A few weeks ago during a talk hosted at the Institute for Economic Affairs, I picked up a pamphlet written by Lawrence W. Reed of the Mackinac Centre about the life of Thomas Clarkson, a man who, in the late 18th Century, campaigned in print to ban the slave trade. While characters such as William Wilberforce or T.B. Macaulay may be more widely recognised for their role in outlawing this vile business, it was Clarkson who in many ways provided much of the intellectual ammunition. (His name is probably not greatly known and the first thing that sprung to my mind was whether he was the ancestor of British motoring journalist and TV personality Jeremy Clarkson.)

Clarkson wrote an essay for a prize at Cambridge University, and chose to write on the subject of slavery -- then a booming industry enriching many a Briton. For the remainder of his life, he campaigned tirelessly, sometimes even to the point where his own life was put in physical danger. But as we know, victory was eventually secured.

Why do I mention this tale? I do so because it is fashionable amongst a certain type of person to decry the importance of ideas, of individual campaigners against injustice and oppression, and to claim -- with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, of course -- that slavery, and other monstrosities, only declined because of economic or other forces. But even though there is some truth in ascribing changes to these things, as this Wikipedia entry accepts, it still requires the energy and commitment of actual people to force the pace of change. We do not know, for instance, how long slavery might have persisted under the British Empire had people like Clarkson not bothered to campaign against it. It is fair to assume, however, that it ended a good deal sooner than otherwise and hence millions of people probably owed what freedoms they had to people such as this fellow.

It is sometimes a bit depressing to be a libertarian in a country where freedoms are being stamped on as they are at present but frankly I have no time for self-pity, and stories like that of Thomas Clarkson are an inspiring example of how good people with ideas in their heads and fire in the belly can make a difference. Clarkson is a great British hero.

The British pub chain JD Wetherspoon has decided to postpone a ban on smoking in all its pubs, although a nation-wide ban will come into force at the start of 2007, due to the government's new law. A rather ironic tale.

How odd. In many ways, JDW was a good example of how, in a free market, people who wanted a quiet pint without breathing cigarette smoke or listening to loud music could do so. In my own area of Westminister, there is a large chain called the Willow Walk which I and a number of friends use from time to time. Everyone is happy, smokers and non-smokers alike. Considering that the majority of the adult population do not smoke, one would expect plenty of entrepreneurial pub and restaurant owners to cater to the tastes of said public, and indeed many such businesses have developed.

But of course, markets are messy and full of tradeoffs. And for our tidyminded masters, that is unacceptable.

The Guardian's Jenni Russell points out that the attitude of British officialdom is changing subtly.

I find this change truly frightening because I spent the first few years of my life in apartheid South Africa. My parents were political activists, and we lived in an atmosphere of fear. My mother's relations distanced themselves from her, fearing that they too would be targeted if they associated with us. My earliest memories are of police raiding the house at night, emptying out dolls' cots and sweeping books off shelves. People would simply disappear. A black friend left our house to travel to his family in Zululand, and vanished.

After a month of inquiries, someone found a witness who had seen him being picked up by the police. He was being held without charge under the 90-days legislation - the same policy that the government is trying to introduce here. The relief when we came to England was incalculable. This country, these policemen and this government were benign, reasonable and trustworthy. As my father never ceased to point out, a Britain that had fought fascism had a deep-rooted commitment to protecting the individual from the state.

That is no longer true. ID cards are one danger, but there are other measures which are already a reality. [...]

I fear that many of us are failing to see the danger we are now in, precisely because we have grown up in a largely benign state. We still trust in the good sense and reasonableness of its agents, and the rest of officialdom.

However, I think she is wrong about the cause:

This change in the relationship between people and officials can only be explained as a result of the new illiberal atmosphere in which we are living.

That's back to front. An illiberal attitude is insufficient for oppression or we would be living under the dictatorship of the Free Church of Scotland. It is actually about power. Unchecked power will be abused. Not may, will.

You cannot change the culture of the law - Blair minor - without affecting the culture of the land. British police were once famous for courtesy. But then as little as twenty years ago they had few powers not available to the ordinary citizen. They relied on voluntary cooperation for much of their authority, and the reasonable exercise of that authority yielded general cooperation.

