Sunday
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(30)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.
Friday
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.
Sunday
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.
Wednesday
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.
Tuesday
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.
Tuesday
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.
Saturday
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).
Monday
MPs have just voted in favour of making it compulsory for Britons to have an ID card when they apply for a passport. Bastards.
Sunday
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.
Thursday
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.
Thursday
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.
Wednesday
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.
Sunday
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.
Friday
Here is a photo taken of the march by Muslims protesting against Jyllands-Poster and the 'Satanic Cartoons' saga in London earlier today.
click for larger image
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"...
Friday
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
Friday
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.
Tuesday
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.
Tuesday
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.
Tuesday
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.
Tuesday
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?
Monday
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?
Sunday
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.
Saturday
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.
Friday
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.
Thursday
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.
Sunday
I look forward to Blair apologists spinning this unsurprising revelation.
Town hall bureaucrats are to be given sweeping new powers to investigate homes for identity card evasion and to impose heavy fines on occupants found without one. The revelation, in an obscure Whitehall consultation paper, calls into serious doubt the Government's repeated promises that planned ID cards, already hugely controversial, will be voluntary and that no one will be forced to carry one.
But we should trust the government because... well, just because.
At least the Telegraph is putting out bloggy articles like this one in opposition. I wonder, is the rest of the Fourth Estate going to sleep through this?
Saturday
As the report stage of the Identity Cards Bill approaches in the Lords, a reminder of one highlight from the first day of the committee stage Hansard, 15 Nov 2005, Col.1012:
Lord Gould of Brookwood: Both the previous speakers—the latter with great emotion—were arguing for freedom. We have to ask what greater freedom is there than the freedom to place a vote for a political party in a ballot box upon the basis of a mandate and a manifesto. That is the crux of it: the people have supported this measure. That is what the noble Earl's father fought for. But that is too trivial an answer. I know that. The fundamental argument is that the truth is that people believe that these identity cards will affirm their identity. The noble Lord opposite said that he likes to be in this House and how he is recognised in this House because it is a community that recognises him. That is how the people of this nation feel. They feel that they are part of communities, and they want recognition. For them, recognition comes in the form of this identity card. Noble Lords may think that that is strange, but it is what they feel. This is their kind of freedom. They want their good, hard work and determination to be recognised, rewarded and respected. That is what this does.Of course it is right and honourable for noble Lords to have their views, but I say there is another view, and it is the view of the majority of this country. They want to have the respect, recognition and freedom that this card will give them. Times have changed. Politics have changed. What would not work 50 years ago, works now. It is not just me. I have the words of the leader of your party:
"I have listened to the police and security service chiefs. They have told me that ID cards can and will help their efforts to protect the lives of British citizens against terrorist acts. How can I disregard that?".
This is not some silly idea of the phoney left. It is a mainstream idea of modern times. It is a new kind of identity and a new kind of freedom. I respect the noble Lords' views, but it would help if they respected the fact that the Bill and the identity cards represent the future: a new kind of freedom and a new kind of identity.
This is the sort of rhetoric that makes my blood run cold. Here's a prefiguring example:
In our state the individual is not deprived of freedom. In fact, he has greater liberty than an isolated man, because the state protects him and he is part of the State. Isolated man is without defence
- Benito Mussolini
Terry Eagleton (from a review of Paxton's Anatomy of Fascism in the New Statesman) elucidates the connection:
Conservatives disdain the popular masses, while fascists mobilise and manipulate them. Some conservatives believe in ideas, but fascists have a marked preference for myths. If they think at all, they think through their blood, not their brain. Fascists regard themselves as a youthful, revolutionary avant-garde out to erase the botched past and create an unimaginably new future.
All supporters of the old-fashioned conception of individual liberty, whether they think of themselves as left or right, conservative or progressive, must do what can be done. Resist. We should not expect any quarter for outdated ideas under a new kind of freedom.
[cross-posted from White Rose]
Saturday
A letter to The Independent:
Sir: In the article "Terror suspects describe alleged torture 'in front of MI6 agents' " (4 January) Elinda Labropoulou claimed "The British Government has issued a gagging order to prevent the publication of the alleged British agent's name". It has not.The advice given to editors on this issue was not offered by the Government, but by me on behalf of the Defence Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee. The five standing Defence Advisory Notices on the publication and broadcasting of national security information agreed by this independent Committee (see www.dnotice.org.uk) constitute a purely voluntary code, one without any form of legal sanction. Any suggestion that the media has been "gagged" on this issue is plain wrong.
ANDREW VALLANCE
AIR VICE-MARSHAL, SECRETARY, DEFENCE PRESS AND BROADCASTING ADVISORY COMMITTEE, LONDON SW1
Which rather begs some questions. If the D-notice DPBAC has no legal sanction, what extra-legal sanctions are available to it? Is there an implicit distinction here between "the Government" and government? I'm sure you can think of others.
Thursday
I have been a bit more tolerant than my Samizdatista comrades about the populist postures adopted by nice Mr Cameron. And being a Conservative Party member, it is me that has to be tolerant, after all. A certain sainted editor has been consistent in urging people not to vote for a long, long time, so a Tory leader really need not care what Perry thinks...
But this has brought me up short. OK, it is speculative bluster about what might be considered by a working party. But how are the 'liberal values', that Cameron has made so much of, served by forced labour?
Sunday
According to Pfizer:
When friends encourage the use of treatments with comforting words like “natural” and “herbal” - the person may not know that natural products include hemlock and cyanide or realize that not all products available without a prescription have been proven efficacious and safe.
Well in that case, we'd better get them banned.
Tuesday
Do not count on it but there is a much belated push on in Westminster to undermine the ID cards legislation that, if successful, would in effect make them voluntary. The Tories and LibDems peers (the later of which have at least been consistent in their opposition to ID cards) are at least going through the motion of blocking this monstrous intrusion by the state but I will believe it when I see it.
So... will David Cameron make the immediate scrapping of ID cards and abolition of the national register a manifesto pledge? If not then clearly it is still very much the party of Michael 'a touch of the night' Howard. Even if the move to prevent back-door compulsion succeeds, as long as the infrastructure of surveillance and branding us like cattle remains in place, Britain will remain nothing more than a Police State being held in abeyance.
Friday
I have written a couple of times before about the very useful cultural confrontation with intolerant Muslims that occurred when Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten published some less than flattering cartoons featuring the Prophet Mohammed.
Well in case you are curious what those cartoons actually looked like, here they are (sorry, but I do not have a larger version and the original link no longer works):
If Salman Rushdie wrote the 'Satanic Verses' and incurred the ire of the moonbat faction of Islam, I guess the Jyllands Posten publication must be the 'Satanic Cartoons'.
Here is a link that shows the cartoons more clearly so you can see what all the fuss is about.
Thursday
Britain's Law Lords, the nearest thing this nation has to the U.S. Supreme Court, has ruled that evidence obtained by torture is inadmissable in a criminal court. I'll state right off that this surely has to be the right decision for cases including those of terrorism. Torture is a sort of "canary in the mineshaft" issue in a civilisation. The willingness to admit evidence obtained by torture is a no-go zone for me. Even on practical, consequentialist grounds, the use of torture cannot be expected necessarily to give valuable, credible evidence for those trying to prevent terrorist attacks.
The broader point for me is that there is not much point trying to defend civilisation if we use barbaric methods.
The rule of law has had a good day today.
Update: so far 117 responses! By my rough calculation, about 70 percent think torture is a legitimate practice in certain cases. I honestly don't know whether the comments are representative of Samizdata readers overall. What I do find odd is that so many of you fellows, normally so hostile to abuse of state power and suspicious of things like ID cards, are prepared to let state agents use torture. That cannot be right.
Thursday
Britain's Law Lords, the nearest thing this nation has to the U.S. Supreme Court, has ruled that evidence obtained by torture is inadmissable in a criminal court. I'll state right off that this surely has to be the right decision for cases including those of terrorism. Torture is a sort of "canary in the mineshaft" issue in a civilisation. The willingness to admit evidence obtained by torture is a no-go zone for me. Even on practical, consequentialist grounds, the use of torture cannot be expected necessarily to give valuable, credible evidence for those trying to prevent terrorist attacks.
The broader point for me is that there is not much point trying to defend civilisation if we use barbaric methods.
The rule of law has had a good day today.
Update: so far 117 responses! By my rough calculation, about 70 percent think torture is a legitimate practice in certain cases. I honestly don't know whether the comments are representative of Samizdata readers overall. What I do find odd is that so many of you fellows, normally so hostile to abuse of state power and suspicious of things like ID cards, are prepared to let state agents use torture. That cannot be right.
Tuesday
Only a few years back, banning smoking in bars and restaurants was seen as an implausible idea. But New York's smoking ban made a big difference. New Labour guru Stephen Pollard, caught up in the euphoria of a trip to New York, enthused in a pro-ban article for the Independent:
Years of leaving it to individuals to decide how to behave have had almost no effect for the better. In New York, the impact of legislation has been truly wonderful, reclaiming the city from smokers who, as experience clearly shows, almost never act considerately...The fact is, the ban works in New York City, and I’ll bet a jumbo packet of Marlboro Lite that it would work here, too. So rise up and unite, clean air freedom lovers of the world. Let’s ditch our principles, and push to make London a capital in which we can all breathe freely.
But there was another cause for the ban aside from misguided Blairite euphoria: a major lobbying effort. And a major player in the campaign for a smoking ban was Pfizer, writing cheques in support of a ban. There is a commercial reason for Pfizer being in favour of a smoking ban. By reducing the places people can smoke, life is made uncomfortable for smokers, leading to more people wanting to give up. Pfizer sells Nicorette which helps people quit. Smoking bans mean higher Pfizer profits.
Forest, the Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco, describes Pfizer (sarcastically) as its "friends", and Forest's site gives some clues as to Pfizer's involvement. Pfizer keeps funding events at party conferences that promote bans on smoking. After one such "debate" in 2004, Forest director Simon Clark complained that Pfizer refused to have anyone on the panel who was against a ban - so all three speakers toed the same line. Another Forest columnist refers to how:
this most altruistic of companies is... sponsoring a one-day conference in Liverpool entitled - wait for it - 'The Smoke Free City: how to improve health, business, productivity and city image by taking positive action to free your city of tobacco smoke'.
Thanks in no small part to Pfizer, we are going to get more restrictive smoking laws. As Forest puts it: "Oh, what sweet words they must sound to Pfizer's lucky shareholders. After all, smoking bans = increased sales of quit smoking aids = big, big profits. Now that's what I call music!"
Wednesday
This is not some silly idea of the phoney left. It is a mainstream idea of modern times. It is a new kind of identity and a new kind of freedom. I respect the noble Lords' views, but it would help if they respected the fact that the Bill and the identity cards represent the future: a new kind of freedom and a new kind of identity.
- Lord Gould of Brookwood (most decidedly New Labour) speaking at yesterday's Committee of the Whole House on the Identity Cards Bill.
Chilling, eh?
I file this under "Self ownership" because the Bill (do read it) seeks to end all that sort of thing. No more of the messy business of people deciding for themselves who they are and how much to involve the government in their lives.
Wednesday
Samizdatistas David Carr was on the Jeremy Vine Show (BBC Radio Two) this morning, arguing with some Labour member of Parliament who believes that firemen and ambulance drivers should enjoy higher levels of legal protection than the ordinary people in the street.
David puts his views forcefully and you can download and listen to it here (mp3 file).
Saturday
The leader in this week's Spectator kicks off with this zinger of a paragraph:
When history comes to make a final judgment on the Blair government — and we can be forgiven for hoping that moment is not too much longer delayed — there is one key statistic by which to assess the Prime Minister’s performance. Since 1997 the Labour government has created no fewer than 700 new criminal offences. This is supposed to be an age of increasing peace and prosperity. Yet the Labour party has been in such a continuous panic about the behaviour and potential behaviour of the British people that it has found 700 new ways in which to proscribe courses of conduct. In case you are wondering how that compares with any previous administration, Labour is creating criminal offences at a rate ten times greater than that of any other government.
No further comment required, surely.
Thursday
Earlier this year the British government overturned the old "double jeopardy" rule, that previously meant that a person could not be tried twice for the same offence. Today, Reuters reports that the first case of a man to face jurors for a second time for the same alleged crime is to go ahead.
This is another step down a slippery slope, precisely because the argument for ending the rule is so seductive at first glance. It is possible to sympathise with victims or relative of crime victims who see a person whom they think has gotten away with it. Many years ago in the course of my then job, I watched several court cases in my native East Anglia and saw people get away with crimes on technicalities. It was maddening.
But - the double jeopardy rule existed for a reason. If people can be repeatedly tried for the same crime, it creates a potential very bad and unintended consequence: police and the Crown Prosecution Service will become lazy in the preparation of cases. Why bother to get a case presented as powerfully as possible and with as much care if you think that if X gets acquitted, one can always have another go, and another, and another....?
The potential for abuse of power from double jeopardy is at the core of why the rule exists. The law in the United States was based on the English model. Hard cases, however appealing, make bad laws, as they say. This is a bad day for justice in Britain. There have been a lot of them lately.
Thursday
Want to see a splendid example of verbosity when the simple word arse (or even ass) would have sufficed?
Wednesday
Paul Coulam sees that a contempt for private property leads people to do some very strange and self-defeating things. Free association? Not any more.
Amazing as it may seem the government has today banned 'gay clubs' as a result of campaigning from the gay lobby.
According to the Times:
Hoteliers, bed-and-breakfast owners and pub landlords will no longer be able to bar gay people from their premises under new laws to be announced today [...] The Government will accept today an amendment to its Equality Bill that will outlaw discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation in providing goods and services or organising public functions. The amendment [...] will also mark the end of gay or lesbian-only clubs because bars and nightclubs will no longer be able to turn away straight people.
How stupid can these people be? Many gay businesses survive as such only because they can so explicitly discriminate, especially in their advertising. This ridiculous new law will be a very serious threat to the continuation of a 'gay scene' in many towns across the country. It is tricky to foresee all of the unintended consequences of this one. Gay clubs operate varying degrees of explicit discrimination depending on the locale or type of club. The strictest hard core gay cruise clubs generally operate a 'men only' door policy, which does the trick, but this itself may be or may become illegal - who knows what horrors of forced integration are still to come?
However many of the more general gay dance clubs operate what they advertise as a 'gay majority policy' which is usually employed to refuse entry to large parties of girls only. Gay clubs are often the best clubs in a particular town and tend to attract groups of girls who want a night away from predatory straight men. Of course the large numbers of unwary girls in these clubs itself attracts the straight men and before long the club has lost all appeal for gays. In the case of hotels there are lots of hotels in various, often remote, parts of the country that offer gay only accommodation and advertise as such. Will such advertising be illegal? In the short term after this absurd bill is passed clubs, bars and hotels will continue to operate discrimination informally but all it will take is some petulant activist or a council with a bee in its bonnet or some obsessive bureaucrat to stick their oar in to ruin some particular venue or business.
Friday
Via Owen's Musings.
Friday
Some time ago, a commenter on this site made such a telling point about how to "name and shame" advocates of UK ID cards that his post was reproduced on the main page of the blog. We live in an age where it may be necessary to fight a bit dirty to halt this wretched proposal in its tracks. I was reminded of how politicians may have a financial interest in the ID card venture when I read this article by the Spectator on the political demise of David Blunkett, former Home Secretary, who resigned as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions this week in grubby circumstances:
That David Blunkett infringed the rules by failing to consult Parliament’s advisory committee on his appointment as director of DNA Bioscience may seem a somewhat dry matter. But it is the nature of the appointment and his acquisition of shares in the company that say much about the culture of this Labour government. DNA Bioscience is a private company whose shares cannot be bought by the public through the stock exchange. When the company floats next summer, Mr Blunkett’s shares, which he has now disposed of, will, on current valuations of the company, rise from £15,000 to between £60,000 and £300,000. Were the company, which manufactures paternity-testing kits, to be awarded the contracts by the Child Support Agency for which it is expected to bid, Mr Blunkett stands to gain even more.
It has not escaped our notice that a company which tests for DNA might also appear to be in a good position to bid for government work in relation to David Blunkett’s great pet project: ID cards which will carry biometric information on every citizen in the country. We have argued all along that ID cards are both illiberal and a huge waste of money, and that they will cause inconvenience to the public while doing nothing to reduce crime or terrorism. Our concerns on those scores have not been answered. Yet now to discover that David Blunkett followed his resignation from the Home Office by scurrying off to a plum job in the DNA business puts the plans in an interesting light. Did it really not occur to David Blunkett that it might be inappropriate for a former Cabinet minister who has such an inside knowledge of the government’s use of forensic science to take a job and buy shares in a company well placed to bid for contracts? Ignorance of the finer points of ministerial etiquette is no excuse for what appears to be a serious conflict of interests.
How very interesting!
Tuesday
It appears that prohibitionists in the United States are winding up the pressure against computer games for allegedly turning the nation's young into violence-crazed monsters. This article in Wired nicely points to some of the absurdities involved in the position of would-be banners of such games like Jack Thompson. Another article here in libertarian monthly Reason makes an even stronger case against the moral panic brigade here.
This issue reminds me of an unusual book I read a few years ago, called Killing Monsters. The book makes the argument that children - and adults - often use games as ways of acting out roles in ways that can help them to overcome fears and grapple with issues, rather than as just passive recipients of violent messages while watching a movie. This is not psychobabble. Children have played games involving rough-house action, or staged plays, or dressed up as cowboys and fighters, since time immemorial. What the moral scolds of our present age tend to overlook is that with some modern computer games, the players get to shape the plot, even down to the point of adding their own ideas to how games should be run and developed.
As the Reason article points out, turnover of gaming has shot up enormously over the last decade in sales volume, from $3.2 billion in 1995 to $7 billion in 2003, while levels of youth violence in the United States have gone down. Whatever else may be going on to explain the drop in some categories of crime in the U.S., video games don't seem to be making the problem worse.
In fact, computer games may even make us smarter.
Tuesday
A friend of mine alerted me today to this story, of 34-year-old property developer Sally Cameron:
She was walking from her office in Dundee to her home in the suburb of Broughty Ferry when she was arrested under new anti-terrorist legislation and held for four hours.She said: "I've been walking to work every morning for months and months to keep fit. One day, I was told by a guard on the gate that I couldn't use the route any more because it was solely a cycle path and he said, if I was caught doing it again, I'd be arrested.
“The next thing I knew, the harbour master had driven up behind me with a megaphone, saying, 'You're trespassing, please turn back'. It was totally ridiculous. I started laughing and kept on walking. Cyclists going past were also laughing.
"But then two police cars roared up beside me and cut me off, like a scene from Starsky and Hutch, and officers told me I was being arrested under the Terrorism Act. The harbour master was waffling on and (saying that), because of September 11, I would be arrested and charged."
My friend was trying to imply that the police were somehow overdoing it here. But this seems like a perfectly reasonable set of circumstances to me. After all, you do not want swarthy looking young men in anoraks hanging around harbour installations. But, you cannot pass a law called the Anti-Swarthy-Looking-Young-Men-In-Anoraks Act. It has to be anyone doing anything suspicious, like, you know, walking about.
But, cyclists are obviously not a problem. Cyclists are good. This is a well known fact. So, whereas public footpaths in the vicinity of harbours are an obvious problem and need to be shut down, there is clearly no need to involve cyclists in this prohibition. Cyclists are, I repeat, good. So, these footpaths can simply stay as they are, but be cycle tracks. But, that means that pedestrians must now be told to steer clear of these ex-footpaths, despite the fact that they still exist.
At which point, since this is the Anti-Terrorism Act that is being imposed here rather than merely some exercise in traffic control, any insubordinate pedestrian who causes trouble, by – I don't know – laughing when you tell him, or her, about the new arrangements, must clearly be treated as the terrorist that he, or she, may well be. I mean, better safe than sorry. This is the survival of our very way of life that we are talking about, the preservation of our ancient liberties against the forces of barbarism.
I cannot see why the Times Online is making such a fuss about this utterly routine matter.
Monday
The scale of identity theft in Britain as revealed in this story ought to be shocking, but it does not entirely surprise me. My other half used to work in the credit card industry and she has plenty of stories to tell about how careless people are in throwing out old credit card bills and other documents. The slack attitude many people adopt boggles the mind.
Of course, when our lovely government gives a grateful nation the new ID card, all be well and we will not have to worry about such stuff anymore. Er, oh, wait a minute...
Thursday
Tony Blair now does not even feel the need to hide the fact he intends to introduce summary 'justice' in Britain without the inconvenience of a trial or other for of due process.
He cited the example of a police constable who saw someone throw a brick through a window or abuse an old lady. "If you have got to take that person all the way through a long court process, you are not going to do it," he said. Mr Blair said he had introduced fixed penalty notices to try to get round the problem. Offenders who disputed such a notice issued by the police could fight the case in court. "Summary justice is tough, it is hard, but in my judgment it is the only way to do it," he said.
So in other words, rather than just arresting the person and then determining the facts in a trial, we are just supposed to trust that the police will always act in good faith and impose summary justice only against the truly guilty and with only the best judgement. Calling Judge Dredd, please report to Scotland Yard to collect your warrent card. Courts? Bah! Who needs 'em?
So I have been an alarmist all these years, eh?
Monday
The words that follow are the start of a (not all that) recent piece by Theodore Dalrymple entitled You Must Be Healthy. They certainly deserve to be noticed here, even if belatedly.
The place of liberty among political desiderata is a matter of philosophical dispute. No doubt, we must occasionally curtail liberty in pursuit of other ends; but I nevertheless find alarming the creeping authoritarianism of the medical journals, which seldom recognize liberty as an end worthy of the slightest consideration in the making of public policy.
I think the problem here is a malign mixture of politics and the medical mentality. The politics is pretty obvious. Here is a generation of politicos who are opposed to freedom, and who will miss no opportunity to establish the institutionalised habit of violating it.
The medical attitude, and the reason why doctors are so vulnerable to this anti-liberty political agenda, is that doctors typically see people at their weakest, at times when they are positively begging to be told what to do by the god-almighty doctor. Doctors are thus pre-disposed to neglect the distinction between them advising people what to do, and simply telling them, for their own good.
Dalrymple has also written recently about the closing of the asylums. This story, in contrast, is one of how the duty to take charge and to give orders was shockingly neglected. Mad people really do have to be bossed about. Madness is horribly difficult to explain or diagnose, and this is often done wrongly, even wickedly. Looking after mad people is likewise horribly difficult, and is often done horribly badly. But that is no excuse for it just not being done. Yet, in accordance with the itself mad idea that madness is all of it caused by social circumstances, a shocking proportion of mad people in Britain have just been turned loose to fend for themselves, often with minimal help.
What this all adds up to is that everyone who can do adulthood is being treated in an ever less adult manner, while insane people – who truly cannot endure the burdens of adult life – have had those very burdens thrust upon them.
The insane, but only the insane, have been liberated.
Thursday
This is the un-edited version of an article sent in by Diana Quaver, which we published earlier in a reduced form. Diana has been closely following this story, which should be of great interest to the on-line community:
I have recently followed the trial of Daniel Cuthbert. This was the gentleman who was accused of "hacking" into the website of the Disasters and Emergency Committee. He was recently found "regretfully" found guilty under section 1 (a) of the Computer Misuse Act 1990. He never even lived in Whitechapel. This was the BBC story a few months ago:
Charge over tsunami 'hacking' bidA man has been charged over an alleged attempt to hack into a website set up to raise funds after the Asian tsunami.
Daniel Cuthbert, 28, of Whitechapel, east London, has been charged with one offence under the Computer Misuse Act.
Scotland Yard said the charge followed an alleged unauthorised access of the Disasters and Emergency Committee site on New Year's Eve.
Mr Cuthbert is due to appear at Horseferry Magistrates' Court next Thursday.
The disaster fund has raised an estimated £250m to help victims of the tsunami.
Tens of thousands of people used its web pages to offer money to those caught in the Boxing Day tragedy.
Today, Daniel Cuthbert was found guilty.
Daniel Cuthbert saw the devastating images of the Tsunami disaster and decided to donate £30 via the website that was hastily set up to be able to process payments. He is a computer security consultant, regarded in his field as an expert and respected by colleagues and employers alike. He entered his full personal details (home address, number, name and full card details). He did not receive confirmation of payment or a reference and became concerned as he has had issues with fraud on his card on a previous occasion. He then did a couple of very basic penetration tests. If they resulted in the site being insecure as he suspected, he would have contacted the authorities, as he had nothing to gain from doing this for fun and keeping the fact to himself that he suspected the site to be a phishing site and all this money pledged was going to some South American somewhere in South America.
The first test he used was the (dot dot slash, 3 times) ../../../ sequence. The ../ command is called a Directory Traversal which allows you to move up the hierarchy of a file. The triple sequence amounts to a DTA (Directory Traversal Attack), allows you to move three times. It is not a complete attack as that would require a further command, it was merely a light “knock on the door”. The other test, which constituted an apostrophe( ‘ ) was also used. He was then satisfied that the site was safe as his received no error messages in response to his query, then went about his work duties. There were no warnings or dialogue boxes showing that he had accessed an unauthorised area.
20 days later he was arrested at his place of work and had his house searched. In the first part of his interview, he did not readily acknowledge his actions, but in the second half of the interview, he did. He was a little distraught and confused upon arrest, as anyone would be in that situation and did not ask for a solicitor, as he maintained he did nothing wrong. His tests were done in a 2 minute timeframe, then forgotten about.
He was prosecuted under the Computer Misuse Act 1990, which was signed in 1989 when perms were just going out of fashion and mobile phones were like bricks and cost £1000 and we were still using green type on a black background. The word “ Computer” was not even defined as they realised that this area was moving at light speed so they wanted to keep it open. Sadly, it has become open to willy-nilly interpretation and the magistrate decided there was intention to access data as stated in section 1(a), although I may be biased, it is an incorrect interpretation.
Cuthbert was prosecuted under the Computer Misuse Act 1990, and convicted under Section 1 (a) of this Act. The relevant section of the Act is:
Section (1) of the Act states:
(1) A person is guilty of an offence if –a. he causes a computer to perform any function with intent to secure access to any program or data held in any computer;
b. the access he intends to secure is unauthorised; and
c. he knows at the time when he causes the computer to perform the function that that is the case.
As an expert, if he had true intent (as the judge deemed he did, which is an incorrect analysis) he would have been more than capable of "hacking" and gunning that door down with a digital version of a point-blank range AK47, but he did not. He maybe should not have done the tests that are beyond the knowledge of a regular user and a caution would have sufficed, there was no need for a trial and certainly not 10 months of waiting time. The policeman was smug as he got his browny points and the CPS prosecutor was what one can expect of a CPS prosecutor, patronising, pedantic and uninteresting but sadly successful.
The ../ sequence triggered of the alarm which was set up as "high" for this sort of “attack” at the donate.bt.com website that was set up by the DEC website. This alerted someone that there was something potentially suspicious, this was then passed up to someone who reported it to the police. They found their suspect through the IP address and were able to trace it to his laptop. Well, the Computer Crime Unit (known in the industry as "Muppets") were very happy they got their man.
Mr Cuthbert was convicted under S. 1 (a) of the Computer Misuse Act 1990. It will be almost impossible for him to work in IT, the security industry being totally based on trust and reputation, as they are all freelancers and rely on contacts. That simply is not right. Justice is not always synonymous with legality.
When someone tells you, "whatever you do, do not press the red button" and you are almost compelled, in just that way, I am feverishly tempted to type in the ../../../ sequence in the Ministry of Defence website, and see what happens. Maybe not.
Tuesday
Perhaps you think I am talking about Venezuela under the thuggish Chavez?
Nope. I am talking about Britain.
Tuesday
Tony Blair gave his annual Labour Party conference speech to the party faithful (and not-so-faithful) in Brighton this afternoon. He touched on a variety of issues but this series of quotes stands out and reminds us, as if we needed reminding, that this is one of the most illiberal governments since the Second World War:
We are trying to fight 21st century crime - ASB (anti-social behaviour) drug-dealing, binge-drinking, organised crime - with 19th century methods, as if we still lived in the time of Dickens. The whole of our system starts from the proposition that its duty is to protect the innocent from being wrongly convicted. Don't misunderstand me. That must be the duty of any criminal justice system. But surely our primary duty should be to allow law-abiding people to live in safety.
It means a complete change of thinking. It doesn't mean abandoning human rights. It means deciding whose come first.
The emphasis is unmistakeable, however much Blair tries to soften the authortarian message with assurances about defending the rights of accused persons. Under this government, the traditional checks and balances of the Common Law, already eroded by the previous Tory government, have decayed at an accelerating pace. The right to trial by jury, habeas corpus, double-jepoardy, admissability of previous conviction details... the list of protections that have been wiped out or been eroded gets longer and longer.
Blair, being the crafty sonafabitch he is, understands how easy it is to portray we defenders of civil liberties as "soft on crime", and so the point to stress must be to challenge the false choice he offers: be liberal or be safe.
Far from making us safer, playing fast and loose with the Common Law protections of the individual are having the opposite effect in the medium and long run. Weakening the right to self defence emboldens burglars. And dismantling traditional legal safeguards will undermine respect for the rule of law among the otherwise law-abiding, to no good effect. And yet when people are convicted of serious crimes like rape and burglary, the offenders often regain their liberty after a relatively brief period in jail, making no restitution to their victims.
Blair, and for that matter the Tories, have still not grasped the fact that it can and should be possible to crack down hard on crime while protecting our ancient liberties. Or is that too subtle for for our political classes to grasp? Is there some great nugget of wisdom in the Blair speech that I missed?
Those so inclined to read Blair's speech in full can go here.
Monday
Via Daniel W. Drezner, I read this story about the new rules that China has established to regulate news reporting on the Internet.
"The state bans the spreading of any news with content that is against national security and public interest," the official Xinhua news agency said in announcing the new rules, which took effect immediately.The news agency did not detail the rules, but said Internet news sites must "be directed toward serving the people and socialism and insist on correct guidance of public opinion for maintaining national and public interests."
That is a nice touch in the way they do not define what is against 'national security and public interest'. In effect, it is whatever the Chinese Communist Party says it is.
The Chinese government is also getting quite adept at regulating Internet content in its own country, not least through help from US Internet and software companies. Dave Kopel writes that these companies might well have broken the law in selling this technology to the Chinese government, but the current administration refuses to apply it, and thinks that only pressure from consumers and shareholders will cause these companies to mend their ways.
Foreign companies that invest or do a lot of business with China are going to have more and more ethical headaches of this nature in the years ahead.
Sunday
What does this, have in common with this,
and this?
What's different is also interesting. The police being used as as an instrument to suppress peaceful political dissent is one thing, but their doing it on their own initiative is if anything more worrying.
Wednesday
Respect for property rights in America seems to be at a new low these last few years. Just a few months ago we heard the Supreme Court announce that any government can apply Eminent Domain to steal pretty much anything it wants.
Now we have the Federal Government using a technology for 'secret' purposes and making sure the inventors cannot sue for fair recompense.
I do not know about you, but I do not find it surprising enough to warrant high secrecy that the US government is using submarines to tap undersea cables. They have been doing this for decades, albiet with copper. They even had a special submarine for it, the USS Halibut.
I can understand sensitivity to which cables and what data... but to pretend that we do not already know what they are doing is much like the 3 year old with a cake smeared face confronted with the empty cake plate proclaiming: "I didn't do it!"
Thursday
The Home Secretary today announced yet another package of "anti-terrorism" police-state measures.
Maybe it's just me, but don't they appear to come out more frequently and be bolder each time? The pace is stiffening, which is weird since the rhetoric is always of "striking a balance". Surely, if a balance really was being sought, we would expect successive adjustments to be smaller and smaller?
The most interesting and alarming are the "powers to tackle extremist bookshops". The proposed new offence is "the publishing or possessing for sale of publications that indirectly incite terrorist acts". Better run down to Waterstones or Borders and pick up those copies of The Monkey Wrench Gang, The Fountainhead, Long Walk to Freedom, and Mein Kampf now, before they are shut down.
Make no mistake, the Blair régime now proposes to make many, many polemical and political books illegal. Or potentially illegal. For "indirect incitement" is a novel, but plainly very inchoate, inchoate offense, and the definition of "terrorism" we may expect to be used is that of the Terrorism Act 2000:
(1) In this Act "terrorism" means the use or threat of action where—
(a) the action falls within subsection (2),
(b) the use or threat is designed to influence the government or to intimidate the public or a section of the public, and
(c) the use or threat is made for the purpose of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause.(2) Action falls within this subsection if it—
(a) involves serious violence against a person,
(b) involves serious damage to property,
(c) endangers a person's life, other than that of the person committing the action,
(d) creates a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public, or
(e) is designed seriously to interfere with or seriously to disrupt an electronic system.(3) The use or threat of action falling within subsection (2) which involves the use of firearms or explosives is terrorism whether or not subsection (1)(b) is satisfied.
(4) In this section—
(a) "action" includes action outside the United Kingdom,
(b) a reference to any person or to property is a reference to any person, or to property, wherever situated,
(c) a reference to the public includes a reference to the public of a country other than the United Kingdom, and
(d) "the government" means the government of the United Kingdom, of a Part of the United Kingdom or of a country other than the United Kingdom.(5) In this Act a reference to action taken for the purposes of terrorism includes a reference to action taken for the benefit of a proscribed organisation.
Potentially, is the rub. I doubt any of the works I mentioned will be banned this decade. But almost every strongly expressed political, religious or ideological opinion will be illegal, if the authorities so choose.
Arbitrary power by democratic mandate. Lawlessness backed by law. Once more Lenin would be proud.
I've already pointed out what the Home Office's ambitions could mean for this site. Locking people up and deporting them for openly expressed opinions is easy. But the freedom of the press in other parts of the world presents a problem: are they going to search every book package from Amazon.com for works from the proscribed list?
Friday
The government's plans to impose ID cards on British people get wobblier by the day and at last they seem to realise that there is no point in pretending otherwise. Nevertheless, it is important for everyone to remember who cast their votes in Parliament and thereby allowed us to get this close to a civil liberties calamity in the first place. We are by no means in the clear yet but it does seem that things are going our way to some extent and so it is important to kick and stamp on this beast hard whilst it is down.
If we are to avoid this issue coming back to haunt us again and again, we need to make sure that forgiveness is left for the afterlife and use the voting record to MPs who voted in favour at any time to question their fundamental morality and trustworthiness, regardless of party. It is essential not just now but in the foreseeable future to make this issue as fraught and unpleasant as possible for all concerned. If we can make 'the ID cards issue' synonymous with political calamity, politicos might just avoid the issue in favour of lower hanging fruit.
Thursday
I implied here that I would let Samizdata readers know when a new, more inclusive ;) anti-ID-card pledge was up and running. It is now.
We are lucky to have the charming former stand-up Franky Ma as the pledge leader. As the covers of more consumer magazines, in more countries, than it is comfortable to imagine attest, you cannot go far wrong associating an attractive young woman with your product.
You can give your word to support the nearly 11,000 ID refuseniks here and you can support NO2ID itself, as ever, here.
Thursday
Washington DC's Heritage Foundation has sent out a remarkably stupid e-mail today telling us how to deal with terrorism:
the British government must strengthen its anti-terror laws, from suspect detention to intelligence.
It is bad enough having Charles Clarke fighting against civil liberties in Britain without having the American Right poking its nose into our affairs. I am reminded of the words Charles Fox who in 1794, when warning against the suspension of Habeus Corpus, wrote:
The bill was characteristic of those violent times when, instead of being guided by reason, we were to be put under the dominion of wild passion, and when our pretended alarms were to be made the pretexts for destroying the first principles of the very system which we affected to revere.
We do not need right-wing opportunists from America campaigning against our civil liberties. Someone, please tell them to put a sock in it.
Tuesday
I cannot claim to have been brave very much in my life. And I do not know that I am being brave now. But I do know that I am now committed along with more than 10,000 others to refuse to register with the National Identity Register, whatever the Government may now choose to do to me.
The first NO2ID "Refuse" pledge through the MySociety PledgeBank site has been successful. 10,000, and counting, British people value freedom enough that they are prepared to become an un-person, rather than submit to lifelong supervision under the fallaciously named "ID card" system that the Government hopes to introduce. In four weeks we have raised promises of £100,000 for legal defence. And people are still joining in.
In a few days we will launch a bigger pledge, a million-pound-plus fighting fund, for everyone to subscribe to who supports the refuseniks, but cannot (because they have dependents or professional obligations) join in the identity strike. We need 50,000 people willing to pledge £20 if the bill passes. Look out for it.
And to the American readers of this blog I say: Help us now. If we go down, you are next...
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"I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered.
My life is my own."
Sunday
Fine editorial in the Sunday Telegraph here pointing out that the proposed law designed to regulate comments about religion (conceived cynically by NuLab to buy votes in Muslim-dominated electoral districts) will actually make it harder for the authorities to crack down on radical mullahs intent on brainwashing impressionable young minds.
The law of unintended consequences in work again. I have come to the conclusion that this law should be taught in school, like Newton's laws of gravity.
Tuesday
It is good to know that in these troubled times, when we feel under attack from terrorist nutters, that those considerate folk in the European Commission have refused to take their eye off the ball.
Vitamin supplements will become more expensive and many health food stores will be closed as a result of an EU directive being upheld. I find it depressing, but not the least bit surprising, that Brussels regulators should feel that ordinary folk are too thick to figure out the risks and benefits of vitamins for themselves. It is a setback for people who want to take charge of their health, and must send a funny message to people who are also constantly urged by our regulators and politicians about the dangers of obesity, smoking, booze and driving too fast.
Even if you are a sceptic about the benefits of so-called alternative medicine, it seems a fairly basic point that the substances one chooses to ingest are none of the State's business. Period.
Friday
So London was attacked and hundreds were killed or wounded by Islamic fanatics (showing incidently why we are utterly right to be fighting these vermin wherever they are to be found)... and having ID cards would have made not one damn bit of difference.
Next time some pontificating dissembling jackass holds up 'terrorism' as why Britain need these odious things, I am likely to spit in their face.
Thursday
Rebecca MacKinnon blogs about her communication with Ethan Gutmann, author of Losing the New China: A Story of American Commerce, Desire and Betrayal.
One of the chapters is about Cisco's business in China and the extent to which they actively supply Chinese law enforcement with censorship and surveillance technology. Cisco denies, Gutman responds by making available Cisco brochure from the China Information Infrastucture Expo 2002. There is also a very sound argument about why this matters and why Cisco (or anyone else) should not be allowed to get away with profiting from assisting the state to surpress the freedom of individuals. That is the kind of 'social responsibility' I can support.
As you know, the Chinese authorities don’t want to block the web. They want Chinese users to practice self-censorship. Surveillance, and the awareness of surveillance leads to self-censorship and that’s where Cisco comes in. Cisco has built the structure for the national PSB [Public Security Bureau] database, and as of June 2003, it is already resident in every province of China, except Sichuan. Police can access a suspect’s political history, imaging information, the lot, and read their email at will. Cisco calls it "Policenet".
This is the scary stuff of Panopticon. The real deal that the combination of the totalitarian nature of the Chinese government and technology has made possible. The argument that if Cisco does not follow the 'demand' created by the Chinese authorities, someone else will, does not hold - it absolves businesses (and those individuals responsible for them) from the physical and moral consequences of their actions.
via Instapundit
Monday
Popular support for ID cards - never all that evident to me in the first place - has collapsed, according to this story in the Daily Telegraph this morning. The article, citing a YouGov poll, says support has dropped sharply in part due to the likely high cost of the cards.
I am of course pleased that Tony Blair and his oafish Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, are facing a serious setback on this issue. Nothing would give me more pleasure than if this most devious of administrations had to abandon this wrongheaded, expensive and oppressive scheme. But I cannot help feel a twinge of dismay that an assault on our liberties may be thwarted not because the UK electorate have grasped the principles at stake but because of the monetary cost. It makes one wonder whether we would happily sell our freedoms if the price were right.
I hope of course that I am dead wrong about that.
Friday
Here is a list of the MPs who voted in favour of trying to make you have an ID card. Do you see your MP here? Let them know what you think of what they have done.
Special kudos to the 20 Labour MPs who put decency before party and refused to be go along with this disgraceful attempt to control you.
Thursday
There is a new outfit calling itself the Smokers Liberation Front which is taking a no retreat, no surrender line regarding the 'health fascists' (taglines are: "No More Passive Smoking. Welcome to Active Smoking!" and "Separate & Ventilate. Don't Legislate!").
My view is that if you are on private property (and that includes businesses), and if the owners elect to allow smoking there and you think this could damage your health, feel free NOT to go in or take a job at that place. Simple really.
Wednesday
Fine and detailed article here over at The Register, a techie website, laying out many of the pitfalls associated with the British government's wretched ID card measures. Some of the arguments are pretty familiar terrain to Samizdata regulars but in the current climate it pays to repeat an argument as loudly as possible.
I have already made it clear in the comments, but I'd like to repeat how much I like the look of Michael Taylor's idea on naming and shaming the businesses, officials and politicians backing this proposal. The Freedom of Information Act can be a highly effective weapon in the hands of those skilled at digging out information and we should make use of it.
Having some experience of investigations, I'll be hoping to post up more details of the sort Michael Taylor referred to in the next few days. Please keep the comments coming in and hopefully this blog can kick up a storm.
Tuesday
This appeared in the comment section of the previous post, writen by Michael Taylor. It is just too interesting to leave as a comment:
One thing we in the online community can do is to work to ensure transparency and accountability is brought to this process. We need to find out who has been pressing this scheme from its infancy: that doesn't just mean finding the Labour Party hacks who've embraced it; it does not even just mean finding the Whitehall Committees which pushed it.
It means finding the details of the people who sat on that committee: it means getting their names and track records out in public. I want names and reasons and track records. Where possible, I would want those personal details which they would collect from us out there on the web for all to see. It also means tracking every single hardware and software supplier who is bidding for the work - again, we need personal names not company names. And then these people need to be monitored closely, and lobbied intensively. There needs to be absolutely no place for these securocrats to hide: there must be no secrecy, no privacy for them.
Let us also make sure we use the Freedom of Information Act aggressively to get this information: swamp them with requests for every detail of every person's career who has ever been on any committee which has recommended any part of this scheme. If nothing else, such an intensive and personal campaign of transparency gives opponents of the scheme the best possible chance of keeping these people on the back foot.
Look, for example, at how angry the govt has got with the LSE's report. That should be only the merest footfall, the tiniest ripple of administrative inconvenience and distributed informational opposition they must face. Do this, and we will win.
Michael Taylor.
Tuesday
The ID card is at hand in the UK and we should now start thinking very hard about how to wreck the government's plans at every level. Every options needs to be considered because if this can be made into a political fiasco of epic proportions and is remembered as 'Labour's Poll Tax', then it will be a long time before any party tries this sort of abridgement of civil liberties again.
It is important to remember that the Poll Tax was not defeated in Parliament, it was defeated in the streets.
Sunday
It is just plain wrong to think things were just peachy in the United States until last week when all the Supreme Court did was make de jure what had been de facto for quite some time regarding the state's ability to sieze private property for no other reason than to get more tax. But perhaps this is for the best as there is no longer any doubt that things are badly broken and that this should not be a left vs. right issue. As Clarence Thomas wrote in his dissent:
If ever there were justification for intrusive judicial review of constitutional provisions that protect discrete and insular minorities, surely that principle would apply with great force to the powerless groups and individuals the Public Use Clause protects. The deferential standard this court has adopted for the Public Use Clause is therefore deeply perverse. It encourages those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms to victimize the weak.Those incentives have made the legacy of this court's public purpose test an unhappy one. In the 1950s, no doubt emboldened in part by the expansive understanding of public use this court adopted in Berman, cities rushed to draw plans for downtown development. Of all the families displaced by urban renewal from 1949 through 1963, 63 percent of those whose race was known were non-white, and of these families, 56 percent of nonwhites and 38 percent of whites had incomes low enough to qualify for public housing, which, however, was seldom available to them. Public works projects in the 1950s and 1960s destroyed predominantly minority communities in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Baltimore, Maryland. In 1981, urban planners in Detroit, Michigan, uprooted the largely lower-income and elderly Poletown neighborhood for the benefit of the General Motors Corporation. Urban renewal projects have long been associated with the displacement of blacks; in cities across the country, urban renewal came to be known as Negro removal. Over 97 percent of the individuals forcibly removed from their homes by the slum-clearance project upheld by this court in Berman were black. Regrettably, the predictable consequence of the court's decision will be to exacerbate these effects.
I trust that decent Democrats who are not in the pockets of public sector employee associations and who actually have at the core of their convictions the desire to help the 'have nots' against whom the system can at time be so slanted, will set aside partisan politics and join with Republicans who are not in the pockets of well funded business interests to rebel against this savage wound to the US Constitution which in effects rips out the Fifth Amendment. Let this case be the litmus test of decency against which political figures of both left and right will judged and judged harshly.
Tuesday
I came across a text of a speech by Democrat Senator Richard Durbin here which, at least from my reading, did not liken what is going on with suspected terrorists in U.S. captivity and the old Soviet gulag, on the other. The speech contains a lot that one might reasonably dispute but it is not rabid Michael Moore moonbattery, as far as I can tell. (Of course, his speech on his website may have been edited later on with the offending para taken out, but one should not assume that out of fairness to the senator).
So where did the reference to the "Dick Durbin slanders our boys" come from? Seriously, I'd like to know.
I posted similar thoughts over here.
It appears Durbin did make a reference to the gulag and the Nazis in the speech text I have now seen, so the guy clearly deserves some of the heat coming his way. But like I said, it doesn't overall appear to be a rabidly silly speech.
Tuesday
Attention all petty, vindictive snitches everywhere, your country needs you:
New powers effectively criminalising smoking in public were announced by the Government yesterday, with the minister in charge promising an "intelligence-led approach to enforcing the law".Informers will be encouraged to report breaches of sweeping bans on the habit, in which company smoking rooms will be outlawed and places such as bus shelters and the outsides of office blocks made no-smoking areas.
Very little encouragement will be required as there will be no shortage of willing and zealous 'informers'.
What a horrible place this country is becoming.
