be used. Its working title is Britain: The Horror Movie. It will be transmitted sometime this Autumn

In the meantime, I recommend Bastiat, who wrote:

The state is the great fiction by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.

Toby Baxendale

Brian Micklethwait on my colleague, Cobden Centre Chairman, Toby Baxendale:

…You don’t get from seventy grand in debt at the age of twenty one to running a company that turns over a hundred million quid a year before you are even properly middle aged without having something about you.

…

The thing I find particularly intriguing about Toby is how his thinking in the academic sense and his business and social thinking are so deeply intertwined, which is sadly not true of far too many businessmen.  His early acquaintance with the economic facts of life, due to his parents divorcing early and him being raised by his single mother, meant that he came to the study of economics with a well developed sense of how the economy worked and how wealth gets created, and regular economics didn’t add up.  Too abstract.  Simply: not right.  He paid for much of this education by himself working, first by part-owning and running a night club, then by buying food for a restaurant that he part-owned, the latter activity being the basis of his later business success…

Toby is a remarkable man and I am proud to have been instrumental in establishing the educational charity he founded to promote honest money, free trade and peace in the tradition of that great statesman, Richard Cobden.

Read more.

Via Holidays 4 Heroes, the armed forces show how to deliver “quick reaction welfare”:

Holidays 4 Heroes is an informal group of people, including serving and retired personnel from all the UK Armed Forces and civilian supporters. We try to assist serving and former military personnel and their families, in a variety of ways that might otherwise fall outside the remit of the better-known Forces Charities. We work together through an Internet web-site used, mainly but certainly not exclusively, by Army personnel (The ARmy Rumour SErvice or “Arrse” for short – the military have a highly sophisticated sense of humour!).

It all started in December 2007, when users of the “Arrse” website and chat-room were made aware of a former serviceman in some financial difficulty and in imminent risk of being evicted from his home. In the simplest of terms, the folks had a whip-round and sorted the problem – within 48 hours the guy and his family were saved from eviction, Christmas groceries and presents for the children were provided, and everyone felt really good.

A Guardian journalist supports David Cameron:

A few months ago I might have disagreed with [Cameron]; I might have argued that he was quite simply scaremongering, that the country is at heart, just as Gordon Brown has said, basically “decent and compassionate”. But that was before this week. A week when three separate events showed the depths to which this society has finally sunk.

Again, I find I ask if it is time for a change of heart. Again, I find that this problem goes to the core of political debate.

Should we rely on an increase in state power to fix a society broken by a lack of responsibility and morality or is it the state that devours liberty, prosperity and virtue?

I reflect on what I have read, on the present seemingly boundless intervention of the state and on what my East European colleagues have told me about post-Communist societies, and I am determined that the state is the cause of this problem, not its solution.

The solution is individual people, en masse, deciding to take responsibility for restoring a civil society “of uncoerced collective action around shared interests, purposes and values.” Hegel was wrong: state supervision has failed to maintain civility in society.

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