Before the merger of the agencies, the Inland Revenue was proverbially gentlemanly and reasonable compared to HM Customs and Excise, though the taxation functions were very similar. The difference in culture wasn't accidental. Customs had vastly greater powers and found it easier to rely on fear to do the job.

ASBO-land is a different place from England. And this is why: as they gain more capacity to order us about, those in office will order us about more. What else?

The PM implies he wishes us to 'respect' one another and social norms. He claims he has given powers to officials to make it so. But respec' on the streets will mean something else. It will mean respec' (in the sense of fawning obedience) towards the same officials who have the powers to make it so. And as we have ever fewer rights - perhaps not even existence - without their say-so, truculence, swagger and oppression by officials will become the norm.

Perry de Havilland wrote in this post that

all insulting behaviour (short of actual incitement to violence), blasphemy and 'holocaust denial' laws are an intolerable abridgement of freedom of expression and must be abolished, now!

Why is incitement to violence an exception? When a violent act is committed, why should a citizen capable of standing trial be able to claim that they were incited as some kind of mitigating circumstance? Is there not a legal expectation in nations respecting the rule of law that an adult capable of standing trial is a thinking, responsible individual? And thus, if said individual claims to have been 'incited' to violence, surely the point is that at some stage that person has decided to physically remove the rights of another. Grandma's favourite scold - "if someone told you to jump off a cliff..." - applies in spades.

I cannot see how an 'incitement to violence' is any different to racist 'hate speech' - something that is censured but not censored by most supporters of liberal values. Surely a liberal believes that personal responsibility is central pillar of liberty. Criminalising incitement to violence further divorces personal responsibility from individuals, thus further justifying the existence of an overmighty State.

Incidentally, I am sure I am not the only one who would like to know further details of Perry's run-in with David Irving.

At the same time Jyllands-Posten in Denmark is valiantly establishing that freedom of expression is a core western value and that the right to say what you will does indeed include the right to say what some people may find offensive... a court in Austria has in effect sided with Islamic extremists by sentencing 'historian' and fantasist David Irving to three years in jail for upsetting Jewish sensibilities by making preposterous claims about the Nazi Holocaust.

Am I the only one who sees the sickening irony of protecting Jewish feelings ending up giving aid and comfort of Islamic bigots who want to prevent the publishing of anything they find offensive? I can just hear them now: "Oh, so upsetting the Jews gets you thrown in jail but anyone can upset the Muslims..."

Dr Romain, rabbi of Maidenhead Synagogue, said: "I welcome yet another public rebuff for David Irving's pseudo-historical views, although personally I prefer to treat him with disdain than with imprisonment."

And that, Rabbi, is the sign of a mature and freedom loving disposition. What a pity that more Muslim clerics do not take such a view when their sensibilities are offended and their community starts howling for the state to ban offensive remarks as Austria has done in the case of David Irving. Had Jyllands-Posten been an Austrian rather than Danish newspaper, it would be hard to make the argument that there was clearly a legal right to offensive (and therefore free) expression.

And before people in the USA get too smug, this is not just a European issue. Let me ask you this: do you support making burning the US flag illegal? If so, then clearly you agree with the Muslims that free speech does not include the right to offend people.

Time to clean house: all insulting behaviour (short of actual incitement to violence), blasphemy and 'holocaust denial' laws are an intolerable abridgement of freedom of expression and must be abolished, now!

Update: Stephen Pollard and Oliver Kamm have broadly similar views.

Look, I have got a cold coming on. I do not really want to post about this. But, for the record (and because this is Samizdata, dammit! We may not be able to stop the passing of liberty but we of all people should toll the bell) David Irving should not be jailed. Historical opinions, however deluded and malevolent, should not be criminalised.

Reuters reports that the hunting with hounds is more popular than ever despite the move by parliament last year to outlaw the hunting of foxes with hounds. (Incidentally, foxes are increasingly a problem in the cities as they scavenge for food. I used to live in Clapham and the place was full of them).

It makes me wonder about whether the vote by MPs this week to ban smoking in public places, including private members' clubs, will be easily enforced. Let's hope it meets the same fate as the anti-foxhunting measure. I say this as someone who does not smoke or hunt on horseback (despite being a Suffolk farmer's son, hunting with hounds never appealed, although I have shot the odd bunny rabbit from time to time).