Wednesday
I rarely fly these days, but will be buzzing off to New Mexico in a few days for our annual fishing expedition to Vermejo Park Ranch. (Note: Ted Turner may be a loony tranzi goofball, but he runs a fine ranch, and for that alone gets an indulgence in my book.)
Last time I flew, I had a perfectly good and utterly useless-for-highjacking cigar lighter confiscated, which still rankles. Given my impending trip, Christopher Hitchens' rant about the idiocy of our airport security was both timely, and dead on target.
We learn that there is no real capacity to detect explosives, for example. And we learn that, "If, say, a handgun were discovered, the terrorist would have ample ability to retain control of it. TSA screeners are neither expecting to encounter a real weapon nor are they trained to gain control of it." Who hasn't worked that out?What we are looking at, then, is a hugely costly and oppressive system that is designed to maintain the illusion of safety and the delusion that the state is protecting its citizens. The main beneficiaries seem to be the pilferers employed by this vast bureaucracy—we have had several recent reports about the steep increase in items stolen from luggage. And that is petty theft that takes place off-stage. What amazes me is the willingness of Americans to submit to confiscation at the point of search.
Hence, my "disappeared" lighter. Imagine my irritation at learning that said lighter was only added to the confiscation list last month, so that when it was lifted over a year ago, there was no basis for confiscation at all.
A prediction: when we get hit again, and we will, there will be one almighty and well-deserved backlash against the Republicans who were in charge of this farce, and wasted everyone's time on the irritations and idiocies of "homeland security" rather than doing something real to meet the most basic obligation of the nation-state - the safety and security of its citizens.
Friday
It is strange how English seems so often to be the 'language of graffiti'
Wednesday
It is astonishing that a potential law could even reach the stage of being voted on in the USA that says if you witness or 'become aware' that neighbours or friends have broken the law with narcotics (which presumes you are a competent judge of that), you will be compelled by law to denounce them to the police. Failure to do so means prosecution and the threat of a two year sentence yourself if convicted of simply minding your own business. Even if you disagree with the drug laws, you will be threatened with prison if you do not actively help enforce them against other people.
I have met Congressman Sensenbrenner and I am shocked that he could have come up with such a profoundly authoritarian and illiberal law like this. He explained his support for the ghastly Patriot Act was purely a temporary emergency measure, pointing to the sunset clause as proof of that. Well if this* is his idea of reasonable legislation then I fear that I see all his motivations in a dramatically different light.
Turning neighbour against neighbour like this was how communist states maintained power in the Eastern bloc and anyone putting their name to such a law should be seen for the enemy of civil society that they are, turning people who just wish to be left alone into coerced informers for the state. Truly disgraceful.
*= to see details, enter HR1528 in the search box, then check the enter bill number button, then press search
Tuesday
The US Supreme Court today overturned the obstruction of justice conviction of the Arthur Andersen accounting firm. This comes too late, of course, to save Andersen, which was largely destroyed by the conviction, but it nonetheless injects some common sense back into the rules around withholding information from the government (it can be legal, you know, a fact which the SCOTUS felt the feds needed to be reminded of) and document disposal (a topic on which I spend far too much of my time).
In a unanimous opinion, justices said the former Big Five accounting firm's June 2002 obstruction-of-justice conviction - which virtually destroyed Andersen - was improper. The decision said jury instructions at trial were too vague and broad for jurors to determine correctly whether Andersen obstructed justice.. . .
[I]n his opinion, Rehnquist noted that it is not necessarily wrong for companies to instruct employees to destroy documents, even if the intent is in part to keep information from the government.
Like a mother who advises a son to invoke his right against compelled self-incrimination out of fear he might be convicted, "persuading" an employee to withhold information is not "inherently malign," Rehnquist wrote.
"The instructions also diluted the meaning of 'corruptly' so that it covered innocent conduct," Rehnquist said.
The Andersen case was of a piece, really, with Martha Stewart's conviction. Both were convicted, essentially, of failing to cooperate in their own prosecution. Give Martha cred for serving her time, but I wonder if she wouldn't have won out on appeal. Eventually.
Saturday
It seems like we are getting there. The serious press is starting to understand the threat posed by the nationalisation of personal identity dressed up as a populist system of "ID Cards"
This devastating quote appeared in an article in the New Statesman, house magazine of the British political left:
"Public opinion likes the idea of ID cards because it seems like the ultimate solution to all known problems," says Brian Gladman, retired director of strategic electronic communications at the Ministry of Defence. "But actually, the way this bill is designed enables a police state. You're not going to be allowed to opt out of having an ID card, the linked databases make detailed tracking feasible, and a system with this combination of complexity and scale is way beyond the state of the art. It won't be reliable or safe. Anybody with access to the database will be able to target anybody. It's horrendous what you'll be able to do."
One hopes the message is now starting to get through to Labour MPs, and they may find important other things to do rather than vote for the second reading (the first non-formal stage) in parliament.
Saturday
A very small silver lining to the very large dark cloud that overshadows these violent times is that the war on drugs - that is to say the "war" on a particular form of unhealthy behaviour - no longer gets the prestige it once did. I think someone is feeling left out.
Police have claimed new successes in the war on drugs in central Scotland.They called it Operation Overlord?Officers have swooped on nearly 20 homes in the Falkirk, Stirling and Clackmannanshire areas in the past week as part of Operation Overlord.
Wednesday
As you can see from the photo, below, that I snapped at London's Fenwick department store yesterday, the hype of supposed miracle wrinkle potion Creme de la Mer is not letting up. And why would it, when there are women like the one who told the Sunday Telegraph's Elizabeth Day that she spends £850 per week - that's $1700 US - on the cream so that she can rub it over her whole body?
This is, clearly, madness. But what is even more mad is that people are so gullible. People tell themselves that if it did not work, the government would not let it be sold. Yet another instance of people relying on the state to do the critical thinking they should be doing for themselves. Sure, all that is lost in this case is a lot of cash, but it never stops frightening me that people are so eager to give up responsibility for their own choices. Of course, cosmetics are not the only area of peoples' lives where they actually want to be freed from engaging their brains, but it is the one that concerns us here.
Day's article tells us that the British Advertising Standards Authority - the main body that is supposed to "protect" consumers from cosmetic products (in the US, that's the Food and Drug Administration) - last week "heavily criticised" cosmetics firm Estée Lauder for:
suggesting that it could "melt away the fatty look of cellulite" when, in fact, the ASA said that the company had not proved the product's efficacy at removing cellulite.
But reducing the appearance of something and actually removing it are two different things. The fact is that - as beauty editor Kathleen Baird-Murray writes in How to Be Beautiful:
Many ordinary moisturisers will puff up the skin temporarily enough to 'diminish the appearance of fine lines,' so to prove that they are more effective than ordinary moisturisers, many anti-ageing creams will have undergone comparative testing. In other words, they will improve skin texture more than most, but they don't actually claim to remove wrinkles for ever - it's we who assume this because we're paying a lot of money...
Further, the Advertising Standards Authority holds that if a cream causes actual physiological changes to the skin - such as real, permanent removal of wrinkles - then it is medicine and needs to be regulated as such.
One sad claim in Day's article comes from a London PR person, Barbara Dodds, who says:
When one cream doesn't work, I move on to another one in case that does. I probably spend about £100 a month on various products. I live in hope that the next one is actually going to get rid of my cellulite or my wrinkles and increase my self-esteem - but it never does.
In which case, Barbara Dodds is a fool, and it is up to her to curb her reckless and ridiculous buying habits. I am all for shouting it from the rooftops if a product does not work, but a lowering of expectations is clearly in order for far too many women. Fine, spend £850 per week on Creme de la Mer, but don't come crying to the nanny state when it doesn't turn you into Heidi Klum.
Cross-posted from beauty blog Jack & Hill
Tuesday
Mark Steyn comments here on the absurdity of trying to legislate to make our charming youth appear less menacing by stopping them from wearing hooded tracksuit tops of the sort familiar in any major city. As he goes on to write, the attempt by the government to try and regulate this sort of thing suggests the government has a terrible naivety about the ability of the State to improve things like manners and standards of conduct by brute force of law:
But respect is a two-way street, and two-way streets are increasingly rare in British town centres. The idea that the national government can legislate respect is a large part of the reason why there isn't any. Almost every act of the social democratic state says: don't worry, you're not responsible, leave it to us, we know best. The social democratic state is, in that sense, profoundly anti-social and ultimately anti-democratic.
As Steyn points out, the habit of wearing hoods, large baseball caps and the like is in part a rebellion against the gazillions of CCTV cameras which now festoon so many of our town centres, shopping malls, public buildings and even, so the government hopes, our countryside. The law of Unintended Consequences, as Steyn says, applies. If you treat the populace like kids being minded by nannies in a creche, some of them will try and hide from nanny the best way they can. Of course, there is no reason why owners of private premises cannot enforce dress codes, as happens in pubs which ban people from wearing soccer shirts etc. However fair or unfair, owners should be allowed to insist on the dress code and behaviour they deem fit.
Perhaps this government might try to treat us like reasonably intelligent adults. You never know, the habit might catch on.
Wednesday
The indefatigible Radley Balko has a nice roundup of latest regulatory nuttiness from across the world, including my personal favourite, a rule in Italy stating that dog-owners must walk their furry friends at least three times a day. Tremendous stuff, the sort of law that would make the land of Julius Ceasar and Enzo Ferrari proud.
Joking aside at this lunacy, we are surely far beyond the point at which it is possible to subject this sort of regulatory mania to Monty Python-style satire. How on earth can one excite the anger of people against this sort of thing when it appears that the humourless berks who want to pass these rules feel no shame, no sense that they are infantilising the public?
Wednesday
Two recommendations. First, a general recommendation for this news site. It is the work of a law firm, and there is a definite bias in the direction of news stories about internet law, intellectual property matters, and such like. You will not get relentless civil liberties based complaint about the way things are going, the way you do here, but you will, if you tune in regularly, learn quite a lot about the legal facts around which such arguments rage.
If there is a general message, it is: It's complicated! Call us before you do anything! Fair enough. Here is yet another example of how to do Internet business. They 'advertise' themselves and their services, not by having silly adverts saying, e.g.: "It's complicated! Call us before you do anything!", but by giving away helpful and informative content where that is only one of the subtexts.
And second, a particular recommendation for this article from last week, which explains what the ID card argument is all about.
First two paragraphs:
Information published by Government Departments since February shows that the database which underpins the ID Card is central to the Government's aim to deliver efficient and effective public services in general. This purpose, which is far wider than the narrow objective of establishing identity in order to access public services, has not been mentioned so far in the current General Election campaign. For example, the Labour Party Manifesto refers to ID Cards in the context of immigration, identity theft, illegal working, fraudulent use of public services and terrorism.Also absent from the General Election debate is any commitment concerning the wider use of the database of registrable facts which will support the ID Card. It is this database, which will contain up to 50 classes of personal information held on each individual, which has alarmed the Parliamentary Committees dealing with the Constitution and Human Rights.
And this paragraph shows how the government intends to gather all this information:
New developments show that the ID Card has become integral to the success of the Government's e-strategy. Published in March 2005, Connecting the UK: the Digital Strategy aims to tackle the persistent digital divide and low uptake of e-government services by UK citizens. In relation to the ID Card, the e-strategy states that "the Home Office will ensure that ID Cards are developed in such a way as that they add value to the whole range of digital transactions". This means that e-transactions could be reflected in a record in the ID Card database, e.g. if the database was accessed to check identity of the sender of the digital transaction.
They will "add value". In other words, if you prefer the old by-hand methods, the methods that make this national database so much more tiresome to construct, not doing things electronically will subtract value. We will, in short, be bribed to be part of it, and fined if we try to keep out of it.
The Conservatives have heckled the idea of ID cards, intermittently. But at no point have they challenged the principle of the government constructing a national electronic database such as this one. This is because the Conservatives have thoroughly accepted the principle that the government is there to help everybody, by supplying all manner of goods and services, benefits and emoluments, depending on the age, youth, poverty, infirmity or legality of the particular citizen. That being so, it is hardly unreasonable for the government to want to keep tabs on everyone, and to want to make use of the latest electronic methods of doing so, and of supplying the relevant services.
In a better world with a much more skeletal and stand-offish sort of government, the citizen would not be of any concern to the government unless the citizen did something evil or aggressive. But in the world we inhabit now, in which the average citizen expects all manner of benefits and protections and pensions from the government – to have things done for him – the citizen must expect also to have things like this updated version of the Domesday Book done to him.
If and when the government starts leaking this information to third parties in ways that upset the voters, the voters will no doubt grumble, and the debate that the writer of the article I have quoted from wants will duly happen. The promises that he thinks the government should now give will then be given, and some of these promises may even be kept.
Meanwhile, the voters are content.
Sunday
There is a name for a country where the police tell us what the law ought to be, and give us heavy hints which way to vote. It is called a police state.
In a constitutional monarchy such as ours, the police keep the Queen's peace and uphold the laws as they are; they do not bluster and threaten the public for publicity, nor do they enter the political process and shill for attempts to change that constitution.
Your resignation would be appropriate. Before you go and do something even more repugnant.
Thursday
There is an excellent article on the Social Affairs Unit blog called Civil liberties cannot be defended selectively, by Joyce Lee Malcolm.
As the culture and meta-contextual assumptions of liberty have decayed amongst the intellectual and activist elements of British society, the institutions supporting liberty for so long have been revealed to have no foundations and are thus unable survive the torrent of events such as Hungerford or even the 9/11 terrorist attacks in another country.
As the Joyce Lee Malcolm article points out, the so called 'opposition' and even the vast majority of the media have abdicated their role in seriously questioning the disassembly of ancient civil rights for decades, whilst the rights to self-defence, trial by jury and double jeopardy are steadily abridged. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the British system, which for so long survived and thrived by using the custom of liberty as its bedrock, has shown its fatal weakness. Defending civil liberties in the UK is becoming harder and harder because not only have the institutional means for doing so been effectively swept away, so few British people even understand upon what their now largely illusory liberties were based.
Wednesday
You may well have heard this point made before, and I surely have myself, but it nevertheless made me grin, again, today:
We can only ask supporters of the precautionary principle to follow it through to its logical conclusion, that is not to have it applied unless it can be proved that no risk is involved. It is up to them to prove that this principle is harmless.
Those are the concluding words of Precaution with the Precautionary Principle, published (pdf only but in both French and English) by the Institut Economique Molinari. My thanks to Cécile Philippe of the IEM for the email that pointed me to this publication, and to this conclusion.
Tuesday
The brilliant new blog, Nanny Knows Best, has an item on the latest piece of nannying insanity, namely, bans on adverts that mix images of sex and alcohol. God forbid that alcohol should be sold on the basis that it is to do with fun, ooooh noooo. We cannot have the poor deluded moppets otherwise known as the British population led down that dangerous path, can we?
It does of course mean that lots of one's favourite films will have to be doctored lest the image of Sean Connery or Humphrey Bogart sipping a drink and chatting up a lady leads one to get the wrong idea about the sauce.
It is enough to drive one to the bottle.
Wednesday
Over the span of international and domestic flights covering some 11,000 miles in the past fortnight, I have spent a lot of time reading magazines. I tried to limit myself to fluff - gossip and pictures of celebrities wearing ugly clothes - because reading about wrong-headed business ideas and even more wrong-headed political ideas really is not my idea of a fun way to spend several hours in a confined space where screaming at the top of one's lungs is frowned upon.
Alas, alas. I avoided idiocy but the idiocy sure did find me, and in Cosmopolitan magazine of all places. Okay, no surprise there: Cosmo articles telling women to wear animal prints if they want to make a guy attracted to them are hardly the height of intellect and good sense (or taste). But at least I could kick back with some mindless articles about makeup and men and not worry about being hit over the head with loopy politics.
Or so I thought.
An Israeli fashion photographer - coming from an industry that is surely the great unsung incubator of brilliant legislation - wants the Knesset to put a law on the books that would make it illegal to use women as fashion models if they are not deemed "healthy" enough by the government. The aim is to produce:
legislation insisting all models undergo an examination by a Government nutritionist. Those deemed healthy would get a licence while any who were too thin would be given nutritional advice and a two-month deadline to put on weight or be barred.All this is based on BMI (body mass index), which is not a reliable way of determining health anyway. Even if it was, such a law would not magically make the population healthy. But junk science being accepted as gospel is hardly a shock. What did surprise me is that 53 per cent of polled Cosmo readers said that the US should introduce similar legislation of fashion photography.
In short: I would have been less enraged if I had watched a Michael Moore "documentary" festival on the plane. Thinking about it, though, I wonder how long it would be before such legislation would make any image of someone deemed unhealthy fall into the realm of the banned and illegal. The upside of that would be no more pictures of Michael Moore in our faces, but the price for such a benefit seems a bit steep.
Friday
There has been a great deal of discussion today about the McCann-Feingold attack on the First Amendment. These lowlives are behind the most dangerous attack on American civil liberties in my life time and probably even that of our oldest readers.
They are gutting the First Amendment.
I have gone to Senator McCain's comment page and left the following polemic:
Dear Sirs:Should you attempt to overthrow the First Amendment on the internet, I will disobey.
I will not answer the court.
I refuse to pay fines.
I will organize civil disobedience against your Communist style election rules.
I will never, ever, submit to this attempt to destroy American liberty.
With utter enmity and ill will,
Dale Amon.
Live Free or Die.
I hope y'all will come visit me when they send the Marines to Belfast to haul my ass off to a Federal prison for the crime of Lese Majeste and inciting Civil Disobedience.
Actually, I hope to see a lot of you there with me. Massive in your face disobedience is the only real answer to this all out attack on our Constitution and Bill of Rights.
It does not matter what your politics are: Left, Right, Center or Libertarian. We have to hang together and fight these bastards.
PS: It is never too early to begin the campaign to unseat them.
Wednesday
The threat to civil liberties in Britain posted by the Labour government, with laws that make the Patriot Act in the USA seem like a mere trifle, is finally regularly getting the sort of attention it deserves, at least in the Daily Telegraph.
The notion that a politician would dare to try and take powers to deprive people of their liberty without recourse to courts and without even presenting evidence because they 'know' that they pose a threat is astonishing. It should also should answer all those people who shrug their shoulders and say "why get worked up about ID cards? We can trust the state." House arrest without trial and without the ability to confront your accusers... and of British subjects on British soil. And the people who want to do this expect to just be trusted without at any point being required to present proof of a crime or threat to national security. If this is allowed to stand then truly, Britain stands on the brink of something truly dark.
Tuesday
This is the question asked by Anthony Daniels over on the Social Affairs Units blog. His article conveys the sense of mounting unease that I certainly share. Read the whole thing.
Saturday
The land of the free is imposing privacy-busting requirements on its visitors.
At America's insistence, passports are about to get their biggest overhaul since they were introduced. They are to be fitted with computer chips that have been loaded with digital photographs of the bearer (so that the process of comparing the face on the passport with the face on the person can be automated), digitised fingerprints and even scans of the bearer's irises, which are as unique to people as their fingerprints.
There are so many concerns that one does not know where to start:
For one thing, the data on these chips will be readable remotely, without the bearer knowing. And—again at America's insistence—those data will not be encrypted, so anybody with a suitable reader, be they official, commercial, criminal or terrorist, will be able to check a passport holder's details.
So we have unencrypted details about an individual, recorded in by an unreliable manner (biometrics). That's what I call the worst of both worlds...
A second difficulty is the reliability of biometric technology. Facial-recognition systems work only if the photograph is taken with proper lighting and an especially bland expression on the face. Even then, the error rate for facial-recognition software has proved to be as high as 10% in tests. If that were translated into reality, one person in ten would need to be pulled aside for extra screening. Fingerprint and iris-recognition technology have significant error rates, too. So, despite the belief that biometrics will make crossing a border more efficient and secure, it could well have the opposite effect, as false alarms become the norm.
And far more unpleasant as you already will be 'guilty' of not having your non-papers in order.
The scariest problem of all is the remote-readability of the chip, which combined with unencrypted data on it, make it designed for clandestine remote reading. Deliberately.
The ICAO specification refers quite openly to the idea of a “walk-through” inspection with the person concerned “possibly being unaware of the operation”.
Privacy and liberty implications of this are enourmous... and it gets worse. Identity theft will become a matter of setting up such clandestine remote readings. Terrorists will be able to know the nationality of those they attack.
Even the authorities realised that this would be double-plus-ungood and are looking for ways to 'protect' the chip either by blocking radio waves with a Faraday cage or an electronic lock. As a result, some countries may need special equipment or software to read an EU passport, which undermines the ideal of a global, interoperable standard. And so we come the full joyous circle of government 'compentence'...
Monday
... is also sauce for the gander, so the old saying goes.
The preposterous EU proposal to extend the ban the symbols of the German Worker's National Socialist Party that is already law in France, Germany and elsewhere, has prompted a move to also ban communist and socialist symbols.
So now let us also ban Imperial Roman symbols (they were a slave owning political system), Christian symbols (Inquisitions, religious wars and sundry other nastiness), Confederate Flags... oh hell, let's just ban all symbols except the 'peace symbol' and the EU symbol.
Via Rex Curry.
Monday
The cover of print version of The Economist is titled 'Taking Britain's Liberties' and the issue discusses many of the very serious abridgements of our civil rights that have recently taken place.
But rather than link to any specific article, what interests me is that the truly grave situation is finally 'front page news' in a fairly mainstream publication. It is nothing less than amazing that it has taken this long for the seriousness of the situation to reach the collective editorial consciousness of any significant element of the media outside the blogosphere and other elements of the activist fringe.
Thursday
Although Samizdata concerns itself with more important things than mere politics (thankfully for our collective sanity), it seems wrong that we should pass let without record the government's announcement of its intention to introduce indefinite executive detention for UK citizens. For those who missed the vigourous Parliamentary debate (which must have lasted at least 15 minutes), in future anyone may be locked up indefinitely in their own home on the say-so of the Home Secretary, based on evidence known only to him.
The Daily Telegraph appears to blame the Human Rights Act, noting that this decision is ostensibly being taken because the Law Lords said that it was illegal to empower the Home Secretary only to detain foreigners arbitrarily. This view is advanced notwithstanding Lord Hoffman's ditcta that applying such a equally rule to British citizens is no more defensible. But it is an absurd idea that such unlimited arbitrary power of arrest and detention is something the government reluctantly finds has been thrust upon it.
On the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, I am tempted to wonder about the timing. Is this just a good day to bury bad news? Is it some kind of sick joke? Is the government double-daring libertarians to announce the beginning of the police state on the day we remember the ghastly outcome of arbitrary rule? Whatever the truth, it is a black day.
Tuesday
The Countryside Alliance continues its quixotic fight to use the approved levers of power to overturn the ban on hunting with hounds. Somehow the realisation that there is nothing at all 'undemocratic' about the fact they are being oppressed by the state has still not percolated through those worthy but rather thick country skulls.
Mr Jackson said the Countryside Alliance believed that the House of Commons acted unlawfully in forcing through the Parliament Act in 1949, without the consent of the House of Lords. Mr Jackson stressed that he was not challenging the supremacy of Parliament.
But why not? If Mr. Jackson believes that what is being done to him by Parliament is unjust, then why not challenge the supremacy of Parliament? There is nothing sacred about a bunch of lawmakers and a law is only as good as its enforcement. If the Countryside Alliance actually have the courage of their convictions, they must start challenging the right of the state to do whatever it wishes just because its ruling party has a majority in Parliament. Maybe if they realised that they are a minority and will always be a minority they would be less inclined to trust the old way of doing things. There is a long history of civil disobedience to duly constituted authority in the defence of what is right. That matters far more that what is or is not legal.
Monday
Regular readers of this blog will know that the student newspaper at the University of St Andrews was evicted by the student union after it fell foul of the union's "Equal Opportunities Policy". One of the principal student union officials responsible for the ban says that he is just trying to help students:
I am so close to resigning from the Union. I don't think that people realise that I spend all my time working there and sit up at night working to represent students better. And with Preston [a member of the Liberty Club] trying his hardest to fuck people over, it just compounds the problem. I'm not trying to run a fatwah, I am trying to help students. But no. Let's ignore that and blame me because we all love the Saint [newspaper], don't we?
Believe it or not, this virtuous student censor's job title in the union is "SS Officer".
Monday
Today is the anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in 1916 that income tax is a violation of the Constitution.
So the politicians had to change to Constitution.
Friday
The Guardian reports today on an announcement from Tom Ridge, to the effect that a quick fix has been put in place by the US government to allow low risk passengers to get on and off their airplane's more quickly:
Acknowledging that travellers resented the stringent security checks at US airports, he announced that "low risk" flyers to John F Kennedy New York would be allowed to register their fingerprints and other biometric details so that they could avoid the long queues at Schiphol by stopping at a fast check kiosk.
The Guardian complains only about how it is Schiphol that is getting the benefit of the new arrangements, rather than Heathrow, making the story a hook for another cheap gibe about American geography knowledge.
This is a perfect example of the way the world now works. This register is voluntary, but the process is now well in hand to enable the authorities everywhere in due course to demand such information from everyone, as a condition of international travel. How long before it starts being claimed that an unwillingness to register is an admission that one is a high risk flyer?
If you doubt this, read the rest of the story:
He said the system was based on that used for frequent flyers on US domestic flights.He told Associated Press in Amsterdam: "The main advantage to the United States will come if this program successfully and efficiently moves traffic through and other countries say: 'We ought to apply this on a much broader basis.'"
Precisely. We are rapidly entering a world in which the world's various Big Brothers know our every move. Our best hope will be that, on the whole, Big Brother does not care.
Monday
If we can have an 'absurdity of lawmakers', I suppose we can have a 'stupidity of doctors'. In the face of attempts to deregulate drinking in Britain, a nation which is unusually restrictive when it comes alcohol compared to most western nations, we have Prof Ian Gilmore, a spokesman for the Royal College of Physicians (an extreme statist professional organisation and political lobby) saying:
"We are facing an epidemic of alcohol-related harm in this country, and to extend the licensing hours flies in the face of common sense as well as the evidence we have got."Prof Gilmore said plans to stagger the times people left pubs were an attempt to manage drunkenness rather than prevent it.
He added that the key to tackling the problem was reducing the availability of alcohol and increasing the price.
"I think it is fanciful to think we can turn ourselves into a French-style wine-tippling culture merely by licensing regulations," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
However he does not explain why digging the same hole deeper will make things better, given that Britain is already far more regulated than France and also has more serious alcohol related problems. Like most regulatory authoritarians, Gilmore and the RCP simply do not have either the imagination to think that perhaps the over-regulation caused the problem, nor do they have the socialisation to have the notion occur to them that imposing their views on others is immoral.
If people get drunk and commit crimes, punish the criminals, not those who drink and do not commit crimes. And in any case, the true criminals are those who added times limits to drinking hours which more or less institutionalised binge drinking.
The political class at work
Thursday
Of all the criticisms of the War on Terror (and there are many legitimate ones), at least there appears to be no intention on the part of the prosecutors to deliberately target children.
Alas, the same cannot be said for the War on Drugs:
PUPILS at a secondary school will undergo random drug testing when they return from the Christmas holiday next week in what is believed to be the first state scheme of its kind.Students as young as 11 at The Abbey School in Faversham, Kent, will have mouth swabs taken to detect the use of drugs including cannabis, cocaine and Ecstasy, Peter Walker, the headmaster, said.
Oh but why settle for all these namby-pamby, milquetoast, half-measures? There is only one sure way to stop children taking drugs: kill them.
Yes, that's it! Kill the little bastards. Think of all the valuable police and court time it will save, not to mention precious and overstretched NHS resources.
Kill them all now. You know it makes sense. If it saves just one child from a life on drugs it's worth it. It's for their own good. It's called 'tough love'...etc...etc... (adding shopworn cliches infinitum).
Wednesday
Michael Howard's Conservative Party is planning a U-turn over identity cards - but not until after the General Election. According to a senior Conservative Party MP, the plan is to support ID cards at present in order to look tough on law and order, but they will drop support on 'practical grounds' when public opinion edges away. Cynically, Michael Howard's office has already drawn up plans to flip-flop in the summer.
I believe this is called 'conviction politics'.
Tuesday
Although I knew this day was coming, it is profoundly depressing nevertheless. It is now the law that ID cards will be imposed by force in Britain, with the support of the Leaders of the Conservative Party and the Labour Party. They have won and as far as I am concerned, the guttering flame of the culture of liberty in Britain just blew out.
I do not expect a truly repressive state to be implemented for many years yet (hopefully), but the infrastructure of tyranny is now well and truly in place, all of which came to pass with a soundtrack of a faint bleating sound of an indifferent public in the background. You might as well flip a coin to figure out which party will usher it in but a authoritarian panoptic state is coming. If this is what the majority of British people want, then may they get exactly what they deserve, but I am out of here. For those of you who will be happy to see me go, trust me, the feeling is mutual.
I realise most people will just shrug their ovine shoulders and find my worries inexplicable, crazy even, as it is not like Blair and Howard are setting up Gulags, right? No, of course not. Who needs those when there is a camera on every corner and your every purchase and phone call will eventually be logged on a central government database? As far as I concerned, the war is over and my side lost.
I have to try and speed up my business ventures and get out as soon as I can afford to do so. I shall try to be out of Britain and have my primary residence in the USA by 2007 at the latest to avoid being forced to submit to this intolerable imposition... and I shall be taking my wealth generating assets with me. I cannot say I am looking forward to winters in New Hampshire but I do not really see that I have much choice anymore. I do not see the United States as a paragon of civil liberties (to put it mildly), but at least it is a place in which the battle can be fought within the last bastion of the Anglosphere's culture of liberty.
Damn it.
Thursday
We interrupt your regular blogging schedule to bring you an important government announcement:
Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, starts his new job vowing business as usual and refusing to reconsider plans for the controversial and expensive ID cards.Mr Clarke promised "continuity" of his predecessor's policies.
Thank you for listening and have a nice day.
Wednesday
The Tory Party in Britain has been beyond a joke for a while now, but having now come out in support of ID cards, the Conservatives have well and truly screwed the pooch. Apart from the Democrats in the United States, never has a political party been so clueless and thoroughly unfit to govern. Let's get this bursting at the seams.
Link via Patrick Crozier
Wednesday
The Saint, the award-winning tabloid student newspaper at the University of St Andrews, has been banned by the student union. Though this will not stop the paper circulating among students, The Saint will no longer be on sale in the union shop and, more seriously, the paper is being thrown out of its editorial office on the top floor of the union building. The argument used for the ban is that the paper does not respect the dignity of all students. According to the union: "The Saint's last two issues have included a number of offensive comments as well as misleading statements concerning amongst other groups, the University's LGBT students, dyslexics and the Welsh".
Update: You can e-mail the President of the student union, Simon Atkins, on pres@st-andrews.ac.uk
Tuesday
The leader of the neo-fascist British National Party has been arrested by West Yorkshire Police on 'suspicion of incitement to commit racial hatred'.
Now let us ponder that for a moment. Incitement to commit racial hatred. He has been arrested for trying to get someone else to hate non-white people. Now if he had incited someone to hate Manchester United supporters, the Old Bill in West Yorkshire would not have hauled him off for questioning, so clearly we are still permitted to suggest to others that they should hate some folks without being dragged into court, just not folks of a given race.
But please note he was not arrested for 'incitement to violence' against some racial group, he was arrested for inciting hate. He was arrested for trying to get people to think and feel, not act, a certain way. He was arrested for leading people into thought crimes. So they have outlawed certain emotions (i.e. hatred) and have moved to enforce that law against the racial collectivist Nick Griffin, because the hatred he incites is directed towards a certain classification of people.
Well I also happen to loathe, yes loathe, certain other classifications of people: communists, fascists, theocrats, some paleo-conservatives, members of Al-Qaeda and many flavours of socialists. I do not necessarily think all such people need to have violence done against them (well, members of Al-Qaeda excepted...) nor should they be arrested for thinking the things they do, but I do indeed think such people should be regarded with a fair degree of detestation. Moreover I have no hesitation inciting others to feel the same way towards such because those who would take away our liberties should indeed incur the hatred of those whose rights they would abridge.
I wonder how long I have left before I have to live somewhere else other than Britain if I wish to continue to have freedom of speech and stay out of jail.
Tuesday
A few days back, Perry de Havilland wrote about the sheer weight of regulations which empower officials to tell homeowners what sort of windows and fitting they can have in their own homes and mused as to whether such laws might, given their sheer impertinence, help provoke Britons to revolt. Maybe. I hope so but I want to mention another related thought - how the state makes it harder for us to carry out practical tasks in our daily lives, and what this does to our society.
Let's face, it, home maintenance or 'Do It Yourself' (DIY) is not every man or woman's idea of fun. In today's hectic world, it makes a lot of rational economic sense to 'outsource' work to plumbers, electricians, plasterers and carpenters, and such folk can make a good living thereby (I read somewhere that a lot of ex stockbrokers have retrained as plumbers - it pays better). The usual Adam Smith arguments apply. But there will always be folk who, for either economic reasons or plain love of working with their hands, will want to look after their homes themselves. My dad is such a person and built the very house my parents now live in. It is a very good building.
Some of the satisfaction people get in buying a home - as I am about to do - is knowing that you can paint, decorate and shape your possessions as you like, subject to getting insurance cover, which tends to be rather more effective in promoting quality than government rules. In today's world, of course, things like preservation orders and planning regulations impose tight limits on certain alterations, but even with such restrictions, owning a home gives us the chance to make a small physical mark on our world in a tangible way. This matters to people. Owning your own bit of bricks and mortar touches something in our psyche deeper than abstract political treatises on liberty ever can.
By telling us whether we should be able to wire a plug or put in double glazing, the State officials is continuing to infantilise the public, and also alienate us from our physical surroundings by telling us that we are not allowed to alter anything without a permit. By frustrating our desires to enjoy the simple pleasures of property ownership, our splendidly caring masters may be denying many of us the chance to to grab those small but priceless parts of daily life.
Monday
It does exactly what it says in the tin. You either have it or you do not... and judging by many of the letters to the Telegraph, many on Britain would rather you not have it. In response to an interesting article by Charles Moore, we see...
Sir - I have been a regular reader of your newspaper for more than 25 years. I am very concerned to read Moore's article: it is offensive and flawed. It may cause racial disharmony among four million British Muslims at a critical time.Dr. Basil Adam Shihabi, Consultant Physician, Secretary General of the British Iraqi Medical Association, Stevenage, Herts
For a start, 'Muslims' are not a race, they are a religion. But that aside, if I wish to poke fun at the muslim religion, or any equally daft belief in invisible imaginary friends, I will damn well do so. At least the good Doctor is not calling for Moore to be prevented by law from saying what he wishes and that is an important thing to note. The fact Dr. Shihabi is free to respond in the Telegraph is proof enough that the deck is not stacked against him.
However...
Sir - Moore entirely misses the point about the proposed law against inspiring religious hatred. It is not aimed at those who laugh at religion or scorn it. It is aimed at the "kill the infidel" brigade.Michael Gorman, Guildford, Surrey
What we have here is a touching naivety about the nature of states and laws in general. The law may be aimed at the "kill the infidel" brigade (I have my doubts) but that means other remarks which disparage and insult the muslim faith will be illegal and to just assume 'people like us' (as opposed to 'them') will not have the law enforced against them is preposterous.
Making insulting remarks about any religion is like shooting fish in a barrel but the right to say what you will is vastly more important than some imaginary right to not to be offended. Without freedom of speech the whole damaged edifice of liberty really is in the gravest peril and if not enough British people realise that then we are in serious, serious trouble.
Sunday
In April of this year, I did a White Rose posting, linking to this BBC report about people who are wrongly accused by the Criminal Records Bureau of being criminals. Because I wrote the piece, I today received email notification of this comment on it, that has just been added by David Wilson. This comment deserves wider circulation than just to sit in the White Rose archives. The message is, if you have a quite common name, like David Wilson, look out.
Just found your page and I have experienced this mistaken identity by the National Identification Service (NIS) and been wrongly identified with a convicted criminal with a similar name and date of birth – but absolutely no other similarities.
I am trying to emigrate and was shocked when the report from the NIS came about a man who was convicted of fraud, serious assault and most distressing sexual assault!
I found all doors for complaint closed to me. I called the NIS and was told by an ignorant person on the phone 'that's your problem and it's up to you to prove otherwise'. The Police where equally difficult to deal with. No lawyer would touch it.
I then took it to my MP Mr James Wray, who wrote to Blunkett, who passed it to the Minister Bob Ainsworth, who then wrote to my MP, assuring him that it wouldn't happen again. I then received a corrected document which stated I had no offences, and an apology for the error.
That wasn't the end of it though. On July 25th of this year I was stopped in a US Airport (after trying to collect an eticket from BA check-in, who instead of giving me a ticket held on to my passport and alerted and armed security guard) and prevented from boarding my flight to Gatwick for over an hour. A manager finally came and told me it was an issue between myself and my government, and let me board the plane.
On arriving back in the UK I wrote to the NIS asking for justification of why my name is still being linked to this other person, and recorded proof of posting of my letter - Royal Mail tell me it was received on 30th July 2004. I never received any response. It was quite simply ignored. Today I believe there has been no change despite the intervention of Mr. Ainsworth.
Once again I find myself needing to get a copy of this sheet and just today had a letter sent to me asking me several questions which relate to the other man. I have been told by someone in the legal profession that it is a 'violation of my rights to privacy by government' and that I could in fact have a legal case.
Any advice would be appreciated. Right now I would just like to be at my liberty and enjoy my freedom to travel in the world without harassment or any violation of my civil liberties.
I am an honest person who has never been charged with any offence. The PNC and the actions of the NIS is an absolute disgrace - it would seem that a civil servant in London has more power than any Judge or Jury in the nation and has the ability to put one person's criminal past on another. There is I have found no way to completely clear your name.
Friday
Roll up, roll up ladies and gentlemen! Book your tickets for a day or two in the verdant British countryside where you will find thrills, spills, adventures, games, rides, puzzles, jokes, wheezes, teases, conundrums and wonders to behold:
The new law banning hunting with dogs is "so poorly drafted" no-one can define the offence, pro-hunt MPs say.The accusation came after it emerged a Devon man had been told he could use his four dogs to "chase away unwanted animals" from his farm.
Because he did not intend to kill deer or foxes it was not hunting.....
Tory MP Peter Luff, another co-chairman of Middle Way, said that the legislation was "so poorly drafted nobody appears able to properly define the offence".
"It is no wonder the government desperately wants to move on from this disastrous law. However, I seriously doubt the countryside will be that accommodating."
Guaranteed fun for all the family.
Thursday
When the state's representatives does something truly egregious, like shoot someone dead for no good reason or seize someone's property because they want it to be owned by someone who can pay more tax to them, it is pretty easy to get folks angry by recounting such tales and get them to nod solemnly and intone "The state is not your friend".
Yet maybe the proverbial straw that will break the political camel's back may be one of the seemingly endless encroachment of the state into the little stuff of everyday life:
I tell her about that infamous legal text, and the insane requirements it places on all of us who break our own windows, in our own homes, in the course of a loving affray, and how we are compelled, if we wish to replace that window, to become members of the Society of Window Replacers, called FENSA, provided we can stump up the fee and pass the exam; and if we cannot pass the FENSA exam, how we must go to the council and deposit a plan showing how we propose to replace our own windows, in OUR OWN HOMES, in line with Britain's commitments under the Kyoto protocol on climate change, and having replaced the window how we must then go back to the council and get a COUNCIL APPOINTED WINDOW INSPECTOR to come out and verify that whatever we have done is in line with those international commitments. And is that not mad, ladies and gentlemen, I demand. Is that not the height of insanity?
And it is via this sort of thing that the state gets businesses to eagerly sign up to ever more regulation. I mean if you in the window replacement business, the last thing you want is 'laymen' getting the idea that they do not actually need you.
Yet there comes a time when even the post-Thatcher strategy of regulatory gradualism used by socialists of both left and right accumulates to the point it cannot escape the notice of any but the most obtuse Daily Mail reader or wilfully blind Guardianista. As it gradually dawns on people how few things they can do with their own land, labours and capital without navigating a labyrinth of regulations and permissions, maybe the already palpable uneasy I detect will turn into something which is actually politically useful for attacking the whole system.
And when might that point be reached? Good question.
Wednesday
Well, well, well. A famous showbusiness celebrity is making a big fuss about the crushing of dissent and the stifling of free speech.
But, this time, the claim has merit:
Blackadder star Rowan Atkinson has launched a comedians' campaign against a government bill to outlaw inciting religious hatred.The Mr Bean actor says parts of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill are "wholly inappropriate" and could stifle freedom of speech....
The main thrust of the bill creates a new Serious and Organised Crime Agency to tackle drug trafficking, people smuggling and criminal gangs.
Quite what religious 'hatred' has to do with drug trafficking and criminal gangs is quite beyond me but this appears to be another example of the government bundling up huge sheafs of seen-to-be-doing-something new laws and stuffing them altogether into one big, deliverable package. Perhaps they are trying to cut down on their printing costs.
Anyway, to the meat of the matter. I applaud Mr Atkinson for his taking a stand notwithstanding that it may be motivated by self-interest. That is still better than nothing. However, I expect that his pleadings will fall on wilfully deaf ears. HMG was rattling its sabre about new 'hate speech' laws even while the cement dust was still drfiting over New York. It was, near as dammit, their first response.
I have not yet read the Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill but, in due course, I will. I do not expect that it will materially differ, either in theme or content, from similar recent legislative atrocities. That is to say, it will endow the state with sweeping new powers, give birth to lavishly funded and unaccountable agencies and usher in a whole raft of new laws that will be so widely and vaguely drafted as to make them dangerously open to interpretation and judicial activism.
Following the now familiar pattern of previous legislation, widespread enforcement will prove impossible. So enforcement will be selective, politically-motivated and high-profile with a handful of unlucky short-straw drawers nailed to the wall pour encourages les autres.
If that was the only outcome then it would be bad enough. That alone would be sufficiently capricious and despotic. But that is only the intended outcome. The unintended outcome could be a great deal worse.
A climate of cowed silence doth not a happy-clappy country make. The worst of it is not knowing where the boundaries are. What can we say? What can't we say? The majority with something to lose will opt for saying nothing at all as the safest policy (and who can blame them?). Thus, there will be a Potemkin appearance of normality and what we have learned to refer to as 'tolerance'.
But, underneath, the true picture will be much darker. The only way to successfully challenge bad ideas is to challenge them with good ideas but that is not possible to do if the bad ideas cannot be expressed in the first place. Similarly, resentments left unspoken do not simply whither on the vine and grievances (however irrational and baseless they may be) will not conveniently decay into half-lives like radioactive materials.
Instead these unstable elements will foment and fester and bubble away quietly in the dark until the solution has been transformed into a toxic and explosive substance. It will remain inert only so long as the lid can be kept firmly screwed down.
Monday
If David Blunkett falls from office because of his shenanigans between the sheets, I do hope that civil rights activists will not see this as a sign from God (be it Cthuhlu or whoever) that the truly perilous state in which British liberty stands is about to take a turn for the better.
Nothing Blunkett has ever done was done under his authority alone. The accelerating rate at which common law is set aside and ancient liberties debased have been the product of decades of antipathy to non-collectivist rights and individual liberty, a process which was well under way when David Blunkett's Tory predecessor was in power: would-be future Prime Minister Michael 'a touch of the night' Howard.
The fall of a ringwraith might be cause for some brief rejoicing (I will certainly be raising a glass or two that day!) but please remember there are plenty more where he came from. Sauron lives at Number 10 Downing Street, not in the office of the Home Secretary.
Friday
This is fun, in a gruesome way. It is the David Blunkett policy maker, which comes up with things like this:
Detain yobs in the street indefinitely under the Terrorism Act, and then put them under a curfew order.
Or this:
Arrest refugees, and then issue them with compulsory 'Entitlement Cards'. And charge them for it.
Or this:
Pre-emptively convict asylum seekers, and then try them in secret. And charge them for it.
Although, whenever the BBC is mentioned, I get the feeling that quite a few people around here might agree with Automatic Blunkett's ideas. I got this, for example:
Deport the BBC to Guantanamo Bay, and then give them a 'Citizenship Test'.
That is the problem with people like Blunkett. Almost everyone gets something that they want.
Qwghlm.co.uk, whoever he may be (this would be a good place to start finding out - his real name is, I think, Chris Applegate), adds his own cautionary note:
NOTE: The random generator can generate actual policies that Blunkett has launched. I take no responsibility for any distress caused by sudden realisation of the truth, nor any feelings of fear, doom etc. for one's own civil liberties.
"I take no responsibility …" This man sounds like a lawyer. Maybe a lawyer and definitely a pessimist. Could he be a lefty version of this person.
See also gwghlm.co.uk's latest blog posting about ID cards. Quote:
I've written before at much greater length on just why ID cards are such a bad idea (snappy three word version: costly, useless, invasive) and none of these questions has been satisfactorily answered in the meantime.
Indeed.
(It is off topic, but I could not for the life of me get copying and pasting from this guy's blog to work. First I could not highlight just the bit I wanted. Then I could not copy even that huge gob that I almost completely did not want. (Although, I was able to copied the embedded short cut.) In the end, I copied that last quote by hand. What gives? Am I using the wrong Internet access whosadaisy programme? Is he one of these guys who made up his own blogging programme? Enlightenment please.)
Friday
Margaret Hodge makes speeches about the unsung virtues of the Nanny State.
She forgets to remind us of her record as leader of Islington council, when a shocking series of terrible abuses against children were covered up.... by the Nanny State.
Unfortunately for people like Hodge, some of us remember the reports of child brothels being run from local government premises, where children were hooked on drugs and rented out for sex by local government employees and bullying older children. I remember the exposures (after years of cover-ups), the harrassment of anyone daring to protest against the paedophile rings operating in Islington and Lambeth, to name only the worst cases in London.
Unfortunate too, the Guardian, not noted for its crusading against the welfare state, details the case neatly, including recent attmpts by Hodge to prevent the BBC from telling the story of one of the abused children who were unsung recipients of Islington's special care. I was especially impressed with Hodge's rubbishing of a victim of sexual abuse as "an extremely disturbed person".