MPs have just voted in favour of making it compulsory for Britons to have an ID card when they apply for a passport. Bastards.

Our home grown authoritarians plan to inflict yet more absurd measures which have nothing to do with defending ourselves against terrorism. ID cards would not have stopped a single terrorist attack in the UK: they are a control measure designed to make taxing and regulating people's economic activities easier, nothing more. Yet because there is a genuine threat from Islamic terrorists, the government keeps trying to conflate ID cards with 'doing something about terrorism'. As it is so obviously untrue, this issue makes a rather good quick and easy litmus test to detect people who are either complete idiots or barefaced liars (or both).

Moreover the intend to make 'glorifying terrorism' illegal is not just bound to backfire, it is a terrible idea on every level. You would think people in the dismal halls of Westminster would have learned to leave well enough alone given the comical absurdity of past attempts to ban terrorists saying things in the UK, which lead to such farcical situations as having Sinn Fein/IRA's Gerry Adams' voice being dubbed by other people's voices to get around attempts to stop him airing his views. We need people to actually say what they think and the more vile they are, the more important it is to hear what motivates them.

Moreover does anyone seriously think people are attracted to actively support terrorism because of what they read in a mainstream newspaper rather than opinions closer to their every day life? It is a bit more complex than that and again you would think the experience of Ulster would have shown that when terrorists gain the support of a section of a society, all stoping their spokesmen from talking in the media does is prevent everyone else from understanding what they really think.

The BBC and mainstream media generally has followed the government line that there is a large pool of moderate Muslim opinion which does not support or sympathise with radical and intolerant Islamic views. I too have assumed this to be the case, at least in some measure, and yet as time goes by the theory is starting to look rather threadbare as if there really is a majority of moderates out there, they are more than just silent, they are almost invisible. The organisers of the demonstration yesterday in Trafalgar Square carefully choreographed the event to show the world a moderate face of muslim opinion standing hand in hand with a few dhimmis like Ken Livingston and select useful idiots such as Pax Christi and former KGB front man Bruce Kent. Yet it took less than 24 hours for one of the people behind the demo to reveal his true colours.

But any attempt to shut these people up with the law will not stop them saying whatever they want amongst their own community, unless the government plans to have multi-lingual spies reporting on what gets said in every single mosque and Arabic/Turkish/Kurdish/Pakistani social club in Britain. The only people who will no longer know what these guys really think will be the rest of us. And given that anyone who trusts the what the state says to decide who is and is not 'the bad guys' is a credulous fool, that is not a good idea to say the least. Yet again we see why freedom of expression is not just important, it is essential if we are to know our enemies as well as our friends.

When I worked at the Adam Smith Institute, I used to go on the radio arguing that extending licensing hours would reduce violence. Well, it seems we were right: serious violent crime has fallen by over a fifth since the UK's pub licensing laws were liberalised.

Muslim Action Committee are calling for changes to the law in Britain to implement an aspect of sharia law and they want the British state to do it for them. What they want is to legally ban people from displaying pictures of Mohammed, the seventh century warlord who founded their religion, because it annoys them. Never mind that showing images of this historical figure does not threaten them with violence or prevent their exercise of religion, they want to make it illegal to annoy them.

They are planning to stage a protest march in London on 18 February, expecting to attract 20,000 to 50,000 people. I hope the number is considerably larger because I am sure as hell going to be there expressing my views as well.

If they get their way, we will undoubtedly be prosecuted as Samizdata's response to this islamo-fascist proposal will be a "Mohammed Picture of the Day", each day and every day until hell freezes over or we run out of server space. Intolerant Islam does not like being annoyed? Well guys, you ain't seen nothing yet, I promise you that. Our Dutch friends at The Amazing Retecool are a fairly good place to start for interesting interpretations of Mohammed's image.

If this ever becomes law and I personally get dragged into court over what Samizdata will most certainly do, rest assured that as we are hosted in the USA we will remain on-line and 'expressive' regardless, even if I have to 'host' myself in the USA a few years earlier that I expected. So to all your intolerant Islamic fascists out there who think it is within your power to silence all the voices you dislike, with all due respect (i.e. none), you are very much mistaken.

The main thing that the Jyllands-Posten incident was intended to do was to assert the right of freedom of expression as a way of defending that right, and they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

Given the climate of abridgement regarding freedom of expression and civil rights generally in Britain and elsewhere, I can only offer my heartfelt thanks to not just Flemming Rose of Jyllands-Posten for publishing those aesthetically unremarkable cartoons and forcing this issue onto the front page where it belongs, but to everyone involved in this drama.

In other words I would like to thank not just those august Danes but also offer a hat-tip to the millions of screaming Muslim activists and blood curdling placard bearing demonstrators who underlined and put into bold what those Danes did, giving them publicity but above all proving their point. If you guys had not taken the bait hook, line and sinker, this would have been a non-event.

Yet now only the most gibbering purblind Chomskyite will claim that Muslim activists have not created a climate of fear and intimidation regarding what people can and cannot say about them, or that is it all about Israel (sorry, Palestine) and BushMcHitler. Without the help and support of all those guys in Kabul, London, Beirut, Cairo, Copenhagen and Damascus, this incident would have been a foot note rather than a global headline. As I have said before, with enemies like them, who needs friends?

We now have a powerful set of memes to use against the enemies of liberty, both domestic and foreign. I suggest we use them for all they are worth and assert our rights, continually pushing the boundaries just to defend what we have. Someone wants to curtail what you can say? Point out they are appeasing the guys with the signs reading "WE WILL BEHEAD ANY WHO INSULT ISLAM".

We must also refuse to tolerate the intolerance that wraps itself in worlds like 'respect' and 'acceptance' because whilst we must tolerate our enemies provided they do not threaten us with force, we should feel no obligation to respect them or to accept their views any more than they must respect or accept us.

Tolerance however is non-negotiable.

Update: this is something these guys understand.

The ever industrious Dissident Frogman was toiling into the wee hours last night to produce some splendid graphics for blogs and other websites who want to show their support for Denmark. We now sport one of these graphics in our sidebar because we need to defend our imperfect but hard won rights to free speech in the western world.

The fact that a group of intolerant Muslims in South Africa, where they are a minority, have use the force of law to both prevent freedom of expression pre-emptively should make it clear that complacency is not an option.

Certainly we cannot just assume the media will defend itself... listen to this (mp3 sound file... may take a moment to download) and contrast the snooty BBC journalist with the Danish gentleman (a member of Parliament) who defends liberty regardless of the cost in economic terms.

Here is a photo taken of the march by Muslims protesting against Jyllands-Poster and the 'Satanic Cartoons' saga in London earlier today.

The placards read Behead those who insult Islam & Butcher those who mock Islam & Slay those who disrespect Islam etc. etc.

Freedom of expression is quite literally intolerable to them. And we cannot and must not tolerate that. It makes no logical sense to tolerate intolerance.

With thanks to H for the picture

And for those of you who say "It's just a protest"...

We have a free press and this freedom of expression is a vital and indispensable part of our democracy and this is the reason why I cannot control what is published in the media
- Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen

Robin Koerner of Watching America thinks that the whole 'Satanic Cartoon' issue needs to be resolved with the straightforward notion that people must agree to disagree

Gulliver's Travels is a satirical story about two factions that face over how to eat boiled eggs. The first maintains that boiled eggs should be cracked at the smaller end. Their opponents maintain that they should be cracked at the larger end: and they are all set to go to war over it.

With the 'offensive' Danish cartoons, we have the modern equivalent: the large-enders (Western apologists) are apologizing to the small-enders (offended Muslims) for making a joke out of small-ending!

This entire furor is premised on the assumption that we can not dignify people by giving them responsibility for the way they choose to react to the things in their world - and especially things that they do not like. Just as I have the responsibility not to choose to get angry at all every Muslim when a few damaged individuals commit such evil acts as beheading of innocents.

No one can insult me or offend me unless I choose to be insulted or offended. In denying that, I deny my own power over myself. I understand that people may not have arrived at that understanding, but since I have it, I cannot in good conscience withdraw my own free expression when no hurt was intended.

Did all these politicians and pundits not learn this very basic lesson when they were five and got upset at a hurtful remark in the playground, and their teachers told them, "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me"...?