Never mind the unsung virtues of totalitarian welfare statism, how about the unsung victims? Margaret Hodge is a government minister with a nice salary, lifestyle to add to her already considerable wealth before becoming a national politician. Instead of devoting herself to helping the victims of her administration with her own time and money, Hodge wants to tax the rest of us to create more opportunities that would allow 'public servants' to destroy even more lives than at present.
What a fine signal she sends to the most vulnerable in our society. And what a fine signal from the present government. I feel sick.
Thursday
Travelling to distant lands often has the effect of changing your perspectives about your own country to some degree or other. After returning to Britain from my trip to the USA earlier this week, I was struck by how leaden and grey London appears in November compared to the pastel, azure balminess of the California coast.
But, that said, I was born here in Blighty and I have had a lifetime of getting used to its forbidding and dismal winter skies. Besides, there are other and newer characteristics that make me wonder exactly what type of country I have returned to. They are altogether more pernicious and have nothing to do with the climate:
In the aftermath of my experience, I started some purely anecdotal research on the type of behaviour and attitude displayed by the police towards me. In speaking to friends, acquaintances, tradesmen, cab drivers and people in the pub I rapidly came to realise that a quite staggering number of ordinary, law-abiding people had endured similar experiences.
To discover precisely what 'experiences' the author was forced to endure, you will need to read the entire article. I recommend it in particular to our non-British readers so that they can get some idea of what is happening to this country.
The account of the ordeal left me with a ball of cold mercury in the pit of my stomach. For what happened to him could just as easily happen to me or any number of my friends, relations or colleagues.
And this is merely a taste of things to come. The hors d'oeuvres before the main course. We will not enjoy this meal.
Thursday
The vast majority of the British public opposes the government's nannying campaign, according to a poll released today by the campaign group Reform. It shows that 71% of the public think that "Too many infringements on personal liberty are being proposed on matters that should be for individuals to decide for themselves", while only 27 per cent believe that "The Government should legislate on such things even if they mean restrictions on personal liberty."
Monday
It will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that we have long regarded the Ban on Foxhunting with Dogs as having very little to do with foxhunting.
As David Carr has pointed out before, those who shout loudly that the move against hunting is 'undemocratic' are completely wrong: it is perfectly democratic. Welcome to the world in which there is no give and take of civil society... welcome to the world of total politics.
Mr Bradley says: 'We ought at last to own up to it: the struggle over the Bill was not just about animal welfare and personal freedom: it was class war.'The MP for The Wrekin adds that it was the 'toffs' who declared war on Labour by resisting the ban, but agrees that both sides are battling for power, not animal welfare.
'This was not about the politics of envy but the polities of power. Ultimately it's about who governs Britain.'
[...]
'Labour governments have come and gone and left little impression on the gentry. But a ban on hunting touches them. It threatens their inalienable right to do as they please on their own land. For the first time, a decision of a Parliament they don't control has breached their wrought-iron gates.
No kidding. That is what we have been pointing out here on Samizdata.net for quite some time and why we have treated commenters who shrugged and said "why get worked up about foxhunting?" with such derision. It was never about hunting but rather things that are far, far more fundamental. It is about those who would make all things subject to democratically sanctified politics ('Rule by Activist') seeking to crush those who see private property and society, rather than state, as what matters.
Mr Bradley, 51, admits that he personally sees the campaign to save hunting as an assault on his right to govern as a Labour MP.
And Mr. Bradley is correct but for one thing: the battle in question is about the limits of political power and not just Labour's political power. Until the supporter of the Countryside Alliance see that they are actually struggling against the idea of a total political state, they will not even be fighting the right war. It is not about who controls the political system but what the political system is permitted to do under anyone's control. The United States has a system of separation of powers and constitutional governance which (at least in theory even though not in fact) places whole areas of civil society outside politics. Britain on the other hand has no such well defined system and the customary checks and balances have been all but swept away under the current regime. Britain's 'unwritten constitution' has been shown to be a paper tiger.
But those who look to the Tories to save them from the class warriors of the left are missing another fundamental truth. During their time in power, the Tory Party set the very foundations upon which Blair and Blunkett are building the apparatus for totally replacing social processes with political processes, a world in which nothing cannot be compelled by law if that is what 'The People' want: populist authoritarianism has been here for a while but now it no longer even feels it has to hide its true face behind a mask.
Moreover it would take another blind man to look back on Michael Howard's time as Home Secretary and see him as being less corrosive to civil liberties that the monstrous David Blunkett. Have you heard the outraged Tory opposition to the terrifying Civil Contingencies Act? Of course not, because the intellectual bankruptcy of the Tory party is now complete... for the most part they support it. If the so-called 'Conservatives' will not lift a finger to stop the destruction of the ancient underpinnings of British liberty, what exactly are they allegedly intending to 'conserve'? The Tories are not part of the solution, they are part of the problem and the sooner the UKIP destroy them by making them permanently unelectable, the better, so that some sort of real opposition can fill the ideological vacuum.
Those who were marching against banning foxhunting completely miss the issues at stake here. The issue is not and never has been foxhunting but rather the acceptable limits of politics. And you cannot resolve that issue via the political system in Britain. It is only once the people who oppose the ban on foxhunting and the people who oppose the Civil Contingencies Act and the people who oppose the introduction of ID cards and data pooling all realise that these are NOT separate issues but the same issue will effective opposition be possible. And I fear that opposition will, at least until the 'facts on the ground' can be established, have to be via civil disobedience and other ways to make sections of this country ungovernable by whatever means prove effective. The solution does not lie in 'democracy' but rather by enough people across the country asserting their right to free association and non-politically mediated social interaction by refusing to obey the entirely democratic laws which come out of Westminster.
Peter Bradley is right and he has provided any who are paying attention with a moment of utter clarity: It is time to challenge his right to 'rule' by whatever means necessary.
Monday
The Civil Contingencies Act became law last Thursday in what can only be described as a blaze on non-publicity. This legislation, which represents perhaps the most serious threat to liberty in Britain since World War II, has put in place the legal tools for some future government to impose rule-by-edict.
It would be hard to overstate how grave this situation is.
Sunday
In about three months' time from now, the centuries-old country practice of foxhunting with hounds will be a criminal offence in England and Wales, following the decision by Labour MPs to vote for total abolition of the activity. It has already prompted thoughts on whether foxhunting groups will defy the law and make life in marginal rural constituencies difficult for Blair and his cohorts. Personally, I hope Labour lose a swathe of key seats on this issue, although in practice I do not imagine the issue will be a make-or-break one. But it will have an effect.
In issues like this, it is easy to get caught in the thickets of whether foxhunting is particularly cruel or not, a necessary activity, etc, etc. But it seems to me that the supporters of foxhunting allowed themselves to devote too much time stressing how many jobs would be lost from a ban, and not enough time on the fundamental issues of liberty and property rights. What appals me - as one who has never been to a hunt meeting in his life - is that the banners of foxhunting are determined to crush a particular form of enjoyment. Foxhunters have fun. Yes, their idea of fun may not be yours or mine - but our lives would be pretty bleak if our pleasures could be struck down at the whim of a temporary majority of our fellow electors. In banning a form of fun, this government has shown itself at its bullying worst and established a particularly nasty precedent, coupled with a rancid amount of bigotry against the 'upper class'. The affair is a reminder of just how much class hatred still exists inside the so-called New Labour Party.
The property rights issue also has not been stressed nearly enough by the now-defeated hunting lobby. The government has essentially told owners of land that they are not allowed to hunt game on it in a certain way. It is, along with the outrageous 'right to roam' legislation giving ramblers freedom to go on owners' land, an attack on the ownership rights of landowners.
The question now has to be - who is next? Game shooters, anglers, horse riders? What happens when today's cheerless puritans run out of things to abolish? Will they spontaneously combust?
I am writing this up in deepest rural Suffolk, which is not a main hunting area like Leicestershire or Gloucestershire, but nevertheless the locals are steamed.
UPDATE: In case anyone brings up the argument about cruelty to animals, while I strongly sympathise, I should point out that the abolition of hunting with hounds will not mean the end of killing foxes, which are classed as vermin. They will be shot, gassed and trapped. Nice.
Thursday
The No2ID campaign has established an e-petition aimed at 10 Downing Street demanding the end to plans for imposing mandatory ID cards and pervasive state databases recording a vast range of what you do in your life.
The No2ID campaigners have taken the line of principled objection, given that the government seem to have decided that there is no longer any room for public debate and refuses to engage with serious - and growing - civil liberty and privacy concerns with the scheme. The Home Office have not met once with civil liberties organisations yet say their concerns have been addressed whilst at the same time avoiding public meetings but at the same time having private briefing with technology partners for introducing the schemes.
Take a stand and make your voice heard while you still can at www.no2id-petition.net. Time is fast running out.
The state is not your friend.
Sunday
Business enterprises are often attacked for selling people 'junk food' and not telling them about the health benefits of vegetables.
Well recently ASDA (the British arm of Walmart) labelled its vegetables, explaining that people who eat certain types of vegetable have a lower chance of developing certain forms of cancer.
ASDA was promptly prosecuted and punished. It seems that 'making health claims' is not legal in Britain.
Oh well, back to selling junk. The state is not your friend.
Tuesday
The British government is preparing to launch a further assault on the English Common Law by eroding the presumption of innocence in jury trials involving certain categories of offence. In short, the government wants it to be possible for a defendant's previous convictions to be made known to a jury unless there are compelling reasons in the eyes of a judge against it.
It does not take a lot of imagination to see why prosecutors and even the odd well meaning but deluded politician think this is a grand idea. It must be disheartening for a prosecutor to see a serial rapist, mugger or thief get off on a technicality and for the defendant's nefarious past to be undisclosed to a jury. But - and it is a very big but - keeping previous convictions a secret except in certain conditions is designed to ensure that juries examine a criminal case on the facts as they are presented, and not by trying to guess the motives of the accused or rushing to a conclusion on the basis of a hunch.
Also, by withholding information about previous convictions, police and others are forced to present their evidence as strongly and as competently as possible. The Law of Unintended Consequences applies here. My fear is that prosecutors and others could become lazier and more slapdash in how they present evidence if they think that they can always shove X's seedy past in front of a jury as part of the case.
I must say it is hard to summon up feelings of surprise or even anger any more at what our political classes are doing to the traditional checks and balances of our criminal code. To be fair, much of this process began long before Tony Blair, although this most authortarian of governments has set about destroying our liberties with a zeal not seen in decades. I hold little hope that the Conservative Party or the Liberal Democrats will offer much resistance, given their terror at being thought to be 'soft on crime'.
And so we go on, changing processes of law in ways which will undoubtedly lead to more unsafe convictions. The present government, like all too many before it, is extraordinarily hostile to process and the understanding of the long-run bad consequences of interfering with constraints of law and custom.
The likelihood, of course, that all this messing around with the Common Law will reduce crime significantly is, I confidently predict, zero.
Monday
The European Court has dispelled any residual doubt that it is little more than a politically motivated tool of the European Commission and continues its slow but steady construction of the means to make investigative journalism impossible in Brussels by ruling that Belgian police could seize Hans-Martin Tillack's computers and records to identify his sources regarding reports on EU corruption.
The Euro-court has made little attempt to hide that is has colluded with EU political interests in a judgement that cuts to the heart of journalists ability to report on wrong doing and corruption by politicians.
Euro-judges accepted commission claims that it played no role in the arrest of Mr Tillack, even though leaked anti-fraud office documents show it orchestrated the raid from the beginning.
Whistleblowing will not be tolerated. The superstate is not your friend.
Saturday
If your political antennae have been sensitive to the undercurrents shimmering across the blogosphere, then you will have picked up the few postings alerting readers to the implications of the Civil Contingencies Bill. The dangers of this giant step towards authoritarianism have been publicised far more effectively both by David Carr and on Iain Murray's personal weblog, The Edge of Englands Sword:
Lord Lucas has described the Civil Contingencies Bill as comparable to Hitler's Enabling Act of 1933 which enabled him to transform Germany's Weimar Republic into his own personal tyranny. I have now read it, and I have to say that he is not exaggerating.
Readers could argue that this is an invocation of Godwin's Law and that, by quoting this passage, I have lost the argument. However, this opinion is that of Torquil Dirk-Erikson, "a noted Eurosceptic writer and learned silk". However, in considering the passage of this Act, it should also be noted that the European Constitution has a section on 'civil protection' as one of the coordinating powers for the European authorities.
The Government wishes to push through an updated Civil Contingencies Bill in 2004. It does not mention the EU, but the draft EU Constitution includes 'civil protection' as an area for 'coordinating action' and the current Treaty mentions the topic vaguely. The Bill also enables the creation of arbitrary imprisonable criminal offences. It enables regulations that can delegate powers to anyone or confer jurisdiction on any court or tribunal. This could be an EU body, unaccountable to government or the people.Although the draft Constitution gives us a veto on a European Public Prosecutor (the Government says it 'currently' sees no reason for one) Blair has said that he opposes permanent 'opt-outs' or being isolated in Europe. Although the amended Bill states that it will not change criminal procedure, the Government is happy for the EU to have over-riding powers to do this via the EU Constitution.
These developments happen at a time when the Government is trying to introduce universal ID cards and a 'population register', and has just announced a national database to carry information on all children, not merely those 'at risk' (Sunday Times, 25.7.04). Again there are worrying parallels with European developments. Amazingly, MI5's website, which is listed in Preparing For Emergencies assures us that "the subversive threat to parliamentary democracy is now negligible".
One giant step along 'Chavez' Blair's road to a 'managed democracy'.
Cross-posted to White Rose.
Wednesday
I bet that if I mention the term coup d'etat it conjures up images of heavily-armed soldiers on the streets, tanks on airport runways and besieged radio stations.
In truth, though, that is precisely the means by which such things are usually conducted. But they happen in faraway, third-world countries. It is the kind of thing we have come to associate with Oxford-educated 'Generals' who manage to wrest power from their tribal rivals in some African shanty-nation or with bandoliered, mustachioed Bolivians firing their carbines into the air and shouting "Viva El Nuevo Presidente" while the still-warm body of the old 'Presidente' swings from a nearby lamppost.
But this is not the kind of thing that happens in developed countries like Britain. No, this is a stable country with a proper economy and elections and democratic governments and political parties and judicial independence and free speech and the such.
I suppose it is, in part at least, because complacency caused by all those institutions appearing to be extant that we are about to taken over in a quiet, stealthy and bloodless coup d'etat all of our own.
Not a shot will be fired. No-one will be rounded up. The airports will remain open and all the media will stay on air. For now.
No, the weapon of the revolution to come is made only of paper and it is called the 'Civil Contigencies Bill', due to become law next year.
Envisaged, ostensibly, as a means of giving the government sufficient emergency powers to deal with terrorist threats (as if they do not already have enough powers), the actuality is a lot darker and goes a great deal further than that.
The effect of the Bill, once passed into law, will enable any senior government minister to delcare that an 'emergency' has happened or is about to happen and, entirely at his own discretion, enact any regulations he wishes for the purpose of:
protecting human life, health or safety treating human illness or injury protecting or restoring property protecting or restoring a supply of money, food, water, energy or fuel protecting or restoring an electronic or other system of communication protecting or restoring facilities for transport protecting or restoring the provision of services relating to health protecting or restoring the activities of banks or other financial institutions preventing, containing or reducing the contamination of land, water or air preventing, or mitigating the effects of, flooding preventing, reducing or mitigating the effects of disruption or destruction of plant life or animal life protecting or restoring activities of Her Majesty’s Government protecting or restoring activities of Parliament, of the Scottish Parliament, of the Northern Ireland Assembly or of the National Assembly for Wales, or protecting or restoring the performance of public functions.
In other words, regulations for any purpose whatsoever.
And that is just the beginning. The Bill goes on to set out just what those ministerial fiats can do:
provide for or enable the requisition or confiscation of property (with or without compensation); provide for or enable the destruction of property, animal life or plant life (with or without compensation); prohibit, or enable the prohibition of, movement to or from a specified place; require, or enable the requirement of, movement to or from a specified place; prohibit, or enable the prohibition of, assemblies of specified kinds, at specified places or at specified times; prohibit, or enable the prohibition of, travel at specified times; prohibit, or enable the prohibition of, other specified activities;
The Bill will also enable said minister to abolish any law or statute at the stroke of a pen.
These are Bolshevik-style powers, so sweeping and totalitarian that they sound as if they have been lifted out of some 1930's banana-republic manifesto.
The effect (and almost certainly the intention) of these laws will be to give the Executive complete political control over the country. Bloggers or media owners who oppose the government can have their businesses requistioned and shut down. Political opponents can be put under indefinite house arrest or dragged before kangaroo courts. Meetings or organised protests can be disbanded and, theoretically at least, the Executive could even order Parliament (which is an assembly) to be evacuated and closed.
Under the rubric of 'terrorist threats' the Executive is about to equip itself with awesome and unlimited powers and let no-one delude themselves that these powers will not be used against, say, pro-hunt campaigners, petrol protestors and maybe even Samizdatistas. The Nulabour fantasy of complete control is shortly to be made flesh.
This is probably the last year of Britain as a liberal democracy yet the mainstream media is (as usual) asleep at the wheel. They will remain that way. It is up to bloggers to raise the awareness and ring the alarm bells in the hope that some opposition can be stirred into life.
Saturday
The unfortunate but wholly predictable result of British government meddling in the affairs of the countryside:
Militant pro-hunt groups are targeting Labour MPs and government ministers in a growing campaign of abuse, threats and intimidation over the decision to ban hunting.An MP had a large lump of concrete thrown through his constituency office window while the private homes of three MPs have also been targeted.
What about the root causes of the hunter's anger and frustration?
Saturday
The stunt pulled by pro-hunting protestors of intruding into the inner sanctum of the House of Commons has produced a large number of very predictable responses. MPs and other establishment figures harrumphed that "Parliament's privileges have been infringed!" and "This is an attack on democracy itself!" and "We must protect this most important of our institutions!" and "The protestors must not alienate people by acting so despicably!"...
Well I have a suggestion for the pro-hunt protestors: ignore all those remarks because the only way to win is to fight your battles on ground of your choosing. As David Carr pointed out earlier with regard to when one of the protestors in the Commons shouted "This isn't democracy. You are overturning democracy." - Wrong. This is democracy in action and you are on the receiving end of it.
What they really, really need to understand is that the majority of people in Britain are urban folk who are at best utterly indifferent to the protestor's concerns and frequently somewhat hostile to them. The hunters and their supporters cannot hope to convince a majority that hunting is something that is either important or even needs to be tolerated.
Do not waste your time making arguments about 'country livelihood' or 'managing pests' because not only do most people not believe you (such as me, for example), most simply do not care because they feel no particular affinity with you. It is preposterous to argue that the only effective way to put down vermin is to chase them on horseback with hounds.
It is simply not a matter for highly questionable utilitarian arguments but rather for arguing for free association to do what you will on private property. That is the only coherent and more importantly resonant argument to make.
If gay men can congregate together in clubs to do things the majority of people find deeply distasteful, without having to worry about being raided by the fuzz, why cannot foxhunters congregate together to do things the majority find distasteful without worrying about the Boys in Blue showing up? Successfully point out to gay rights activists that making the prejudices of the majority the law of the land is not something they should be comfortable with... and suddenly the class warriors behind the hunting ban might find it much harder to 'bash the toffs' as the implications of where this is clearly heading starts to dawn on altogether different groups.
In short, stop making invocations to the graven idol called 'Democracy' because it will not hear your prayers. Accept that you are a heretic and raise up an idol of your own. Call it, say, 'Liberty' and then challenge your enemies to denounce it.
If you want to defend your liberty to do things in free association with likeminded folk on private property, you will have to come to some very sobering realisations.
Firstly, realise that you will always be a minority and may never be a match for the political machine arrayed against you. However that does not mean are alone. There are millions of people who support your views with far more intensity than the many million more who oppose them.
Secondly, accept that The System which the Barbour jacket, flat cap and green wellington set always assumed was, when push comes to shove, there to protect them, is in fact run by people with whom in many instances you have about as much in common culturally as Osama Bin Laden. Moreover, a great many of those people who are oiling the machine under which your aspirations are being crushed are actually members of the Tory party and some of your friends are in fact members of the Labour party. That said it is true that most of the people behind what is happening are indeed Labour and LibDem drones... so just stop thinking it terms of party politics because political parties, any political parties, are just components of the system you are going to have to confront. If you think a mere change of government can make your problems go away forever, you are sadly mistaken.
Thirdly, democratic politics is not the only way to cause political change. Cast your mind back to the days of the Poll Tax and also try to take a dispassionate look at the political realities in Ulster. It is not really violence that is the issue but the fact substantial activist minorities simply refused to accept the verdict of the democratically sanctified political process and yet ended up with at least a significant part of what they were after.
What you need to understand is that you cannot trust to democratic politics: in fact you must confront democracy and be prepared to say that your liberties are not something that the political process can legitimately abridge in this manner, regardless of how many people vote for it. It is the system which allows this to happen that you must confront, not just whatever party happens to be running it right now.
If there are some liberties you are simply not prepared to surrender, then you must be prepared to refuse to accept the authority of the state to impose its institutional will on you and accept the possible consequences of that... I say 'possible consequences' because Sinn Fein/IRA, the Animal Liberation Front, various 'Traveller' groups and all manner of other people have demonstrated that consistently and collectively refusing to obey the law is by no means a guaranteed road to ruin. I am certainly not urging activists to blow anyone up, invade anyone's property or terrorise anyone's family like the groups I have mentioned are prone to do, but it is hard to escape the conclusion that working well and truly outside the democratic system of politics in various ways is both less dangerous and considerably more effective than the Establishment would like you to think.
However regardless of what the pro-hunting protestors and activists decide to do, it seems that Britain may be about to undergo a dramatic and quite possibly earthshaking change, which most people will of course remain oblivious to just so long as it does not interrupt the flow of reality TV shows and sporting events - If the government does indeed use the Parliament Act to impose certain laws when there is clearly no state of emergency, then we must accept that Blair has shattered Britain's constitution (with scant opposition) and we are in a situation a thousand times graver than I would have ever dreamed possible just a few weeks ago.
Moreover I suspect even this will not rouse the Tory party from its torpor and induce them to actually make a coherent civil liberties based argument and promise a policy of non-cooperation. This is vastly more serious than the issue of red jacketed country folks galloping around the fields in pursuit of small mangy quadrupeds. If the Parliament Act is used, we are suddenly living in a country with no checks and balances on the ruling party's power other than the one on Election Day. That is not alarming, it is terrifying.
Thursday
Parliament today finally voted by a substantial majority to outlaw hunting with hounds:
MPs have voted to ban hunting with dogs despite mass demonstrations and the debate in the House of Commons being interrupted by protesters.
The 'fearless and principled' Tony Blair (having pushed this law forward as a sop to his increasingly fractious party) failed to show up for the debate and did not even bother to vote.
But plenty of hunt supporters did show up to rally outside the Houses of Parliament in a protest that turned into a pitched battle. By 5.00pm this afternoon, the radio news networks were reporting that Westminster had been closed off by the chaos and blood on the streets. Five hunt supporters even managed to invade the floor of the House of Commons:
It was shortly after 1620 BST that the protesters rushed in, with one shouting at Rural Affairs Minister Alun Michael: "This isn't democracy. You are overturning democracy."
Wrong. This is democracy in action and the hunters are on the receiving end of it. Tempers are flared:
"Banning Easy, Enforcement Impossible - That's A Promise" and "Tally Ho Tony, We're Off Hunting" suggested many would not see a ban as the final word.Particularly popular among the younger protesters were T-shirts which had hijacked French Connection's controversial slogan to read "FCUK yer ban".
"These people are very angry," said Davina Morley, 53, from Yorkshire, who has been hunting all her life.
This is not the end. It is just the beginning.
Tuesday
NO2ID is launching its activities publicly:
Saturday, 18 September 11:00am - 2:00pm
The Corner Store
Covent Garden
33 Wellington Street,
London, WC2E 7BN, Map
There will be a couple of speakers before lunch, including a Labour 'rebel', Neil Gerrard MP followed by campaigning around central London, i.e. handing out leaflets, setting up stalls on the street in a number of locations until mid-afternoon.
Please join them to Stop ID Cards and the Database State!
The NO2ID Coalition, who are trying to make sure Blunkett fails in his attempts to introduce mandatory ID cards, argue that:
- An ID scheme won't stop terrorists
- An ID scheme will not control illegal immigration
- An ID scheme won't enable you to have anything you do not already have
- An ID scheme will cost billions in taxpayers money and achieve nothing
- An ID scheme will mean your most intimate details will be controlled by the government forever
- An ID scheme will cost everyone £75 every year
Cross-posted from White Rose.
Monday
Something tells me that HMG does not expect their proposed fox-hunting ban to be awfully popular with the country folk:
Police are planning to use spy cameras in the countryside to enforce a ban on fox hunting.Chief constables intend to site CCTV cameras on hedgerows, fences and trees along known hunting routes to enable them to photograph hunt members who break the law after hunting with hounds is outlawed.
They used to warn that 'walls have ears'. Now walls will have eyes as well. I suppose the panopticon countryside is nothing more than a logical extension of our panoptican cities. It is merely a matter of time before every workplace and every home is wired up to the Big Eye of Big Brother. Then the nightmare really begins.
There exist all manner of varying justifications for this surveillance-fever but there is only one reason that our political masters are deploying it with such alacrity: because they can.
The same technology that enables us to chatter with each other across national boundaries is being used to create a tightly-wrapped police state.
What a very, very grim future we face.
Friday
... but if you think that means the idea of banning smoking in the UK has been condemned, you would be wrong. The headline appeared in the Telegraph above the article reporting that plans to restrict areas for smokers in pubs were denounced as inadequate last night by campaigners pressing for a ban.
The anti-smoking campaigners denounced the agreement of more than 20,000 pubs in Britain to introduce restrictions on smoking to make around 80 per cent of bar space tobacco-free within five years. Smokers in these outlets would be restricted to specified areas or rooms.
The 'anti-choice extremists' for the smoking ban, apparently encouraged by evidence suggesting that a big drop in tobacco sales in Ireland due the prohibition on smoking in pubs, are pushing for more. Deborah Arnott, director of Action on Smoking and Health (Ash), said:
This is a last desperate throw of the dice by the biggest players in the pub trade. They spin their plans as a smoke-free initiative, but they are nothing of the kind.They will still leave their non-smoking customers gasping and leave more than half the country's pubs unaffected.
I must be missing something, I did not notice any spin for a smoke-free initiative. It is a question of choice, not an imposition of a health-fascist measure.
Rob Hayward of the British Beer and Pub Association, which brokered the deal, argued with sensible points:
Clearly with the number of non-smokers on the increase companies want to reflect that in the way they run their pubs. We want to see better choice for non-smokers. At the same time we believe in freedom of choice and a policy that will still allow smokers to enjoy a night out with their friends in the pub.
Indeed. I do not like cigarette smoke in pubs, bars and restaurants although I am partial to a good cigar. But I do like the right of owners to let customers do in them what they wish on their premises. And it seems that even a government survey cannot produce better than 20 percent support for a total ban.
Surveys nothwithstanding, the ban in Ireland caused a 15 per cent drop in trade. A similar loss of business in Britain would lead to the closure of 5,000 pubs. And that's got to be a bad thing.
Tuesday
Hate crime. What it is exactly? Opinions vary but in essence it means that a given crime, such as assault, murder or defamation, will be treated more seriously if the perpetrator is judged to be motivated by certain politically disfavoured prejudices.
It means that if someone smashes a bottle in your face because you are black (or catholic or muslim or homosexual), rather than because they want to steal your wallet or because they caught you in flagrante delicto with their girlfriend, then that is more serious. The actual substance of the crime is not what makes it a 'hate' crime, just the motivation to commit it against a member of a designated group of people based on their race (which in reality means 'certain races'), religions (meaning 'certain religions') or sexual orientations (meaning 'homosexuals'), that then becomes a hate crime... crimes against philanderers, drunks, football supporters, loud mouths etc. are not hate crimes.
You may hate supporters of Celtic Football Club but if you bash one of them over the head with a two by four, that is not a 'hate crime', it is just assault and perhaps GBH. Unless of course the Celtic supporter in question happens to be a nominal Catholic but you are a nominal Protestant.
It is a criminal act which attracts extra sanction because of what the perpetrator was thinking at the time. In short, a 'hate crime' is a 'thought crime', albeit one usually only applied to thoughts held by certain politically disfavoured classifications of people.
Do you really trust something as corrupt and fallible as a political process to create laws not on demonstrable facts (who hit who with the two by four) but on what people think? Sure, motivation matters: for example being put in fear of your life can justify violence in self-defence, even (sometimes) in Britain. But to legislate that certain groups are more sacrosanct than others is collectivism at its most intellectually pernicious because it denies the individual basis of rights and assigns value on the basis of group membership. We all know where that can end up.
If you think laws should be based on crimes against individuals regardless of what race/religion or sexual orientation they have, then you might want to go over to the Hansard Society on-line consultation on Hate Crime in Northern Ireland and tell them that group rights are not a form of human rights, they are their antithesis.
Friday
Only if you say things that are favoured in Islington, it would seem.
Some odious Jamaican singer rejoicing in the name of Beenie Man could be charged under British law with incitement to violence because of the anti-homosexual lyrics of his songs.
I am all for the annoying Peter Tatchell trying (with some success) to cause 'Beenie Man' and his ilk financial difficulties by getting sponsorship deals cancelled as a result of their hate-mongering: that is civil society in action and an altogether good thing... but unless 'Bennie Man' actually starts taking up his bazooka for real, the state has no business suppressing free speech by force.
The essential civil liberties called 'freedom of expression' are rather more important that the actual substance of some idiotic reggae song. Has the culture of liberty really decayed so far that this sort of overarching state control can be tolerated? Freedom of expression for the politically favoured or the mainstream are the easy bits... it is when some detestable half-wit homophobic prat like 'Beenie Man' opens his noisome trap that you discover what the real state of civil liberties in a country is.
Pathetic. It is just a song and the state has no business banning songs.
Tuesday
This article from the Washington Post, on the application of the little known Data Quality Act to hobble the regulatory leviathan, is full of unintentional insights. The Data Quality Act is, well, let the Post tell it, and let the insights begin!
The Data Quality Act -- written by an industry lobbyist and slipped into a giant appropriations bill in 2000 without congressional discussion or debate -- is just two sentences directing the OMB to ensure that all information disseminated by the federal government is reliable.
The first insight is, of course, the clonking great pro-government, pro-regulation bias that the Post brings to this story. Note the disparaging terms applied to this piece of legislation, which has a genesis and a pedigree that is totally ordinary - most legislation is the product of interested parties, and most finds its way onto the books via massive omnibus bills that no one reads. However, these routine facts of Washington life are given ominous prominence only when the media outlet is opposed to whatever was done. The rest of the story is riddled with similar bias - in the Post's world, regulation is always good, always to protect the people, never fails a cost-benefit test, always supported by the preponderance of the scientific evidence, etc.
The next set of unintentional insights comes to us when the relatively innocuous purpose of the Act collides with the prerogatives of the regulatory state.
But many consumers, conservationists and worker advocates say the act is inherently biased in favor of industry. By demanding that government use only data that have achieved a rare level of certainty, these critics maintain, the act dismisses scientific information that in the past would have triggered tighter regulation.
First, of course, note who the Post asks for their opinion. Of equal interest is the rather revealing admission that, in the past, regulation was apparently handed down on the basis of information that was, how to put this, of less than adequate quality. Declining to regulate because the data isn't there is, of course, a Bad Thing.
These final comments surely need no elaboration.
"It's a tool to clobber every effort to regulate," said Rena Steinzor, a professor of law and director of the Environmental Law Clinic at the University of Maryland. "In my view, it amounts to censorship and harassment." . . . .Yet Steinzor, the Maryland environmental lawyer, and other critics complain that the OMB's involvement politicizes the process. The expertise of the handful of scientists hired by Graham, they say, cannot match that of the thousands of experts on agency staffs.
Monday
One of the conceits of the press here in the US is that the First Amendment, which states that "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press" somehow grants them special status and immunities from laws that we plebes have to comply with. Not too surprisingly, the establishment media sees itself as the "Fourth Estate," Americanized as the fourth branch of government (after the legislative, executive, and judicial branches) entitled to its own kind of sovereign immunity.
They are wrong. If the freedom to publish is restricted only to a certain limited or identifiable class, then it isn't really a freedom at all, but is a privilege.
One of the more common expressions of the misconception that they belong to a special privileged class is the belief among journalists that they are entitled to defy court orders. Specifically, they believe that the First Amendment somehow guarantees them an immunity against having to identify their sources.
One of the micro-scandals plaguing the Bush administration has been the entirely hoked-up l'affaire Plame. In a nutshell, when former ambassador and Saudi shill Joseph Wilson began lying in public about his fact-finding mission to Africa regarding Saddamite nuclear ambitions, someone in the Bush administration may or may not have "leaked" the fact that his wife works for the CIA and got him the gig. This was scandalous because his wife may or may not have been an "undercover" op, so that leaking her identity may or may not have been against the law. Valerie Plame was so concerned about being outed that she and her husband arranged for a nice photo spread in Vanity Fair.
The scandal was hoked up because the press knew from the get-go who leaked Valerie Plame's name and identity, but nonetheless went on a rampage about a coverup and the need for a grand jury to investigate the White House for this dreadful breach of national security. In effect, the Washington press was demanding a grand jury to discover what they already knew. This bluff has been called - the grand jury quite logically subpoenaed the testimony of two reporters who had fingered the White House for the leak.
Newly-released court orders show U.S. District Court Chief Judge Thomas F. Hogan two weeks ago ordered Matt Cooper of Time magazine and Tim Russert of NBC to appear before a grand jury and tell whether they knew that White House sources provided the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame to the media.Cooper still refused to answer questions after Hogan's July 20 order, and on Aug. 6 Hogan held him in contempt of court and ordered that he go to jail. Cooper has been released on bond pending his emergency appeal to a federal appeals court. Hogan has ordered that Time pay a $1,000 fine for each day Cooper does not appear before the grand jury.
A timely reminder that freedom for all is not a privilege for the few.
Thursday
Some time in June I was contacted by the production company responsible for making a radio programme called 'Straw Poll' for BBC Radio 4. They asked me to join the panel for a forthcoming debate on the proposition that 'We Should Not Legislate Against Obesity'.
I agreed.
The format of the show is a panel which consists of four speakers, two of whom are in favour of the proposition and two of whom are against. The debate is thrashed out for about 30 minutes or so before the studio audience is given a chance to put questions to the panellists. The studio audience then vote on the proposition.
The programme was recorded last July 19th at a Central London location. My opponents were two doctors representing Orwellian-sounding NGO’s whose names I have not forgotten because I never bothered committing them to memory in the first place. On my side was a very polished and very professional PR spokesman for the food industry.
Prior to the recording we were all asked to prepare 90-second opening statements. This was mine:
Having presumably grown bored with their crusades again tobacco and alcohol, the health fascists and professional busybodies have now turned their attentions to food in what is clearly an attempt to conquer new worlds.As with previous and similar campaigns, the case against so-called 'fatty' foods is being advanced by means of a toxic mixture of junk statistics, unsubstantiated claims, gross generalisations and manipulative attempts to tug the national heartstrings by claiming that it is all to 'save our children'.
But even if their ludicrous claims had a basis in fact (which I very much doubt) that would still be no excuse for them to browbeat our politicians into passing more laws and regulations. Protecting us from ourselves is not a legitimate function of government and we should all be at liberty to eat, drink and consume whatever takes our fancy and as much of it as we jolly well like without interference from self-appointed guardians no matter how 'caring' they claim to be.
This attempt to hobble the advertising industry is just the first stage in what is sure to prove a long campaign aimed at getting us all to accept government control over our diets. This is a very bad idea but only a part of a general trend towards every greater micro-management of the individual by the various organs of the state. But the more decisions that are made on our behalf the less inclined and empowered we are to make decisions for ourselves.
Unless this creeping tendency is reversed, it is going to result in a nation of infantilised and dependent people who have been stripped of both the will and the capacity to take responsibility for their own lives.
Nothing is unhealthier than that.
I started as I meant to go on. I am rarely minded to compromise and, before the show had even commenced, I had switched myself fully over to attack-dog mode.
I think it fair to say that I gave the producers their money’s worth. They had set me up in the role of Resident Heartless Monster and I set about my assigned task with aplomb and enthusiasm. While the doctor-types dutifully trotted out their stock scary statistics ("Junk food is killing 46.8 innocent children every nanosecond") and my PR ally produced his own data to prove that his industry was already doing enough to encourage healthy eating, I tore into everyone like a Tasmanian Devil, denouncing the food fascist careerists and their manipulative agenda-advancing lies.
I truly, madly and deeply enjoyed myself.
However, the studio audience did not enjoy me. In fact, they clearly despised me. I was advised beforehand that they were drawn from the same database that is used to fill the studio for BBC's 'Question Time' and, hence, our British readers will need no further explanation as to why. By the time we were 10 minutes into the debate I could already hear the hisses and boos emanating from the back of the room. It only spurred me on to even greater heights of 'insensitivity'.
I informed my PR debating ally beforehand that we would lose the vote and lose we did. Crushingly. I think he was not best pleased as, in common with most people in his position, he was hoping to make an impression as a model of compromise and co-operation. Instead I rather think he was peeved about being tainted by my 'extremism'.
But I went home a happy man. The vote is a matter of complete indifference to me. What matters is getting the message out and, as far as I am concerned, the victory was mine because of three members of the studio audience who came forward after the show to express their agreement with me. I gave them all Samizdata.net cards and thanked them for their support. Little by little we roll back the tide.
And the message will be going out again tomorrow evening (August 6th) to a far larger audience when the show is broadcast on BBC Radio 4 at 20.00 hours UK time (and again on Saturday afternoon at 13.15 hrs UK time). Again, the proposition will be a put to a vote (this time by phone-in) and, again, the result of the vote is of no consequence to me. What matters is that more people will hear what I had to say and, though I will not be on hand to give out cards this time, some of them will at least learn that they are not alone.
Sunday
The British government is advocating the vaccination of children against particular behaviours using the forthcoming array of pharmacotherapy vaccines. These would innoculate children against a host of behaviours that the government defines as anti-social: drinking, smoking, drugs, blogging and so on.
The article explains that "Doctors would immunize children at risk of becoming smokers or drug users with an injection" and that the program would operate in a way similar to the "current nationwide measles, mumps and rubella vaccination programme." Further the authors reveal that "such vaccinations are being developed by pharmaceutical companies and are due to hit the market within two years."
Developments like this are monitored by the Centre for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics, whose response was clear:
Richard Glen Boire, a legal scholar at the CCLE, believes that vaccinating children with "anti-drug" drugs would be "alarming and unlawful, and would signal the first time that neuropharmaceuticals were overtly used to enforce government policy."Aside from the human rights concerns, the UK plan raises serious health questions regarding the long-term effects of these drugs on the complex neurochemistry of the brain.
The CCLE warns that advances in the neurosciences will challenge the ability of individuals to maintain their cognitive freedom. Governments will redefine mental health to use drugs and other neurotechnologies in order to police and channel people's behaviours.
(My thanks to Alex Ramonsky of the Entelechy Institute for alerting me to this issue). Crossposted to White Rose.
Thursday
This is one scary, scary animation... It may seem exaggerating and a bit on the cheesy (or sprout submarine combo) side but it is certainly my impression that things are moving in that direction.
via Dan Gillmore and cross-posted from White Rose
Tuesday
Today is the deadline for the Home Office consultation period on ID cards bill. Phil Booth of Infinite Ideas Machine and No2ID campaign draws our attention to the fact that there are still a few hours left...
Just in case you need any inspiration he has published the full text of his e-mail submission to the Home Office consultation on ID cards.
He also points his readers to Spy Blog's excellent annotated blog of the Draft Bill, Mark Simpkins' equally excellent blog of the entire consultation document. For those with some time on their hands he recommends reading Stand.org.uk's submission [219KB MS Word document].
Please do send something (even if it's just a simple 'I am against the proposed scheme and legislation' type mail) to identitycards@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk, making sure the words 'consultation response' appear in the Subject line.
Thanks.
Cross-posted from White Rose.
Tuesday
Blogger and friend Russell E. Whitaker links to and quotes from an article citing the increasingly intrusive, impertinent and downright rude questions which compilers of the U.S. national census deem is fit to ask citizens of Jefferson's Republic once every ten years.
It is scarcely better in Britain, as far as I can tell. Oh well, I do recall with amusement reading somewhere that in response to questions about matters of religious belief, a number of folk now give their answer as 'Jedi'. Even funnier, it is now a recognised category. I wonder if I ought to go through my collection of science fiction novels and come up with a new category or two.
Monday
I have a problem with Rowan Atkinson. He only has to open his mouth to set me off laughing. Bob.
Maybe we should start taking him seriously. Every few years Mr Blunkett takes it into his head to publicly demonstrate that he is not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican, by making a new law against incitement to religious hatred and Mr Atkinson stands up to argue against him. This is what happened in 2001 and that is what happened again the other day in the pages of the Times, and on Radio 4's Today programme where I heard him, waiting for a joke that never came.
The joke is indeed a long time coming. Freedom of speech in this country did not merely arise during a period of violent religious divisions but because those divisions were insurmountable by any means other than allowing liberty for all.
Tuesday
I didn't know whether to laugh or cry at the Beeb's latest gaseous emanation regarding global warming.
Now, I am no climate scientist, but I harbor a suspicion that maybe, just maybe, one factor impacting on the Earth's climate just might be - now, I'm just throwing this out - the sun. I find discussion of the sun's impact on global weather to be oddly absent from the reams of paper speculating on how minute variations in various gases here on earth may affect climate, rather like speculating on how adjusting the air pressure in your tires a few ounces might affect fuel efficiency without ever considering the, well, fuel you are putting in the tank.
I have noted the occasional article exploring the correlation between temperature variations and solar activity, and so I read this with interest:
Scientists based at the Institute for Astronomy in Zurich used ice cores from Greenland to construct a picture of our star's activity in the past.They say that over the last century the number of sunspots rose at the same time that the Earth's climate became steadily warmer.
However, the scientists made sure that the reigning anti-materialist orthodoxy of those providing their grants was not called into question by these merely scientific observations, scurrying to observe:
This trend is being amplified by gases from fossil fuel burning, they argue.
and
This latest analysis shows that the Sun has had a considerable influence on the global climate in the past, causing the Earth to warm or chill, and that mankind is amplifying the Sun's latest attempt to warm the Earth.
The notion that non-human forces might occasionally affect the Earth's weather can not quite be denied:
Over the past few hundred years, there has been a steady increase in the numbers of sunspots, a trend that has accelerated in the past century, just at the time when the Earth has been getting warmer.The data suggests that changing solar activity is influencing in some way the global climate causing the world to get warmer.
but of course if this truth were recognized then it would quite knock the props out from under the latest rush to regulate under the banner of Kyoto and global warming. Even when evidence of the obvious - that the sun's output is what really controls global temperature, and that global temperature swings regardless of human activity - is presented, it must be spun so that human agency, and thus the need for regulation, is paramount.
Laugh or cry? I can not quite decide.
Thursday
The animal welfare charity, the RSPCA, wants lawmakers to ban 'non-official' firework displays and outlaw sales of fireworks which make very loud bangs, due to the distress this causes to dogs, cats and other animals, including livestock.
Now, it would be dead easy for we libertarians to immediately characterise this sort of thing as the obsession of a bunch of control freaks who want to remove our fun. I can certainly see that point. As a kid, I loved the annual Bonfire Night firework display of November 5, when my dad invariably built an enormous fire at our farm and let off vast numbers of fireworks.
But libertarians are also conscious of the issue of property rights. If I am a dog owner, and I do not want my canine companion to be traumatised by loud bangs coming from my neighbour's property, can and should I be able to find a way to get the noise stopped? Do repeated loud noises constitute an invasion of my property rights? Or should I be able to make some kind of agreement, perhaps even involving money? For example, the firework lovers could offer a neighbour a cash sum, or offer to take the neighbour's pets to a kennel home (soundproofed!) for the evening?
Sound 'pollution' can be hard to enforce via property rights, but that does not mean it would be impossible to do so. So at the risk of attracting the ire of firework nuts, I sympathise with this particular RSPCA cause, but obviously vastly prefer solutions which mean that enthusiasts of firework displays, both amateur and official, can enjoy a party while their neighbours' pets are not sent into agonies.
Monday
You may have wanted to know the REAL reason that 'Friends' has been taken off the airwaves. The 'official' reason is that the show's makers wanted to quit before the show became too stale.
The truth is rather more sinister.
In Lyle, the California Court of Appeal held that creative discussions in which writers of the popular sitcom Friends developed ideas and created scripts could constitute sexual harassment of individuals listening to the sometimes bawdy banter of the writers.
So now we know.
[Thanks to Virginia Postrel for the link.]
Tuesday
It seems astonishing that the state still gets involve with the content of TV programming in the USA. I expect this sort of crap in Britain and Europe, but in the USA?
The U.S. Senate on Tuesday approved a measure to crack down on indecency on radio and television by sharply raising fines. The Senate also took steps to rein in the growth of U.S. media companies by invalidating new, more relaxed ownership rules.
Can anyone tell me, do these absurd rules in the USA also apply to other non-terrestrial broadcast media companies, such as cable and satellite TV or even internet 'radio'?
Saturday
Patrick Crozier's Transport Blog has a valuable service at the top right of the blog, in the form of links to transport related articles. (Most of the media do not seem to have a special category for "transport" stories, the way they do for "education" or "arts".) Patrick adds very little in the way of accompanying commentary to these links, but others can comment, and on this story, several people did. I missed this when it first came out, but it seems to me worth making a fuss of, even if belatedly:
A pensioner who warned motorists of a police speed trap was convicted of wilfully obstructing a constable in the execution of his duty, banned from driving and ordered to pay £364 costs yesterday.Stuart Harding, 71, was attempting to slow motorists down as they approached a Sunday morning car boot sale where many people were crossing the road.
Noticing that police were parked nearby with an officer using a hand-held laser speed camera, he decided that a warning stating "Speed Trap – 300 yards ahead" would be the most effective way of getting drivers to reduce their speed. But as soon as the officers noticed his placard he was cautioned for committing an offence.