While I am the first to expound openness to those who see things differently from me I also expound my own need to be who I am. We have a right to do our truth as individuals, and as a culture, just as do all Muslims and the culture of Islam. While I will always respect the right of someone to disagree with me, and respect the equal humanity even of those who disagree with me violently, I never have to deny my own truth.

Voltaire's famous line, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" will only make for a better world if we add to it, "You disapprove of what I say, but I will defend to the death my right to say it."...

In the instance of the 'offensive' cartoon, no one needs to defend anything to the death. We need only politely apologize for causing unintended upset; politely explain that we do not require that the cartoon be read by anyone who is in any way upset by it, and that we respectfully disagree that our culture is worse for protecting freedom of expression where it is not imposed and does no physical harm.

Then let it drop and let the fire burn itself out. It is called "agreeing to disagree" and is the very manifestation of treating everyone with equal respect.

Today Mr Blair and his cronies will bring their banning Incitement to Religious Hatred (i.e. death to another part of what is left of free speech) idea before the House of Commons.

Normally one must be careful not to use the word "evil" in politics. One must not claim a monopoly of virtue for one's own side in any political debate as one may always be wrong and, even if one is correct, the people on the other side may simply be honestly mistaken. They may be voting for a bad statute, but they are not themselves bad people.

However, the vile scheme that is the banning Incitement to Religious Hatred Bill has been exposed so many times (and in so many places) that no member of the House of Commons can honestly say that they did not know what they were voting for.

There is no question of (say) "the balance of argument" or "people of good will taking different sides". The people who vote for this bill (in the hopes of their party getting some Muslim votes - and, of course, not from tolerant Muslims) are voting for something they know to be evil, and that makes these members of the House of Commons bad people, unfit to serve in the 'Mother of Parliaments'.

I hope that a full list of the Members of the House of Commons, and their constituencies, who vote for this measure is published and widely distributed so that people will know who not to vote for in the next General Election.

I also hope that people who live in the constituencies of the MPs who vote for this bill write to them to, politely, express their horror and disgust with what they have done.

To see a term like "Blairite Tyranny" bandied about on a blog like this by people who think things like civil liberties actually matter, is to be expected.

However to see those words in print at all in the mainstream media is quite remarkable! More of the same please.

It is not much fun being nearly sixty, but it does have some advantages, one of which is that you can just about remember political debates now long dead, of a sort which younger people may have little idea about.

And during the nineteen fifties, I recall, there was a debate, at any rate in Britain, engaged in by diehard free-marketeers, about the long term consequences of the Welfare State. The name of Anthony LeJeune springs to mind, but most of his recent writing nowadays seems to have been reviews of crime stories. Anyway, these diehard free-marketeers said that the Welfare State would corrupt the working class and turn then from the upstanding citizens that they then mostly were into barbarians. Diehard non-free-marketeers genuinely could not imagine this happening, and dismissed such fears as absurd. Most politicians, similarly unable to imagine that times might seriously change, concurred with the diehard non-free-marketeers.

Insofar as it was then acknowledged that the Welfare State would undermine the social pressures on people to be upright citizens, this was mostly regarded as a good thing. The Welfare State would enable people to escape from narrow-minded social prejudices and live freer and happier lives.

I concider the Prime Minister's somewhat implausible attempts to civilise our current crop of barbarians to be evidence, if you need any more, that those diehard free-marketeers had a point.

The essence of the Welfare State, as was well understood by the people who founded it, was and is that you get your goodies, meagre though they may typically be, as a right. Nobody can take your goodies away from you, unless you do something like rob a bank, get caught, and get sent to prison. Short of that, you have your rights, and you can behave as you please, which for some means behaving very, very badly.

In the decades before the Welfare State, you depended on the people around you - like landlords, employers, neighbours, etc., above all on your own family - for whatever goodies you managed to get your hands on, and bad behaviour towards these people was punishable, and was punished, with loss of goodies.

One should not exaggerate. These pressures still operate on most people in Britain now. Most people still know that if they behave very badly, they will be shunned by polite society, which for most people still exists, even if they now would not use that particular phrase to describe it. Most people have jobs, and many of them want better jobs. If they indulge, say, in football hooliganism at the weekend, they know that this might cause employers (or customers, which amounts to the same thing), potential and future, to look askance at them.

But, for a substantial minority, mostly the minority whose lives are dominated by the Welfare State, there is now no such thing as polite society to be shunned by. The remnants of such a society may still exist, but it no longer has power over the barbarians who prey upon it.

What Tony Blair is trying to do is to recreate a "modern" substitute for such informal social pressures with the force of the law and with the power of the state.

The difficulty with this approach is that it means attacking the problem with only a rather small number of quite large bludgeons, wielded from relatively few power centres, rather than with millions of little truncheons, wielded by millions of different persons of only moderate influence. And these bludgeons are all too likely to end up being a problem worse than the one they are being created to solve. The power of the police to arrest on sight, or the power of welfare bureaucrats selectively to withhold benefits, or of council officials to eject troublesome tenants, creates a world either of arbitrary political tyranny or of endless political and legal wrangling. In practice, both. It recreates informal, social power, but in the negative-sum arena of politics, rather than in the positive-sum world of the free society.

Against one tyrannical landlord, or against one malevolent neighbour who falsely accuses you of mayhem, you may have a chance. You can seek another landlord, new neighbours. You can retaliate by arguing with the community by which you are surrounded that your reputation deserves to remain spotless, and that it is your landlord or your neighbour whose name should now be mud. But now, for many people, there is no "community" within which to establish a reputation or to add a bit of black to other people's. "Community" has become a euphemism for a mere aggregate of persons connected only by being classified in the same bureaucratic category

And if some marauding gang of barbarians has a "reputation", so what? They now glory in this. If a surrounding community does still exists without the need for any inverted commas, it lacks the power to make its judgements of such mayhem stick. It now has no power to reward or to punish.

The state has takes away those resources and that power, at first because it either saw no need for such power or else because it regarded the power as bad, and now because it cannot imagine handing it back. (Who to? How do we "recreate civil society"? Etc.)

Nor would the people from whom this power has been taken away necessarily welcome the upheavals involved in it somehow being re-established. Just as it was impossible in the nineteen fifties for people to imagine the harm that the Welfare State would eventually do, so now, it seems impossible for most to imagine a world without the Welfare State, or how on earth such a world might be contrived.

By the way, I am a libertarian rather than a conservative (of the pessimisitic British sort) because I believe that people respond quite rapidly to incentives, and not just in a bad way. Abolish the Welfare State with a magic button right now, and you would be amazed (and British conservatives amazed) by how very quickly a lot people would at once start behaving better and how quickly they would then inefect most of the rest. "Human nature" is not all bad. Most people instinctively want to be good, and many more have at least be raised to be good. If they did not want to be good, the voters would not be telling Tony Blair that there is a problem, and he would not even be going through the motions of trying to solve this problem.

As it is, there definitely is a problem, and those who merely say that "these people need to be helped rather than threatened" are being idiotic. Those libertarians who emphasise only the bad things (basically the civil liberties angles) about Blair's answers without confronting the problem he is trying to confront are likewise rather missing the bigger picture. ASBOs may indeed threaten the integrity of the the criminal justice system, but in the meantime, many an abused neighbour or gang-terrorised estate is surely thankful for them.

So Blair is by no means totally wrong about this stuff. But the answer to his problem is a whole lot more complicated than most Labourites, and I suspect, the majority of anything-else-ites, are now willing to acknowledge.

More from me (and from Theodore Dalrymple) in a similar vein here.

William, Lord Rees-Mogg in The Times says:

In Parliament, particularly in the House of Lords, there is a growing reaction against such social control [as identity cards]. Most of us think policemen should not be turned into busybodies, warning people not even to discuss adoption by homosexual couples; arresting them for any trivial offence; threatening smokers and publicans; and galloping after fox-hunters. We resent this on behalf of the public, but we also resent it on behalf of the police.

In the history of Britain there have been many periods when liberty was threatened. The immediate threat is a government with a lust for control, with little respect for liberty or for the House of Commons, but enjoying the opportunity of using new technologies for social control. The British are certainly less free than we were in 1997 or 2001. The fightback will be laborious and difficult, but there is a new mood.

There is small sign of such a new mood on the Government benches. Is there one in the country?