And there seems little doubt that it was this sign that was the "offence".
Robert Manley, prosecuting, said: "In displaying this sign the defendant was giving motorists advanced warning of a road safety camera being operated by the police 300 yards further along the road."
The supposed idea of speed cameras is to dissuade people from breaking the speed limit. Mr Harding was also dissuading people from breaking the speed limit. Yet this is something that a prosecutor considers it proper to denounce Mr Harding for doing. And what is more, the court agreed.
I suppose you could just about argue that if we were all allowed to put up signs about speed cameras, we would all be at it, and we would all accordingly only have to obey the speed limit where there was a warning sign, instead of all the time as we should.
But I prefer Andy Wood's explanation, which he links back to in his comment on this story. The income from speed cameras goes to local police forces, and they use cameras, and place their cameras in the first place, to raise revenue rather than to dissuade dangerous driving, the problem with dissuasion being that if it succeeds they get no money out of it.
So, watch out. If someone is committing an offence for which he is liable to be fined, do not, whatever you do, try to dissuade him. You will be "wilfully obstructing" the police in their attempts to fleece us of our money whenever they can.
I suppose the next question is: would it be wrong to encourage people to commit such offences? Would the police have any objections to that? Presumably not.
More seriously, this illustrates the general principle nowadays, that the state would rather tax and torment and generally mess with law-abiding, and even, as in this case, actively law-upholding citizens, rather than go after real criminals. Criminals are just too much bother to deal with. Moral: be a criminal. Seriously. The government is always jabbering away about how this or that measure might "send the wrong message" – usually what they say is that if they do not forbit some harmless and utterly unaggressive thing they might be interpreted as encouraging it. Well, what kind of message does prosecuting Mr Harding send?
Wednesday
Today I did something I do not normally do, but ought to do more often. I bought the latest issue of Viz, which looks like this:
What a fine British institution this is! Dirty jokes. Merciless send-ups of political and any other sort of correctness, attacks on the high and mighty (especially God), and lurking under its lewd surface is a fiercely freedom-loving political agenda, not unlike that pushed in a similarly subversive manner by the creators of South Park.
I have been feasting in particular on the wonderful Viz letters pages, where, in this issue, there is to be found a thoughtful exchange of views on the nature of the terrorist menace, and the concomitant threat to civil liberties posed by the various state measures that are allegedly being taken to curb it.
T. Harris of Leeds starts the ball rolling:
So the Home Secretary plans to force us to carry identity cards with our iris patterns encoded onto them. That's rich. How dare David Blunkett judge people on their eyes when his don't even work. It would be like the head of the DVLC not having a number plate on his car.
Les Barnsley of Barnsley pursues the theme of iris patterns:
Could the Home Secretary explain to me how biometric checks on iris patterns and fingerprints are going to help keep tabs on muslim cleric Abu Hamsa.
Good points both, I think we would all here agree.
Londoner Charles Nylon has this reflection to offer concerning the nature of terrorism:
These suicide bombers really get my goat. What an evil way to kill innocent people, running screaming into a crowded place like madmen, blowing themselves and everyone else to bits. Whatever happened to good old-fashioned gentlemen terrorists like the IRA, who'd quietly pop a nail bomb under a pub table and leave without making a song and dance about it.
But Bamber Ross of Ross ripostes:
Mr Nylon (above letter) does not know what he is talking about. Gentlemen terrorists, indeed. When you get stang off a wasp, it just flies off to sting again and again in the style of the IRA bombers that Mr Nylon so admires. However, when a bee stings, it pulls its arse inside out and, like a suicide bomber, dies. And I think we' all agree that bees are much nicer than wasps.
But Prof. J. Shiels of the Dept of Entomology, Maudling College, Oxford, rejects this bee/wasp metaphor in no uncertain terms:
I'm afraid Mr Ross's insect/terrorist analogy (above letter) doesn't hold water. The reason that we agree that bees are nicer than wasps is nothing at all to do with their stringing ability. It is because bees are furry, like little black and orange flying teddy bears that make jam. Wasps on the other hand are all hard and have them Darth Vader faces. And they chase you when you run off.
Good to see the academic classes contributing to the debate there.
And the profundities just keep coming. Says Tracey Cusick of Cumbria:
The NSPCC keeps going on TV and saying that unless I send them three quid a month, a baby called William won't be so lucky next time. I suggest that we don't give in to these extortionists and blackmailers, or they'll be back with a threat to top him if we don't send them a fiver.
Wise words indeed.
Viz. Gentlemen intellectual terrorists. At all good newsagents now. And I have not even mentioned the Fat Slags.
Friday
Scott Baines calls for the government to allow an fair debate on smoking.
There is conserable pubic debate at present about the role of government in regulating smoking. The Prime Minister has called for a "Big Conversation" on whether local authorities should be able to ban workplace smoking. Yet the government seems unwilling to allow a fair debate. Instead, it is hugely bankrolling one side.
Action on Smoking and Health, which calls for smoking to gradually be made illegal, received £177,640 last year from the Department of Health. It also received £136,936 from the Welsh Assembly. This is money earned by taxpayers, including the especially heavily-taxed smoker, which goes towards an organisation that persecutes them. Ash offers an entirely negative contribution to society. Its funding should be stopped.
Scott Baines
Sunday
This on the midday BBC Radio 4 news:
The Government is resisting pressure from the European Union to introduce random breath tests.
Yes, my ears did not deceive me. Here is the story in writing:
Police should carry out random breath tests as a matter of course, according to the European Commission.Under existing laws, UK police can only carry out a breath test if they believe the driver has been drinking.
But the European Commission wants all member states to allow its police to carry out random tests.
The Home Office said introducing random testing was "inefficient in catching drink-drive offenders."
Whenever the British Government describes itself as resisting pressure from the European Union, it is a good bet that this pressure will in due course be succumbed to.
Saturday
The pseudonymous 'Slowjoe' sends in this article to ponder on the subject of ID cards. Incidentally, anyone with articles on that subject would do well to consider submitting them to our sister site White Rose, which really specialises in civil liberties issues such as this.
The Register has the story of a man jailed because of a flaw in a fingerprint identification program which appears to have been chosen as the basis of the UK ID card scheme.
A number of disturbing points:
- The victim in this case didn't realise that the software was flawed until 4 years after he'd been jailed.
- There have been at least 97 cases where mistaken identification took place that the state of Oregon was aware of. Since these involved fingerprints, it's likely that this means "97 cases of wrongful arrest".
- This story appeared in the Register on May 11th. No mainstream news site has considered it worth covering. (My basis for this is are two searches at new.google.com, a search of the UK site and of the US site. For the lazy, these links show that no mainstream news organisation has gone beyond printing Mr. Benson's press release. A couple of finance websites and trial lawyers sites seem have also run it.)
- The defendants are crass enough to ask for the suit to be dismissed because the victim didn't know about their software bug in time.
Next time someone suggests that "fingerprints are flawless", the kicker is, the chosen system apparently cannot distinguish between men with 10 fingers, and those with only 9. How anyone can trust such a system is beyond me.
Is anyone still in favour of ID cards?
Slowjoe
Thursday
If something sounds too good to be true then it is most likely untrue but if something sounds too bad to be true you can probably take it to the bank.
If there is anything axiomatic about that proposition then perhaps I should claim proprietory rights on it and call it 'Carr's Law' or something. I am not sure how much use this law will prove to be on a practical day-to-day basis but it may oblige as a useful yardstick against which to measure my natural cynicism about opinion polls, surveys and related statistical exercises.
For example, take this one, published last month:
David Blunkett has pledged to push ahead with ID card legislation after an opinion poll said most people would be happy to carry one.The MORI survey was commissioned by an IT consultancy which has worked on projects with the government.
It revealed 80% of those questioned backed a national ID card scheme, echoing findings from previous polls.
And published yesterday:
Most people would support closing a legal loophole that allows parents to smack their children, says a survey.A total of 71% of people would favour such a ban, according to a survey commissioned by the Children are Unbeatable! Alliance.
And published today:
A majority of British adults favour a total ban on smoking in public places, a survey suggests.A poll of more than 1,500 people by market analysts Mintel found 52% support for a ban, including two-thirds of non-smokers.
Despite my ingrained reluctance to pay these wretched surveys even a jot of heed, I do accept that a sufficient number of such polling exercises (if conducted scientifically and honestly) can, correctly identify a trend if not quite reveal great truths.
Assuming that some objective methodology has been employed in the gathering and analysis of the above data, then the polls paint a picture which is clear but, from my point of view as a classical liberal, bitterly depressing. In other words, and applying my own axiom as set out above, it all sounds too bad to be true and is, therefore, probably true.
Typically, that would be just about all I have to say on the matter. I would offer it up as just another product of the Samizdata Moan and Groan Factory, designed and hand-crafted specially to ruin your day.
But that is far from all I wish to say because none of the above seems to tally with what might reasonably be regarded as the definitive political phenomenon of this decade: vote apathy.
By every standard that is not open to interpretation, participation and interest in politics (especially electoral politics) is in free-fall decline. Wheareas they could once have been counted in the millions, the membership rolls of both Labour and Conservative Parties combined barely nudges the 500,000 mark. Voter turnout drops lower with each passing election and, in terms of popularity and respect, politicians themselves rank somewhere between tele-salesmen and kidney stones.
The Great Public Disconnect is the talk of the town and the very real prospect of the next election producing a landslide win for the 'None of the Above' Party is already sending the political and media classes into a funk.
So what is actually going on here? The public no longer cares for politics in any shape or form yet they appear to be hungry for ever-more state intervention in and micro-management of their lives. Could it be (oh horror of horrors!) that the yawning disillusion of a fed-up and alienated public is the not the product of frustration with an government that nannies and regulates too much but an expression of disappointment due to the perception that the government does not regulate and nanny sufficiently?
On the other hand, I must temper my concerns with other concerns about the accuracy of these monotonously gloomy surveys. This is not just because of the appeal to the crude majoritarianism which passes for discourse in this country but because opinion polls of the political kind are not (and never have been) mere objective exercises. They are a form of propganda and are shamelessly wielded as such in a "resistance-is-futile" method of undermining opposition to favoured agendas.
Is it merely coincidence then, that these apparent 'huge majorities' all appear to be roundly supportive of every Big Brother/Nanny State project currently under construction? Or, to put it another way, for the project managers, are these results too good to be true?
We can but hope that my axiom holds water in that regard.
Cross-posted to White Rose.
Thursday
Something rather remarkable has just happened. I am watching Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned, and they have just had a serious discussion about how they really did not like the fact that the Government can tell exactly which internet sites you have just been visiting, and read all your emails, and send you to prison if you encrypt them and do not tell them the key, or whatever it is. Baddiel and Skinner never have serious discussions.
A bloke in a beard (of the trimmed sort rather than ZZ Top style) asked a question about this, and instead of him being laughed out of the studio, they found themselves discussing it quite seriously. Bearded bloke was allowed to add a further comment (about the emails). Baddiel in particular seemed quite upset.
Interesting.
Thursday
Has anyone ever come across a case of a politician championing the expansion of state regulation from beyond the grave? Is this a first for cemetery regulation?
The Florida Funeral, Cemetery and Consumer Services Bill has just been passed by the state's House of Representatives in response to the Menorah Gardens scandal, where fees were pocketed by the funeral home and corpses went unburied. This bill is known as the "Howard Futch" Bill since his untimely demise was marred by his internment and relocation, after the plot designated for his widow was filled by someone else. Futch was, by all accounts, a decent man, a Second World War veteran, and like all representatives, inclined to act in order to right perceived wrongs through government action. Now he has a highway and a funeral regulation bill named after him. Still, people will sleep easier in the ground for this:
The bill will require cemetery operators to survey and plot new grounds, establish minimum grave sizes, and put names on vaults. It also will establish a monument dealer inspection program, allow monument companies to join funeral homes, cemeteries and crematoriums in the pre-need funeral services industry and consolidate the regulation of the industry under the Department of Financial Services....
Why the scandal of unburied bodies requires the monument dealer inspection service or other regulatory actions is beyond me? At the moment, the European Union has only turned its attentions to pet cemeteries as the ever vigilant Euromyths website under David Delaney details here and here.
Once this furore has died down, let us hope other deceased politicians rest more quietly than Howard Futch.
Sunday
Lest anyone forget about the "broken-watch principle" (i.e. even a broken watch is still right twice a day), a reminder is served up courtesy of this excellent and unsettling article by Nick Cohen in the Guardian:
Politicians might be despised, but it is a fair guess that if a home secretary or prime minister proposed repealing the Human Rights Act or tearing up habeas corpus a majority of the population would clap their hands and cheer him on. A paradox of our time is that while ministers are everywhere vilified as scheming liars, and bureaucrats as sinister incompetents, large sections of the supposedly cynical and wised-up electorate are eager to allow them to behave like major-generals.
Sadly true. Mr Cohen even goes on to quote H.L. Mencken:
'The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary,' said H.L. Mencken. But in modern Britain it's hard to know who is the leader and who is the led. It's easy enough to blame elite politicians, desperate to win the approval of apathetic voters, and elite media managers, desperate to hang on to their shares of declining audiences. But there's also no doubt that politicians are buffeted by an angry and fearful public which isn't overly concerned if the punitive measures they demand tear up civil liberties or, indeed, work.For such great wrongs are liberties which this country fought Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler to defend abandoned without a squeak.
Mr Cohen's doleful analysis chimes with my own observations and experiences of life in contemporary Britain and because I often come to the same melancholy conclusions I am sometimes accused of 'revelling' in pessimism. But this is not true. It is rather that I am unwilling to ignore the evidence of my own eyes and ears.
For those same reasons, I find myself growing increasingly impatient with analyses of our current woes in terms of historical precendents (the 1930's, the 1950's and the 1970's appear to be the most referred to). If Nick Cohen is right (and the evidence points towards his being right) then comparisons with previous eras are specious. We are facing a whole new situation here.
Monday
Looking for trouble? Well, you've come to the right place:
People who refuse to register for the government's planned ID card scheme could face a "civil financial penalty" of up to £2,500, it has emerged.David Blunkett said not making registering a criminal issue would avoid "clever people" becoming martyrs.
Got that, dickhead? That is what happens to people who try to be 'clever'. We do not like clever bastards going around being all....clever. So just pack it in, right, otherwise you will be cruisin' for a bruisin'. Are we clear, pissant? Because if not, its two-and-a-half grand and a punch in the face.
Now just piss off, mind your own bleedin' business and do you as you are fucking well told.
Sunday
After an enjoyable day out with fellow libertarian troublemaker Andrew Ian Dodge, I settled in a for a quiet night in front of the television and watched about half of an interesting, if rather depressing, documentary about the late British comedian, Frankie Howerd.
He ranks alongside the late Peter Sellers and Terry Thomas in my pantheon of eccentric Brit funnymen. Howerd was the master of the double-entendre, teasing his audiences with riske jokes at a time when censorship of the press and popular entertainment was still relatively strong by modern standards. He is probably best known for his role as a comic slave in the Roman comedy, "Up Pompei!", accompanied by his usual refrains such as "No missus!" or "Titter ye not". (He's an acquired taste, I will admit).
The programme on Howerd's life focussed on his private life, which was not particularly pleasant. Howerd was a homosexual and in the post-war years up to the 1960s before gay relationships were legalised. In consequence, Howerd conducted his personal life on the fringes of the law, and at times was vulnerable to blackmail.
With all the current concerns about state ID cards, European Union cross-border arrest warrants and the like, it is easy to become despondent about the threats to our individual freedom. But we should not forget that in that much maligned decade, the 1960s, a group of people like Frankie Howerd were liberated from the bigotry of the law. In certain areas, the cause of liberty has taken a leap forward, and we should not forget that fact.
Oooooh, shut yer face!!
Sunday
The Home Secretary, David Blunkett, has once again pledged to introduce a compulsory national ID card scheme saying that ID cards were an essential tool in the fight against global warming.
Speaking to the BBC today, Mr. Blunkett denied that ID cards were merely a fetish and emphasised that they were a much-needed response to a fast changing world:
"Everbody understands the need to take serious steps to tackle the growing menace of global warming but we cannot even begin to do this without a proper national ID card system".
Mr. Blunkett was also dismissive of the scheme's critics:
"These so-called civil libertarians who try to suggest that there is no link between ID cards and global warming are simply dangerous and deluded. They are terrorists in all but name."
According to a recent opinion poll, every single person in the UK has pledged that they will murder their own children and then kill themselves horribly unless the government issues them with a biometric ID card immediately.
Friday
Recently, this blog noted the repressive measure by the Irish government to outlaw smoking in pubs and restaurants, even though no-one is either forced to work, drink or eat in these privately owned establishments. When thinking, however, about how to frame the arguments against such bans, it is very easy to just rail against the latest nanny state outrage but not give examples of how the market can cater much more effectively for tobaccophobes instead.
Sticking with the issue of smoking in pubs, consider this. In a market order, different pubs will enforce different rules depending on whether the owners figure that they can get the most business by either banning smoking totally, banning it in part of the building, or by installing smoke extractor machines, or even creating American "cigar-bar" type establishments where smoking is positively encouraged as part of the whole pub experience. The point is, the more choice there is, the more opportunities for those who have different tastes to get along in congenial company without the need for unnecessary wrangling.
This also gives a great example of how private property can and does act as a solvent of potential conflicts, a point which collectivists rarely pause to consider.
It is uncertain how health and safety regulations have encouraged bars and restaurants to change the way they deal with this issue, apart from requiring owners of premises to enforce minimum standards. But the trouble with minimum standards is that businesses have no real incentive to raise standards much higher than such a level because the cost is unlikely to bring a commensurate reward. The paradox is that letting the market work could actually raise standards much higher overall.
As with all such issues, you can be sure that legislators rarely bother to consider the law of unintended consequences when it comes to things like this. plus ca change...
Thursday
If there were ever an annual Ayn Rand award, here in the UK, for Britain's most outstanding business leader, then a recent contender could easily have been Tim Martin, the founder and chairman of the JD Wetherspoon chain of pubs. He created this chain from virtually nothing, in 1979, and built it into one of the largest leisure businesses in the country. Which is remarkable.
But being a former law student he has fallen into the trap of believing that if a law is passed by a legislature then this automatically makes it a good thing. Because he has just called for a smoking ban to be imposed upon all the privately owned pubs and bars in Britain, following Ireland's recent heavy-handed example.
Now I have no problem with Mr Martin banning smoking in all of his own pubs. But like all the best hypocrites Mr Martin has no intention of doing this, because he realises he will lose too much business to his competition. But this hypocrisy has failed to prevent him from wishing to inflict his own intolerant views upon every other private bar owner and pub smoker in the country.
Which does beg the following question: Are there any truly successful business people here in Britain who we libertarians could actually hold up and respect as role models for the future? Or is it simply impossible in Nanny State Britain for any big business leader to be successful without being mentally flexible enough to accommodate the sinuous and relentless needs of our slave controllers in government?
I need a hero to worship. Does anybody have one?
Friday
Blair is a liar. But of course the notion any politician does not utter more than the occasional porkie pie is a very uncontroversial one. But as I said in the wellspring of lies yesterday, one can but marvel at the bare faced effrontery of it when our political masters stand up and state something is true when any person not wilfully blind (or David Blunkett) can see it is patently untrue just by reading a few newspapers or one of several thousand blogs and websites.
Mr Blair said political objections had been removed and the only obstacle now was technical. He made clear he wanted the project to "move forward" as soon as it was feasible.He risked antagonising civil rights campaigners by claiming they no longer objected to the idea, which would see each citizen required to buy a computer-readable card that would record personal details.
Risks antagonising? Civil rights campaigners no longer object to the idea? Excuse the French, but, what the fuck? Blair is a bare faced liar. The only other alternative to that is that he is so ignorant of goings on outside the cloistered world of 10 Downing Street as to be completely deluded.
I will try my damnedest to refuse to get an ID card and I will openly declare that I do not have one when the sun rises on that evil day. I urge as many people as possible to not just resist but to do so openly when the time comes. They will try to make it very difficult to live without one so we must make the system unworkable by using whatever civil disobedience and intelligent resistance is needed. Do not cooperate with your own repression. Time to get creative, people. Time to get angry.
Cross-posted to:
Monday
It is galling to read endless utilitarian articles for and against banning smoking on commercial (but nevertheless private) property with nary a mention of whether it is actually just to enact authoritarian proscriptions on the acts of others who are, after all, in voluntary close proximity.
At least the erratic Telegraph takes a fairly good stab at doing just that:
Other politicians throughout Europe will be watching the Irish experiment closely. You can be sure that if the Irish surrender to the new law without a strong show of resistance, it will not be long before a similar ban is introduced in Britain.So Irish smokers have a responsibility to freedom-lovers everywhere to make their displeasure felt. They have already come up with some ingenious suggestions for exploiting loopholes in the new law. We wish them luck in finding more.
We note that prisons are among the very few workplaces exempted from the ban. So anyone incarcerated in the cause of freedom will at least be allowed the consolation of a smoke.
Light up, Ireland. Do not cooperate in your own repression.
Friday
More Tsarism, this time of the Euro variety:
European Union leaders agreed yesterday to rush forward a clutch of EU-wide surveillance measures and created an anti-terror "Tsar" in response to the Madrid bombings.The list of counter-terrorism measures pushed by Britain, France and Spain at a Union summit in Brussels include plans to retain mobile telephone records, e-mail and internet data indicating the time and address of all websites visited.
White Rose has further EUro-reportage and links about similar EUro-stuff, here and here.
This report also illustrates the point that EUrope is not just a machine to enable foreigners to muck the British around, it is also a machine to enable to British to muck the foreigners around: a sort of universal substitute empire for all the old European imperialists. Having been made to stop tyrannising over their previous imperial possessions, the tyrannising classes have switched instead to tyrannising over each other's nations. Bad luck on the rest of us, but there it is, these people have to have someone to tyrannise over.
Meanwhile, proof that when the Euro elite wants something, it just beavers away until it gets it:
A new summer deadline for agreement on the EU constitution has been agreed by European leaders, putting renewed pressure on Tony Blair and his non-negotiable "red lines".Mr Blair had seemed content for the troubled constitution to slip off the agenda after December's summit ended in deadlock. But a new deadline for agreement on the document has been set.
Although, when the time comes that the people who want EUrope to fall to bits are finally in the ascendancy, they will have the perfect precedent for saying: "We are going to keep on destroying this thing until we succeed, and will ignore all counter-opinions, of, e.g. voters, because these opinions are anti-historical and do not matter. We are doing what we know to be best. Our opponents are deluded. That's what the founders of this thing did when they started it, and we are merely following their inspiring example."
Trouble is, by the time that happens, those people may be even nastier.
I will read this piece by David Carr to cheer myself up.
Wednesday
I am beginning to seriously whether our Home Secretary, David Blunkett, is having some sort of breakdown:
David Blunkett, the increasingly angry home secretary, is calling for "lifestyle punishments" to shape Britain into a less violent society. He wants the power to confiscate mobile phones and ban people from football matches. He is also wants to counter the "increasing portrayal of violence" on television. Which sounds like censorship.
No, that does not sound like censorship, it is censorship though given the degree of regulation to which TV broadcasting is subject anyway, further measures are redundant.
One unhappy source at the Home Office told the paper: "These proposals are disproportionate, unenforceable and criminalising and do not go to the heart of the cause of these problems. But Blunkett will not be deterred."
Lest anyone forget, the Home Office (in common with the rest of our political superstructure) is staffed by people who earnestly believe that rates of finger-nail growth can be brought under control with the appropriate set of regulations. So if even they think that Big Blunkett's ideas are 'unenforceable', then I reckon some pretty deep cracks are beginning to open in the edifice of British government.
Monday
In his latest post Chris Bertram of Crooked Timber gives the background to, and an unedited version of, his letter in today's Guardian.
I agree with every word of his letter. Paticularly the bit about scavenging for soundbites that the Guardian edited out.
Judging from what I've read in blogs and the press about Cavanagh's unreconstructed views, he did not put forward the standard libertarian argument that to forbid racial discrimination is to violate the human right of free association. (The standard libertarian view is the view I hold. It is quite compatible with thinking that in all but a few special situations racial discrimination is morally wrong, a view I also hold.) According to Edward Lucas in a letter further down the page, "We invited Mr Cavanagh [to the ICA debate that started all the fuss] as a leftwing critic of equality of opportunity. He argued, for example, that it leads to an overemphasis on competition between individuals."
In other words the views I hold would be even more likely than Mr Cavanagh's to be described as pyschotic by David Winnick MP, a member of the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee. As described by the Guardian this prominent Labour MP's own views appear close to totalitarian. He does not merely think it is pyschotic to oppose the discrimination laws he thinks it is psychotic even to question them.
That's us lot for the loony bin then.
Still, you never know with the Guardian. Tomorrow we might be treated to the amusing spectacle of Mr Winnick saying that he was quoted out of context, just like Mr Cavanagh before him.
Wednesday
Yesterday I marvelled at the notion that David Blunkett had the gall to suggest that victims of miscarriages of justice should be charged for 'room and board'. That this has not featured on the front page of every newspaper in Britain is also shocking to me. It seems to me that when there has been a miscarriage of justice, the state should bend over backwards to make amends as fulsomely as possible and make lavish restitution for damages done both directly and indirectly for the life it has unjustly disrupted. If justice is administered 'in the name of the people' then surely amongst the endless litany of grotesque uses of the public purse that consume billions and billions of pounds, this would be a rare legitimate public charge that few would dispute.
However what is even more baffling to me that the Tory Party is not queuing up in the Commons to denounce Blunkett in the most extreme language allowed in Parliament. Why are they not trying to use this latest affront to common decency and natural justice and using it to paint the Labour Party as the party which tramples over civil liberties? They should be relentlessly calling for Blunkett's head over this and what do I hear? The sound of silence. Anyone who harbours delusions that the party of Michael Howard will be their champion for civil liberties against the ever more authoritarian Labour government really needs to see them for what they really are.
Regardless of whether or not the government manages to get this measure accepted or not, the mere fact Blunkett can even suggest such a thing without sparking clamourous calls for his removal from office is both a damning indictment of the moral and political vacuity of Britain's political parties and a chilling measure of state of Britain's culture. I sincerely hope to be proved wrong and see a ground swell of anger emerging in the press and polity in the next few days but I am not holding my breath. It would be interesting to hear the views of some of Britain's blogging Members of Parliament on this issue.
Tuesday
Given my extremely low expectations, it takes a lot for a British government to actually amaze me.
Well they have managed to do exactly that. The people who rule us are not misguided, they are actually evil.
Wednesday
Slowjoe has spotted something calculated to start teeth grinding here on Samizdata.net
The Register talks about an attempt by the EU to railroad through the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive.
It appears to give the 'rights holder' carte blanche... almost the right to set up a private police force.
The interesting thing is that the rapporteur did an end-run around any debate. She also happens to be the wife of the head of Vivendi Universal.
Slowjoe
Tuesday
What does the FBI do if it has a search warrant to track down one miscreant on a network? Why they seize the whole data centre of course!
I'll attempt to make the seriousness of this more apparent in a non-cyber world example. Imagine the local police are looking for a document that is evidence of a possible crime. The Judge gives them a warrant based on probable cause. When they search the file cabinet at that address, they can't find what they are looking for. So they corden off the entire apartment building and seize all the file cabinets containing all of the personal and business records of everyone living there. They cart those off with total disregard to the impact on lives and businesses. Then they tell everyone their file cabinets will be returned as soon as they've made a permanent State copy of their entire contents.
What sort of society would you say you were living in if that happened?
Tuesday
Just as the Tory Party (the party that has given us Chris Patten, Edward Heath and Ken Clarke) cannot be counted on to reverse the march into regulatory Euro-statism (they at best slow the rate at which it happens), similarly the Tory reaction to plans by Labour Home Secretary David Blunkett to lower the burden of proof in criminal cases where the state really wants to convict someone is one of essential support.
So... we are left with only one half-way significant party who seems to care even the slightest about civil liberties in the court room: The LibDems. But then again, when it comes to regulatory statism and abridging economic free association in society at large, the LibDems are even more keen than Labour to replace all social interaction with politically derived formulae for just about any kind of behaviour you can think of.
And people wonder why I urge folks not to vote for anyone? So how does one resist the increasingly panoptic regulatory state? Good question.
Monday
There is a sense in which I pity this government. No, really I do. When someone is prepared to exploit any sort of human tragedy in order to get what they want, one is forced to conclude that they have very little left in the way of self-respect or decency.
I don't think any of us truly appreciate just how badly our Home Secretary, David Blunkett, wants a national ID card system but the desire must be intense enough to burn a hole in his soul. It has now got to the stage where there is no bad news too pathetic enough not to be manipulated into a ID card propoganda opportunity, be it a shooting in Shropshire, a murder in Manchester or a child-abduction in Cheltenham.
The latest ghastly incident to be turned into a government rhetorical tool is the 19 illegal Chinese immigrants who were drowned off the coast of Lancashire over the weekend:
A coroner has set up a commission to identify all the mainly Chinese cockle pickers who died after being caught by high tides - but none have been named.A group of more than 30 cocklers were trapped by rising water in the Hest Bank area of the Lancashire bay on Thursday night.
Alongside the calls for 'more regulation' (the chief reflexive response), Mr Blunkett popped up on the late evening news (sorry, no link) in a laughable attempt to persuade everyone that a national ID card would prevent this sort of thing happening again.
Complete and utter rubbish, of course. But that does not matter. What matters is the drip-drip propoganda required to facilitate 'acculturation'.
Mr Blunkett and his underlings must trawl through the daily news bulletins desperately seeking the kind of heartstring-tugging stories that they use to piggy-back their pet project into the public realm. Like teenage crack-whores, there is no part of their dignity these people will not sacrifice in order to get their fix. How sad, how pathetic.
Wednesday
Reproduced below is the text of yesterday's press release from the Libertarian Alliance:
"Any Excuse for a Police State: Blunkett Secret Trial Plans as Bad as Foreign Conquest", Says Free Market and Civil Liberties Think TankHome Secretary David Blunkett wants to bring in laws allowing pre-emptive arrest of suspects, secret trials without juries, with state-chosen defence lawyers, on undisclosed evidence provided by the security services, and a lower burden of proof. He says this is to protect the country from "terrorism".
"Nonsense", says Dr Sean Gabb, Director of Communications for the Libertarian Alliance. "We did none of this in the second world war, when the enemy was poised to invade from across the Channel, and killing 60,000 British civilians in bombing raids. We did none of this when Irish terrorists were killing thousands of state and civilian victims within the United Kingdom.
"The truth is, this government wants a police state and will use any excuse to get one. We are told these new laws will only apply in terrorism cases. That is a lie. We were once told that confiscation orders would only be used for drug dealing cases, and after normal conviction: now we have a Confiscation Agency trying to seize assets from suspected criminals without the need for criminal charges. This legislation would soon become the normal mode of trial of all offences.
"Do you want a criminal justice system where you can be tried in secret by another Lord Hutton, on the basis of secret evidence supplied by the same security services that did such a good job at proving Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction? I don't. Looking at these proposals, anyone who fell asleep in 1940 and woke today might almost think the Germans had won the war. I wonder if all those who fought to prevent that ever suspected our own government would behave like an army of occupation?"
Perhaps that is now how they think of themselves.
[This article has been cross-posted to White Rose.]
Tuesday
If it was not so late and if I had not had such a long day, I would launch myself into a rooftop-raising rant about this. But it is late and I am weary and, besides all of that, I am beginning to wonder precisely what good a rant from me (or anybody else for that matter) would do anymore:
Home Secretary David Blunkett wants new anti-terrorism laws to make it easier to convict British terror suspects.He has discussed lowering the standard of proof required by a court and introducing more pre-emptive action.
Possible plans, revealed on his six-day trip to India and Pakistan, also include keeping sensitive evidence from defendants and secret trials before vetted judges.
Is there any significance to the fact that David 'Mugabe' Blunkett elected to unveil his sinister plans on a trip to South Asia? Was he driven into delirium by the heat and the dust? Or maybe a particularly acute case of Delhi-belly left him feeling all bilious and vengeful.
But civil rights groups have condemned the proposals as shameful and an "affront to the rule of law".
It's not an 'affront', it's a point-blank dismissal. 'Lowering the standard of proof'? 'Pre-emptive action'? 'Secret trials'? 'Vetted Judges'? What next? Trial by Ordeal, Ducking stools, Iron Maidens and The Rack?
The truly frustrating thing here is that not only is Big Blunkett unlikely to be opposed to any meaningful degree (the Conservatives are already weighing in on his side) but his ripping up of our last remaining bulwarks of civil liberty is probably going to make him more popular. That is because civil liberties are unpopular. They are merely the boring obsession of pot-smoking hippies and wishy-washy do-gooders; a shielding sanctuary behind which terrorists and child-molestors can hide from justice.
So, go ahead, Mr Blunkett, kick the crap out of them. With a bit of luck nobody will miss them until they have gone (by which time it will be too late).
Saturday
Cecile du Bois is getting grief at her school for opposing affirmative action. Her teacher asked her what she thought about it, and Cecile told her the truth. She is against it. And for that, she got all the grief.
And I'm not complaining, I am merely expressing my frustration with the atmosphere of being "weird, and going against the flow". My very own friend advises me not to speak my mind if I am going to offend anyone. And yes I did, I poured it all out, given the opportunity because the discussion was on womens rights and for some reason my teacher asked me if I agreed with affirmative action. Does affirmative action relate to womens rights? Not in my world it does. I guess in her world where being against illegal immigration and calling African-Americans "black" are racist, it does. Well, if asked a question, I am compelled to answer honestly. My mother suggested I could have asked her what it had to with Mary Wollstonecraft, but I was so flustered by her laughter at me, I replied. I said "No". And did that cause commotion!
Go to Cecile's blog and read the whole thing.
I can just about understand (although I despise) the way that Cecile's classmates (if that is the right word) are treating Cecile, but some way ought to be found of communicating to Cecile's 'teacher' that she is now being deservedly trashed for profoundly unprofessional conduct on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, and everywhere else in the world where the blogosphere counts for anything if this posting has the desired effect.
Isn't education supposed to encourage people to tell the truth and to stick up for their ideas? Someone she can not manipulate and ridicule should also tell this Grade A Bitch of a teacher that there are impeccably non-racist arguments against affirmative action, like: affirmative action exposes all those people from ethnic minorities who do get ahead to the accusation that they are only did well because they were given an unfair advantage, even if they actually got ahead entirely on their own merits and by their own efforts. Affirmative action encourages racism, in other words. Hasn't this ignorant woman even heard of this line of argument?
And even if she has not, she has no damned business encouraging all her other pupils to pick on one pupil, just for expressing an opinion, honestly and courageously.
If you agree with me about this, please do at least one of the following things.
- Add a short comment to Cecile's own blog, supporting and sympathising, and do it now. Warning: when I tried to do a quite long comment I came up against a thousand character limit, so don't try to write at too great length. Something short and nice, and soon.
- If you are yourself a blogger, then write about this thing yourself, and link to this posting. Link to Cecile's blog as well, of course, but the particular advantage of linking to this piece is that the number of linkers will be automatically counted and announced here, and people reading this will be able to swing straight over to your blog, and then link to you themselves. I'm going to do a piece about this on my Education Blog just as soon as I can.
- Put a supportive comment here as well, especially if you want to say something that makes use of more than a thousand characters. Cecile will definitely get to read it because I've already promised this posting in my comment at her blog.
It is not strictly relevant to the rights and wrongs of how she is now being (mis)treated, but since it may cheer her up, I will add it anyway. In my opinion Cecile is a terrific writer, and very possibly destined for literary superstardom. (She is certainly obeying rule number one for being a writer, which is to Live Interestingly, and rule number two, which is to get started with Living Interestingly good and early.) Be sure to scroll down, past all her links to other people, to the links to her own archives and previous postings. I particularly enjoyed her description of going to the movies with her Dad and brother, which Cecile's Mum also liked. LOR: LOL.
If only for coining the phrase prostitute college, Cecile du Bois is destined for world fame sooner or later.
Wednesday
Paul Smith is a man with a profound interest in driving and road safety. As a driver myself I, too, have a vested interest in these matters. Whenever I depart from point A I much prefer it to be overwhelmingly probable that I will reach point B with all my favourite limbs and organs in situ and functioning as nature intended.
The British government and its various agencies claim that they share this interest as well. Moreover, they assure us that the solution to the problem lies with forcing everyone to drive more slowly and punish those drivers who fail to comply. Hence the virus-like proliferation of the 'GATSO' or 'Speed Camera' which (just by complete coincidence I am sure) has also raised tens of millions of pounds for the public coffers from already over-taxed motorists who infringe blanket and arbitrary speed limits.
In response to the wave of discontent this has caused, the government, the police and the various lobbyists that support them, have doggedly stood their ground and explained that, yes, it is all very regrettable but the point of the GATSO's is most assuredly not to raise revenue (no, perish the thought!) but merely to save lives. In other words, they are relying on the canard that freedom must be sacrificed in order to achieve safety.
Well, they are wrong and Paul Smith has made it his business to prove, publicly and beyond argument, that they are wrong. His website, Safe Speed, cuts a swathe through the cant and the piety:
We have never seen any credible figures that put road accidents caused by exceeding a speed limit at even 5% of road accidents. We object to speed cameras mainly because they fail to address the causes of at least 95% of road accidents. The Government claims of 1/3rd of accidents being caused by excessive speed are no more than lies according to the Government's own figures.
I am shocked, SHOCKED I tell you!
Mr Smith has amassed a treasure trove of documentary, audio and video evidence that entirely discredits the myth that Tax Speed Cameras are anything whatsoever to do with either road safety or saving lives. In fact, so confident is Mr Smith in his own research that he throws down this gauntlet:
So here's the challenge. We promise to publish here (in this box, on the first page of the web site) web links to any serious credible research that implies a strong link between excessive speeds and accidents on UK roads.
So if you are one of those people who thinks that the GATSO is a life-saver, you know exactly what to do.
In the meantime, more power to Paul Smith and his campaign for common sense and reason. When we eventually win this battle, the victory will be due in no small part to the dedication and integrity of people like him.
Cross-posted on White Rose.
Thursday
Are politicians actually capable of thought and articulation or they merely making noises in return for which they think they are going to get rewards?
Barely two weeks after Michael Howard trumpeted his alleged belief that "the people should be big and the state should be small", he weighs in on the side of big state and against the little citizen:
A future Conservative government would reverse Labour's downgrading of cannabis from Class B to Class C, Tory leader Michael Howard has said.His intervention comes a week ahead of the change to Class C, which will place cannabis alongside anabolic steroids and prescription anti-biotics and mean police will rarely make arrests for possession of small amounts of the drug.
Mr Howard said: "After thinking about this very carefully, we have come to the view that the Government's decision is misconceived and when we return to office, we will reclassify cannabis back to Class B."
Mr Blunkett's changes introduced a "muddle" which would send a signal to young people that cannabis was legal and safe, when it was not, said the Tory leader.
Well, there is a germ of truth here in that HMG is most certainly in a 'muddle' but at least it is a muddle which is shambling along, after a fashion, in a sort-of, vaguely right direction. The motives may not be entirely logical or even honourable but I think it's results that count here.
But am I to believe that Mr Howard has thought about this 'very carefully'? Cannabis is only illegal because people like Mr Howard demand that it be so and the question of whether or not it is 'safe' (whatever that means) is entirely irrelevant. If he genuinely wants to the state to be small then he is hardly likely to achieve that aim by reinforcing the principle rubric behind big government, i.e. that it is necessary in order to manage the citizen's health and welfare.
So is Mr Howard (a) disingenuous or (b) really not thought this through at all?
I think we have a right to know.
Thursday
According to this Guardian article and the this one in the Independent the Labour MP turned talk show host, Robert Kilroy-Silk, is under fire for having written an anti-Arab article. I have read the Sunday Express article concerned on a forum but have not been able to find it in linkable form.
Predictably the Commission for Racial Equality is making noises about lawyers and prosecutions and public order. I will be amazed if they actually do anything. The point of the CRE's threats is not to carry them out, but to have a chilling effect on the next person who wants to write in a similar vein.
(The issue of whether Mr Kilroy-Silk should write as a freelance while working for the BBC is a separate one which I shall ignore here.)
Here is something the CRE and other race relations bodies ought to remember but will not: freedom of speech and relatively good race relations go together. In fact it is broader than that. Freedom and relatively good race relations go together. Pogroms happen under tyrannies. I call it the "pressure-cooker effect."
The conclusion that free speech promotes racial harmony is not obvious at first sight. Words lead to deeds, one might think, and so, obviously, harsh words will lead to harsh deeds. Nonetheless you may make some headway among sceptics if you ask them whether in their own lives they think it better to bottle up resentments or to voice them before they become explosive.
Do a little mental scan now of those countries where freedom of speech has reigned longest and is most secure - aren't they also the countries that people of all races are desperate to get into? Partly that is because free countries are rich (riches being consequence of freedom) but it is also because they are the places where race conflict means a riot not a massacre.
Now do a similar mental scan of those physical areas and institutions within the free countries where race is an ugly issue. You will find the PC crowd have been active for decades in these areas. Yet things never seem to get better. The Commission for Racial Equality never seems to report success any more than the Race Relations Board did before it. I find it hard to believe that all of this failure is just a cynical ploy to keep their jobs. Most people mean well, even race relations advisers. It's just that, unfortunately, some attempts at cure do more harm than good.
I am not saying, "restrictions on freedom cause racism". Race hatred is older than political freedom. What I am saying is "restrictions on freedom disable the safety valve".
When people have had no practice, and cannot get any practice, in saying legitimately harsh things about a non-western culture - yet feel them anyway, and with reason - then it is no surprise that when speech finally bursts out it is all a mish-mash of good points mixed in with prejudice.
Which is more or less what I think of Kilroy-Silk's actual views. Seeing as he has his own TV show, he himself cannot be said to have been prevented from getting practice in being critical about Arab society in a nuanced manner. (Nor was there anything stopping him from doing the minimal research necessary to know that the Iranians are not Arabs). However the general level of the dialogue is low. There is a disconnect between the actual danger and evil of Islamo-fascism and the nicey-nicey way the media talk about it and I see his angry hammering as a product of that. He sees plain savagery and sees it called militancy and he thinks, by God, I am going to say what I think.
I support his right to free speech without qualification. But is his article one to be proud of?
Yes and no. Here is a typical paragraph:
What do they think we feel about them? That we adore them for the way they murdered more than 3,000 civilians on September 11 and then danced in the hot, dusty streets to celebrate the murders? That we admire them for being suicide bombers, limb amputators, women repressors?
Part of me says, Yep. Damn straight. Arabs did dance in the streets. Most terrorists are Arabs. Scarcely any other part of the world has punishments more barbaric than those in Arab lands, Saudi Arabia in particular, and no other part of the world is more misogynistic.
However I do not like the way that the word 'them' shifts its meaning. Sometimes it means the actual 9-11 attackers, sometimes the large numbers of Arabs who clelebrated the murders, sometimes the whole culture as manifested by its most spectacular and violent expressions.
I call it lazy, bigoted and emotive reporting when I see lines like "...the America that shoots schoolchildren at Columbine and executes them in the electric chair." I made that example up, but I bet you can find real parallels. (You could try a Google for "George Bush's America" or "John Ashcroft's America.") In places Kilroy Silk's article shows exactly this tendency. The last line, oddly not quoted in either the Guardian or the Independent, really was offensive: "...That says it all about which country deserves the epithet loathsome."
All in all I didn't admire the article. But every morning there is a new crop of articles written from the other side that display every one of Kilroy-Silk's faults and then some and they don't have Trevor Phillips calling the cops. Nor should they. They, too, are the steam from the safety valve.
That was meant to be the end of the post, but I can not resist saying how struck I was by a quote (in the Independent article linked to above) from Professor Haleh Afshar, a Middle Eastern expert at York University:
"[Professor Afshar] said the article displayed a dangerous "ethnocentricity". She added: "He does not have a history that goes beyond September 11. The world begins on September 11 for him but I would like to tell him that the world actually began 3000 years before Christ."
Wednesday
Today, the US Supreme Court issued a decision that will live in infamy. It upheld the core provisions of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. I confess I have not yet digested the full 300 page turd dropped on the Constitution by our masters at the Supreme Court, but I would observe that any decision of this length is bound to be flawed. It does not take many words to apply the simple phrase "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech" to overturn legislation; it does, however, take many, many words to obfuscate the meaning of that phrase sufficiently to uphold legislation that, in part, prohibits the airing of campaign commercials in the weeks before an election.
I will address one of the fundamental flaws underlying the entire project of regulating campaign finance - the claim that money does not equal speech.
First, though, allow me to state that it is perfectly consistent with freedom of speech to outlaw bribery and other permutations of the quid pro quo that may crop up in connection with campaign finance activities. Outlawing bribery in such circumstances is no more a restriction on freedom of speech than outlawing the fencing of stolen property is a restriction on freedom of contract.
It is a fundamental premise of campaign finance regulation that such laws do not restrict speech, but rather restrict only the raising and spending of money.
This distinction between speaking and expending resources on speaking is utterly fallacious, unless you believe that guarantees of free speech extend only to the fine art of conversation. Any attempt to distribute your thoughts to persons who are not in the room with you when you utter them requires the use of resources, and thus the expenditure of money. Allowing the state to prohibit the use of resources to broadcast or distribute speech means that freedom of speech is no more than freedom to converse.
Speech, for all practical purposes, is the distribution to an audience of your thoughts. In the political realm (and most others as well) this distribution cannot be made to any meaningful audience without applying resources, that is, spending money. You cannot print a newspaper, distribute a flyer, operate a website, or stand on a streetcorner ranting through a bullhorn, without using money to distribute your speech. Even bullhorns cost money, after all. The use of resources, the expenditure of money, to distribute your speech, is an absolutely indivisible part of freedom of speech.
Yet campaign finance regulation is nothing more than state limitations on the use of resources to distribute political speech, which is to say, state limitations on political speech. No one would say that a prohibition on expenditures by a publisher to print and mail a magazine, or on a publisher charging for subscriptions or advertising, are consistent with freedom of speech, yet these limitations are closely analogous to the campaign finance restrictions now blessed by the Supreme Court.