This story is old hat by now, but it reminded me of an unusual anomaly when I was in China recently. Most readers are probably aware that some time ago China erected a firewall that censors parts of the internet it deems too sensitive for ordinary Chinese to view. Consequently, the more uncontrollable realms of the internet (like Blogspot.com) that could be exploited by computer users with a dissenting streak - as well as sources of critical news and the like - cannot be accessed within China. Wikipedia is also out of bounds.

Whilst in the Middle Kingdom, I visited a Sinophilic friend of mine. I would go so far as to say he has a case of the old rose-tinted glasses regarding China and the nature of its administration - needless to say we enjoyed a number of discussions about the direction China is heading in. Apart from being a China enthusiast, he is also an Apple Macintosh fanatic, and he owns one of those rather handsome new and expensive Apple Powerbook laptops. In one of our debates about Chinese freedom - or lack thereof - I parried with an example of China's neutered internet access. Why, I was not even able to access my own (and now defunct) Blogspot blog in the country! Rubbish, cried my friend. He read my blog all the time on his Macintosh.

Of course, I had to see for myself, and sure enough it was able to be accessed on his computer. I know that sometimes the firewall does not work and once in a while you can view sites that are normally off limits. Then the firewall kicks in again and the illicit page is unable to reload. However, I accessed a number of different Blogspot sites on his Mac several times over a period of days without the slightest bit of hindrance, even though all Blogspot sites I tried to visit were blocked across the country on computers that ran Windows platforms. I even tried using a different browser - Firefox was no different to MSIE. I would have liked to have been able to test the theory further and Google up some Falun Gong links, but this did not seem prudent on someone else's machine, given the Chinese government's attitude to that group.

The above got me thinking - when the story broke about Microsoft shutting down that Chinese blog, I wondered if Microsoft and the Chinese government had colluded in the construction of the Great Internet Wall. In the eyes of the computing world, this would surely be a far more heinous crime. Since the Windows platform enjoys considerably less competition in China than it does in the MS-dominated West, ensuring Chinese Windows machines cannot access sites the Government disapproves of means the job is pretty much done.

I admit, if China and Microsoft did work together to construct the wall, it seems like an unusual and inelegant solution - relying on the software of the end user to filter out content. Surely some specific backdoor entrance would need to be engineered into the programme. I am certainly no computer expert - there could be a perfectly reasonable explanation for the above, and there are some pretty switched on people who comment here. Ideas?

While in the US there is an argument going on about whether the intelligence services may spy on Americans without a warrant, in Britain we have had unsupervised surveillance for years. But The Independent on Sunday reports that Mr Blair's quest for total power has started to worry even some cabinet ministers. This in particular:

Until now, successive administrations have pledged that there should be no tapping "whatsoever" of MPs' phones, and that they would be told if it was necessary to breach the ban.

But that convention - known as the Wilson Doctrine, after Harold Wilson, the prime minister who introduced it - is to be abandoned in an expansion of MI5 powers following the London bombings.

American readers may wish to note that our equivalent of attorney-client privilege is very nearly dead, too.

Jamie Whyte in The Times is a paragon of rational liberalism. Today he neatly skewers the fallacious thinking of those who impose their own heirarchy of values and risk aversion on the rest of us.

Doctors, he points out, will tend to overvalue health relative to other goods, such as pleasure. They "confound what is good for us with what is good for our health." And this analysis is readily applicable to the army of experts who struggle to control us and get use of our taxes to pursue their own preferences. They all fail to accept that other people have different tastes that in conditions of liberty are traded-off by those people.

Jamie Whyte again:

Politicians always claim that their safety regulations are motivated by concern for people in dangerous jobs. Yet the beneficiaries are always people who do not do dangerous jobs. Workplace health and safety meansures are a zero-sum game in which wealth is transferred from the brave to the timid.

And yet, I think Whyte here simplifies and understates the case. He concentrates on the loss of 'danger money' to workers if the market price of the safer jobs falls. That, adding in workplace costs, might look like a zero-sum game, but a business is not a closed isolated system linking effectively infinite reservoirs of labour and capital.

The cost of complying with regulations is not transferred between internal costs and neatly compensated by changes in the labour market. The costs must be borne by customers and workers and capital in an uncertain proportion, and may force the business to shrink or restructure. And some of those costs are transfers of wealth to new players: regulators, inspectors, compliance officers, policemen, lawyers, prison officers, and the businesses that spring up to sell advice, form-filling guides and special stationery to all of the other new players and the businesses trying to minimise their attentions.