UPDATE: I was grousing about this to one of my partners, and he pointed out that apparently the Supreme Court was just being somewhat over-literal. The Constitution protects "free speech," and they thought that meant it protected FREE speech. If you see what I mean. Sadly, that seems to be about the level of comprehension on display in the opinion.
Friday
The British Medical Association cuts to the chase. No shilly-shallying about. None of these namby-pamby half-measures or pathetic, milquetoast compromises, no, they have decided to go for the kill and demand another full-blown drug war:
Smoking should be completely banned in the UK, according to a top medical journal.The Lancet said tens of thousands of lives would be saved by making tobacco an illegal substance and possession of cigarettes a crime.
Might as well really. The political climate is right, the enforcement apparatus is all in place and resistance will not be futile because it will be non-existant. In fact, they are probably kicking themselves for not coming out with this sooner.
Dr James said the government had already shown it was willing to pass similar legislation, such as banning the use of hand held mobile phones while driving.
Once again we see that appeasement does not work. Give the bullies an inch and next they want a mile. These people cannot be placated.
Forest director Simon Clark said the Lancet was "the true voice of the rabid anti-smoking zealot".He said smokers should not be treated as criminals, adding: "The health fascists are on the march.
Oh no, Simon, they have been on the march for decades. Now they have taken the citadel.
"What next? Will they urge the government to ban fatty foods and dairy products?"
Yes. There is no reason for them not to.
Saturday
Over on White Rose I have put up some remarks by Josie Appleton of Spiked On-Line regarding ID Cards. To which all I can add is... yeah!
And while you are at it, you might like to check out Trevor Mendham's worthy anti-ID cards campaign on iCan.
Friday
Compulsory state ID cards are a monstrous assault on individual liberty, as well as useless in protecting us from the increasingly sophisticated terror groups who threaten us. That much is clear.
So here's a question. At every possible occasion, we should ask Conservative MPs, including new party leader, Michael Howard, whether his party would abolish any such compulsory ID scheme put into place by the current Labour government. Similarly, selection committees for prospective parliamentary candidates should be urged to select those who pledge to reverse any ID card law.
Of course, when he was Home Secretary in the 1990s, Howard proposed ID cards, and his record on civil liberties is, to put it mildly, dismal. But he has a chance to repent, to start anew.
So to repeat the challenge - Tories - stand up and fight the ID card.
Friday
In the comment section of David Carr's article here on Samizdata.net called Government Property, one of the commenters, Tim Haas, suggested the inimitable Dissident Frogman should come up with a suitable graphic... and indeed he has!
click for larger image
Wednesday
A question for all those people who support the introduction of a national ID card scheme.
Cattle get tagged.
And slaves get branded.
Which one are you?
Tuesday
Today the Home Secretary, David Blunkett pushes on with his 'scheme' to introduce identity cards to Britain despite considerable opposition from two senior Cabinet colleagues, Gordon Brown and Jack Straw. But Tony's behind him, so they don't count. Natch.
It might be amusing to watch the man's pathetic stumble down the Orwellian path, if not for the fact that his totalitarian impulses have a profound impact on freedom and life in this country. And, of course, his actions do nothing to address immigration and welfare fraud, two of the poster-issues for Big Blunkett's campaign. Not that I want him to do anything about that either, apart from to get the f*** out of that too. But I digress.
The Telegraph article linked above talks about unveiled plans for a new national identity card with his [Blunkett's] most forceful argument yet in favour of the scheme. I would expect them to reproduce or at least hint at the 'most forceful argument yet' in the article. This is all I found:
For a long time, we have relied on minimal internal controls and strong external borders - this is no longer enough. An ID card is not a luxury or a whim - it is a necessity.I know some people believe there is a sinister motive behind the cards; that they will be part of a Big Brother state. This is wrong.
Only basic information will be held on the ID card database - such as your name, address, birthday and sex. It will not have details of religion, political beliefs, marital status or your health records.
Indeed, that is so not Big Brother, you Big Blunkett.
White Rose has a post or two about this as well as a link to the official Home Office document (pdf).
Thursday
This may seem a minor thing. Two Florida student organizations faced the possibility their floats might not be allowed to take part in this year's Homecoming Parade.
It is not as if they were Animal House's. One was a Young Republican group with a toppleable statue of Saddam Hussein. The others were Christian students with Jesus as their co-pilot... or at least their float topping.
So did they accept the requirements of Political Correctness and go meekly to their re-education in Cultural Sensitivity? Did they demonstrate and block the street to the school? Spray paint red liberation slogans on the school windows?
Nope. They called the Orlando based Liberty Council and threatened the school with a law suit.
Saddam will be toppling and Jesus saving at the Philips High School Homecoming Parade, as scheduled.
Freedom Is For Everyone.
Tuesday
It may be a little thing, but I'll take my good news where I can get it.
A Williamson County judge has dismissed a Franklin police citation against a man who warned other drivers of a speed trap.He flashed his lights at them.
County Judge Russ Heldman yesterday ruled Walker was right about the citation violating his free speech guarantees.
The Franklin city police chief has now written a memo to officers, telling them not to cite drivers for flashing their lights in warning.
For his part, Walker is pleased to win his case, but says he’ll flash only his brights next time. He says the only way Marlowe knew he was flashing his lights was because his tail lights were going on and off.
Fight the power, brother!
Sunday
For reasons I cannot even begin to adequately explain, the gatherings of the increasingly angry and militant pro-hunt movement conjours up 'spaghetti western' images in my head; the brooding silence, the tumbleweed, the flinty, menacing stares and the 'man's-gotta-do-what-a-man's-gotta-do' atmosphere of grim resolve.
Yes, somewhere out in merciless, sun-baked badlands, guns are being greased and cheroots are being lit. The Hunting Clan is fixin' for a showdown:
Thousands of people have gathered around England and Wales to protest against moves to outlaw hunting with dogs.Organisers said 37,000 protesters at 11 rallies on Saturday and one on Friday, to mark the first day of the new hunting season, signed a pledge to ignore any ban.
Alright, it is actually the middle of the verdant English countryside, but you get the gist.
Having failed in their appeals to reason, common sense and principle, the hunters are still threatened with a government prohibition that will eradicate a centuries-old tradition and the way of rural life that has grown up around it. They are being 'run out of town' for no better reason than that they are perceived as an easy target for a government that wants to score cultural 'brownie points' with the metropolitan elite.
So the hunters have decided that they are not going to be such an easy target after all. I do not see what else they can do. It is fight or die and they have chosen the former:*
The Declaration is an opportunity for those who support the freedom to hunt to demonstrate to the public, press, Peers, parliamentarians and the Government that we will never accept unjust law. Critically, it aims to convey in an unambiguous way that enough people are committed to either refusing to accept any law that comes into effect (if it does) that any such law would be unenforceable and so fail.
While the language is temperate, the intention is unambiguous: they intend a campaign of civil disobedience. It is an open and explicit challenge to the authority of the British government. What started as protest has become insurrection.
It is still not clear whether the government will press ahead with the abolition of hunting in England and Wales (the ban has already passed into law in Scotland). But, if they do, and these people are good to their pledge, then they are quite capable of making life very difficult indeed for the authorities. In effect, a low-level civil war will be waged in the English countryside.
Regardless of whether or not that scenario comes to pass, I get the feeling that the hunters have started something that will have consequences in the future. The Labour government's sustained attacks on rural England have led to an awful lot of people getting angry, getting political and getting organised and of such activism are revolutionary movements born. I have no idea how long it will take or what it will become but I do strongly suspect that the countryside movement will metastasise into something much broader and wider than the issue of fox-hunting.
[*The link is to the homepage of the Hunting Declaration where sympathisers can download a copy of the Declaration to sign and send in with or without a donation to the cause.]
Tuesday
Londoners are to be asked what they think about using force to prevent people smoking in 'public' places (meaning privately owned places to which members of the general public may choose to enter... or not enter).
I do not smoke, though I did puff on a Havana recently, and I generally do not like smoke filled rooms. However, I do not have anyone holding a gun to my head forcing me to go into a smoke filled room against my will or compelling me to take employment with someone who allows people to smoke on their private property (such as a restaurant or bar owner). And yet millions of people see nothing wrong with legitimising threats of violence against others to force them to not smoke for nothing more than their personal convenience.
To take the view that replacing social interaction (such as deciding to walk out of a bar because it is too smoky or quitting your job because you dislike smoky environments) with political interaction, namely agreeing that people can be dragged off to jail by armed men because they smoke in places you would like to enter as a matter of your discretionary ease, is nothing less than taking the view that imposing your convenience by force (and we are not talking prohibiting robbery or murder here) is okay, because anything done via political process is okay. This is what is really meant when people like George Monbiot talk about 'a more democratic society'... what they really mean is a society in which all interaction is political rather than social.
The genius of the US Constitution was not that it brought forth democracy, albeit one which countenanced slavery (for Britain was also a democracy of sorts in 1776), it was that at its core the revolutionaries tried to place whole swathes of civil society simply off-limits to political interaction... such as free speech, the means of self defence, being secure in your property etc. It recognised that liberty can only exist within the context of a functioning extended civil society, which means the messy melee of free association and disassociation, private ownership, trade and freely entered into contract, actions constrained and encouraged by social imperatives and opprobrium, rather than the stern violence backed impositions of politically derived law.
For a minarchist such as myself, I see a role for democratic politics as a means of constraining the minimal state that even I concede is required to keep the barbarians from the gates of civilization. Yet until democratic politics is once more seen as underpinning a free republic and not an end in and of itself, most politics must seen as a baleful thing and the people who practice it professionally as legislators little different from Mafia Dons dispensing patronage amongst the people under their 'protection'
In many places across the Anglosphere, civil society is dying under the cumulative pressure of decades of regulatory statism. "There ought to be a law against it" comes to the lips of anyone who dislikes anything...and yet at the same time the moral authority of states is decaying with trends pointing to ever less people choosing to participate in political processes in an ever more affluent and information rich civilization. This is one of the central contradictions of our modern information age and sooner or later those contradictions will cause something to give in ways that cannot be reliably predicted.
Saturday
Nick Timms recounts a new yet sadly familiar tale of how the state just sees us as things to be managed for its convenience. The state is not your friend.My friend Ron, a semi-retired gentlemen, who after a working life fairly high on the corporate greasy pole, now pursues several different activities including taking his pedigree dogs to shows and sitting as a magistrate, told me today about a visit he had recently from an employee of his local planning office. I should explain that first he had a visit from the local environmental health department because a lady neighbour of his had complained about the smell of his kennels. Ron has kept fairly rare pedigree dogs for showing for the last fifteen years and he is meticulous about hygiene and cleanliness. His home is in a semi-rural area backing onto some woods and running behind his house is a pathway used by some of the locals as a shortcut. This area is also frequented by foxes and the dog foxes mark their territory with a particularly pungent urine. Apparently when Ron's bitches are in season the dog foxes make a special effort and spray the whole area thus causing the offending stink.
Ron showed the environmental health officer around his kennels and the officer was apparently satisfied that he kept his dogs in a good and healthy manner.
However, very shortly after this he was visited by the local planning department. His visitor told him that as he kept more than six dogs at his home he had to apply for change of usage. Ron asked for what usage he should apply and was told he should apply as a breeder. Ron explained that he was not a breeder as he only occasionally had litters and he kept the pick and sold the rest only to what he considered would be good homes. He did not do this as a commercial venture so he was not a breeder.
He was told he would still have to apply for change of usage because case law indicated that local town planners could decide for what purpose he used his home and they had decided that having more than six dogs was one of their criteria. (Apparently all homes are granted rights of usage when they are registered and the local planning office can withdraw or alter these rights.)
Ron asked how much this application cost and was informed that it was around £250 [note: about $400]. Ron then asked would his application be approved and was told "No" because the local planning office wanted him to appeal so that they could have a test case. The appeal application would cost Ron another £200-£300. And he could still lose the case.
Ron resorted in the end to telling his officious visitor that he was a local magistrate and that under the Human Rights Act - and he made up some paragraph - the local planning office was unlikely to win the argument.
This seems to have silenced the secret police for the moment, although they may just have decided to pick a softer target. Ron is anxiously awaiting further developments but as he commiserated to me, his council tax went up by nearly 20% this year which is probably paying for more little führers who cannot get a real job.
Nick Timms
Tuesday
It would seem Tony Blair has finally been sold on David Blunkett's plans to chain us into perpetual serfdom. Along with the clap-trap flummery, the knocking of the opposition, and the other accoutrements of a Big Government leader under fire, I'm still struggling to believe I heard the following:
It made sense to ask whether identity cards were no longer an affront to civil liberties but a way of protecting them
A ripple of comfortable applause accompanied this slogan, from the Blessed Leader, at today's UK Labour Party conference. Welcome to Oceania.
Wednesday
This strikes me as rather draconian:
The software giant Microsoft declared war on internet paedophiles last night by announcing the closure of its thousands of UK-based chatrooms used by millions of people.It will also restrict access to chatroom systems around the world, allowing only identifiable, adults living in the same country to use them.
The decision is a significant precedent, the first time one of the biggest internet service providers has cut off an element of the World Wide Web in reaction to concerns over misuse.
Calls to place all internet chat rooms under strict state regulation and control cannot be far off.
Tuesday
Guardian columnist David Aaronovitch, who occasionally writes quite sensible things about Iraq and All That, has decided to resume normal service as Bullying Blairite Columnist, on the subject of compulsory ID cards.
The usual reasons in favour are trotted out. He says they are convenient. No doubt they are in many cases. So, for that matter, would be carrying a tattoo on one's forehead with an ID number and message, saying, 'State Licensed Guardianista' or whatever.
I can quite see how, in a minimal or even anarcho-capitalist private 'state', how citizens could freely choose to have ID cards carrying all kinds of info. Then again, they might not choose to do so. I find it a great bore to point out to collectivists of various hues that if X is such a grand idea then it should not be necessary to compel citizens to have X. Take banks, for instance. I see no reason why, in a truly liberal order, banks could not give clients incentives to carry photo-ID credit cards to cut fraud and hence cut charges to their customers. Indeed such transactions would be quite normal and no-one would have grounds to complain given sufficient consumer freedom.
Then, perhaps realising that the usual reasons for compulsory ID cards amount to little more than making life easy for the police and the security authorities, Aaronovitch comes to his guiding motive: "What is convenient or aesthetic for the individual is not, unfailingly, what is good for society."
That is true. It's one reason I always rather liked Mrs Thatcher's misquoted remark about there being no such thing as society. 'Society' may indeed in some sense be better off if Pc Plod and his colleagues knew of my wherabouts 24 hours a day. 'Society' can take a hike, thankyou very much.
So when Liberty (one of those annoying civil liberties groups, ed) talks of ID cards turning people into "suspects not citizens", I am bound to ask whether Liberty has any concept of the duties - as opposed to the rights - of citizenship.
Well, those folk over at Liberty can no doubt answer Aaronovitch's question for themselves. But I think we ought to feel grateful to him for framing the question so bluntly. He is right. Social democrat statists like him think that the entity he calls 'society' is somehow possessed of some claim on the citizens who compose it. For him, carrying an ID card is a badge of collective solidarity and hence non-ownership of such a thing demonstrates one's anti-social (heaven forbid) character.
One thing is for sure. No one is ever likely to be in danger of thinking Aaronovitch believes in personal liberty. The next time I read one of his more sensible pieces about the Middle East, I will bear that in mind.
Saturday
It's like a cancer that we can battle against but never truly defeat. As it creeps purposefully through our national lymph system some of us can summon up the courage to fight it back and, for a while, it can appear as if we are in remission. But then comes the hoping and the praying for the final 'all clear' that signals a rebirth and a new lease of disease-free life.
It never comes. The cells are corrupted again and the cancer returns to devour us:
Sweeping powers for Government agencies to carry out covert surveillance, run agents and gather the telephone data of private citizens were contained in legislation published yesterday.State bodies ranging from the police, intelligence services and Whitehall departments to local councils, the Postal Services Commission and the chief inspector of schools will be able to authorise undercover operations.
The measures were activated by David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, under the controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which became law three years ago. They need to be approved again by both Houses of Parliament before they can be used.
These horrors first made their appearance about a year ago and set off a call-to-arms that, in turn, caused the Home Office to drop the proposals. Or, at least, they made an appearance of dropping them because, like that lurking cancer, they never really went away. They were merely stacked neatly in the pending trays until an another opportune moment presented itself. Seems that the moment is now.
Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said the British people were "the most spied upon in the Western world".
I reckon that's a pretty fair prognosis. But why? Why are our political elites so determined to construct this panopticon? Why are they so single-minded about this project that they appear immune to sweet reason, protest or appeals to decency? What exactly is driving them? Are they so riddled with paranoia and insecurity that they see monsters and assassins lurking behind every curtain? Is that how they see us? I cannot think of any other reason why a democratically elected government would come to think of themselves as colonial occupiers of their own country.
What has led to this calamitous collapse of trust? Is it repairable? I rather fear that it is not.
Questions, questions. Answers may come in due course but I suspect none will be satisfactory or stop the cancer from spreading. Time for palliative surgery?
[This has been cross-posted to White Rose.]
Wednesday
User Friendly has been my daily "must read" cartoon every day since it's inception. It's the "Bloom County" of the computer world. If you see a tech guy laughing hysterically and falling off his seat, it means he's either just wiped the corporate server terrabyte disk and backups by accident or is reading UF.
Like Bloom County, the strips have long standing characters and follow ongoing story lines. The stories often have a connection to the humorous side of current events.
Now to the point and the current events. UF's Sunday 'toon takes a pithy look at the true meaning of the RIAA "amnesty" program.
Don't blame me if you spend the rest of the day and well into the night reading the UF cartoon archives... you have free will. Really.
Wednesday
What do you call a country which is run by the police for the benefit of the police? Is that a 'police state'? Yes, I think that qualifies. Surely it does?
SENIOR police officers will call this week for the DNA of everyone in Britain to be put on a national database from the moment they are born.They believe that this would be a vital weapon in the drive to curb crime and help to solve hundreds of murders.
[From the UK Times]
Some nerve those plods have got! Assuming that nothing has been lost in the media translation, I detect not even a hint of humility. After all, they are supposed to be public servants. And what next, I wonder? 'Police demand increase in income tax to help fight crime'? 'Police demand greater integration with the European Union to help fight crime? 'Police demand greater regulation of world trade in order to fight crime'?
What disturbs me here is not so much the idea of a national DNA database. Okay, that does disturb me but HMG hasn't got the money to fund such a grand scheme so it isn't going to happen (yet). No, the ugliness is more immediate than that; it lies in the casual assumption by police chiefs that they can simply demand such a thing and expect their will to be done without even paying lip service to the principle of democracy that most people in this country set great store by. Who died and left them boss?
The crime-solving canard has worn so thin that it is almost beyond mockery. Solving crimes is something that the UK police are not much interested in doing anymore. Population control is now their job ('Social Management' in NuSpeak). And as they now regard themselves to be a uniformed wing of the ruling elite, I suppose we're going to get much more of this kind of thing from them in future.
So now we are the servants and they are the masters. How did that happen?
Thursday
At last, the people of the world unite to take a stand against tyranny:
Casting aside petty differences and forging new allegiances, UN ambassadors said they would ignore New York's smoking ban, imposed five months ago and extended to the UN this week.
Now that's what I call multilateralism!
Wednesday
White Rose notes that London's police commissioner is calling for introduction of ID cards for all citizens as a means of combating terrorism and organised crime. The said commissioner is apparently opposed to any such "Big Brother" schemes but he needs "to have the ability to identify those people who are around doing their business lawfully and those other people who want to create mayhem and effectively destroy our way of life."
And how exactly is that not Big Brother...?
Monday
White Rose has a selection of posts on surveillance with some interesting developments in RFID (radio frequency identification) technology used by supermarkets and retailers. Engraged civil liberties activists plan to 'watch' them closely for an opportunity to mount a legal challenge.
A report about a not very useful security camera system in Florida that has been scrapped.
And finally my favourite about microchips buried inside your vehicle that could soon be tipping off the authorities about your driving misdeamenors. The author of the Telegraph article, Jason Barlow, warns:
It could be worse. And, in five years, it will be – you'll be fined for doing an illegal U-turn in the middle of nowhere at three in the morning, while someone burgles your house and gets away with it. Cue calls for everyone on the planet to be fitted with a microchip. After all, the innocent will have nothing to fear.
In the true spirit of White Rose.
Monday
In more traditional police-states, citizens may be blissfully unaware that they have done wrong until they are woken in the wee small hours by an ominous rapping on their front doors. In modern police-state Britain, the knock on the door is to be replaced by the thud on the doormat.
If this report from the UK Times is accurate (and it is just about creepy enough to be true) then it may be time to think about buying a bicycle:
EVEN George Orwell would have choked. Government officials are drawing up plans to fit all cars in Britain with a personalised microchip so that rule-breaking motorists can be prosecuted by computer.Dubbed the “Spy in the Dashboard” and “the Informer” the chip will automatically report a wide range of offences including speeding, road tax evasion and illegal parking. The first you will know about it is when a summons or a fine lands on your doormat.
The plan, which is being devised by the government, police and other enforcement agencies, would see all private cars monitored by roadside sensors wherever they travelled.
Who the bloody hell are the 'other enforcement agencies'? And the very notion of an informer in every vehicle! Saddam Hussein could only dream about that level of control.
Police working on the “car-tagging” scheme say it would also help to slash car theft and even drug smuggling.
The same old, same old. Every accursed and intrusive state abuse is sold to the public as a cure for crime and 'drug-dealing'. The fact that it still works is proof that we live in the Age of Bovine Stupidity. A media advertising campaign showing seedy drug-dealers and leering child-molesters being rounded up as a result of this technology will have the public begging for a 'spy in the dashboard'.
Having already expressed my doubts about the viability of new government schemes (see below) I should just add that the fact that this relies on technology rather than human agency means it just might work.
The next step is an electronic device in your car which will immediately detetct any infringement of any regulation, then lock the doors, drive you to a football stadium and shoot you. HMG is reported to be very interested and is launching a feasibility study.
[This article has been cross-posted to White Rose.]
Monday
I wonder how many of our readers went to see the film 'Minority Report' and came away thinking, 'Hey, what a great film'?
Contrast this with one of HMG's advisers who went to see the film and cam away thinking, 'Hey, what a great idea!:
Tony Blair is to announce plans to put up to half a million children deemed at risk of becoming criminals or getting into other trouble on a new computer register.Teachers, family doctors and other professionals working with youngsters will be asked to name potential troublemakers whose personal details will then be placed on the database.
The new "identification, tracking and referral" system will allow the authorities to share information on vulnerable children, including their potential for criminal activity.
Alright, let's get the obvious question out of the way, such as, exactly what does 'at risk' mean? What constitutes a 'potential troublemaker'? Who decides these things and on what basis? Who guards the guardians?
Oh I daresay that there are answers (or, rather, great globs of state-management gobbledekook that purport to be answers) but they will almost certainly remain occluded behind the volumes of policy documents that filter through the ziggurat of state agencies charged with enforcing it all.
For the record, I denounce this but I do so merely as a matter of form. My stores of furious indignation have all but dried up leaving a residue of doleful resignation. And, to be fair, we've always had mechanisms for controlling the poor; this is merely the latest manifestation, albeit dressed up in the fashionable terminology of 'caring and concern'.
The chink of light (well, a fissure really) is that this grand plan may not get off the ground at all and, even if it does, it will probably be a shambles. HMG already has far more laws, regulations, rules, plans, initiatives, schemes and regimes that it can possible see through or enforce and nothing they announce nowadays is likely to work as intended or at all.
Still, it will keep a few state bureaucrats busy for a few more years and that is probably enough.
Wednesday
White Rose has a post about the launch of the Campaign for an Open Digital Environment (CODE) to raise awareness about the IP Enforcement proposal’s threat to consumer rights and market competition.
Forbiding tools that are required for the exercise of legally protected rights, like private use, preservation of works by libraries, and reverse engineering, means giving a complete monopoly to right-holders on the basic infrastructure needed to communicate in the digital world.
Thursday
We who fancy women but renounce our desires must work to end the evil oppression by the actively straight people. They impose all sorts of costs on us, lobbying for government funding of research into impotence, test tube babies and groin problems. They force us to pay for family planning clinics and for their children's education. This permissive society we live in where a man and a woman are legally allowed to have sex must be stopped.
Is that a bad argument? Yes, you're right. But it's exactly the same as those used by John Derbyshire and other social authoritarians with regards to homosexuality:
More open attitudes to homosexuality were socially liberal...but led to lavishly funded programs to look after AIDS victims and pay for research into cures, and to state patrolling of our speech and thoughts via 'hate-crime' legislation.
Hang on a minute! Straight people get sexually transmitted diseases as well, and much government spending on AIDS programmes is actually directed at straight people in Africa where it is a real problem. AIDS-infected homosexuals, very much on the decline in Britain, generally die before they retire, thus cutting the amount of money they claim from the state. What the social authoritarians are forgetting is that straight people, as well as gay people, use political power to lobby to impose costs on the rest of society.
It is true that some gay people are statists who think the government should force everyone to give them acceptance. They are just like social authoritarians who also want to use the power of the state to impose their views. While it is true that on the question of speech, social authoritarians don't say that they want to ban gay speech, that is only because they know they wouldn't gain the political support for it. Instead, they complain about libraries having gay sections and about 'gay propaganda' on television. They usually favour censorship of sex and violence.
At stake here are two visions of a society. One is a bottom up society, where people can make their own choices about their lives, where people make mistakes, but where society grows and develops organically. The other is a top down society, where – even if your actions don’t hurt anyone – you can have your right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness made illegal.
Most gay people are not particularly interested in 'gay politics' at all. They have never done anyone any harm. They just want to get on with their lives without the state telling them what to do or punishing them for their choices.
Wednesday
This article on White Rose is rather interesting and really rather heartening...
The Irish Council for Civil Liberties says it will prosecute any priests found distributing or quoting the Pope's anti-gay document for hate crimes.
I have long feared incremental statism more than revolutionary statism, because revolutions are easy to notice and thus easy to shoot at and, more importantly, get support from other people when you do. Incremental diminution of liberty however falls within the 'boiling frog' syndrome. By the time people notice, it is too late.
Now I really do not care what the Catholic Church has to say about gays or whatever... that is matter for practicing Catholics, not a well and truly lapsed one like me. But I am rather interested in anything which could well cause a major collision between civil society and the state.
You see, what I see here is that sooner or later, the Irish state is going to find itself confronted by a Catholic Priest who loudly proclaims in unambiguous language what the state defines as 'hate speech' by strongly depreciating homosexual relationships... and the state will be faced with in effect prosecuting someone for being a Catholic and following ex cathedra Catholic doctrines to the letter.
And then all of a sudden, when it becomes clear that the state has decided it will give itself a force-backed say in what gets said from the pulpits of Catholic Churches, millions of people who are voluntary members of a civil non-state social organization called The Roman Catholic Church are going to have to look long and hard at how they see the state. I could not ask for better grounds on which to draw up an army for that particular fight.
I think rather a lot of them will come to the conclusion that...The state is not your friend.
More and faster please.
Wednesday
Who'd have thought it? The UK Department of Health has said ID cards are the best way for removing health tourism from the UK government's dreadful National Health Service (NHS). What a coincidence that the Home Office, which has been struggling for decades to find a problem necessitating an ID card solution, are trying to introduce just the very thing. And at this exact moment in time? Fancy that.
And here's the best part. State-subsidised UK family doctors already refuse people access rights to their medical lists, if they don't have the correct UK citizenship qualifications or residency permissions. Yes, the very people whom the ID card is supposed to prevent abusing the glorious wonders of the NHS, are already prevented from abusing it, at least up to the point the government is prepared to stop them. And whatever happens, the Department of Health have said, nobody will ever be refused emergency treatment, whatever their circumstances.
So currently, without ID cards in place, all those whom the state deems invalid for NHS treatment must go to Accident and Emergency departments, which will treat everyone who turns up regardless of status. And in the envisaged ID card NHS future, all those whom the state deems invalid for NHS treatment must go to Accident and Emergency departments, which will treat everyone who turns up regardless of status. Err...Doh?
The only solution to stop 'health tourism', where hapless British taxpayers are forced to subsidise the health needs of various global parasites, is to abolish the NHS. Immediately.
That way, everyone pays for what they need, or insures themselves against what they might need. And Britain can start becoming a welcoming place again, which people only come to for its wet Welsh weather and its fine Breakspear ales, rather than trying to sponge off our coerced goodwill after fighting their way through malevolent Blunkettesque security, at the ports of entry, before finding the nearest organised crime ID card forger.
Is this solution too simple, or should I be strung from the nearest lamp-post for daring to suggest that the great white elephant of our wondrous National Health Service should be slaughtered right here, and right now? String me up, baby. It can't come a moment too soon.
Monday
A great many articles have been written on Samizdata.net about the monstrous Tony Martin case (just do a search for "Tony Martin" and you will see what I mean). I have always thought that he was convicted more for challenging the state's monopoly on force by defending his property rather than for actually killing a man.
Well even the faint fiction of the Tony Martin case being a simple matter of criminal justice (which has come to mean justice for criminals) has been abandoned. The fact he was not going to be released early is old news... the demented fact this was because he was deemed a danger to burglars is also old news.
What is new was revealed in a Telegraph article yesterday (emphasis added):
Ms Stewart [a probation officer] has previously written a report on Martin which was submitted to the Parole Board before its ruling in January. In it she said that Martin's support base in the country had made him more likely to reoffend."This is a case which has attracted immense and ongoing media attention and public interest," she wrote. "I believe this has had an impact on Mr Martin's own perceptions of his behaviour and his right to inflict punishment on those whom he perceives to be a threat to his own security.
In short, because he has widespread support from other people who believe he has been shafted by the system, lots of support, in fact political support, he is not going to be released. Ergo, he is a political prisoner. How else can one interpret it given the reason for his continued detention is due to the support of other people?
And let us not forget the other reason: he refuses to repent his 'crime' of perceiving two men breaking into his isolated country home as a threat to his security. Martin does not just have the temerity to demand he has the right to defend his own property, he refuses to apologise for doing so.
At the end of many articles I have written on Samizdata.net I have used the words "The state is not your friend". Probation Officer Ms. Annette Stewart is the perfect embodiment of why I make that sort of remark. She is just acting in accordance with the institutional imperatives within which she works. The system is not just broken, it is insane.
Sunday
Thursday
Oliver Letwin, the UK shadow Home Secretary for the Conservative Party, has said he remained "highly dubious" about any move towards a compulsory ID card.
Come on Oliver, you can do better than this! How about saying something more like the following:
The Home Secretary, David Blunkett, forsooth, can try to force me to carry one of these draconian internal passports, in his attempt to turn this former land of liberty, into a socialist police state. But I will rot to death as a prisoner, in the Lubyanka gaol of his choosing, before I ever carry one of these modern forms of an Auchwitz tattoo. I am not a number. I am a free man.
Obviously, you may wish to be slightly less strong than this, as any professional Westminster politician must, I suppose, agree to be bound by any laws ratified by Parliament (except Dawn Primarolo, of course, the Treasury minister who refused to pay the poll tax).
However, I currently possess a full-length poster of you, which I garland every day with fresh flowers, and I need something a bit stronger than "highly dubious". A Conservative copper-bottomed promise, from you, to abolish ID cards forthwith, the day after an election victory, would do the trick.
I hate to be shameless about this, but a promise like this would also gain you hatfuls of votes. It's grubby I know, but unless you want me to replace your poster, with one of the eminent Mr. David Carr, you need to show me what you've got; what I've seen so far isn't yet good enough.
Wednesday
Last evening I attended a seminar hosted by the Conservative Party group, cChange on the issue of civil partnerships. Civil partnerships are being advocated by the present Labour government as a way of enabling gay and lesbian couples to legally formalise their relationships in a number of ways, allowing them to take advantage of some, if not all, of the advantages now accruing to married heterosexuals.
I am not going to rehearse all the various arguments in favour or against such a move. Suffice to say that, unless some overwhelming public interest or danger can be shown to exist, the burden of proof should rest on the shoulders of those who would ban any adult - important qualification - wishing to enter into a lifetime commitment with any other person (s). (Yep, that includes polygamy, in case you are asking).
A number of other bloggers much more qualified than I, such as British ex-pat Andrew Sullivan and the group blog at the Volokh Conspiracy have argued as to why gay marriage, for instance, would be entirely consistent with a broadly socially conservative worldview. Sullivan points out that allowing gay men - like himself - to marry would probably reduce, not raise, male promiscuity and actually strengthen the bonds of civil society, including heterosexual marriage.
Last night's seminar was interesting for several reasons. Arguing for civil partnerships was Conservative MP for Buckingham, John Bercow. Arguing against was Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips. I was pretty impressed by the quality of arguments on both sides. Bercow gave a broadly libertarian argument, one based on the idea that although 'traditional' marriage was a Good Thing, there was nothing so fragile about it that enabling non-straights to marry would send the world spinning out of control.
Phillips argued, in essentials, that heterosexual marriage was in crisis, and that one of the chief bulwarks of this institution in the past have been taboos such as horror of adultery, child-rearing out of wedlock, and so on. Her argument was that allowing gays to marry, even if the persons concerned were utterly harmless, would tend to generally weaken what she saw as the rightfully privileged status of marriage.
From my scribbled notes, here are some quotes:
It is a mistake to say that marriage confers rights.....This is based on a misunderstanding of the marriage deal. It is the only family relationship in which the state has a direct interest - the orderly raising of children.
Marriage is a convenant that is privileged and hedged around, based on a network of rules and procedures.
It was clear from her talk, in particular, that she sees marriage firmly in the context as providing the ideal place for raising and rearing children. Even if one accepts that - and I broadly do - it makes one wonder how the marriages of childless couples, or those marriages entered into late in life, should be viewed.
The question & answer session was also interesting. I asked the panel why we had to look at marriage through Statist lenses, since marriage has been around a lot longer than the present State or indeed the Church. This produced from Conservative MP Robert Jackson the observation that the State must confer a particular status on heterosexual marriage, and hence ban gay marriage, because the State had a kind of "theocratic" or normative role in civil society.
Jackson was not the only person to voice such a view, though it is fair to say that many other commenters in the audience (about 60 people on a hot night) were more libertarian and dismissive of such concerns. Even so, I found it noteworthy that a Conservative MP like Jackson, one of the sharpest minds in the present party, could use "theocratic" as a term of praise without the slightest hint of irony. Clearly the separation of Church and State in the UK has some way to go.
A vast topic. Time for me to sign off and let the brickbats begin.
Tuesday
The House of Lords has done us proud tonight by opposing a bill to end trial by jury in certain cases.
Baroness Kennedy of the Shaws, a Labour peer, gets to the root of why Blunkett wants to scrap trial by jury. "It was about control," she said of today's motion. All these pesky independent people deciding whether someone is guilty is really bad - it takes power away from the executive.
Of course, Big Brother David Blunkett hasn't read Hayek's chapter "Why the worst get on top", and can't understand why it's a problem for him to micro-manage the criminal justice system. So he is going to to reintroduce the proposal in the Commons. Oh dear.
Tuesday
Oliver Letwin is one of my favourite Parliamentarians, so I was pleased to find an article by him in today's Telegraph. He is defending the right to trial by jury - which is under attack again by Our Glorious Government. He makes the very good point that the legal system should be bottom-up, rather than top-down:
There are, in essence, two models of justice. In the first, justice is an item imposed from above upon the community. In the second, justice is the means by which the community uses the power of the state to protect itself.The significant difference between these two models is that, if justice is seen as something imposed from above, the citizen begins to regard the law and its enforcement as alien forces; whereas, in the second model, justice is understood to be something in which we all have a stake - and hence, as an activity in which all honest citizens can co-operate.
This of course helps protect individuals from abuse by the state:
The fact that amateurs have this role is one of the guarantees against the state arbitrarily imprisoning an individual.
The depressing thing is that David Blunkett just doesn't get it. He doesn't see why the people need protecting from him. After all, he's an altruist and New Justice is in everyone's interest. He's from the government and he's here to help.
Labour's first term in office was relatively moderate for a Labour government. Most of the damaging policies were done by stealth or - with policies like foxhunting - put off until the future. This term, however, Labour is much more authoritarian, openly raising taxes, creating regulations and destroying civil liberties. But a third term, with Blunkett still in the Home Office and possibly Brown as PM, is not a prospect I like to think about.
Sunday
Today's news about the Home Secretary inexorably steamrolling his Big Blunkett ID card scheme fills me with gloom. It is the same sentiment that gripped me in April this year when the news of the revived ID card plans reached the headlines and made me set up White Rose, a protest blog collective.
The blog has been up and running with the help of some notable bloggers who find the issues of civil liberty a hot topic in the Western world. However, a blog alone may not be enough. Civil disobedience may be the only way to oppose the damage being done. Such actions start from individuals. And we are all individuals here, right?
For now, we have only the shining example of Mr Willcock. Let's see what we can come up with...
Sunday
Home Secretary, David Blunkett, has gained Cabinet approval to push forward his plans, for compulsory 'Magic Eye' ID cards, for all British citizens.
Ladies and Gentlemen, we are entering the abyss.
Wednesday
Make no mistake, the moves afoot to ban hunting in Britain have very little to do with animal welfare but everything to do with class warfare. It is nothing less than a clash between those who believe civil society must be tolerant to those who share different minority views and who wish to freely associate in the pursuit of a beloved activity... and those who believe that state and violence backed political interaction, rather than society and voluntary social interaction, is the core around which all activity must revolve.
The class warriors of the Labour and LibDem Parties, and a few statist Tory confreres, wish to regulate notions of free associating civil society out of existence and replace it with a regulatory democratic state in which no aspect of rights or affinity are beyond the reach of regulatory politics... nothing less than an intolerant dictatorship of the political plurality.
Well a bunch of people met in front of Parliament today who said that regardless of what the bigoted class warriors of Westminster say, they are not going to cooperate.
The class warriors are not 'progressive' at all... they are in fact the heirs to a view of the role of the politics which in days gone by used law to oppress other despised minorities, such as homosexuals or Roman Catholics. They are just hate filled sanctimonious collectivist bigots.
(the photos taken today courtesy of The Dissident Frogman because my camera is knackered)
Monday
A leaked memo revealed that David Blunkett is pushing the Cabinet to back national identity cards for everyone aged 16 and over, carrying biometric information, such as fingerprints, to allow police to confirm the holder's identity. Under Mr Blunkett's scheme, the card will cost £39 for most people between the ages of 17 and 75.
An opinion piece about the identity cards news in Telegraph is yet again explaining what is wrong with Blunkett's argument. Basically, each of the claims made by the Home Secretary in support of his pet scheme is wrong.
- First, Mr Blunkett says that there is strong public support for the idea. In fact, the Home Office's recent consultation exercise focused on the concept of an entitlement card, a very different prospect. (Also, according to this Out-law article, the goverment has admited that the public opposes the ID card scheme.)
- The Home Secretary goes on to argue ID cards will help fight crime. This is one of those assertions that is forever being made, but hardly ever substantiated... The public mood is said to have changed since September 11, 2001, but no one has explained - or even seriously tried to explain - how ID cards would have thwarted those bombers, many of whom died in possession of forged papers.
- Nor, by the way, are ID cards a solution to illegal immigration. The root of the asylum problem is not that we cannot find clandestine entrants, but that we never enforce their deportation.
- More faulty still is Mr Blunkett's central proposition, as set out in a letter to his Cabinet colleagues: "The argument that identity cards will inhibit our freedom is wrong. We are strengthened in our liberty if our identity is protected from theft; if we are able to access the services we are entitled to; and if our community is better protected from terrorists." In an appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell describes how a concept can be traduced if the words used to express it lose their meaning. The example he gives, uncannily, is the word "free". Now here is Mr Blunkett using "freedom" to mean more state control.
- Any doubts as to the wisdom of the scheme must surely be removed by the Home Secretary's final argument in its favour: that we are "out of kilter with Europe". Indeed we are, thank heaven. Policemen in Britain are seen as citizens in uniform, not agents of the government.
The most worrying is Blunkett's spin on the concept of freedom. In his view we are strengthened in our liberty if our identity is protected from theft; if we are able to access the services we are entitled to; and if our community is better protected from terrorists. This is vaguely based on the distinction between negative and positive liberty, which are not merely two distinct kinds of liberty; they can be seen as rival, incompatible interpretations of a single political ideal.
Negative liberty is the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints. One has negative liberty to the extent that actions are available to one in this negative sense. Positive liberty is the possibility of acting - or the fact of acting - in such a way as to take control of one's life and realize one's fundamental purposes. While negative liberty is usually attributed to individual agents, positive liberty is sometimes attributed to collectivities, or to individuals considered primarily as members of given collectivities.
Blunkett and his New Labour chums are classic and rather unexceptional anti-liberals. (I use the term liberal in its original meaning, based on negative definition of liberty and claiming that in order to protect individual liberty one should place strong limitations on the activities of the state.) In Blunkett's mind, the pursuit of liberty (whether of the individual or of the collectivity) requires state intervention, which, by definition, is not contradictory with limitations on personal freedom. As a result, the protests of civil liberties groups do not make sense to him.
The concept of freedom as being unprevented from doing whatever one might desire to do is alien to him. According to Isaiah Berlin the defender of positive freedom will take an additional step that consists in conceiving of the self as wider than the individual and as represented by an organic social whole - “a tribe, a race, a church, a state, the great society of the living and the dead and the yet unborn”. The true interests of the individual are to be identified with the interests of this whole, and individuals can and should be coerced into fulfilling these interests, for they would not resist coercion if they were as rational and wise as their coercers.
I will not grant Blunkett's social and political philosophy such level of 'sophistication'. I will say that his are the simple and toxic insticts of a collectivist and a statist and that those protesting policies based on them will have their words muffled by the Big Blunkett.
Cross-posted from White Rose
Sunday
The Chancellor Gordon Brown has long been hailed as an economic wonder, a giant, a prince among men; a proto-tyrant possibly, but nevertheless an economic God. What a load of old spoons. Those feckless Tory MPs in the House of Commons may be scared of his bombastic rhetoric, his curling lip, and his comprehensive knowledge of the canon of John Kenneth Galbraith; well, at least the idiot's guide to John Kenneth Galbraith. But let me tell you of a tale, to put a sword to the lie of this risible greatness.
It began yesterday morning, at 10am. The phone rang. A certain Englishman, of Scottish, Irish, and Jewish extraction, picked up the phone.
"Yes?"
"Hello, is that Mrs Duncan?"
"No, who's this?"
"It's the Inland Revenue, in Liverpool. Can I ask you some questions?" The man panicked. Did he 'owe' £10,000 more in Corporation Tax? Had his company secretary, or accountant, failed to send in Form IR-XYP/9100/97/a.30, his thirtieth of the year? He decided to go for the polite response, in case this was being taped.
"Yes..."
"But first, you will need to answer some security questions..."
This went on for some time. I had to give my date of birth, and my postcode, just to find out whether I could help the Inland Revenue's poor girl, or not. Then she asked me some intrusive questions about my children, and demanded to know what my child care costs were. Whew! It was not a Corporation Tax underpayment. I told her to phone my wife back, who had these details.
My wife and I regard it as our God-given duty to get back as much of our money stolen from us, by this rotten government, as Gordon Brown tells us we are 'entitled' to; all the better to ruin his borrowing projections with.
So, to cut an irritating story short, it is apparently everyone's duty in this country, if claiming child tax credits, to inform Gordon's minions if your child care costs ever differ by more than £10 pounds in a week. This has caused chaos in every Inland Revenue office, across the country, because if you can find a couple whose child care costs do not go up or down by £10 pounds a week, every couple of months, I will show you two people flaunting their duty to obey.
My wife has spent days trying to get through, to permanently engaged IR lines, trying to fulfil this duty; they phoned her back on a Saturday morning, when she was out. Great.
But leaving aside the intrusion on our liberty, the inconvenience on our time wasted, and the small matter of the state needing to know the inside leg measurements of our children, let's do a back-of-the-envelope economic analysis on the Great Man's child tax credits policy. (If the back of an envelope is good enough for his famous five tests, done in the back of cab with Charlie Whelan, then it is good enough for us!)
Our initial tax payment: £1,000
My wife's unanswered phone calls: £30
My time proving who I was: £10
My accountant's time, helping with our claim: £50
My wife's time, checking claim: £20
Our total costs: £1,110
IR form production and checking: £50
Help centre and phone-line maintenance cost: £30
IR Girl's hour on Saturday morning: £40
IR amendment of our claim details: £20
Estimated IR cost, on inevitable repeat process: £100
IR background costs, per couple claiming: £50
Total IR costs: £290
Our Final "Benefit": £710 (£1,000 tax - £290 admin)
Robbing Peter to pay Paul used to be the Old Labour fraud. Now they are robbing Peter, to pay Peter. But as the money goes round, they have taken, wasted, or destroyed, over a third of the hard-earned capital inputted into the initial transaction.
In what way, Gordon, is this 'economic'? Even if we'd stuck to a Burkeian Old Tory way, and increased child benefit to £1,000 pounds a year, this would've wasted no more capital, and we'd have been £400 pounds a year better off; the poor Girl in Liverpool would've been doing something productive with her life; we would not have needed the new IR helpdesk, and my wife and I would not have been wasting our time on telephones, on a Saturday morning, when we had guests round, answering state-intrusive questions.
Even better, of course, to have just cut our tax in the first place. If the admin of child benefit costs the government £100 pounds a year, per couple, this would've been a £1,100 tax cut, or a whopping £500 pounds increase in our benefit gained. And we would have spent that £500 pounds usefully, in the productive sector of the economy, not made it disappear into the smoke, and the recycled paper troughs of unnecessary Inland Revenue offices designed to redistribute my Tory money to Labour-voting Liverpool.
It is this continuous waste of capital, Gordon, which has caused your economic stagnation, which you are bamboozled by, and which will soon cause a great big bust, once you have succeeded in wiping out Margaret Thatcher's immense economic legacy, whose incredible achievements you still claim as your own. Which is bizarre.
I am currently up to page 169 of Murray N. Rothbard's 'Man, Economy, and State', and it becomes clearer, day by day, Gordon, as I stagger through its pages, what a complete economic no-hoper you are. I suggest, James Gordon Brown, My Lord and Master, whose wages I wish I could avoid paying, that you buy this book. You might learn something. No, you will learn everything.
To every Tory, on the front bench, buy it too; find out why Gordon Brown, our esteemed Chancellor of the Exchequer, is such an economic clot, and the true economic reasons why his New Labour policies are all failing. This book, as they say, is unputdownable.
Friday
Having been published last month, this article, in blogosphere terms, is verging on the archaeological but it is well worth a delve into the archives for a sobering illustration of just how despotic and deranged our ruling classes have become.
Not content with having turned our justice system into a playground for victimologists, parasites and professional race-baiters, the Home Office is now preparing the ground for an arbitrary police-state:
The government’s war against men is now plumbing ever more astonishing depths. On Radio Four’s Today programme yesterday, the Home Secretary David Blunkett could scarcely wait to boast of new proposals to deal with domestic violence.Anyone truly concerned with civil liberties could not fail to have been appalled by Mr Blunkett’s comments. The problem was, he enthusiastically explained, that at present ‘you have to get someone through court’ before a domestic violence suspect can be restrained.
So his solution is to restrain them before they even get to court. In other words, he wants action taken against a man on the basis of an unproven allegation by a woman– made under the protection of anonymity, to boot. So much for this Home Secretary’s understanding of the presumption of innocence, the meaning of justice and the necessity for a trial of the facts.
The article deserves to be read in it entirety in order to understand the extent to which the Home Office has deliberately ignored or manipulated statistical data in order to justify their insistence that male violence in the home is far worse and far more common than it actually is. Another case of tailoring the data to fit the political agenda.
These wicked and spiteful proposals are not on the books yet but they are clearly on the drawing board and, as per usual, it is only a matter of time before they are enacted thus ending the protection of the law for every man in this country.
The scope for abuse of powers like this is simply enormous and any case of abuse will lead to a man losing his home, access to his children and possibly even his livelihood all on the basis of an unproven and unanswerable allegation.
The damage this will cause to families and the fabric of society remains to be seen but, tragically, it will be seen thanks to a regime which is deeply in thrall to dangerously extremist femininst ideologues and which has now run out of easy targets.
[My thanks to Dr.Chris Tame who posted this link to the Libertarian Alliance Forum.]
Friday
The UK government's chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, has claimed that outlawing smoking in bars, pubs, clubs, restaurants and at work would dramatically reduce levels of lung cancer, and other lung diseases, caused by passive smoking. It seems the push is on, by the UK do-gooding society, to follow the example recently set by Michael Bloomberg, in New York.
Significantly, Sir Liam cited a recent government report, which claimed that 88% of people were in favour of smoking restrictions in restaurants. He obviously knows where to hit a government hard, especially one with no other principles than those dictated to it by opinion poll.
No doubt the UK government's response will be to say, at first, that it has no plans to impose a public area smoking ban. Then it will say if private businesses fail to co-operate with a 'voluntary' ban, it will be 'forced' to take the necessary action to impose one, and then eventually, it will 'regretfully' impose the ban, if the appropriate opinion polls tell it to.
I am non-smoker myself, having taken seven New Year Eves to finally give the filthy weed up, but I am with South Oxfordshire's very own TV celebrity chef on this one; Antony Worrall Thompson said on Channel 4 News last night:
I believe in smoking and non-smoking areas. If you don't like a place because people are smoking don't go in.
No doubt one day smoking will be banned completely in the UK, if these do-gooders keep up their do-gooding work, even in the privacy of your own home. The fact that people have to die of something, eventually, seems to have fully escaped them.
On the day they do successfully get smoking fully banned, thereby creating an enormous black market and making it even more sexually attractive to teenagers causing them to start up in the first place, is the day I will light up again. I am not looking forward to smoking Golden Virginia roll-ups again, but if it is in the cause of freedom, and helps the US economy to boot, so be it!
Tuesday
When Hong Kong was handed over to Communist China by the British state, to much joy and acclamation by credulous Chinese and Gweilos alike, the totalitarian gerontocracy in Peking pronounced soothingly that Hong Hong would retain its relatively liberal order under a doctrine 'One nation, two systems'.
Tens of thousands of people have marched in protest at a planned anti-subversion law aimed at an EU style 'harmonizing' of Hong Kong law with that of the rest of Communist China. One nation, one system it would seem.
...the government is pushing through the national-security legislation, known as the "Article 23" measures, too quickly, and without enough public debate. The proposal is in many ways an attempt to bring Hong Kong's laws regarding subversion, treason, sedition and the theft of "state secrets" in line with China's.
Well it comes as no surprise to me that these patent lies only took six years to be revealed. I look forward to hearing the people who rejoiced at the surrender of Hong Kong's people to China recanting their folly. I am not holding my breath however.
The Chinese way of dealing with effective protests
(WSJ link via Combustable Boy)
Monday
While opinions may vary on the correctness of the opinions of people who believe the income tax was illegally instituted - and there is some historical evidence that on the issue of employer withholding they are correct - few libertarians would disagree they have a right to say it.
That right is exactly what is being abridged:
"On Monday, June 16, Federal District Court Judge Lloyd D. George issued a preliminary injunction banning the sale and distribution of Irwin Schiff's book about the income tax titled, "The Federal Mafia: How The Government Illegally Imposes And Unlawfully Collects Income Taxes And How Americans Can Fight Back."Say what you will, this is a rather vile and blatant breach of the First Amendment. Judge George should be severely reprimanded.
If you are interested in very large court documents, I've made the Court Order available for reading.
And speaking of Judges who should be reprimanded... A Texas judge who was in trouble once before has reverted to his previous bad behavior and placed a tax withholding protestor in jail without bond and after improper procedures.
This was after a previous hearing in which the judge nearly laughed the State out of court over their claim the dissenting corporate CEO was a flight risk. While their victim is in jail, the IRS is spreading rumours the company has been dissolved. Creditors are calling the victimized company demanding cash payments.
Just one more example of "Your Government Servicing You"... like a bull with a cow...
Sunday
Due to the high risk of an embarrassing misunderstanding here, I think it behoves me to start off by advising our American readers that, in Britain, the word 'fags' is a slang term for 'cigarettes'. It is not generally perceived as having anything to do with homosexual men.
And this is important because cigarettes are no longer just 'fags' or even 'smokes'. Now, they are symbols of defiance as well.
For the past two decades or so, tobacco manufacturers have been forced to print hectoring health warnings on cigarette packets. But now, due to a directive from Brussels (where else?) manufacturers are required cover at least half the space on both the front and rear of the packet with even more lurid warnings. It is the kind of useless, paternalistic gesture that enables the European political classes to posture self-righteously at someone else's expense.
At last, though, someone is fighting back in the form of a website called 'Fake Fags' through which you can purchase waggishly irreverent stickers to cover up the politically-mandated health warnings on your cigarette pack.
It is a delicious act of subversion and, predictably, it has sent the reactionary health fascists into a blue funk:
Deborah Arnott of anti-smoking group ASH criticised the labels."These labels do not strike me as being funny," she told BBC News Online.
Well they strike me as hilarious and I am very heartened that at least some of my compatriots are not prepared to throw in the towel just yet.
Wednesday
Never mind San Francisco or Hampstead, Brussels is the true home of the radical student left. Still as committed as ever to the anti-ismism crusades of the 1980's, they continue to dig away at the foundations of our 'bourgeois values'.
Seems they have just struck another seam:
The Commission is in the final stages of drawing up a directive to ban sex discrimination, with implications for the media, advertising and insurance industries.The draft directive, revealed in Tuesday's Financial Times, would leave it to the courts to decide whether programmes or advertisements were sexist or "did not respect human dignity". An explanatory note says: "The purpose of this provision is to avoid throughout all forms of mass media all stereotypical portrayals of women and men, as well as any projection of unacceptable images of men and women affecting human dignity and decency in advertisements."
The law could have profound implications for institutions such as Britain's topless Page Three girls in The Sun newspaper and vast swathes of Italian television. Advertisers using sex to sell could also be affected.
If it wasn't so offensive and inappropriate, I'd say that they've just discovered a motherlode.
The real devil in this detail lies with the apparently reasonable proposition to 'leave it to the Courts' thereby providing a fig-leaf of objective justice. Actually, though, this is a charter and blessing for looney-left activists to drag any number of advertising agencies and media companies through any number of Courts on pretty much any pretext they damn well please (as these things are usually drafted in the widest and vaguest possible terms).
However, in practice, this will only need to be done once or twice for the wicked capitalists to get the message and, in order to avoid the risk of a ruinous lawsuit, start censoring themselves. That is the ideal solution because why bother with all that messy and troublesome enforcement business when life is so much easier for the ruling elite if everyone just internalises their own repression.
The European Union: if it didn't exist, we would not have to invent it.
Monday
With the assistance of several notable bloggers, namely Perry de Havilland and Dissident Frogman, I have set up a protest blog collective called White Rose. The original impetus came from an article about imminent introduction of identity cards in Britain which scared the hell out of me, and so I decided it is time to rally the Anglosphere behind resistance to the accelerating destruction of personal liberty in the UK.
White Rose will point a finger at the British government's measures eroding personal freedom. All the time. With as many people helping as possible. It is not an exclusively libertarian project and we welcome regular contributions, from bloggers and non-bloggers alike, across the political spectrum. The only requirement is a refusal to tolerate the draconian nature of the state's reach over the individual.
The format is that of a one-stop-shop for news, analysis, ideas, concepts and arguments, information and contacts related to privacy and civil liberties. The focus will be on the situation in the UK but any contributors who can point at similar cases and experiences in their countries will form an essential input in the debate. The objective is to discuss alternative solutions and halt the drive for security undermining personal freedom and privacy.
To read the White Rose argument about why the debate should not be framed around the trade-off between freedom and security, please go here.
If you want to find out how to become a White Rose contributor, please go here.
Tuesday
The proposed EU regulation of blogs and other forms of Internet speech being suggested by the Council of Europe (a quasi-governmental think-tank whose views have inordinate sway with the EU's policy making elite) is very revealing about what lies at the heart of The Great European Project.
Steven Den Beste has written a rather good article on why the press is treated differently than broadcast media which use the finite resource of the electromagnetic spectrum. One can argue that as the EM spectrum is finite, it is reasonable to share out its use and as clearly not everyone can set up a radio or TV station, some rules to prevent the use of the media from becoming over mighty are justified. This is not quite how I see that issue myself but the contention is far from absurd.
One can even make the far less supportable assertion that because in reality setting up a newspaper is far beyond the means of most people simply because it is so expensive, the state should regulate the press, at least to some extent. Not surprisingly I flatly reject this notion and think the only defence individuals need against the established press are laws against libel. However the thinking behind this sort of regulation is at least easy to understand and can, if you accept the state as an essentially benevolent neutral institution (which I certainly do not), be seen as a way to prevent abuses of power by an over-mighty media corporation given the vast asymmetry of access to public opinion between a newspaper and an individual.
But when the Council of Europe start urging the EU to regulate blogs like this one, it should be clear that none of the arguments which can be applied to broadcast media and or the press apply here. As I mentioned in my previous article on this issue, if you have a cheap computer and a crummy modem, it still only takes about five minutes and no money whatsoever beyond your dial-up or broadband connection charges to set up a blog. There is no asymmetry of access to the public involved here. Granted, setting up an effective blog is another issue entirely, but simply getting viewable grievances in front of blogosphere eyeballs is simplicity itself.
So if anyone can set up a blog, and there is no finite resource in need of being allocated 'fairly' and there are no de facto capital related barriers to 'market' entry, what are we to make of this Council of Europe proposal to regulate us?
If I had to pick a single word to describe the root of this move to intermediate the state between on-line free speech and on-line readers, it would be Communitarianism. The notion at work here is much the same as that which I discussed when I rebutted Peter Hain's ideas for a totally political 'society'. If I write something and plonk it on the Internet, I cannot compel someone else to read it just as they could not have compelled me to write it in the first place. Yet the notion of a freely offered opinion via an almost universally available medium and a freely choosing reader assumes that individual choice (mine as writer and yours as reader), rather than some collective political will, is an acceptable basis for social interaction.
What the people at The Council of Europe find so offensive is that this simple process (I decide to write, you decide to read (or not)) is totally non-political. If you read my article and decide to leave a comment, and I decide to delete that comment, and you then decide to start your own blog to decry the things I write, where is the 'political community' in all this? Nowhere of course, because the actions described are purely social. There is no use of the collective means of coercion by either me nor the disgruntled reader. You do not get a vote on what I write and I do not get a vote on what you read... and if you start up a blog of your own to criticise me, I do not get a vote on what you write either and if I leave comments on your blog pointing out the errors of you ways, you can delete them if you choose to.
The understanding that civil society (the several actions of affinity and dis-affinity) and the political sphere (the control the collective means of coercion) are materially different is hardly a new observation. Yet it is the refusal to accept this by people who see force (politics) as the only legitimate means of interaction which lies at the heart of attempts to legally impose certain forms on how people express views on the Internet. It is not about enabling wrongs to be righted, or giving voice to the voiceless, or sharing the means of expression. As blogs are more or less free to set up and the Internet has essentially infinite in capacity to support them, that argument is simply a bare faced lie. This proposed regulation is just a particularly overt example of how the power elite in Europe will not tolerate anything which disintermediates the state because to deny any role for politics in something is to deny them any role. After all, they are not threatening to ban us (provided we comply with their directives), they are just demending we stop acting as social entities, following the customs and manners of the Internet, and start acting as political entities, comporting ourselves according to the politically formats laid out by the superstate's expresion of what they see as the collective will.
This is because if there is one thing communitarians hates above all, it is being ignored and excluded. A communitarian thinks not only is my business everyone's business, but the plurality has the right to use political interaction (which means force backed law) to vote on my every action... there is no real 'private life' to a communitarian, just a political one. In a quite literal sense, popularity is mandatory: you may only do what a plurality allows you to do.
In a perverse way, this policy proposal by the Council of Europe is almost good news: if they want to go to the effort to regulate us, that means they think we humble bloggers 
actually matter in the overall scheme of things. Our voices are being heard and the powers-that-be do not much care for the discordant non-state approved tune we are singing. Splendid.
Resistance is not futile. We will not be harmonised.
Monday
People in the US, who take notions of Freedom of Expression and Private Property for granted, will be astonished by the latest steaming pile of wisdom to emerge from the clenched cheeks of our European would-be masters. Declan McCullagh reports:
The all-but-final proposal draft says that Internet news organizations, individual Web sites, moderated mailing lists and even Web logs (or "blogs"), must offer a "right of reply" to those who have been criticized by a person or organization.
With clinical precision, the council's bureaucracy had decided exactly what would be required. Some excerpts from its proposal:
- "The reply should be made publicly available in a prominent place for a period of time (that) is at least equal to the period of time during which the contested information was publicly available, but, in any case, no less than for 24 hours."
- Hyperlinking to a reply is acceptable. "It may be considered sufficient to publish (the reply) or make available a link to it" from the spot of the original mention.
- "So long as the contested information is available online, the reply should be attached to it, for example through a clearly visible link."
- Long replies are fine. "There should be flexibility regarding the length of the reply, since there are (fewer) capacity limits for content than (there are) in off-line media."
It's pretty zany to imagine that just about every form of online publishing, from full-time news organizations to occasional bloggers to moderated chat rooms, would be covered. But it's no accident. A January 2003 draft envisioned regulating only "professional on-line media." Two months later, a March 2003 draft dropped the word "professional" and intentionally covered all "online media" of any type.
Read the whole article.
So what is the message to the EU I mentioned in the title? Simple:
We will not comply
We have a comments section on samizdata.net in which people can and do comment about what we write, but access to that comment section is at our capricious discretion. If we decide we want to IP ban someone or want to delete their remarks from our comments section because we think they are offensive, or even if they are not offensive but we just bloody well feel like doing it because we have a headache, then we bloody well will. This is our private property.
We are already hosted on a server in the USA and I am quite confident our hosters would tell the EU where they can stick any demands to yank us off the net because we decline to submit to political moderation of the form our free speech takes on our private property (i.e. the server space we rent from them). If we have to go entirely pseudonymous and log onto Samizdata.net in order to post via 'dead drop' servers rather than submit to EU regulation of how we manage the information on our blog, then that is exactly what those of us who post from within the rapidly emerging EU tyranny will do. We utterly reject political moderation of free speech in civil society. This is not about giving people a voice but rather about replacing social interaction (which is what true free speech is), with political interaction mediated and mandated by the state.
If these regulations become the law of the EU (as seems likely), we will not obey, we will not cooperate, we will not accept that anyone has a 'right' to reply on our blog. Do you think we have said nasty things about you and want to reply regardless of our unwillingness to let you use our comment section? Fine...go to blogger.com, sign up (for free), click on 'create a new blog' and voila... you have your own blog on which you can scream about how those mean old Samizdatistas 'done you wrong' to your heart's content.
And if the EU says we have to let you comment... tough shit, it ain't gonna happen. The people who write for Samizdata.net all now live next door to Samizdata Illuminatus, in Arkham, Massachusetts.
Tuesday
The mainstream news outlets in Britain are abuzz tonight following today's statement from Chancellor Gordon Brown that now is not the right time for Britain to abandon sterling and adopt the Euro. Dressed up in the mawkish tinsel of lovey-dovey Euro-warmth, Mr.Brown told the nation that, with great reluctance, he must rule out adoption of the Euro because his 'economic tests' have not been met.
Cue shrugs, eyeball-rolls and 'whaddaygonnado?' sighs from Mr.Brown and a chorus of booing, hissing, spitting and puppy-kicking from an assembled throng of federasts in both Parliament and the nations newsrooms. It is all a pantomime, of course. Blair and the rest of the executive want to the Euro with the kind of slavering intensity with which an alcoholic needs a shot of gin. The so-called 'economic tests' that must be met beforehand are purely a fig-leaf to mask the fact that they cannot convince an increasingly skeptical and surly British public to go along with them. The very nano-second the government thinks it can win a referendum on the issue the 'economic tests' will have miraculously been met.
But let no-one be fooled into thinking that Euro-geddon has been postponed. Beneath the blizzard of high-falutin' fiscal gobbledegook being whipped up by the 'meeja' talking heads, an even more sinister tentacle of the Belgian Empire is slowly and quietly coiling around us.
Some thanks are due to the Daily Telegraph for the timely publication of two articles about the colossal danger to liberty in this country posed by the Europe-wide Arrest Warrant, a legal instrument designed to 'harmonise' justice within the EU but which will, in fact, strip British citizens of every single one of their time-honoured protections:
When the warrant comes into force next year court hearings will be a formality and the requesting country will not have to present evidence of a well-founded case. Nor will the accused be allowed to argue that he will not get a fair trial. It has been a long-standing principle in English law that extradition would not be allowed to a jurisdiction where the procedures were considered unjust.The Government says that because the rest of the EU has signed up to the European Convention of Human Rights, their judicial systems can be considered fair. But most other EU countries do not have habeas corpus or trial by jury and, as in Ms Daniels's experience, can reactivate a legal case years after it was apparently brought to an end.
From next year, any prosecutor in Europe can issue a warrant for the arrest of any British citizen on mere suspicion of having done something which is not even a crime in Britain. Said citizen will then be subject to arrest by British authorities and then sent to the said prosecutors country where they can be held without trial almost indefinitely while the prosecutor investigates the alleged crime.
Yet speaking out against this monstrosity is almost unknown here. Like everything else about this rotten project, HMG has assured everyone that it is merely a 'procedural tidying-up exercise' while assiduously avoiding any discussion of the terrible track record of Europe's 'justice' system.
The Telegraph goes a stage further and offers a case study:
Teresa Daniels, from Aylesbury, Bucks, was arrested by Scotland Yard detectives last week on an international extradition warrant linked to a conviction for drug trafficking imposed in Spain six years ago.Miss Daniels, 30, had thought that the case was closed. But she was "absolutely staggered" when three police officers arrived at her mother's home last week to arrest her.
Miss Daniels account of her original trial is equally scarey:
"I could not speak Spanish and no interpreter was present. I was asked just five questions and was in court for only 90 minutes. I assumed I was there as a witness against Antonio, not as a defendant."
Fortunately for Miss Daniels, the EU Arrest Warrant does not come into force until next year so a British Court can still block the extradition if they think it is unjust or unfair. But not for long:
"If the European Arrest Warrant had been in place, Teresa would already have been put on a plane to Madrid. This is the danger we are fighting against. Yes, the extradition procedures need speeding up, especially to deal with terrorist cases. But we are going too far, too fast."
"Terrorist cases", my foot! The EU criminal code sets out all manner of vague 'crimes' which European prosecutors can pursue, including 'xenophobia' and 'racism' and other such terms drawn so widely and so ill-defined that, in effect, justice is at the subjective caprice of any European poobah with an official stamp.
Next year will mark the end of a thousand years of common law protections, Habeas Corpus and trial by jury and the strongest thing any member of our own political classes can say in opposition is 'We are going too far, too fast'.
I keep thinking of the 350,000 or so British and Commonwealth citizens who sacrificed their lives in World War II. If only they could have known just how wickedly the freedom they died defending was going to be betrayed, they would have stayed in bed.
Wednesday
... and that includes making music, creating pictures, writing verse, shooting films and producing computer games that annoy the crap out of other people.
An attempt by the usual 'guardians of morality' to regulate the nature of computer games in a way that would never be tolerated for the written word has been defeated in a US court.
"If the First Amendment is versatile enough to "shield the paintings of Jackson Pollock, music of Arthur Schoenberg, or Jabberwocky verse of Lewis Carroll", we see no reason why the pictures, graphic design, concept art, sounds, music, stories, and narrative present in video games are not entitled to a similar protection. The mere fact that they appear in a novel medium is of no legal consequence."
Score one for the good guys! 
Now let me fire up my copy of Grand Theft Auto... I feel like running over a few hapless pedestrians.
The full ruling can be found here [pdf file].
Monday
No sooner has Perry reminded us that the Conservative Party are not to be trusted when it comes to liberty, than, as if right on cue, the buggers prove him right:
Patients should be issued with "entitlement cards" to stop illegal immigrants abusing the National Health Service, the Tories said yesterday.Liam Fox, the shadow health secretary, said the cards, which would be issued to every UK citizen, would stop so-called "health tourists" being treated at the taxpayers' expense.
Now, to be fair, the problem they are referring to is a valid one. It is an outrageous abuse of the already over-burdened British taxpayer to force them to pick up the healthcare tab for anyone anywhere in the world who happens to want it. However, the blindingly obvious way of putting a stop to this would be to deregulate health services and dismantle the Soviet-inspired monstrosity of the NHS.
But, no, the Tories would never dream of doing anything to upset the left. They would much rather that we were all issued with an electronic tattoo which is not only obnoxious and anti-British, it will also prove ineffective in solving the problem referred to. Within weeks of the introduction of any such 'Entitlement Card' the country (and possibly the rest of the world) will be flooded with forgeries and, even if that were not the case, neither the Human Rights regime, nor EU law will permit the NHS to discriminate against non-UK nationals. Added to that is the massive cost of administering and policing the system the burden of which will also fall on the taxpayers and probably prove more expensive than treating foreigners for their arthritis.
The Tories clearly have not thought this one through but 'thinking' is generally frowned upon in those circles. I expect very little from the British Conservative Party and I am rarely disappointed.
Sunday
Sadly none of Britain's mainstream political parties are, they just vary (slightly) in who they want to benefit from their regulation of civil society. When it comes from choosing amongst which tribal faction of statists will regulate your life, we are spoilt for choice.
So next time you have an earnest young Tory hopeful turn up on your doorstep asking for your vote and pledging to save you from those beastly Labour socialists, ask him where his party stands on the issue of ID cards, which will naturally start off as 'National Health Benefit Cards' and then very quickly become mandatory for pretty much anything you try to do, such as open a bank account or rent an apartment.
And then look 'earnest young Tory' in the eye, explain why his party is part of the problem rather than part of the solution and then tell him to fuck off. A choice between a party which brought us Michael 'a touch of the night' Howard and one which has brought us David 'RIP' Blunket is no choice at all. But if you cannot bring yourself to resist the syren call to the ballot box, vote UKIP.
Thursday
[SCENE 26. Int. LUCY's bedroom. Night.]
Open on shot of bedroom wall opposite the bed. There is a large mirror hanging on the wall. In the mirror we can see the reflection of LUCY and JOHN making wild, passionate love in the bed. Camera turns down and pans across bedroom floor, past assorted clothes discarded hastily in the fenzy of mutual lust. LUCY's cries of climax drown out JOHN's heaving grunts. Camera closes in on bed as JOHN rolls over. Both are glistening with sweat and breathless.
LUCY: That... that was... fantastic!
JOHN: Yeah... great. You were great.
LUCY: Do you know what I want now?
JOHN: What?
LUCY opens the top drawer of her bedside table and produces two large carrots.
LUCY: Want one?
JOHN: Oh, you bet.
LUCY hands one carrot to JOHN who begins to munch it manfully. LUCY nibbles her carrot, savouring the little bites.
LUCY: Mmmmm... I just have to have a carrot after sex.
JOHN: Yeah. Nothing beats a post-coital munch.
LUCY: So, am I going to see you again?
JOHN: Well, now that Sheila and I have split up... I reckon so.
LUCY: Why did you two split up anyway?
JOHN stops eating his carrot and looks away, trying to hide his shame.
JOHN: She... she was a celery-freak!!!
[END]
Wednesday
He has the gall to (metaphorically) dig up J S Mill's dead body, sit it next to him, do a ventriloquist's act with the dead skull, and then to say, "look - Mill agrees with me."
Hattersley claims that Mill would have joined him in wanting schools to be banned from teaching creationism. Here's the offending article. Yes, I know that Mill sometimes departed from pure classical liberalism, but if there was one thing that he, writing in an age riven by religious controversy and when religious organisations provided the majority of British primary education, would have recognised as a test case for liberty it would be the right of religious people to propagate their beliefs to their children as they see fit. Yet Hattersley writes:
"We need to decide where individual freedom begins and ends. Fortunately, we have John Stuart Mill to guide us. He was a passionate opponent of what vulgarians call "the nanny state". So he insisted that: "All the errors which [we are] likely to commit against advice and warning are far outweighed by the evil of allowing others to constrain (their neighbours) for their own good." But, while we must be free to harm ourselves, there can be no freedom to "injure the interests of one another, or rather certain interest which, either by express legal provision or tacit understanding, ought to be considered as rights." It is surely self-evident that to teach in schools that Eve was created from Adam's rib injures children's interests. They either go into the world believing manifest nonsense, or spend their adolescence under the impression that their teachers are cranks."
I may not have my copy of On Liberty to hand, but thanks to the internet, I can nail that one. Back before I lost the book I put an entry in my blog about Mill's very explicit view that propagating mistaken beliefs did NOT constitute an injury to another's rights. A quick Google search called it up. When the secretary of the Alliance, an organization agitating for the prohibition of alcohol, said, "I claim, as a citizen a right to legislate whenever my social rights are invaded by the social act of another," Mill replied:
"So monstrous a principle is far more dangerous than any single interference with liberty; there is no violation of liberty which it would not justify; it acknowledges no right to any freedom whatsoever, except perhaps to that of holding opinions in secret, without ever disclosing them: for the moment an opinion which I consider noxious passes any one's lips, it invades all the 'social rights' attributed to me by the Alliance."
From memory that passage comes very soon after the passage Hattersley quotes. How on earth did Hattersley come to miss it? Don't answer that! And how, too, did he come to claim Mill as an ideological ally given Mill's view, expressed in the same book, that Hattersley's beloved state education was a thoroughly bad thing:
"A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government--whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the the existing generation--in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body."
(Quote found via Improved Clinch)
I haven't touched here on Hattersley's remarks on extending anti-discrimination legislation to cover sexuality even for religious schools who hold homosexuality to be a sin, nor on his views about halal slaughter. But I am pretty sure that on those topics, too, Hattersley vilely misrepresents the inferences it is possible to make from J S Mill's writings when he (Hattersley) concludes his article thus:
No doubt the government will behave in that way as it examines "creationist" teaching, employment discrimination and ritual slaughter. Unfortunately, it will take as its text not On Liberty but the recent report of a focus group.
Monday
Health fascism? Islamofascism? Same thing?
[My thanks to Marc Brands for posting this to the Libertarian Alliance Forum]
Sunday
Because I grew up in the 1970's I still associate Trade Unions with the rank-and-file of the British urban proletariat; the lantern-jawed, barrel-chested, horney-handed, hobnail-booted sons of industrial toil. These were the rough, tough, no-nonsense men who hewed the coal, forged the steel and rivetted iron plates down in the boiler-room of the British economy.
In those days 'male grooming' meant a smell of honest sweat and a smear of brickdust and anyone who was stupid enough to go into a working class pub and prissily complain about the smokey atmosphere was more likely than not to experience 'Death by Shipbuilder'.
Alright, I know that's a cartoon but at least it was corroborated to a small degree in real world of shop floors, lathes and jackhammers. But the coal fields are silent now, the shipyards have all gone and the smokestack industries are billowing clouds of vapour over Taiwan not Teesside and so the Trades Union Congress (TUC) needs new rubrics to campaign on. Out has gone the fiery old rhetoric of revolution, strikes and class war and in has come the priggish, condescending ideology of health fascism:
Pubs, clubs and restaurants could increase their takings by banning smoking, says the TUC.
The TUC is pushing for the ban, because it believes passive smoking presents a health risk to waiters, waitresses and bar staff.
Very useful this 'passive smoking' hoax. What would organisations like the TUC do without it?
Rory O'Neill, editor of the TUC-backed Hazards magazine which published Saturday's report, said: "Big Tobacco (the lobby) has spent big money to prevent UK workplaces going smoke-free.
Ah yes, the hobgoblin of 'Big Tobacco', yet another shadowy capitalist conspiracy determined to preserve our right to choose. They're a 'lobby', don't you know. All 'lobbies' are malevolent and driven by greed, as opposed to organisations like the TUC which is motivated solely by altruism and love for their fellow humans.
Let us hear the voice of the 'lobby':
But Simon Clark, director of smokers' rights group Forest, said: "Neither the consumer nor the hospitality industry wants a complete ban on smoking and there is absolutely no need for it.
"If the overwhelming majority of people wanted smoke-free pubs and restaurants it would happen, believe me, because people vote with their feet.
Is this Apostate of Hell trying to tell us that if that people wanted a smoke-free environment then any entrepreneur who opened a non-smoking restaurant would clean up? Just further proof that the concept of a free market is a standing affront to people with agendas to advance and empires to build.
My, how the TUC has apparently changed its tune. In the good old days they denounced 'profits' and told the workers that they had nothing to lose except their chains. Now they seem to want to enourage profits while telling the workers to lift that barge, tote that bail, have a little smoke and land in jail.
Wednesday
Just a brief comment regarding the Dixie Chicks. As no one has been threatening to sling their boney arses in jail, I do rather think the 'fighting against censorship' and 'striking a blow for free speech' meme that is floating around is a bit odd.
They freely said what they wanted, as have the people who freely slagged them off for doing so... that they may have suffered negative commercial consequences for this entirely fair use of their gobs is neither here nor there regarding their right to sound off.
That we have the liberty to speak our minds is vital and an objective right, the absence of which means tyranny pure and simple... but that does not always make it a good idea. You may think your boss is a stupid malodorous clown, and you cannot be sent to jail for saying that to him whilst the entire office listens, however...
Tuesday
Last night I watched a Channel 4 TV documentary about SARS.
Meanwhile, according to the Radio Times, over on Channel 5 they were showing the movie Outbreak, starring Dustin Hoffman and Rene Russo. Sometimes Britain's broadcasters cancel things at the last minute if they feel that the bounds of bad taste are being crossed, so I made a point of checking if Outbreak was actually being shown. It was.
The way that SARS is, we were told, being contained, is that the various people who took the lead in spreading it are being restrospectively tracked in minute and individual detail, so that all their contacts can in turn be tracked down and placed in quarantine. The movements of the "super-spreader" Professor Lee, who took the contagion from South China to Hong Kong, were recounted as if doing the research for the disaster movie script that all this will surely yield in due course. The scene where the already coughing Professor shares a lift with a young businessman called something like Johnny Chang will undoubtedly be in this movie, with very scary music.
Cut to Toronto, whence one lady had travelled from (I think they said) Hong Kong. With luck, the deaths outside of China will be in the hundreds rather than the thousands, and the contagion will be contained.
In China it is already clear that they won't be nearly so lucky, and the blogosphere has for several days been making much of the threat that the rapid spread of SARS in China poses to the Chinese economy, and by extension to the very survival of the present political system in China. Briefly, during the crucial early days and weeks of the disease, they covered it up rather than faced the problem. They opted for denial rather than facing up to the disaster and trying to contain it. The phrase "mandate of heaven" (loss of) is now doing the rounds. Those tyrannies which are so tyrannical that their basic method for dealing with problems is to beat the private parts off anyone who dares to publicise problems will not do so well out of SARS. The case for adding the tyrannical intrusions of a competitive media industry to the old fashioned tyranny of governments like the present government of China, so that, in among all the hoo-hah about the ex-private lives of Soap stars, things like SARS can be flagged up a month sooner than the government would like, will be hard to argue against.
But meanwhile, throughout the West, you can bet that the SARS story will be used as an excuse for all manner of tabs being kept on the honest citizenry. From the government's point of view, the beauty of contagious disease is that, unlike crime, the law-abiding majority spreads it, not just criminals (although criminals too of course), and so stopping contagious disease is a matter of keeping tabs on the herd of honest citizenry. Ergo, compulsory "smart" ID cards for everyone. Ergo laws that say you can't take so much as a piss in a public toilet without getting a personalised receipt and leaving a personalised electronic record. We are only hours away from the Euro-speeches and Euro-pronouncements that say all this, and for all I know they have already begun. (See this interesting although off-message comment number one here, about and linking to this. And mark, to answer your question, thanks for the article, which I hadn't seen, but the story has been tracked by such groups as Privacy International and the Libertarian Alliance for years now, not that it will make much difference in the end.)
Contagious diseases are the perfect excuse for the state to tyrannise over the individual. After all, if someone is carrying pestilence towards the healthy majority, the healthy majority really is entitled to stop such a person, by force if necessary.
Also, contagious diseases are emergencies, and governments do love emergencies. It makes them feel important. During contagions, they are important.
What SARS is achieving is our old friend "convergence". The super-tyrannies will be embarrassed into being somewhat less tyrannical, at any rate in their media-suppressing aspects, but the milder tyranny of the democracies will get less mild. Maybe Francis Fukuyama should have stuck with the "end of history" for a bit longer.
Also, when that SARS movie hits the cinemas, something tells me that the World Health Organisation is going to come out of all this very well. Here's what Channel 4 says about them:
If it weren't for the coordinating activities of WHO, it's quite likely that we in the UK still wouldn't know about SARS. Certainly, the viral agent wouldn't have been identified and characterised so quickly and infection controls would not have been put in place so rapidly around the world. If and when SARS is contained all credit should be given to WHO and their collaborating teams of scientists. It is thanks to WHO that we can breath a little more easily in the face of other more serious, more infectious agents that are bound to crop up in the future.
Big Brother is watching over us.
UPDATE: I should have included this link.
Wednesday
There is a groundswell of anger against the Unpatriotic Act I and its' sequel, Unpatriot II (coming soon to a Gulag near you). This very civil disobedience will soon make Herr Ashcroft's life extremely difficult.
I was already well aware of the low esteem in which he and his slab monster laws are held in the blog arena. I quite share it if you haven't noticed yet. Still, I was very happily unprepared for this uprising in the towns and states of America.
If your town or State has not outlawed the Patriot I Act yet, ask them why not. Show them others have done so. You don't have to appear anti-war. You may argue we should not discard the blessings of liberty for ourselves at the same time we are bringing them to others. Defending the freedom our forefathers died for is more American than apple pie, Old Glory, mom and the 4th of July. It's at the core of what allowed them. If we lose that unique freedom and America is "just another country", hardly worth fighting for. Like France.
With enough effort on the part of our readers and the rest of the blogosphere, this could be the biggest rebellion against Washington since the Whiskey Rebellion in Western Pennsylvania. Unlike that one it will be impossible to put down. It is a non-violent, wide-spread effort; it is under the protective eyes of thousands of freedom loving writers like yours truly; and any attempt to kill it will make it grow.
Be a real patriot. Get out there and defy the law!
Monday
Blogger Sina Motallebi has been arrested by Iranian authorities for the 'crime' of giving interviews to Persian language radio stations outside Iran and for his blogging (in Farsi).
I suspect giving his plight as much publicity as possible may give the notoriously intemperate Iranian security services at least some motivation to play it cool if they think the spotlight of world opinion is on them.
It is a good thing we in the west have freedom of the press and internet, eh? No way would such heavy handed tactics be tolerated in somewhere like the USA, right? Right?
Tuesday
Blogger David Holford has been threatened with legal action by Tower Hamlets Council unless he removes some comments from his site. He has no plans to comply.
For more from me about why Tower Hamlets Council are not, as they claim, preventing hate speech but rather are attempting to suppress ridicule of Tower Hamlets Council, click here, or here if the Blogspot archives are bust again.
Monday
You know there are some downsides to this otherwise wonderful transatlantic relationship. I cannot help but suspect that the decision to ban smoking in restaurants by the Mayor of New York has, in turn, inspired some of own moral entrepreneurs:
A bill to make lighting up in restaurants and cafes illegal, cutting the number of deaths from passive smoking, is to appear before parliament.MP for Harrow West Gareth Thomas says he hopes MPs will back the legislation on Monday to "protect both children and adults from a very serious health threat".
Ah yes, Children. They're doing it for the Children! Bless Mr.Thomas for he is the Guardian and Saviour of Our Children.
"Breathing other people's tobacco smoke actually presents more of a risk than living or working in a building containing asbestos," he said.
Yes but nowhere near the risk of living or working in a building containing busybodies with legislative powers.
Meanwhile a gaggle of the usual suspects are lining up eager to lend their support.
"[Restaurants] need to take action now if they're not to lose customers fed up with breathing in the toxic fumes from other people's cigarettes. Going smoke-free will almost certainly increase their trade," said Judith Watt of SmokeFree London.
Well, then a legal prohibition is not necessary, is it. If smoking bans will improve trade then any restaurant owner left to his or her own devices would be mad not to ban smoking from their own premises.
At least 165 bar workers die each year from inhaling customers' smoke, estimates a United States-based passive smoking expert James Repace.More than 600 office workers and 145 manufacturing workers are also killed annually from passive smoking.
The total number of deaths exceeds those who died during the Great London smog in 1952.
We all know the old saying; there's lies, then there's damnable lies and then there's completey bogus statistics fabricated in order to advance a political agenda.
But Simon Clark, the non-smoking director of Forest, the "voice and friend of the smoker", says the decision to ban smoking should be made by restaurant owners and not by law.He described the bill as the work of a "small group of fanatical anti-smokers - and I would put Gareth Thomas in that group - who basically want to interfere, not just with people's lives, but people's businesses".
Brave resistance from a brave few but probably to no avail. After all this is Tony Blair's shiny, new Britain and we must all be re-made in His image.
My thoughts turn to the British soldiers in the Gulf who have displayed their customary elan and professionalism in freeing the Iraqis from tyrrany. Perhaps they could come home now and perform a similar service for their increasingly beleaguered countrymen.
Tuesday
Another one you didn't see in the media.
"The demonstration comprised about a hundred protestors demonstrating against the arrest of Vietnamese pro-democracy campaigners. This action was organised by the 'Alliance Vietnam Liberté' (Vietnam Freedom Alliance) and various Ngos were invited. A representative of Amnesty International was present as well as Françoise Hostalier, former Human Rights Minister [yes we have one of those in occupied France!] and president of 'Action Droits de l'Homme' (Action Human Rights), as well as myself Laurent Muller, president of the 'Association Européene Cuba Libre' (European Association for a Free Cuba). The demonstration ended at 17 hours outside the Republic of Vietnam embassy [in Paris]."
It continues with the following:
"I take this opportunity to remind you that tomorrow, 8 April 2003, the AECL is holding a press conference about the latest wave of repression in Cuba. Some 80 non-violent dissidents are currently being tried for 'treason' and 'supplying information to an enemy state' (the USA). Prison sentences from 10 years to life have been requested [by prosecutors]. It appears that one death sentence has been requested against one dissident."
The press conference will be held at 15 hours at the aid centre for the Foreign Press, maison de la Radio, 116 avenue du Président Kennedy, 75016 Paris. The best contact I have is Prégentil (Americans will really like the graphics on his front page). Sad note: repression is operating worldwide whilst the eyes of the world are focused on the liberation of Iraq.
Monday
Instapundit links to this stirring piece in the Mirror by Tony Parsons, with which I almost wholly agree. Wow, says Instapundit. Indeed. But here's the one bit I have a problem with.
Yes, there have been deeply disturbing images of dead and burned Iraqi children. But do we honestly imagine that Allied forces, fighting a war unrestrained by political concerns, didn't kill and maim countless numbers of innocent French, Dutch and Belgian children in the Second World War, never mind the babies we burned alive in Japan and Germany.We just didn't see pictures of them.
But I haven't seen any pictures of dead Iraqis either. Not at any rate on television, which is the news source I've been relying on.
Neither has James Lileks.
I really like Lileks, to the point where one of the things I most dislike about Saturday morning now is that there'll be no Bleating from him until Monday. But, I find his archives hard to navigate, and I don't know how to get to this Bleat once it has stopped being today's Bleat. This link just goes to the latest one. Meanwhile, here's a big chunk of what he says today (as I write this) on the pictures of dead Iraqis issue. He's talking dead Iraqi soldiers, rather than civilians, but the principle is the same because I haven't seen any pictures of them either.
But I’m serious. Where are the bodies? Or, more to the point, why aren’t we seeing them? One of the most remarkable shots I saw Friday was a slow roll down a broad modern highway; on the verge, a truck with some sort of machine gun fastened to its bed. It was just charred metal - but still, you’d think that if anyone had been manning the gun or sitting behind the driver’s seat, there would have some human remains visible. Then you saw a long black patch blasted in the road. The truck had been hit by a missile and knocked back with such force that anyone inside may have been thrown out, or just plain converted to something that burned without leaving a recognizable shape. That’s just something the camera caught while passing by. Imagine what it would see if it went looking.I think we should see the casualties, but not to serve any particular pedagogical purpose. I get irritated when told that we should see the dead so we understand what war is really like - as if the idea that people die in horrible means would be a surprise. You mean they don’t freeze up, shout AIIEEE, or grimace and crumple over? I saw a T-72 take a hit the other day, and it was one of those classic examples of the flaws of Soviet design – an armor-piercing round set off the munitions, blowing the turret high in the air. If there was anyone inside, the end was fast. But you can imagine the nature of that quarter-second between life and death- and you should. Men died. In the time it takes you to wink the irreplaceable worlds these men held in their heads vanished. One shell, four men, eight parents, 20 siblings, a hundred friends, a thousand details lost for good. One second in war echoes for a decade.
Show the carnage. Rope it off, show it in the late-night hours when the kids are in bed, but show it. I feel the same way about the 9/11 footage. Show it. Don’t presume we can’t take it or must be shielded, like children, from the truth of the thing we have unleashed. I’m not suggesting that the news should be nothing but Death on Parade, or linger with unwholesome glee on the injuries done to our soldiers or theirs. But you cannot edit death out of war; to do so defames those experience it. How can we understand the soldiers who return home without understanding not just what they saw, but what they did?
The Americans have learned many things from Gulf War I, including many good things. Don't start popular uprisings you don't then join in and support. Smart bombs good dumb bombs bad. Kill as few of the enemy as you can. Good stuff like that. But they have also learned this: Don't show scary pictures of dead enemy bodies you do kill to the civilians because they can't handle it.
Remember those gruesome images form Gulf War I of the retreating Iraqis spit-roasted on the Road of Death? Okay, there's not actually been anything quite like that this time. But no incinerated and disfigured dead bad guy bodies? Come on.
But as I say, I've been relying on TV – plus this blogosphere internet stuff of course. Have the old paper media had pictures like this? Or have they been scrubbed clean of such horrors also?
At this point in the writing of this I abandoned my desk in my kitchen and I went out and bought copies of the Guardian, the Independent, and the Mirror. There were many references to dead Iraqis, including in the headlines. If ever there going to be gruesome dead Iraqi pictures in the papers, this was when, and this was where. But there was just one very small picture, a very blurry one off the telly, in the Independent of a few of the dead bodies in the John Simpson friendly fire catastrophe that killed a bunch of Kurd commanders.
Apart from that, none. I call this kind of thing SFGO: something funny going on.
Is the deal that the colour magazines can print all the gore they like, once the war is good and over, but not before? Or will these pictures never be seen? (I assume that they have at least been taken.)
I support this war. I thought it was winnable, quickly, and it is being won, almost as quickly as I had hoped. So this is not me saying that this is evil and fascist. I'm just saying that it is happening.
Maybe we civilians really can't handle such pictures. In terms of boosting civilian support it may have been a very smart move indeed to stop us seeing such things, and at the very least this was perhaps a wise precaution, to delay the moment when the civilians might have turned against a longer campaign than actually happened.
It makes you wonder, as I'm sure the peaceniks are already wondering very loudly: What else are they not allowing us to see?
Saturday
This is quite a story:
A Muslim cleric who urged followers to kill non-believers, Americans, Hindus and Jews has been jailed for nine years.Jamaican-born Sheik Abdullah el-Faisal, 39, was told he had "fanned the flames of hostility", as Old Bailey judge Peter Beaumont delivered the sentence.
The judge recommended that el-Faisal, from Stratford in east London, should serve at least half of the sentence and then be deported.El-Faisal – who said it is permissible to use chemical weapons to kill unbelievers - stretched out an arm to a group of around 12 shocked-looking supporters as he was led away.