I think Whyte is mistaken when he asserts later in the same article that "left to his own devices a profit-seeking employer would get workplace safety exactly right". Employers are often irrationally optimistic—in the modern world they need to be to become employers. But that does not change the fact that the imposition of any new form of compliance on an industry makes all its existing workers, businesses and customers collectively financially worse off, though it may change the balance between them.

The quantity of inspection, regulation and statutory record-keeping is a measure of how much worse off, in financial terms, we are than otherwise we would be. State intervention is never costless, never self-financing, though differing people may end up paying. A would be regulator ought therefore to adduce non-material benefits for what he wants to do sufficient to convince the people affected. Unfortunately it is more likely, as Whyte points out, that his choices will reflect his own preferences. And worse, his preferences when someone else is paying.

Andrew Zalotocky makes a useful point that we need to stop pretending that we have free speech in Britain, we do not. Time for a new description.

Regular Samizdata readers will probably be aware of the cases of Lynette Burrows and Iqbal Sacranie, who have both recently fallen foul of 'hate speech' legislation. The latter case prompted Guy Herbert to comment that "whatever it is, it is not freedom of expression". I propose that we should call it 'permitted speech', in contrast to 'free speech'.

For speech to be truly free it must include the right to say things that others would find grossly offensive. If a government uses the threat of prosecution to suppress speech that it considers offensive it is asserting that the people may only express the views that their rulers deem appropriate. No matter how lightly the government uses this power it is still establishing the principle that citizens do not have a right to speak freely, only a license to engage in the officially permitted forms of speech. America has 'free speech' and Britain has 'permitted speech'.

Of course, the majority of people are not in the habit of expressing controversial views in the mass media and are therefore unlikely to feel immediately threatened by such restrictions. Even cases like that of the student who was arrested for calling a horse "gay" are likely to be seen as a joke rather than a demonstration of how criminalising the expression of certain opinions affects everybody. However, that just makes it even more important to explain why the right to freedom of speech must be defended, and to make clear that permitted speech is not the same thing at all.

The clampdown on disrespect continues. Sir Iqbal Sacranie is under police investigation. The putative crime, a public order offence, disorderly conduct: behaviour likely to cause alarm, harrassment or distress contrary to the Public Order Act 1986.

So, has Sir Iqbal been staggering aggressively around a shopping centre waving his fist at passers-by? Has he been picketing a building yelling threats at workers? Has he been hanging around on a street corner with his legal director and PR man, holding open bottles of cheap cider and throwing traffic cones at one another?

No. Sir Iqbal is a genial, if quite intense, man. He has been doing the sort of thing he got knighted for.

The alleged offense took place in the course of a serious discussion of his religious beliefs on Radio 4. He reportedly said that homosexual behaviour is not acceptable on moral or health grounds, and that civil partnerships therefore were not acceptable either. Some people were offended by this "homophobia" and complained to the police.

I do not care for what Sir Iqbal thinks about gays. But he does think it. I do care that he should be allowed to say what he thinks. And it does worry me that offending people by your mere opinion expressed publicly in a public forum can now be a police matter. I have always opposed the Public Order Act 1986 as too widely drawn, and likely to inhibit all sorts of activities in public places that pose no threat to others - but I had no clue that it might be used like this. You can always find someone who will be offended by anything.

But more disturbing than the law - the existing law, before Tony Blair gets to work on arbitrary extension of summary powers - being used to interdict opinion, is the certainty that it will not be open to anyone to have those expressing opinions that offend them investigated. I am alarmed harrassed and distressed by everything that issues from the Prime Minister's mouth and the ruthless mendacious actions of his government in promoting those views, will police investigate? Had Sir Iqbal, who, like a lot of other conventional religious people, plainly is distressed by the thought of gay sex, heard a lewd interlude by Julian Clary on a Radio 4 panel game, and complained, would police investigate?

This adumbrates a world in which officially approved opinions may be expressed freely, but those that are not officially approved will be deemed offensive, and suppressed therefore. Whatever it is, it is not freedom of expression.