I've spent many minutes of my life opposing jail sentences like this. Clearly there is a point where words and actions can't be separated, but I'm not convinced that this man crossed it. On the other hand, if we are to take these people at their various words over the years, they are at war with us, and the usual punishment for being at war against my country and having the misfortune to get captured is imprisonment for the duration, even if you actually did nothing except wear an enemy uniform. So you won't see me at any demonstrations on this guy's behalf.
Two further quotes from the BBC story caught my attention. There was this …
Defence lawyer Jerome Lynch QC, said it was unfair that people such as controversial cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri had been seen by police and not brought to court like el-Faisal.
… which sounds right to me! And then comes this gem:
Mr Lynch said of el-Faisal: "This was a man who, although misguided, was not malicious."
I love that. He wanted all infidels murdered, but he wasn't being nasty about it or anything.
When all this "hate speech" legislation was being crafted, one of the arguments my side used repeatedly against such laws was that you could never be sure who they would end up being pointed at. I'm sure that the many Muslims who supported such laws imagined that they would only ever be used against tattooed white supremacist thugs wearing Union Jack tee-shirts.
So, on the other other hand, who'll be next? Because this won't end now. It won't just be other Muslim hate-speakers who will now be in the cross-hairs of this law. British Muslims of the we-don't-hold-with-terrorism-but variety, i.e. almost all of them, will be demanding that any excursion into hate-speak territory by non-Muslims, against Muslims or against anybody else, will be responded to by the British state with comparable brutality. And we now have a British state which will probably be eager to oblige, in order to prove that "this is not a war against Islam".
That's how it happens. Ethnic minorities have their feelings hurt - and I do mean really hurt - by white racists mouthing off at them. There ought to be a law against it! So, there is. The boring old business of actually enforcing existing laws against genuinely aggressive, action-not-just-words nastiness is too dull, and too expensive. How much more agreeable to pass yet another law and grab some nice headlines at no cost.
Then, you know what happens you know when, and suddenly there's a push to make life difficult for Muslim nutters in Britain, whom the government had until then been ignoring. But after you know what you know when, British tolerance of intolerably nasty foreigners in our midst suddenly itself becomes impossible to tolerate any longer.
So, we do over some pathetic Muslim hate-speaker, not for what he's been doing (too difficult), but for what he's merely been saying, because now there's a handy law for doing this with no more effort needed beyond playing some of the man's publicly distributed cassettes in a court. The people who have spent the last decade complaining about the law they use suddenly forget all their objections to the law, and think only of their objections to the objectionable maniac that the law has made into its first victim. The people whose instinct is to defend persons like the maniac in question have been arguing for hate-speech laws for as long as they can remember, so what can they say?
Then, so as not to be thought racist (see Britain's immigration policies), white people (equal and opposite maniacs) are then done over for hate-speaking as well.
And so it goes. The principle that you can go to prison merely because of something you said gets ever more deeply entrenched.
Laws have consequences.
Tuesday
Melanie McDonagh, ever the dependable voice of anti-idiotarianism and reason, has pointed out the ludicrous thinking behind the latest changes planned regarding laws on domestic violence. The intention is to remove the defence of provocation, whilst at the same time introducing a plea of self-defence for women who kill after years of being abused... or as Melanie sums it up:
a killing that is premeditated for a long time will be treated more lightly; in another, a killing that was not premeditated at all will be treated with the maximum severity.
As one would expect from a socialist collectivist like Solicitor General Harriet Harman, because men tend to kill out of anger and women out of fear, the law will be skewed to in fact make that a presumption. This is not really English law so much as feminist law, treating men and women according to their category rather than as individuals judged on the basis of facts.
But murder, like romance, is unique to the couple concerned. And it doesn't take much reflection to see that a blanket extenuation of self-defence is quite as likely to lead to miscarriages of justice as the blanket extenuation of provocation.
Quite so! This is a charter for murdering partners with whom a woman has a volatile (but not necessarily violent) relationship. The statue on top of the Old Bailey is 'blind justice', but no longer if you are male, it seems.
Thursday
Martin Taylor works within the British legal system. He is deeply troubled by the latest round of anti-money laundering laws.
During the course of this past month the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 has come into force. This is the legislative instrument which has introduced US-style asset forfeiture into UK law. But the Act goes much further than that. It also consolidates and widens the existing anti-money laundering laws and places a quite terrifying onus on those who are charged with enforcing them.
Prior to this Act the UK already had an anti-money laundering regime in place. It was aimed at the proceeds of drug trafficking and potential terrorist funding. The regime established a 'regulated sector' which consists of people such as bankers, accountants, lawyers, financial advisers, stockbrokers and anybody else who is broadly engaged in the business of money management.
The laws imposed an obligation on professionals working in that sector to establish and maintain procedures for obtaining and then keeping personal and business information about their own clients so that this could be used to assess whether or not, at any later time, there are unusual or unexpected patterns of spending or behaviour which may indicate money-laundering activity.
But that is not all, for it is professional advisers who are required to police their own clients. If the professional adviser suspects, for any reason, that his or client may be engaging in money-laundering then he or she is required their client and the circumstances of the transaction in question to a special police agency. Once a report has been made the professional adviser can take no further action on behalf of the client until they have been given express permission to do so by the police.
Penalties for non-compliance can be severe. In the case of non-disclosure of a suspicion of money-laundering, the maximum penalty is 14 years in prison.
That was the situation up until this month, but the Proceeds of Crime Act has taken things much further.
As far as the anti-money laundering regime is concerned the relevent clauses are Sections 327 to 330. Sections 327 to 329 extend the definition of 'money-laundering' from handling the proceeds of drugs or terrorism to the proceeds of any criminal activity regardless of how petty.
However is Section 330 of the new Act which introduces the most worrying element:
"It is extremely important for all lawyers to note that s330(2)(b) introduces a negligence or 'objective' test which will mean that failure to disclose information about money laundering will amount to the commission of an offence where a person has 'reasonable grounds' for knowing or suspecting that another person is engaged in money laundering, even if they did not actually know or suspect that money laundering was taking place. A solicitor working in the 'regulated sector' will therefore commit an offence if they fail to report money laundering and a reasonable professional should have known or suspected that it was going on. In effect, incompetence or oversight will result in the commission of a criminal offence and probably imprisonment.
On the face of it, this might seem a trivial change, but in fact it is a dramatic and potentially very dangerous extension of the advisers liability. Up until now, advisers were only obliged to report their suspicions. Now, they will be liable to prosecution if it turns out that they should have had suspicions. In effect, they are second-guessed. It is no longer of question of what he or she knew, but of what he or she should have known.
The result of this is that where the police do uncover a case of money-laundering in a transaction touched upon at some stage by a professional adviser, then it will be near-as-dammit impossible for that professional adviser to defend themselves against criminal charges.
One should also bear in mind that a sentence of imprisonment for a professional person means not just loss of liberty but also the termination of his or her career and the loss of everything they have worked for. The destruction of somebody's entire life for simply making a mistake strikes me not as justice but vendetta. How can this possibly be fair?
In the short term, at least, the understandable paranoia among those regulated professionals will cause them to file reports on just about every matter that crosses their desk. Now it is true to say that one cannot be too careful. Thus no significant financial transaction will take place in the UK without police knowledge and approval. This resembles more the febrile imaginings of Franz Kafka than the country I grew up in.
It would not surprise me in the least if ample numbers of professional advisers find the damoclean strain of coping with this from day-to-day to be intolerable and make the perfectly rational decision to earn their living by other means. Such an exodus would not be without national consequences for the financial sector in this country has earned a global reputation for efficiency, honesty and innovation. As a result, it is a sector which provides a generous proportion of Britain's GDP. A 'brain-drain' (or maybe a 'strain-drain') would be an economic catastrophe.
I do not suppose that even the most vigilant public servant honestly believes that we are a nation of clandestine drug smugglers, wannabe-bank robbers or aspiring terrorists. I can only conclude, then, that the demand to monitor every material financial transaction is motivated by a concern over tax 'leakage'. If that is the case, then I submit that the cure will prove far worse than the disease.
Was this not contemplated when our lawmakers drafted these proposals? Or was it contemplated but they simply didn't care? I am not sure which is more disturbing.
Regardless of what behaviour it is that our government is trying to squeeze into extinction it is, nonetheless, encumbant on any civilised administration to enact provision that are both reasonable and measured. To my mind, the provisions of the Proceeds of Crime Act are greedy, vindictive and criminally short-sighted.
Tuesday
Arguments are getting quite heated among libertarians about the claim that the US is a potential threat to freedom versus the view that the US is the best guarantor of freedom in the world today. I happen to agree with both statements.
It would be absurd to claim that the US is a worse place to live than peacetime Iraq, unless one happened to enjoy being part of a quasi-fascist police state. It is reasonable to worry about the potential threat to freedom posed by the world's only superpower: there is no one to overthrow that state if it should go rotten.
I am disappointed in the complacency of some US libertarians and conservatives who ought to remember that wartime is the time when most encroachments on freedom can be justified. I have been accused of hype for using Hillary Clinton as an example of what a horrible US could be. Surely there can't be anyone who thinks that none of Presidents Lincoln, Wilson, Hoover, F.D.Roosevelt, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Bush senior and Clinton were ever a threat to freedom? Or that no one will ever be elected to the US presidency who is a bad person?
I certainly wish the US forces in the Middle East a speedy and successful trip. I equally hope that the plan is to remove the tyrant with no or low civilian casualties, both for humanitarian reasons, but also because a post-Saddam Iraq will be less resentful of US troops if there hasn't been carpet-bombing, or bad target intelligence.
I remain convinced that the British forces will either be as symbolic or ineffective as the Piedmont-Sardinian contingent during the Crimean War, or worse that they are headed for a repeat of Isandlwana, Majuba Hill, or Dunkirk. Bluntly the best troops in the world are cannon fodder when they run out of ammunition, the comms equipment doesn't work and their boots have melted in the sun.
As for ID cards for use against terrorism. Yes they can help. Yes they are also a violation of personal liberty. But I would be rather more convinced if the British government weren't providing safe havens for terrorists whether leftist, Islamist or Irish.
Sunday
As a dual national I have a French national identity card. As a British national who doesn't have a driving licence and whose passport expired in December of last year, I have no state approved form of identifying myself.
Naturally I have never been asked to produce a form of identification in France by a state official except when crossing a border. Equally naturally I have been asked numerous times by police officers in the United Kingdom to identify myself (despite this being illegal without some probable cause, but then I suppose I have a shifty look).
Therefore I fear that a British identity card will become the pretext of even more bullying of white middle-class people by the low-life pigs that pass for law-enforcement officers in the UK today.
During the Second World War, I am told that a well known local dignitary in Ulster was chatting to a police officer at a railway station whilst waiting for a relative to arrive from Belfast. After twenty minutes the police officer said to the local businessman he'd known for years: "Mr Smith, please show me your identity card." He then proceeded to arrest Mr Smith for failing to carry proper documentation. I suspect that a Gestapo officer would have shown more common-sense.
The chances are that the present loutish types will not behave better than the Royal Ulster Constabulary's treatment of a Protestant businessman in 1942. Unfortunately, there is a genuine security advantage to identity cards (even when they can be forged). They provide an audit trail for car hire, bank accounts etc.
But of course in France, of course no self-respecting hotelier would dream of asking a single male for identification, unless they wished to cash a cheque...
Sunday
I have long known that the world is essentially a madhouse with no locks on the doors, but when I read that a former Taliban soldier who fought against British and US forces in Afghanistan will be given asylum in Britain because the pro-western government in Kabul is 'persecuting' him, I start to really wonder at what the word 'asylum' really means. Did rational people object to former members of the National German Socialist Workers Party being 'persecuted' in the aftermath of World War Two?
A few days ago, American bloggers Andrew and Sasha arrived in Britain, neither of whom have ever fought against British soldiers, or called for the death of Christians and Jews, or joined any organisations like Al-Muhajirun which aims to make Britain a muslim caliphate...
...and yet they were nevertheless detained at the airport upon arrival in the UK on Thursday and grilled for nine hours before being provisionally allowed into the country. In fact Sasha's blog was examined by the Immigration agents and its content used as the excuse to initially deny her entry. It is strange that the content of Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad's website does not seem to get him kicked out of the country.
The state is not your friend.
Tuesday
I have never been to Illinois, where the decision has been taken by an out-going State Governor to pardon four convicted murderers and commute the sentences of all "death row" inmates to life prison sentences. Unlike some libertarians, I see nothing especially wrong in a court sentencing a person to death for a crime. I would prefer the court not to be an instrument of the state. But more important than who pays the hangman's wage is the question of due process and presumption of innocence.
Assuming that a person cannot be charged without evidence having been presented to a magistrate or (better) a grand jury. Assuming that the charge is for a crime: murder, as opposed to not wearing a seat belt in the back of a taxicab, or having a cardboard cutter in the trunk of one's car, or other bizarre regulations of the 'welfare' society. Assuming that the suspect is made aware of his rights: to silence, to legal counsel, that any statement made to police may be used. Assuming that the accused is presumed innocent until convicted, has the benefit of not having to assist the prosecution, or even presenting no evidence to the court if he so wishes. Assuming the right to trial by jury (although in France there is the oddity that murder suspects prefer to be tried by a panel of judges than face juries, who tend to convict killers and whose verdicts cannot be easily appealed against). Assuming the right of appeal in the grounds of error, mistrial, new evidence.
Despite all these safeguards, which certainly no longer exist in the United Kingdom, there will always be miscarriages of justice so long as there are incompetent, corrupt or simply mistaken criminal investigations. As a libertarian, I take the view that individual people are not to be used without their consent and in violation of their lives, liberty or property as the means to other people's ends, unless they have forfeited such rights by initiating agression against other people. As far as criminals go, there is no problem, they have declared war on society: violating the rights of their victims. But a wrongly convicted person is the victim and the culprit is the legal process that resulted in the error of justice.
There is a defence from the charge of murder, where the accused believed that killing the victim was a necessary act, even if this belief was mistaken. But such a defence is dependent on being a able to sustain a credible plea that one wasn't reckless: shooting at passers-by at random in the street because one of them might be a mugger is plainly not justifiable.
In the same way, I cannot support the application of the death penalty in any jurisdiction where there is evidence that a wrongful conviction may have taken place. Governor Ryan would have felt doubts about this when he reprieved a convicted killer who was exonerated within 48 hours of being executed. At least if a person serving a life sentence is found to be innocent, we can release him, say sorry, and negotiate some sort of compensation. This is - to say the least - difficult where the hangman's noose has come into play.
Monday
The excellent folks at Stand.org.uk, who describe themselves as "a group of volunteers who originally came together in 1998 in a vain attempt to fix the worst aspects of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) Act", are mobilising efforts to oppose the imposition of ID cards in the UK. They enable you to contribute your comments to the 'consultation' process, which Downing Street is claiming shows Growing support for entitlement cards... We think you should go to Stand.org.uk website and let them show you how to tell the British government exactly how you feel about this. I did and left comments saying:
To put it bluntly, this is clear evidence, not that any more is needed, that the Labour government is as utterly inimical to civil liberties as the Tory party was. I shall never cooperate with what is clearly just a euphemism for a national ID card which will enhance the state's ability to monitor and control its subjects. It is clear that any 'voluntary' system you offer up will just the thin end of the wedge for a mandatory system that will enable policemen to stop you on the street and demand "your papers". I will never consent or cooperate with this.
Be polite but tell them what you think. Kudos to Stand.org.uk for their efforts to defend what is left of civil liberties in the United Kingdom.
The state is not your friend
Friday
A friend of mine insists that the Cato Institute is nothing more than a sell-out, obsessed with media coverage at the expense of intellectual integrity. This view seems to have been shaped by the jealousy of a less media-effective think-tank. In Britain, the Libertarian Alliance has the ambition of being/becoming the world's second best libertarian website after Cato.
Having been sent a copy of a recent publication: "Cato Supreme Court Review 2001-2002" I admit that I'm impressed with the quality of the content, the actual book itself, and the fact that it is possible to produce a commentary on the performance of the Supreme Court.
I have not read the Supreme Court Review from cover to cover yet. But leafing through I learnt about the practice of "fast-track plea bargaining" and the conundrum posed by obscenity laws on the one hand and the provisions of the Bill of Rights on the other. I discovered that 90 per cent of criminal cases don't go to trial by jury in the federal courts because of the "fast-track" system and that British law on defining "child pornography" would be thrown out, probably with a 7-2 majority, if attempted in the USA.
The contrast with the United Kingdom is stunning. No British think-tank has the intellectual quality to produce such an academic work. None produces this level of production quality. And our absence of a constitution makes such a project redundant. The so-called "unwritten constitution" is precisely worth the paper it's not written on.
My only suggestion for future editions would be that it would be handy to have a listing of all Supreme Court cases over the period, with an indication as to which cases were covered in the various chapters.
Otherwise, I welcome the appearance of this tome which deserves to become both a tool for the academic study of the US Constitution in practice, and an essential campaign guide to the wins and losses of individual freedom in America.
Tuesday
I was reporting the events in and around Parliament Square yesterday afternoon, for a French magazine. Having previously attended the 1998 Countryside March and the 2002 Liberty & Livelihood March, I was able to observe the differences in mood.
In 1998 the typical banner read "Please listen to us!"
In 2002 the banners read "The last peaceful protest..."
Yesterday was not a peaceful protest but an act of civil disobedience.
None of the people I interviewed believed that the government would or could deliver a deal. All criticised the leadership of the Countryside Alliance for as one Devonian middle-aged lady put it: "They are protecting their knighthoods." Minutes later she was part of the first violent attempt to break into the House of Commons car park.
I took a careful look at the people, mostly men who took on the police. One looked like a soccer hooligan, baseball cap, beer gut and the drooling stupidity of English nationalism at its worst: the police didn't even bother arresting him when he broke through the police cordon.
The others were in their late thirties or forties. They looked more like farm labourers than landowners. They also looked rather more interested in provoking a battle than dialogue. The campaign badge said "Bollocks to Blair". No pretence at dialogue there.
In all the police acted with almost incredible restraint, police horses were shoved backwards by huntsmen who tried to unbuckle saddles and throw riders. Smoke bombs were thrown by Real C.A. activists, sometimes at police. The Real C.A. activists, who have promised a campaign of direct action against the ban on hunting, were handing out Real C.A. stickers but not wearing them themselves to avoid detection. Some of the demonstration leaders were giving instructions in Welsh to confuse the eavesdropping Special Branch.
There were eight arrests, but most of the violent offenders were allowed to rejoin the crowd. I overheard a reporter interviewing a campaigner and asking why they didn't go through the normal channels: support the Tories, for instance. The reply indicated that for these protesters at least, they have to create their own opposition.
Shortly before I left I heard a police officer saying to a mother with two young children who were screaming "Blair Out!" and cheering a particularly vigourous charge against the mounted police:
"It's one thing to be up against Swampy or those Greens, but this just doesn't feel right!"
He looked as if he'd just realised that his parents could be attacking another part of the human shield of police. Unlike his Parisian police counterparts in 1943, he has the option of refusing to collaborate.
Monday
Everyone knows the old joke. Q.How can you tell when a lawyer is lying? A. His lips are moving.
It's not true of course, but it is an accurate reflection of the popular antipathy towards lawyers in general; something which too many lawyers themselves have done much to foster.
Still, I hope enough of my fellow Brits will be able to cast aside their natural cynicism of the legal profession for just long enough to applaud Matthias Kelly, the Chairman of the Bar Council, who has announced that he intends to take on this 'highly illiberal' government:
""There is something about the Home Office that brings out these really penal instincts in people. Mr Blunkett is profoundly illiberal. We have a system that is fair and I want to preserve fairness. I do not want to sacrifice it for short-term political expediency, which is what I think much of the language of the debate being run by the Government is about."
Admirable sentiments from Mr.Kelly. He has hit upon the truth that the abolition of our liberties is, in some senses, a by-product of incompetence rather than a deliberate political ambition. It has everything to do with a government that is desperate to be seen to be doing something in response to the voters increasing concerns about spiralling crime rates (or, in any event, the general perception of greater crime and violence).
I wish Mr.Kelly every success with his campaign and I hope he will not be deterred by the inevitable response he will elicit from the government and its supporters, that he is motivated by greed and self-interest. It is no secret to anyone that barristers do very nicely from the system as it is and it is, therefore, all too easy to dismiss any genuine concerns they may have as fears for their own pocket.
Such allegations may or may not have any basis in fact but, truth be told, I don't care. Self-interest is always a reliable motivator and I would be only too pleased to witness it being put to a good use for a change.
It is also pleasing to note that concerns about this illiberal government are now being publicly aired by the 'great and the good', a class to which Mr.Kelly assuredly belongs. Thus far, nobody of any public standing has been willing to rock the NuLabour boat. Let us hope that others follow his lead and begin to break their, hitherto, shameful silence.
As for Mr.Kelly, who knows, perhaps he has been reading the Samizdata.
Monday
I suppose it's a bit too tin-foil hattish to suggest that this might have been timed to coincide with the official visit of Syria's President to Britain by the police to recruit paid informants sounds like exactly the kind of thing said President might recognise from his own Ba'athist tradition.
"A £500 reward is being offered to people who tell the authorities about persistent drink-drivers over Christmas."
Question: How will either the informant or the police know if the alleged 'drink-driver' is 'persistent'? I suppose the informant could swear blind to the fact, provided they needed the money enough.
Of course, the Syrian regime has nothing to do with it at all, though it does have all the ring of 'police-state' snitch culture so sadly prevalent in that part of the world. No, the reality is that this is yet another back-door admission by the state that it has now passed more laws and regulations than it can possibly enforce and so has little choice but to co-opt the polity into acting as its eyes and ears.
What next, I ask myself? 'Kids, report your parents for not paying their taxes'?
Sunday
Patrick Crozier has seen a round in the ongoing debate regarding state imposed ID cards... and he did not like what he saw.
Please don't ask me why I was watching Richard and Judy (a sort of British 'Oprah') the other day but I was. They were having a discussion on ID cards with Tony Blair's Big Buddy Lord Falconer on the pro-ID card side and Mark Littlewood of the pressure group Liberty putting the case against... and Littlewood lost.
I had better explain the way the argument went. Falconer said that it was all about cutting down on social security fraud and immigrants working without work permits. Falconer made a mistake in insisting on calling it an Entitlement Card (shades of the Community Charge) but otherwise he did fine. "Nothing to worry about" was the message.
Littlewood made two points. The first was that it didn't work - there was plenty of experience on the Continent to show that was the case. The second was that it would be used by the police to harrass and intimidate members of racial minorities.
I have to say I didn't find this particularly convincing. There is a rather odd belief in Britain that Continentals do everything so much better than we do. This is allied to the even odder belief that to criticize anything the French or Germans do is tantamount to xenophobia. To any "progressive" the argument simply won't wash.
And as for the harrassment argument I am sure any self-respecting policeman can find ways to harrass people ID cards or not.
Which got me thinking - how would I make the case against ID cards? Well, for starters, I wouldn't make it by making appeals to abstract notions like freedom and liberty. From what I can work out the vast majority of the British public simply have no concept of the term let alone a desire to see it preserved or extended.
The problem is that if you abandon abstracts you have to start talking in practicalities. You could mention that it is expensive, maybe a billion or so, but frankly in government spending terms that's peanuts. And anyway, it does kind of miss the point. We are trying to make the claim that ID cards are a bad thing not merely an expensive thing which might do some good but that the costs outweigh the benefits.
You could say that it will prove very useful to future dictators and tyrants. But no one in Britain (outside libertarian circles) believes that will ever happen. "Goose-stepping Nazis here? Don't be daft!" would be the attitude.
So, what on earth should we say? I think it is best to consider where the drive for ID cards comes from. Falconer himself said it: social security fraud ie the state and immigration ie the state again. This is a state policy to patch over the failures of previous state policies.
I think this is the line of attack that is likely to work best. Something along the lines of: "Isn't it amazing. For a thousand years we Britons have been amongst the freest and most prosperous peoples of the world. In all that time not once outside a grave national emergency has our government ever forced us to possess identity cards. Even Bloody Mary had no use for them but this government does. What does that say about this government? I'll tell you what. It tells us that it is uniquely incompetent..."
Well, that's my stab.
Patrick Crozier
Sunday
Few weeks ago I blogged about China's pressure on Hong Kong to pass an anti-subversion law. According to the law, people found guilty of acts of treason, sedition, secession from, or subversion of, the mainland government could be imprisoned for life under the new law. Also, concepts like "state secrets" and "national security" in the law are too vague, leaving them open to abuse.This may be - and I'd certainly argue that it will be - exploited by authorities in Beijing and Hong Kong against anyone they dislike in the former British colony, promised a high degree of autonomy when it was handed back to China in 1997.
Tens of thousands of Hong Kong people (march organisers say 50,000) have taken part in one of the territory's biggest marches in years, denouncing the plans they fear will erode freedom and civil liberties. As many as 100 civil and religious groups joined in the march, including the Falun Gong spiritual movement, which is banned in China.
Mr Wong, a marcher says:
"This law will threaten the rights of many, many people in Hong Kong, how can I not protest?"
Quite. I wonder what John Smith or Joe Bloggs would say...
Friday
Frank Sensenbrenner sees the triumph of subjectivism in the British legal system. The victim's perception of the nature of a crime now replaces analysis of the objective facts.
It seems that in David Blunkett's Britain, it has become a greater crime to offend the opinions of a select class than to infringe upon their rights. Natalie Solent recently reported on Robin Page's arrest. Mr Page, a reporter for the Daily Telegraph, was arrested for inciting racial hatred after stating that rural individuals should have the same rights to legal protection for traditional events as other minorities, such as blacks, Muslims, and gays.
At the heart of the subject is the definition of inciting racial hatred. A libertarian perspective would conclude that inciting racial hatred would be advocacy for direct action to deny liberties and rights to a certain race or group, as opposed to merely voicing bigoted opinions. No matter how repellent one's opinions are, if one is only disparaging certain groups, as opposed to suggesting criminal action against them, it is free speech. After all, no one is forcing anyone who might be offended by free speech to listen to it. Most of history's famous human rights campaigners such as Martin Luther King, Steve Biko, and Mahatma Gandhi used the same construct as Mr Page. They did not advocate hostilities against their oppressors, but demanded equal rights. Today, suggesting similar ideas is racial hatred.
There is deep hypocrisy in the enforcement of the Public Order Act in this context. While Mr Page stewed in prison for advocating equality, Sheik Abu Hamza and his cohorts preach the slaughter of infidels on the streets of London and by main landmarks. Surely proposing murder is a greater crime than proposing equality? Just a look at Al Muhajiroun is bad enough. While Mr Omar Bakri Muhammad is certainly free to preach whatever he likes behind closed doors, to allow him to advocate crime in public is too far.
In addition, the Public Order Act may go too far. According to an official government website, racial hatred is defined as threatening, abusive, or merely insulting behaviour. Also, was looking at what laws enshrine hate crimes against gays, and it looks even worse in that respect. According to Rainbow Network the perception of anyone that a crime was a homophobic or racially motivated attack is enough for it to be deemed so.
Therefore, Samizdatistas de Havilland, Carr, Cronin, Micklethwait & Amon, I look forward to seeing you as a fellow defendant versus The Crown when they get around to prosecuting the Samizdata Team for hate speech, as I'm sure there's some idiot in Islington who'd deem Samizdata 'hate speech'.
Frank Sensenbrenner
Thursday
Yesterday, chewing gum was in the Eye of the Beholder who quoted from this story, about some US-Singapore trade negotiations:
Negotiators from both countries said they hoped to resolve the issue of capital controls quickly, clearing the way for a final deal.But Mr. Zoellick apparently did not break down Singapore's resistance on another issue: its longtime ban on chewing gum, a prohibition ordered to keep the nation's streets and sidewalks cleaner.
I know how the Singaporeans feel. The relentless disfiguring of London's public spaces with chewing gum deposits is one of the things that most often makes me wish that "public" spaces were more frequently privately owned than they are. Occasionally a fresh deposit actually sticks to your shoe, which is horrible. You later have to scrape it off with a knife. Usually the deposit has dried and just remains there, a black blob on the floor.
It's the sneakiness of it that gets me. The chewing gum droppers know that in the grand scheme of things their petty little misdemeanour doesn't rate very high on the wickedness scale. And it is exactly this that they exploit. In a world of terrorist outrages, ever rising crime of the more usual sort, ghastly new laws that won't do anything about crime but will be ghastly, ghastly new … well, just read every second posting on Samizdata (which seems to be going through a rather grim phase just now, for some reason), … in such a world, who has time to moan about chewing gum? Only me and the government of Singapore it would seem.
If the chewing gum miscreants don't drop their chewing gum on the floor, they stick it on a strategically chosen spot in an advert. The first few times you see this it can be funny, but for me this joke stopped being funny years ago.
What's going on here? No doubt a lot of chewing gum misbehaviour is sheer thoughtlessness, perpetrated by otherwise blameless and worthy people, but not nearly all, I surmise. I think what we may also have here is a particular example of the pathetic-person-making-an-impact syndrome. Another example of this is people who make a point of crossing roads just in front of motorists who they know will slow up and be inconvenienced, because that way the regular (car-owning) world is forced to pay attention to their otherwise meaningless existence, if only for a moment. Take that! I'm not so insignificant now, am I? Chewing gum misbehaviour is even sneakier, because it is anonymous. Ha! That was me, but you'll never know, will you, hee hee hee! Chewing gum as clandestine self-expression, a subculture of secret Jackson Pollocking.
And why are there so many pathetic people who can only make an impact on the world by annoying it anonymously with chewing gum? The answer to that would be a bigger and grimmer Samizdata posting. I merely flag up the problem.
Other gum scum (I like that – that's my heading for this) scatter their chewing gum as part of a more general pattern of nastiness and parasitism and not-so-petty aggressions. Presumably what the Singaporeans also feel, in addition to simply not liking gum dropped everywhere, is that if it's chewing gum droppings today, it may be bricks through windows tomorrow and robbing old ladies for small or not so small change the next day. This is the "zero tolerance" theory, which I think is also right.
I know what you'll say, all you people who can only make an impact on the world by leaving clever little comments on blogs (which I do agree is better than gum dropping). There's a difference between possessing chewing gum and chewing chewing gum, and dropping chewing gum. (Cue the great Gum Control debate of Christmas 2002: "The majority of gum users are in fact responsible people, and we should not allow a small anti-social minority to be the excuse for suppressing the harmless pleasures of the law-abiding majority …" blah blah blah.) True. But not my point here. Have a nice day.
Thursday
A columnist for the Telegraph has been arrested and held in a cell for saying that the rural minority should have "the same rights as blacks, Muslims and gays."
Tuesday
China is pushing Hong Kong to enact the anti-subversion legislation, under which people found guilty of acts of treason, sedition, secession from, or subversion against the mainland government could be imprisoned for life. To you and me, any criticism of China or its leaders can be punished by being locked up for life. More importantly, Hong Kong's constitution guarantees a wide range of civil liberties not granted in mainland China and the greatest danger of any anti-subversion law is the possibility that it would open a channel for mainland China's laws to be applied in Hong Kong.
Britain has urged the government of Hong Kong to protect basic rights and freedoms as the former British colony prepares to pass the anti-subversion law based on the mainland's broad notions of "national security" and "state secrets" demanded by the Chinese government.
Apparently, China is concerned that Hong Kong could be used as a base from which to subvert the mainland. What a splendid idea! But what is it that I read?! Hong Kong is required to pass some form of anti-subversion law under its constitution, which was agreed between Britain and China before the territory reverted to Chinese rule. The Hong Kong Basic Law is the miniconstitution that took effect July 1, 1997. The Article 23 prohibits foreign political organizations from conducting political activities in Hong Kong and forbids political organizations in Hong Kong from establishing ties with foreign political organizations.
For example, the proposed law could be taken to mean that as few as two Catholics who contact or sponsor a mainland Catholic community not recognized by the Chinese government could be charged with endangering national security.
China's foreign ministry spokeswoman insisted the legislation would bring Hong Kong into accordance with general international practice. Although to us at Samizdata.net it often appears that general international practice is being brought into accordance with Chinese practices.
I have a better idea, why don't they try a poster campaign instead?! 
Friday
I don't smoke. I don't like the whiff of a cigarette and frequently will come back from a certain pub, cursing the atmosphere in the boozer for making my clothing reek of ciggies. I think that so-called 'passive smoking', while it may not cause cancer or other health problems, is certainly unpleasant. I prefer to sit in the non-smoking bits of a restaurant if at all possible and ask people in my apartment not to smoke. So there it is.
And yet, and yet... I loathe the cultural jihad in the West that has been going on against smokers. The latest lunacy has been the decision by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to ban smoking in all public places. All of them. So even if the owner of a private restaurant or bar (which are of course private property) says it is okay to smoke, and the customers are okay with that, the ban must be imposed nonetheless. Never mind that no one is forced to go into a bar or restaurant if they dislike the atmosphere. This is a clear violation of property rights. Of course with true public spaces which have been funded out of tax, the situation is a bit different and with subways, safety issues to do with fire can be used to justify a ban, or partial one.
But Bloomberg, owner of a some sort of news company 
, is showing a total lack of proportion. Since September 11, 2001, New Yorkers have occasionally had many reasons to steady their nerves and enjoy the indulgences of this fleeting life. For some, it may be the taste of a delicious bagel, or a sip of a beer. But for many citizens of that great city, it has been about lighting up a cigarette.
Friday
Jack Bell makes a timeless point and leads many at Samizdata.net wonder if not just Iran but some Western societies are not well overdue for Jefferson's prescription.
Reason has an editorial everyone should read. It discusses the story of Dr. Hashem Aghajari who is facing a death sentence in Iran because he called for secular and religious reform. He has turned down a negotiated appeal with the religious courts of Iran because, as Dr. Aghajari says
"... those who have issued this verdict have to implement it if they think it is right or else the Judiciary has to handle it."
Basically he is willing to die to make his point.
In these days of jihad where our focus is on the religious fanatics and their facist fellow travellers, it is good for us to know that there are also those in the Middle East who share our belief in the rights and dignity of man and the liberty of the individual. In freedom from religous and secular tyranny. Share it strongly enough to pay the same ultimate price as was once paid here in America to secure those very rights for us.
I wonder how many of us will be standing up for the count in a decade or so if (when) the apparatus of protection we are so busy erecting is used for darker purposes? Personally I think Thomas Jefferson said it best:
"What country before ever existed a century & a half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is it's natural manure."
Jack Bell
Thursday
The police in Britain have been busy smashing down doors and dragging people from their beds.
Yesterday it was wicked people who were connected to child porn (at least the police said they all were - even though hundreds of people have been arrested over the last few days).
Today however it will be people guilty of 'hate crimes' - after all, posters on the London Underground warn that to 'verbally abuse' people on grounds of race, gender or sexual orientation is a crime and will be punished.
So who will defend people who have said nasty things? After all they must all be guilty - otherwise the police would not have dragged them into the street (with the other people who live in the street looking down from their bedroom windows).
Yesterday the Prime Minister made a speech (after the Queen's opening of Parliament). The Prime Minister explained to us that Britain is stuck in the past with a silly devotion to 19th century concepts of civil liberties - such things as trial by jury obstruct the modern state and must be further 'limited'.
Paul Marks
Monday
As the Council of Europe grows more confident, the authoritarian future planned for all who live under the blue & gold stary crown of thorns is rapidly becoming an authoritarian present.
The venerable Eurocrats have decreed that, "'racist and xenophobic material' means any written material, any image or any other representation of ideas or theories, which advocates, promotes or incites hatred, discrimination or violence, against any individual or group of individuals, based on race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin, as well as religion if used as pretext for any of these factors."
[...]
The actual criminal act is "making publicly available, through a computer system" any of the [Council of Europe]'s forbidden thoughts. And be warned; there's a nice weasel clause for carriers -- the CoE castrators are very smart. They know that if they held carriers liable the carriers would lobby this piece of bureaucratic abuse into the dust bin. You are on your own here, and by clever design. You will either take to the streets en masse and sternly warn your government that you will not be told what you can and cannot say, or you will be told what you can and cannot say.
We should like to think that this madness won't stand long; but as Chesterton noted, it's the business of Liberals to make imbecilic mistakes like these, and the business of Conservatives to ensure that they never get fixed.
Soon the fact that I regard the EU as a cabal of Transnational Socialist who will turn all Europe into a panoptic nightmare may well be considered 'xenophobic material' and thus could get me locked up if I wrote that on Samizdata.net from within the EU. Of course the more likely that looks like becoming a realty, the more you will see pseudonymous postings on Samizdata.net and possibly a change of hosting locale. The state is not your friend... and super-states even less so.
The time is coming for things to start getting nasty. Now that habeas corpus has been made meaningless in Britain, if one of Samizdata.net's British contributors writing from London upsets a Greek politician by writing something like, say...
All PASOK politicians are a bunch of corrupt socialist bastards who allowed the '17 November' terrorist organisation to operate in Greece with impunity for decades because it is actually controlled by elements within PASOK. Recent 'successes' against N17 will of course uncover exactly nothing.
Well, merely expressing that view can result in a knock on a door in London by British police with a Greek arrest warrant that cites EU law, and next stop for the person who dared to express a dissenting view is some hell hole jail in the armpit of Europe that was once the cradle of Western civilisation.
This is not something that is the fevered products of wacko anti-EU conspiracy theorists, it is reality and it is well any truly upon Europeans and Britons alike. Transnational fascism of coming, in the guise of anti-fascism, and it is coming right now.
Friday
The BBC Protection Ministry (sometimes knowns as the 'Independent' Television Commission), has banned the US news program "The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board With Stuart Varney" and threatened CNBC with fines. As the Opinion Journal puts it:
"Let us see if we get this straight. The ITC thinks it is protecting viewers by refusing to let them hear the viewpoints of a roundtable of American newspaper editors? These same editors may state their views in a newspaper that bears the name of The Wall Street Journal, but if they utter them on a TV program that bears that newspaper's name, their views are somehow tainted? That sure sounds like a free-speech issue to us.
Which leads to the question of what the case is really about. The answer--and we wish we could say this with the requisite plummy accent--is the BBC. The ITC's actions against CNBC Europe and CNN amount to little more than the British government harassing private competitors of the publicly funded British Broadcasting Corp."
I'll be a bit less compromising than our friends across the water. What the bureaucracy really doesn't like is the non-Tranzi slant of the WSJ. They don't want the BBC to have to compete with ideas.
I hope our Russian ex-pat friend succeeds in taking the Beeb down a peg or two!
Thursday
Under comment pressure from the deeply annoying A_t, and before he says it for me, I realise that "witchfinding" or "witchhunting" are no more appropriate as descriptions of what happened to Harry Stein than they are of what happened during the 1950s when McCarthy was chasing communists. Communists existed. Witches did not exist. But racists also exist. It's merely that Harry Stein isn't one. Oh well.
Wednesday
I don't know – I really do not know – how much clout little old limey Samizdata has in the big wide world out there, by which I mean the USA, but I hope it has some, and that if we flag up this article in City Journal (Autumn 2002), then it will count for a little something, or at any rate an extra little something to set beside the fact that Instapundit has already flagged it up a few hours ago. Maybe it will influence these particular PC witchfinders that they are now getting themselves detectably, internet searchably, despised all over the world (by which I mean in Britain).
The author of the article is a new name to me, Harry Stein. Stein is the author of the book How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (and Found Inner Peace), and the article is about his trials and tribulations on the road selling his book, and specifically about a speech he gave in Dallas and its gutter-journalistic aftermath.
Perry likes quotes so that this will make sense even if the link one day goes dead, so let me see. Well, here's quite a lot of the piece, but it's a good piece, so …:
I concluded the speech with a story about my son. As a high school sophomore, he had an English teacher, a white liberal, who began the unit on Huckleberry Finn by announcing that, though he was obliged to teach it, he wasn’t happy about it. It was a “racist” book, he said, the word “nigger” appearing with appalling frequency. There has, of course, been a lot of this lately. Twain’s masterpiece, a work not only famously cited by Ernest Hemingway as the progenitor of “all modern American literature” but widely esteemed as the most moving attack on racism ever written, routinely appears on lists put out by groups like the ACLU and People For the American Way of works under most sustained assault by book banners—a target, as columnist Michele Malkin succinctly observes, of those “too busy counting Twain’s words to understand them.”Indeed, Twain himself wrote that he intended Huck’s growing recognition of Jim’s humanity to reflect the nation’s ongoing struggle with slavery’s legacy of deeply embedded racism. For any even semi-sentient reader, it is all there in the pivotal scene where Huck agonizes over whether to send the letter he’s written to Jim’s owners betraying the runaway slave, knowing that, as the beliefs of the time had it, failing to do so will mean forfeiting his soul: “I was a-trembling because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: ‘All right, then, I’ll go to hell,' and I tore it up.”
My son, already very familiar with the Twain classic, raised his hand and told the teacher that, in fact, it was an anti-racist book—indeed, one of the most powerful ever written. Thus began an increasingly heated back-and-forth that went on for a good 15 minutes, culminating with the teacher saying, “It’s clear you have to work on your racial sensitivity.” “Are you calling me a racist?” my son demanded, deeply aggrieved. When the teacher turned away, refusing to answer, he stalked out of class. He returned home from school that day remarking: “Well, I’m starting out with a C in that class, and working down from there”—a prophecy that proved, alas, all too accurate. But, as I told the Dallas crowd, I was never prouder of him in my life. That concluded my talk. I got a round of applause and waited for questions.
Immediately a black guy in the middle of the room stood up. Later identified as William Jones of the San Diego–based CityLink Investment Corporation, described in a Fed press release as “an enterprise that acquires, develops, and manages real estate ventures and helps to renew urban areas,” he announced that he didn’t have a question, but a statement. He said he was “very personally offended by your jokes about black people and your seemingly rationalizing the use of the word ‘nigger.' I’m a businessman, my wife is a prosecutor, my children go to college, we pay our taxes. The overgeneralization doesn’t really help to further what I think you really want, which is understanding.”
I stood there for a moment at the podium, stunned, not knowing how to respond. I hadn’t the slightest idea what I’d said to provoke such a response. Told jokes about black people? Not only had I not remotely done such a thing; the suggestion that I ever would was beyond outrageous. Rationalized the use of the word “nigger”? I was describing what had happened between my son and his teacher. It was the word Twain used, what the two of them were arguing about—the very point of the story!
And of course there's more. It gets written up in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Stein has already been in touch with this organ and fears the worst. He's right:
Early the following week, I heard from a friend who lives in Dallas. “What the hell did you say down here?”Mike Lee’s article, co-written with a staffer for the paper in Washington, was an exceedingly nasty piece of work, a catalog of half-truths and insinuations, profoundly unfair, but also rather deft, in that none of that was readily apparent to the untrained eye. Starting on page one and running over 1,100 words, it began with a fundamental mischaracterization of what had occurred and took off from there: “Federal Reserve Bank directors from the Dallas and San Francisco districts were stunned when a conservative author’s luncheon speech at the Dallas bank turned into a lecture about political correctness, blacks, gays, and women who put their children in day care.”
Throughout, things I had said were taken out of context, stripped of tone and otherwise misrepresented. Lee had been granted access to a video of the speech but was highly selective in what he used. On the key issue, the Huck Finn anecdote, the point I was making is nowhere to be found, but Jones’s noble-sounding declaration—with its damning accusation about my “seemingly rationalizing of the word ‘n——-' ”—is quoted in full. (In fact, that’s the only reason I can reproduce it verbatim here.) Of course, my response goes unrecorded. What, then, had provoked Jones’s outburst in the first place? “[Stein] also described an argument his son had with a teacher about Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and repeated a racial slur that is in the book.”
And so on. Bastards. Please read the whole thing. Which I hope stays up there for ever.
A final thought, concerning the title I've used for this posting. The word "witch" is used to describe the communist hunts of the fifties, but that's wrong. Witches never did what they were accused of, by such horrible people as the man played by Vincent Price in Witchfinder General. They were not guilty as charged. But the communists? How dare they call it "witch" hunting. Communism existed then and still exists. Then as now, communists supported it and lied for it and fantasised about it.
But to describe what happened and is presumably still happening to Stein, the word witch is entirely proper. He did none of the things he's accused of, and I hope his vile accusers get a thorough going over from the blogosphere. They deserve much worse.
Monday
Perry has gone and got my creative juices flowing. I've already drafted the copy for the advertisement that I intend to place in all the Singles Columns:
"Practice safe sex! If you've arranged a date this morning, call me this afternoon."
You can hardly blame me for wanting to cash in on (yet another) government 'crackdown'. I'm getting too old to chase ambulances and voyeurism sounds like a far more appealing way to make a living.
'Crackdown'. HMG just loves that word. They crackdown on this, they crackdown on that. Whenever they suspect that the British tax cattle have forgotten why exactly it is they need all these overpaid suits in Whitehall, out they come with another 'crackdown', straight from the Must-Be-Seen-To-Be-Doing-Something School of Political Science. HMG has become like an angry man who can no longer communicate with his children so he just takes his belt to them every now and then to keep them from asking so many stupid questions.
However, the thing about 'crackdowns' is that, very often, they never actually materialise. They're announced, trumpeted by a compliant media for a while and, by the time the news-wagon has rolled on to the next terrorist atrocity or Boy Band break-up, it's all been forgotten about.
This 'crackdown' on the sex laws has that familiar ring to it. They'll probably knock it around at committee stage for a while, draft some new laws, put them before their own laywers for advice, be told that their ideas are insane, unworkable and likely to lead to chaos and then the whole thing will be quietly filed away. However, in the meantime, sufficient kerfuffle has been made to keep some radical marxoid feminist wing of the Labour Party quiet until after the next election.
I'm just speculating of course and I could (Lord help us) be wrong. So I shall maintain a watching brief in the meantime; one that I shall not actually be able to charge for. Damn!
Sunday
David Blunkett, Britain's blind Home Secretary proved his blindness extends far beyond mere eyes.
New sex offence laws to be unveiled by the Government next month could include a crackdown on date rape.Under the proposed law, reportedly being introduced by Home Secretary David Blunkett, men accused of rape will have to prove they made efforts to ensure their sexual partners gave agreement.
They will no longer be able to rely on the defence of "honest belief", a legal loophole where suspects can be acquitted if they genuinely believed the alleged victim wanted sex.
What happened to the presumption of innocence? This is utter madness. Rape is an appalling crime, but how exactly can a guy who "genuinely believed the alleged victim wanted sex" somehow prove it to be a justified believe? Is he expected to get a second opinion from some third party before continuing at each stage? Perhaps lawyers like David Carr will find an new lucrative source of business as 'dating lawyers', sitting at the bottom of the bed and witnessing each declaration of consent.
- Him: May I touch you there, my dear?
Her: Oooo, yes please!
Lawyer: Consent recorded.
Him: Oh yeah, baby...
Her: Ahhhhhh....
Lawyer: Umm, is that 'Ahhhh yes' or 'Ahhhhh no'?
Her: Yes! Yes!
Lawyer: Consent recorded.
Him: Lean back a bit...Oooooo!
Her: Mmmmm... a little lower darling.
Lawyer: Hold it! As your lawyer I must advise you that if you proceed, it could be construed as potentially non-consensual as she has clearly stated you are not touching her exactly where she wishes to be touched! Whilst not admitting anything to the generality of the foregoing on behalf of my client, I must advise my client to, er, withdrawn and seek written confirmation before continuing...
Friday
Taking a bus to Brixton from Streatham this afternoon, I saw the Big Brother posters which assured me I was safe. Considering I was in one of London's three murder hotspots, the posters seemed appropriate. In Coldharbour Lane the new multimedia telephone kiosks were empty yet there were queues outside them. These were the drugs hustlers who called out "Grass", "Charlie" and "Horse" as I walked past.
Directly beneath a bus lane camera a car blocked the bus lane. I was reminded that when the security cameras were installed in Coldharbour Lane one of them didn't work. Any guesses where a murder was committed? Yup, directly beneath the faulty camera.
In Kingston-upon-Thames a few years ago a jeweller's shop was discovered to be the only shop in the street which couldn't be seen from the array of cameras. A nice dark alleyway running alongside was also unaccountably off-screen. Any guesses how this was discovered? Yup, when a gang burgled the shop.
At least there is no suggestion that inside information could possibly have contributed to these crimes.
Friday
I finally found the right Microsoft compatible audio codec for Linux and have watched the video of Netanyahu's press conference which I discussed yesterday.
I must admit I am impressed. I'd never before got the measure of the man. If your opinions of him, like mine, were formed by watching the BBC or other evening news, I highly recommend you take the time to listen. He is a very strong defender of Freedom of Speech.
I think he should get his own blog. He'd fit in nicely with the rest of us.
Wednesday
I have been reading my morning dose of news when I came across ZDNet reporting that a new law against gambling was passed in Greece. Law Number 3037, enacted at the end of July, explicitly forbids electronic games with 'electronic mechanisms and software' from public and private places, and people have already been fined tens of thousands of euros for playing or owning games.
It also transpires that the true meaning of the wording of the law means that anybody carrying an electronic game - even if it is just on a mobile phone - could face a hefty fine or lengthy jail sentence! According to the Greek newspaper Kathimerini,
"The police will be responsible for catching offenders, who will face fines of 5,000 to 75,000 euros (US$4,967 to US$74,506) and imprisonment of one to 12 months. The blanket ban was decided in February after the government admitted it was incapable of distinguishing innocuous video games from illegal gambling machines."
One online report said that even watching a film on DVD - many of which contain promotional games linked to the movie - had resulted in an arrest and a 10,000-euro (US$9,934) fine.
Internet cafes are allowed to continue to operate, providing all gaming is prohibited: if a client is found to be running any sort of game, including online chess, the café owner will be fined and the place closed. The law applies equally to visitors from abroad:
"If you know these things are banned, you should not bring them in"
said the commercial attaché at the Greek Embassy in London - who declined to give her name.
Now, so many words spring to mind - most of them not suitable for a 'family' blog. I will restrain myself and focus my disbelief and fury on one point - the government imposes a blanket ban on games (electronic in this case presumably because it has already banned the other kind) because it is incapable of distinguishing innocuous video games from illegal gambling machines! Not only have governments been preventing people from all sort of activities, now they can't even be bothered to find out what exactly it is they don't want us to do! Somebody wake me up, please, I must be having a nightmare...
Wednesday
I've just listened to Lawrence Lessig's lecture on Free Culture and highly recommend it. Larry describes how much liberty we have lost in the last fifty years. A small number of giant media Corps have used their lobbying power to criminalize more and more of what was once unregulated behavior.
Government acting alone is not the only threat to liberty. The self interest of exceedingly greedy corporations in conjunction with exceedingly greedy lawmakers is a formula for the destruction of civil society. Think how close the world of William Gibson's Corp ruled dystopia is. The combination of latent totalitarians such as Jack Valenti and outright crooked politicians - Sen Hollings (D Disney) comes to mind - is a deadly one for everything we as libertarians stand for. It is also an attack on the core of everything the Left and the Right believe in as well.
Therein lies our hope.
As Ben Franklin said: "We must indeed all hang together, or assuredly, we shall all hang separately."
Wednesday
Ace blogger John Weidner of Random Jottings has written about a truly shocking decision by Yahoo to help the Chinese government censor the Internet for the 1 billion people living in China (and of course that open air prison camp called Tibet).
There is only one way to deal with a company like Yahoo and that is to made them pay a price in the market for their collaboration with the brutal regime in Peking: Boycott Yahoo!
Thursday
I have always believed that the political classes have one project and one project only: maintaining power. All other considerations are dispensible; smoke and mirrors for the voters come election time.
The political class that we are lumbered with in Britain wish to tighten their grip somewhat by removing the obstacle of an 800 year-old Common Law right known as Double Jeopardy i.e. a person cannot be tried twice for the same crime.
This was not a defence mechanism fabricated on some altruistic frolic. It was seen as essential if a citizen was to maintain their liberty against an all-powerful state which had the resources to pursue them at will if so desired. It was a mechanism which maintained the rule of law not the rule of whim.
Home Secretary David Blunkett has announced plans to 'modernise' our legal system by abolishing this hard-won right. He wants to make it easier for the State to pursue serious criminals who are seen to 'get away with it'. It sounds like a noble impulse but the truth is far darker. Of course, the government has been at pains to stress that it will only abolished in so far as it relates to very serious matters e.g. murder but I'm afraid that we've heard this one before. Once the principle is established it is only a matter of time before mission creep drives it forward to cover all and any offences (including, possibly, EU-mandated offences such as 'xenophobia' or the deliberately vague 'computer-related crime').
The ability to prosecute by instalments will manifest itself as a tool of control in politically-sensitive cases with any risk of the 'wrong' result. The State will simply be able to drag a defendant back into Court time after time until it gets the result it wants. Sooner or later, with its ability to write a blank cheque, the State will win and everybody will know it.
There are few more pointed weapons of political control than this. There mere threat of it is enough to silence or cow difficult or even unpopular people into quiessence. With the endless threat of constant prosecution hanging over their heads, normal life becomes all but impossible. Keep quiet and do as you are told or your life will simply become unbearable.
Like my now defunct hard-drive, our collective memories are no longer accessible. If they were, the polity would rise up in revolt at the merest hint of the government arrogating this kind of power unto itself, but by the time iron rule has replaced rule of law, nobody will be able to remember a time when it was any different.
Monday
It's bad therefore it should be banned. No hesitation, no intervening punctuation. Just add -nne- to bad and you're there. That's the meme we have to hack to death.
An article in yesterday's Sunday Times (News Review, 5.7) spreads this same poisonous little idea, far more poisonous than anything in junk food itself. Junk food, says Medicine Today editor Jerome Burne, is bad for you. It contains too much sugar and screws around with the way your brain cells operate. People who have given groups of children non-junk-food diets have seen remarkable improvements in their behaviour. Ergo corporation chasing American lawyers are launching class actions against junk food makers, and Congress is considering taxing junk food.
That is the kind of legislation Alan Simpson, MP for Nottingham South and chair of the reform group Food Justice, would like to see in this country. "It is time the government took the side of society rather than the food industry," he says. "I would support a tax on junk food, on sugar or on snack food advertising. That could then fudn effective campaigns to promote healthy eating."
But what is wrong with simply saying that you think junk food is bad, and saying why, as publicly as you can, if that is what you think? Why do you need government money to say something? Why should people who like junk food and don't misbehave as a result be hit by the law and by the tax man merely to sort out all those kids who eat badly? I read the article. It had me convinced about everything except the need for the lawmakers to get involved. What's wrong with that as a general strategy?
Next to this junk article about junk food there's another one about why sleep is a good thing. (I know. There we all were thinking we didn't need any.) Presumably they couldn't think of any laws to pass to make us sleep better. So they just had some advice: sleep better. That's the way to do these things.
Thursday
The Labour's government's Extradition Bill is a legal obscenity and a dire threat to the liberty of everyone, says the Libertarian Alliance, the radical free market and civil liberties think tank and pressure group.
Libertarian Alliance spokesman Dr. Sean Gabb and Libertarian Alliance Director Dr. Chris R. Tame, say:
"This bill formally applies the EU wide arrest warrant proposals to the UK. What it means, simply and crudely, is that British citizens can be carted off to other European countries on the say so of a foreign judge without the slightest benefit of any legal due process in this country. Moreover, they could be arrested for an array of so-called offences that are not - and never should be - crimes in this country.
In addition to such vague nonsense as "environmental crime" and "computer related" crime the Bill explicitly allows for the extradition of UK citizens for PC-thought-crimes of "racism and xenophobia". It is clear that the EU, and this government, is using this phrase in an obscene attempt to smear critics of the EU as "racist" and any advocacy of the virtues of hard-won British liberties as "xenophobia". Other "crimes" for which British citizens could be deported to Europe include advocating "holocaust denial", selling Nazi memorabilia and advocating a wide range of unpopular (and sometimes silly, offensive or nasty) opinions - and, of course, plane-spotting. The legal system of Britain, whilst far from perfect, seems a paradise in comparison to the politically corrupt and ruthlessly illiberal Code Napoleon systems of Europe - where you are deemed guilty until proven innocent and can be incarcerated without trial for absurd periods of time."
Drs. Gabb and Tame conclude:
"If the British government succeeds in passing this tyrannical and obscene legislation it is clear that the social contract has been abrogated in an unprecedented act of treason by our own government. Nothing less than mass civil disobedience and physical resistance by any means necessary is justified by this attempt to allow the abduction and incarceration of British citizens by foreign powers."
Wednesday
Although I am not an uncritical fan of Lew Rockwell's flavour of libertarianism, he has written an excellent article about that most inconsistent of the many conservative intellectual inconsistencies... conscription.
His article about acceptable face of state slavery is on the Lew Rockwell.com site.
It is interesting that some of the same people who claim the United States is the 'freest country in the world' seem to have no problem with supporting so many American ways of denying the very concept of self-ownership and replacing it with state 'social' ownership rather than 'several' property... and even extending to a person's actual body.
Thursday
...So what? British Home Secretary David Blunkett has been disarmingly frank about the fact he has had to back down on the horrendous planned extension to the already Draconian Regulation of Investigative Powers Act (RIPA). Some commentators have actually been patting him on the back for his admission that the whole plan was ill conceived .
Yet it should be clear that this is in no way a realisation on his part that he was wrong to try and extend this authoritarian infringement of civil liberties on moral grounds, but rather an admission of a failure to read the political support for such an action.
Blunkett and Blair still do not actually see any ethical/moral problems with such people as local councils and the Food Standards Agency being able to read your e-mails and tap your phone calls. No, their contrite remarks are nothing more than acceptance it was foolish of them to assume they could count on widespread political support for such a move.
These people should be abominated for what they tried to do, regardless of the fact they failed. The government are profoundly authoritarian and if the Tories were smart (which they are not), they would use the vast exposed flank Labour has to make this a key issue... but then of course these are the people who have the likes of Ann Widdecombe and Michael Howard in their ranks so I would not hold my breath if I were you.
Wednesday
At the last two Putney Debates, the ones addressed by Simon Davies of Privacy International on May 10, and by Mark Littlewood of Liberty on June 14, I have heard myself giving a little speech and have liked what I heard. This speech has gone approximately as follows.
Current debate about the proper limits of anti-terrorism, internet snooping, sharing of such information by different government departments, and so on and so forth, is now framed as a conflict between the demands of, on the one hand, the ever more centralised and ever more powerful state, and on the other hand, the freedom and the privacy of the individual. The first is assumed to be necessary for the satisfactory achievement of public safety. The second is presented only as a privately desirable benefit that must inevitably be sacrificed to a lesser or greater degree, the argument being merely about how much of this private benefit should be sacrificed. "Is this a price worth paying?" "Are we paying too big a price?" That an improvement in public safety will be purchased with this price is assumed.
The likes of Simon Davies and Mark Littlewood are both painfully aware that they spend their lives saying "yes but". "Yes", protecting the public is indeed important. "But", we shouldn't be quite so ready as we seem to be now to sacrifice personal freedom and personal privacy for public safety. Adriana Cronin's piece just below this one is also a good example of the kind of fighting-a-losing-battle agonising that I have in mind. And Samizdata's most recent Slogan of the day also embodied this assumed relationship, which we were urged to defy, but not to disagree with as a false assumption. Once again, safety was presented as a price worth paying, although by including the word "temporary", Ben Franklin at least hinted at a contrary theory of how things might really be.
I believe that if public safety and liberty continue to be regarded, even (especially!) by libertarians, as things that the people in general are to be asked to choose between, liberty is bound to be the loser.
This dangerous contrast reminds me of an earlier time, somewhat less than a century ago, when liberty was widely regarded as being a private benefit that ought to be sacrificed for economic reasons. Centralised state control of the economy was presented as being essential to achieve the maximum of public prosperity, in much the same way that large convoys were a better way to protect wartime merchant shipping than individually scattered vessels. (By the way, the convoy parallel is not my illustration only. I distinctly remember reading George Bernard Shaw, in a preface to one of his plays I think, using this illustration to make this exact argument.)
There then followed the "Economic Calculation Debate", in which the likes of Hayek and von Mises did something that they are still not perhaps fully appreciated for. As academics they eventually triumphed. They stated their theoretical objections to centralised economic planning, and enough people in the West were convinced to keep capitalism bumbling onwards, thus enabling it to triumph utterly against centralised economic planning. In short, Mises and Hayek were right, and were proved right. But they also triumphed as propaganda street-fighters. What they did was turn the argument about economics from being freedom-versus-prosperty into freedom-is-necessary-for-prosperity. In order to have yourself an even semi-satisfactory twentieth century economy, you had to have freedom, if not for political stirrers then at least in the form of "economic freedom", for people such as businessmen and industrial investors.
I wonder, might the same thing apply to public safety? Is centralised power the answer to achieving the defence of good people against bad people, or is centralised power actually one of the biggest problems? It is now being said, and I'm most definitely one of the ones saying it, that the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington were not completely missed. Quite a lot of people observed various fishy things going on. The problem was that the one almighty, all powerful, all knowing, all seeing Washington Public Protection Apparatus had its single, collective, bureaucratic mind on other things.
But suppose that the power to act had been as dispersed as the power to observe. Consider those people who picked up those vital stories that were actually not acted upon by the great Washington Security Monster, about strange Saudi Arabians taking flying lessons but being indifferent to the usually somewhat essential art of actually landing an airplane. Suppose that those people had been allowed simply to announce, perhaps to their local media, that these guys sure were behaving strangely, and suppose they'd urged the local media hacks to chase the story up. Hey, what are you guys doing? Who are you? What are your real names? Would those strange Saudis have had such an easy ride, so to speak? I think not. I think it distinctly possible that they might have called the whole thing off.
You'll never prove this kind of thing (although you can illustrate your generalised theory/suspicions) merely with individual anecdotes. What's needed is a transformed theoretical framework, a repainted big picture, a different and utterly contrary way of looking at things to the way things are looked at now. A new meta-context.
Tuesday
The widely reported attempt by the state to extravagantly expend the list of state bodies with access to e-mail and telephone intercepts has been withdrawn in the face of strong cross-party opposition from politicians with a modicum of respect for at least the fiction of civil liberties.
However it is very important that people not judge the government just by the laws it has passed but by the laws it has tried to pass. The Regulation of Investigative Powers Act (RIPA) is bad enough as it stands without the latest astonishing power grab by the state, yet it shows once again if anyone doubted it that no matter what the state says about its modest intentions when taking upon itself new powers, the belly of Leviathan is filled with an insatiable hunger for more.
Bob Ainsworth, the Home Office minister is using The Big Lie technique to claim this is not in fact about crushing civil liberties but 'protecting' us all, so do not kid yourself that the advocate of a Panopticon Britain will give up so easily. What we need protection against is the British state or we will soon have a system of pervasive surveillance and intrusion that rivals that of the INS and IRS in the United States. Tony Blair was not joking when he promised to bring us 'joined up government'. The line being drawn between those dots being joined up runs through the centre of our lives.
When the state watches you,
dare to stare back
Saturday
Where can I lay my hands on a copy of the Devil's Dictionary? Is it a shortcoming on my part that I have never encountered this particular lexicon before? Maybe, maybe not but that would explain why its definition of the Common Law as 'the whim of judges' came as such a revelation to me.
Having had the benefit (or otherwise) of a legal education, I have always subscribed to the view that the Common Law was a body of law consisting primarily of judicial decisions based on custom and precendent. I know this cannot be too far wide of the mark because it bears an uncanny resemblance to the definition of the Common Law according to Websters.
You see, Antoine, there is nothing 'whimsical' about the process at all. In fact, it developed, from the ground up I might add, in order to preclude whimsy and provide certainty. Your charge that many judges are 'social justice creeps' is most certainly true but I would hazard that this is a problem which is generational rather than systemic. Those warming the benches in our Courts now were manning the student barricades in 1968 and they have simply completed their long march through the institutions with their imprimaturs largely intact. This is a problem, granted, but it is a universal problem because for sanctuary from judges we beg the mercy of politicians in parliament and dare I suggest that there might be the odd 'social justice creep' in there as well, or should that thought perish? Besides whilst you are free to look up any relevant Statute, what, may I ask, is stopping you from reading law reports for the precedents?
To blame Britain's litigious culture on the Common Law is rather like blaming the poor performance of the NHS on tax cuts. Rather it is State Law or Statute (or Napoleonic Code) synthesised by politicians and handed down to us like the miserable serfs we are, that has stomped all over so many of the sound, long -established Common Law principles that used to protect us from frivolous or vexatious claims as well as nationalising lawyers and judges alike and rendering them mere amplifiers of state policy.
When a burglar sues a homeowner because he tripped over their carpet, we are rightly outraged but you should blame the Occupiers Liability Act. Similarly, when an entrepreneur is hauled in front of a tribunal and forced to pay a hefty fine for failing to provide adequate childcare facilities or a sufficiently happy work environment it is not the Common Law at work, rather it is the various Employment Acts. And would it be indelicate of me to point out that the phalanx of Anti-Discrimination Acts have given birth to not just a litigious culture but an entire (taxpayer-funded, I might add) grievance industry?
Nobody, to my knowledge, has made the absurd claim that the Common Law would 'automatically sort everything out'. Nothing will 'automatically sort everything out'. But I would venture that the Common Law was more organic, more reasonable and better fitted to serve a healthy and prosperous civil society than the instruments of social engineering that have largely replaced it. Was it fallible? Yes. Name me a system that isn't.
Friday
'Judge Ling' from Ally McBeal is no more ridiculous than her more pompous colleagues, but both are the products of the common law. One of the sillier libertarian/conservative claims is that 'the common law' will automatically sort things out. The heck it will!
The Devil's Dictionary defines the Common Law as 'the whim of judges'. As most judges are either social justice creeps or doddering fools it doesn't take a genius to figure out that the common law 'discovered' or 'interpreted' by such people is as much a threat to freedom than the drafted statutes are. Except that at least one can look up the statutes, whereas only lawyers have the time and means to 'interpret' precedent.
Scrapping written legislation in favour of common law solutions is only a good idea for professional lawyers and full-time litigants: the sort of people who walk on cracked pavements hoping to trip up, chip a bone and sue.
Libertarians who want 'the common law' and decry 'the litigation culture' are like vegetarians asking for steak tartare.
Thursday
This letter not just to, but in, today's Daily Telegraph is worth reproducing in full. Its relevance to earlier posts here about "joined up government" is obvious.
Re: Government assists sinister Euro plans
Date: 13 June 2002
SIR - The Government intends to give public sector bodies the capacity to find out what we access on the internet, who we e-mail and who we phone.
This is part of a broader drive by the European Union to give its fledgling police force, Europol, the capacity to accumulate information on all EU citizens. The Europol Convention gives that organisation the right to keep a database of information on any individual, including "sexual orientation, religion or politics". Europol was also charged last August by the Council of Ministers with adding the names of "troublemakers" to the Schengen Information System, so they could be "tracked and identified" with a view to preventing them leaving their home countries shortly before major EU summits.
Under the existing EU Convention on Mutual Legal Assistance, Europol and any national police force can request information on any citizen living in another member country. The legislation being introduced by the Government will greatly assist this sinister process.
On May 30, the European Parliament voted for a new directive granting the police and others the powers referred to above. The Labour leadership instructed its MEPs to support a measure that, until recently, the group had rhetorically opposed. Only Arlene McCarthy abstained. The Tories also voted for it, with the honourable exception of Lord Stockton. To their credit, the Greens, the Lib Dems and UKIP voted against it.
From:
Marc Glendening, Democracy Movement, London SW6
Marc Glendening was one of the speakers at that Liberty Conference we've been going on about. According to what people said to Chris Tame, who was also a speaker but didn't hear Marc's talk, it was extremely good.
For as long as I can remember, every change of importance imposed upon Britain by its political rulers has been (a) something to do with European integration, but (b) announced without the European Union being so much as mentioned. This joined-up government crap seems to be no exception to that rule.
Friday
Here we go again... ever-expanding government surveillance powers and reduction of privacy as part of the drive for greater security. This time it is the US government digging deeper into the Web to capture and corral more of our digital detritus in the name of fighting terrorism.
The new FBI guidelines currently examined by the Senate Judiciary Committee would give federal investigators new licence to mine publicly available databases and monitor Web use. Civil liberties advocates warn that last week's proposal is the latest step along a worrying path back to the 1950s and '60s - days when investigators compiled dossiers on innocent American citizens based on their religious and political practices. FBI guidelines from Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI director Robert Mueller would allow field agents to gather information outside of criminal investigations, relaxing regulations set in the 1970s. Those rules, named after then-Attorney General Edward Levi, barred the FBI from attending political meetings unless they had a reasonable suspicion that a crime was being planned.
The new rules, by contrast, would authorise field agents to attend public meetings freely and request warrants with less interference from the main office. In addition, they would allow the FBI to monitor public Internet sites, libraries and religious institutions. Jim Dempsey, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology protests:
"I hate to be in a position of telling people 'don't go online and speak' or 'watch what you say,' but you have to take from this that on an arbitrary basis, the FBI is going to be tagging people as terrorists based on what they say online,"
Well, actually, I am not sure what is wrong with that. Your mother told you (or should have told you) not to speak to strangers and be careful about what you say in public. And the Web is a public place whether because of its interconnected structure or because no communication is entirely secure and therefore private. I do want to be able to say what I want and where I want, as that is the most immediate and tangible demonstration of my individual and personal liberty. But at the same time, I also want the government that takes my money in order to 'protect' me to pay attention to any communication containing information about an event that could jeopardise my security, life and property.
So the same reforms can be seen as a long overdue end to restrictions that have hobbled investigators and denied them access to research tools available to anyone with an Internet connection. Intelligence failures in the FBI and CIA have come under the spotlight (and fire) amid new questions over who knew what in advance of 11 September suicide hijackings, which left more than 3,000 people dead.
I can imagine the phalanx of hard-core anti-statist libertarians bristling with indignation at the mere suggestion that I might consider any legislation that expands law enforcement's ability to monitor communications anything but an infringement on privacy and individual liberty. Despite my sound libertarian track record on these issues (see related articles below), I would like to explore this issue further.
It seems to me that the problem is not merely removing restrictions on investigators to monitor, gather and analyse information. Surely, amassing and making use of publicly available information with research tools available to anyone does not constitute abuse of powers ...or does it? The difference between Joe Bloggs carrying out his equivalent of obsessive monitoring of other people's communications and the FBI's agent J.B.1984 is that whilst the former cannot do much with it (unless he is a cyber-freak villain in a Hollywood movie), the latter has access to considerable resources and monopoly on force that enable him to act on it. On the other hand, isn't that what the US citizens are paying him to do?!
The issue here is not just what information is collected, by whom and for what purpose but the nature of the state and its authority. We don't trust the state and its agencies to use the information for the designated purpose, i.e. our security and protection. We fear that information will instead be used for other purposes, namely, to increase the state's hold on its citizens. There is no guarantee that after the crucial information about the terrorist plans has been extracted from the monitored data, the information about our private lives, incomes, interests etc, will be discarded. National security has always been used as a cloak for such exercise and it was mainly the US judicial system embedded firmly in the US Constitution that provided some recourse for the most flagrant breaches of individual liberty by the state.
So what is to be done, campaigned for or against, and posted on this blog? The usual stuff - discussions about the state and the legitimacy of its authority and powers, the limited or no government and most of all how the state has expanded beyond any justification. And so although I am willing to grant the state legitimate authority for the purpose of external (army) and internal (police) security in theory, I do not trust the state in its present practice. I will therefore continue writing about the issues of privacy, security and its impact on individual and civil liberties.
When the state watches you,
dare to stare back
Monday
Yesterday four of us stuffed a Libertarian Alliance mailing, chez moi. It will be going out second class mail (don't ask), on Wednesday (Monday and Tuesday are Golden Jubilee Bank Holidays). Libertarian Alliance publications are written and edited so that they can stand any amount of delay, so I'll tell you about them when Sean Gabb's computer is back in business (British Telecom are messing him around royally) and we have them up on the LA website.
However, one of the fliers added to the mailing, about a conference next Saturday organised by Liberty (formerly the National Council for Civil Liberties) will hit hall carpets a lot later than would have been desirable.
This conference is bizarrely entitled "Human Rights v Civil Liberties". What's the "v" about? I guess by "Human Rights" they mean robbing people to pay for other peoples' education, hospital treatment, etc. But the worst things about the conference are that you have to pay GBP35 to get in, and that it starts at 10 am (lasting until 4 pm.) That'll keep the riff-raff away, including me. Maybe Tom Burrroughes - wearing his Reuters hat? - can talk his way in for a better price, and at a time to suit himself.
The "Workshop" subjects give you the flavour: "Hunting, Shooting, Fishing: Neglected Freedoms?", How do Libertarians defend equality?", "The European Union: A threat to our freedom?", "Libertarian Right v Liberal Left: Insurmountable differences?" Speakers include: Louise Christian (Christian Fisher Solicitors), Claire Fox (Institute of Ideas), Mark Glendening (Democracy Movement) , Lord Peter Goldsmith QC (the Attorney General), Michael Gove (Times columnist), Imran Khan (solicitor), Claude Moraes (Labour MEP), Professor Conrad Russell (Kings College London), Steven Norris (former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party), Rabinder Singh (Matrix Chambers), and John Wadham of Liberty itself.
NCCL, as it was, was started by Bolsheviks for their own entirely Bolshevik reasons, and remains overwhelmingly left-of-centre. But as you may have noticed, three of those four workshop subjects push libertarian buttons, and they are apparently making genuine attempts to extricate themselves from the tag of being Blairite poodles. I asked Sean Gabb if he was going? "Oh no, a bunch of lefties chattering amongst themselves." And in truth that is probably what it will be. Nevertheless, they are trying. (The Libertarian Alliance is affiliated to them, for its own reasons.) But what do you do if your side is now the ruling class and hence the people now most vigorously violating civil liberties? What do you do if you have friends of friends whom you are now supposed to be campaigning against? What if the man who is now stitching up asylum seekers or fox-hunters came to your wedding?
Libertarian Alliance Director Chris Tame will also be one of the speakers at this conference, so he at least will know some of what transpires. Marc Glendening, a long-time anti-EU campaigner, is also a cordial acquaintance. Maybe I'll be able to extract something in writing from one of them about it all.
If you're interested, ring 020 7378 3667, or email zoe@liberty-human-rights.org.uk
Sunday
Don't know how to tie your own shoelaces? Just what is the proper way to make a cup of coffee? Should a person sleep standing up or lying down? Having difficulty finding your own arse even though you're using both hands a map? Don't know how to barbecue sausages? Well, fret no longer because HM Government is here to help you.
"The Agency's food hygiene campaign is going alfresco during summer 2002 with a 30-second TV ad spelling out the risks of not cooking barbecue food properly.
This should come as a blessed relief to anyone planning a barbecue this summer. After all, in a country where the mere act of lighting a charcoal briquette is enough to bring on a monsoon, only the hopelessly naive and terminally idiotic can possibly be planning a barbecue in the first place.
'The Agency'. It sounds so sinister, doesn't it? That's because it is. The Food Standards Agency was established in the wake of the BSE crisis to reassure a jittery and highly risk-averse British public that the government was doing its bit to protect them from the evil bugs lurking in their own fridges. Which means, of course, that they do less of their own bit and, thanks to greater dependency and bureaucratic empire-building, today's patronising message will become tomorrow's law. I see Sausage Inspectors in our future.
It's just another brick in the Napoleonic Wall behind which our collective goose is slowly being cooked.
Sunday
The Sunday Telegraph has commented on the latest and most worrying example of the Labour Goverment's accumulation of power by controlling information. The good Dr Liam Fox, also the Shadow Health Secretary, alerts us to the fact that last week the Government effectively dismantled the UK system of medical confidentiality. Under new regulations, slipped in using procedural devices to prevent debate in the House of Commons, the Secretary of State will be able to demand that doctors hand over medical records - and fine them if, in order to protect your confidentiality, they refuse to do so. The language of 'the public interest' is used to assert the right to demand, and receive, confidential medical information. Boringly, the 'public interest' is defined as whatever the Secretary of State says it is....
Having worked as a doctor myself, it horrifies me that doctors will now have to choose between breaching their ethics and breaking the law. To make matters worse, the new law is not restricted to doctors: the behaviour of every health care professional to his or her patients will now be subject to the direct control of politicians. The new law places the administrative convenience of the NHS not only above the bond of trust between doctor and patient, but above the dignity and privacy of patients....the change marks the death of the principle of the patient's right to give consent before identifiable personal data about them is shared. It is yet another restriction of our liberty - and one we have surrendered to with barely a whimper of protest.My question is 'why is this not on the main news but on page 22 in the Comments section....?!'
Monday
It seems the death of Dutch politician and media commentator Pim Fortuyn, which continues to reverberate in the blogosphere and elsewhere, has shed light on just how useless the words 'left' and 'right' are when it comes to making sense of the political and cultural landscape.
An article in the latest edition of the UK weekly magazine The Spectator by Melanie Phillips, makes an attempt to figure out how Fortuyn grappled with the issues of defending secular, liberal democracies against influences thought to be malign, like militant Islam. But she fluffs it.
Take this dumb paragraph:
"Above all we have to reassert liberalism as a moral project which does not pretend to be morally neutral. We have to acknowledge that liberal values are rooted in the Judaeo-Christian tradition and sprang from British culture... Liberalism has to be rescued from the clutches of the libertarians, in order to defend liberal democracy from militant Islam on the one hand and the racist Right on the other. Fortuyn was never going to be the answer. He was part of the problem."
Phillips' attacks legalisation of drugs, voluntary euthanasia and same-sex marital unions, all causes Fortuyn championed, and avers that such "libertarianism" undermines liberty. Eh? Surely the common thread running through his stance on tax, public sector services, and social issues like drugs was support of arrangements arrived at by consenting adults and a general desire to stop Big Government getting in the way. His opposition to unchecked, massive immigration from largely non-Western societies was predicated on a fear that such freedoms were under threat. One can argue whether his fear was justified or not - I am not entirely convinced either way - but Fortuyn's views struck me as entirely coherent.
As for liberalism's roots in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, that strikes me as only partially accurate. Unlike some atheists, I do fully appreciate the contribution of this religious tradition to liberty (such as the doctrine of Free Will) but for starters, what about the heritage of Greece and Rome? What about the Enlightenment?
Phillips' analysis is flawed because, ultimately, she cannot see how freedom can flourish without state-imposed restraints. Nowhere is there any grasp of how order and rules can evolve spontaneously from below, rather than be imposed from above. This is a shame because Phillips does have some good things to say, particularly on how Fortuyn has forced many commentators used to thinking of politics through certain prisms to sharpen up their act.
Saturday
Deputies sitting in the Russian Duma are proposing a law that would re-criminalise homosexuality.
However, according to the BBC:
"At a time when President Putin is concerned about Russia's image abroad, it is inconceivable that the proposed gay ban could be put on the statute book.
Yes, well, I do recall that it was the same BBC that assured everyone that Jean-Marie Le Pen had not a cat in hell's chance of getting past the first round of the French presidential elections.
Friday
As part of the intellectually confused but nevertheless laudable Daily Telegraph project called A Free Country, Charles Moore, about whom I am rather ambivalent, writes an exceedingly good article called Rally on May Day to blow the whistle on the control freaks:
Whose job is it to defend freedom? The answer really is, everyone's. In practice, unfortunately, that tends to mean, no one's. The people who want to ban tobacco advertising or fur farming or dangerous dogs or drugs or the publication of a something they don't like will seldom outnumber the people who would prefer them tolerated, but they will almost always out-organise them. MPs do not get round robins from the "Please let us get on with our lives" society, but from the thousands of groups that want to ban or control. "Stop X Now" is a far more common message than "Leave X Alone". Politicians, who rather like exerting their power to stop things, are only too happy to oblige.
And that is indeed the problem: we must change the frames of reference. Time to start refusing to tolerate force backed intolerance just because it is sanctified by some notion of democratic legitimacy.
Monday
Dale Felber writes in and tell us that he has seen the future.
I smoke. Some years ago the government decided that smoking was bad for me, so they began to tax cigarettes. Law suites began against tobacco companies. Warnings were placed on cigarette packs.
Now the government says that the number one health hazard is obesity! I saw on the news today that California will start taxing soda to fight obesity. Can taxing hamburgers and french fries be far behind? Law suits against McDonalds?-- "I didn't know a BigMac was bad for me... McDonalds owes me $100,000,000!"
The number of products to tax and the companies open to law suites are almost endless. Watch your investments in "Junk Food". If you don't believe me keep an eye on OverLawyered.com and remember what happened to big tobacco.
Everyone looked down on me and the other 25% of the population who smokes. Now it's their turn... the government will divide and tax.
Dale Felber
http://www.businessbay.com
Tuesday
Yes, I think that's what they call it: being 'ahead of the curve'. In this case, the 'curve' that I am ahead of is The Times in an article warning of the dangers of the Proceeds of Crime Bill, the UK government's grand apparatus in the already-discredited war against 'money-laundering'.
The writer adopts a more conservative (some might say measured) tone than I did. The piece reeks of unctious solicitude much in the manner of a senior Civil Servant advising a Minister that his decision is 'courageous' but it does taper to a fine point:
"The legislation needs to be framed in such a way that it does not deter honest businesses from consulting their professional advisers on grey areas, where they may need clarification of their position in order to be able to rectify it. Otherwise the very professional confidentiality that has created a healthy climate of compliance in the UK will be undermined. This is likely to lead to more criminality, not less."
Precisely the point I made (among others) nearly a year ago(1).
Still, my natural desire to gloat must be tempered by my satisfaction that some serious people in serious places are starting to get the message and, more importantly, are broadcasting it.
(1)= (link requires Adobe Acrobat Reader which can be downloaded for free)
Friday
My friend Kristine Löwe, a Norwegian now living in London, is deep into that post-university battle to get started in Real Life, and I want to give her all the help I can. She's just had a piece about European drugs policies published in the electronic version of the Guardian.
"Not very exciting stuff" she says modestly in her e-mail to her friends and contacts, and a ringing cry for total legalisation her piece definitely is not. The story is of a shift from treating heavy drug users as criminals to treating them as medical patients, and I don't know which idea depresses me more. Nevertheless, this is a useful way to learn the latest about the official drugs policy mindset this side of the Atlantic, and next to Kristine's piece you'll find further links to other interesting drug-related stories from the Guardian's electronic archives.
Tuesday
Lagwolf witnesses the Sith Parliament at work abridging civil liberties
I was involved in the pro-hunt protest outside of the Houses of Parliament today. It was a well behaved and good humoured protest which occupied the road outside the building. At 3pm sharp the protestors left the road and gathered in the protest area on Parliament Square or the nearest pub. Alas our efforts were rather less than effective and the parliamentarians voted to ban hunting. It is now up to the Lords to protect this quintessential English freedom.
The fact there are Conservative MPs who voted for the full ban is most distressing and deserve all the derision decent people can muster. That Ann Widdecombe MP voted to ban is telling of how the Tory party has members who do not believe is anyone else's freedom besides their own. Her own dubious sexuality makes this more offensive. Her "do as I say not as I do," mentality is most galling. I hope that any Tory MP who voted for this ban is deselected at the earliest opportunity. You either believe in freedom or your don't. Anyone who voted for a ban on fox-hunting does not believe in freedom...full stop.
Lagwolf
Sunday
Russell Leslie wrote in to disagree with David Carr's article Buddy, can you spare a lime?
"Even a child knows that nobody ever died from eating vitamins or herbal supplements."
To which Russell writes:
Actually - people (specifically asthmatic children) die from the common alternative remedy "royal jelly" on a regular basis. People think of royal jelly as being a wonderful natural remedy but it does kill people.
Vitamin A, a fat soluble vitamin, will kill in excessive concentrations. Though generally the people that have died have been people that have eaten the livers of sharks, seals and (ooh! gross) dogs - rather than store bought vitamin supplements.
Comfrey can lead to internal bleeding in excessive doses (there are some reports that Calendula can do this as well, though I am not clear on how reliable these reports are).
Herbal remedies are fine when intelligently used - unfortunately some people do not have the mental wattage to do anything intelligently. It is not to protect the intelligent that some form of controls may be needed - only the truly stupid need protection - but no one wants to admit that they are stupid. It is difficult to devise a system of controls protects the stupid but that doesn't get in the way of the skilled or intelligent.
However whilst Russell makes some good technical points, I think he asks a very leading question: how do we protect the 'stupid' from the consequences of their own actions?
This seems to accept as axiomatic that, firstly, people who take 'excessive' doses of vitamins or herbal supplements are necessarily stupid... and secondly that anyone has the right to 'protect' said 'stupid' people from their own actions. The first point is highly conjectural and the second is morally dubious to put it mildly. Surely the best way to induce sensible decision making to not to insulate people from the consequences of their actions, be they the people who take alternative remedies or the people who market them.
Saturday
I do not often post about specific bits of government legislation as it makes for awfully dry subject matter but I am unable to resist publishing this example of incandescent lunacy.
A year ago or so I wrote an extensive piece for the Libertarian Alliance about the nature, scope and effects of the UK Money Laundering laws (soon to be codified in the Proceeds of Crime Act).
One of the offences specified is that of 'Tipping-Off'. If a banker/lawyer/ financial adviser suspects a client of money laundering then he is obliged to report the matter to a responsible officer within the firm who must then decide whether or not to make a report to the National Criminal Intelligence Service. All this must be done in secret because the client must not be told that he is under suspicion (in case he flees the jurisdiction). To spill the beans is to commit the offence of 'Tipping-Off' (maximum sentence 2 years in prison).
Well, as if destroying the principle of client confidentiality and trust is not bad enough we all now have to contend with Section 29 of the Data Protection Act 1998 which requires all companies to disclose all internal memoranda to their clients upon demand, even those voicing suspicions of money laundering and, hence, tipping them off!!
One law now forces lawyers/bankers/accountants to break another law!! How long can it be before one is liable for prosecution just for turning up at work in the morning?
Do we have a Government or do we just have a Random Regulation Generating Machine up there?
Friday
Take a look at a fine article defending the ancient British sport of foxhunting by former Labour MP Brian Walden in today's Daily Telegraph titled Ban on foxhunting would be a triumph for the mob. I cannot do better than Walden in laying out the case as to why a proposed ban on hunting with hounds is a monstrous attack on liberty, which libertarians, be they meat-eaters or hard-core vegans, should reject.
Thursday
How could I pass on such a friendly challenge?
I remember my mother telling me a story from her childhood. There was a woman just up the block, a sad case no one spoke of very much: a Morphine addict. The family kept her at home, got prescription "medication" from the local pharmacist... and tried to keep the whole thing as quiet as possible.
I imagine her life was pretty much a waste. I have no way of knowing the when of this. It was in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, some years before well intentioned people tried to "put an end" to such misery.
Some 60 years of drug prohibition later, I was a young Libertarian activist appearing on radio talk shows. Good intentions had resulted in a human disaster beyond the imagination of those unwittingly responsible for it. The percentage of the population using hard drugs hadn't even changed. But the total population had grown and with drug users concentrated in ghettos it seemed as if drug use was an epidemic.
I made the comparison to the interviewer of that woman's life sixty years ago versus what it would now be like for her.
She'd have left home and cut all ties with the famiily after having lost her job and alienated all her friends by begging and stealing money for her expensive criminalized habit. She'd be living in total squalor in an inner city squat with her pimp boyfriend. He'd be beating her for not turning enough tricks and they'd both be robbing houses, shoplifting and commiting other petty crimes to feed their habits. Their pusher would get it all. They'd have to dive for cover when the pusher's gang fought gun battles in the 'hood to protect a valuable territory against rival gangs. The local cops would be on the take from the gangs. Wholesalers and importers upstream would take care of the bigger payoffs to the DEA, the Coast Guard and governments of third world countries.
The couple would be re-using dirty needles and shooting up heroin of uncertain quality and random cut. Overdose, poisoning, hepatitis, violence, withdrawals on bad days... they'd be lucky to live to be thirty.
Little needs changed to update the description by twenty more years. In 2002 the couple are probably HIV positive; and the heroin importers are financing terrorist networks and buying nukes.
Yeah, the prohibition of hard drugs sure did improve the world...
Saturday
The danger of the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA)
By Paul G. Allen
Before anyone remarks about this being Off Topic for the various mailing lists I've sent this to, please think about the effects this could have to Linux. In addition, even though many of you may not be US citizens, the recent happenings with international laws against cybercrime, copy protection and the like could make this US law relevant to you as well, not to mention the impact to your company should you not be able to do business in the US because of such a law. Therefore, it really is on topic, and the time to think about and act on such things is before they are written in stone, not after.
In case you haven't heard, the SSSCA is before the Senate Commerce Committee, with a hearing earlier today (for the story and several links, including a draft of the bill). The SSSCA, if passed, would basically require that all interactive digital devices, including your PC, have copy protection built in. This protection would not allow digital media from being viewed, copied, transferred, or downloaded if the device is not authorized to do so. The bill also makes it a crime to circumvent the protection, including manufacturing or trafficking in anything that does not include the protection or that would circumvent it.
Even if there is no SSSCA, the entertainment industry as well as the IT industry both agree: we must have copy protection of some kind. While I do not disagree that many movies, songs, and other media are distributed illegally without their owners consent, and that copyright owners need some sort of protection, this is not the way to fight the problem, and doing so can, and probably will, have drastic and far reaching consequences for not only the IT industry, but the entertainment industry and the consumer as well.
Many of us have become increasingly involved with, and dependent upon, Free Software (as in GNU GPL or similar), especially the Linux operating system. This type of software is distributed with the source code, allowing anyone to modify it as they choose and need. Linux has become popular to the point that many companies, especially those that provide some kind of service on or for the Internet, rely upon it heavily. Because of the free nature of Linux, and other Free Software, it is extremely difficult to place actual numbers on how many systems are out there employing such software. Some of you, like me, can approximate the number of such systems in your own company or realm of knowledge. So how does this relate to the SSSCA?
As any programmer worth his/her salt will attest, given the resources, anything that can be programmed into a computer can be programmed out, or worked around. In the case of copy protection such as the SSSCA would require, the resources needed for circumventing it is simply the source code for the operating system of the computer, and/or other source code for applications used on the computer (such as one of the many free video/audio layers available). Now given the wording of the SSSCA, along with the DMCA and other supporting laws, it stands to reason that such Free Software would suddenly become a target for legislation. Such legislation logically may require such software to be judged illegal. Such a decision may have serious consequences to the IT industry as well as the entertainment industry and the consumer as well. Little may the consumer or entertainment industry know, but much of the technology they rely upon today is provided at low cost by Free Software. Take that software away, and suddenly doing business costs a lot more, and eventually the consumer just will not be willing to pay for it.
Now aside from the consequences to Free Software, what about the consequences to those who do not use such software. Imagine that home movie you shot last weekend on vacation. Now you wish to send that home movie to a relative, friend, whoever, over the Internet, or place it on your web site for all to download. Well, with many of the protection technologies suggested, this would not be possible, or would be extremely difficult. Some of these technologies require digital watermarks to be placed in the media, for one example. CD burners, digital cameras, etc. can not make these watermarks. The copy protection works by checking for such a watermark, and if it does not exist, the system either will not allow the media to be played, or will not allow it to be transmitted over the Internet as the case may be. So much for sending your cousin your latest home movie, or allowing your whole family to see it from your web site. An additional problem is all current media, including CDs and DVDs, you may currently legally own would not work on proposed new CD and DVD players with copy protection hardware. You would not be able to copy CDs, tapes, or anything else that you legally own in order to exercise your right to fair use, so as to listen to that CD on the cassette deck in your car.
I could go on, but I think this is long enough and has given some food for thought. Besides, I have work to do. Election time is near, so think about what that person you are voting for represents. Think about actually writing a letter to a congressman or other legislator, to a magazine (I actually had one published once, so its not beyond the realms of possibility), newpaper, etc. Many people have the attitude that they can do nothing and make no difference. Well, I say to them they are right, because there are so many people with that attitude, that none of them do anything and they make no difference in doing so. The ones that make the difference, are the ones taking a stance, and the ones taking the stance are the ones that are causing these ridiculous laws to be passed. Guess who those people are?...
Welcome to The United Corporations of America.
[Paul has been circulating this article among the various Open Source mailing lists and we at Samizdata felt it so important we've gotten his more than willing permission to reprint it in its' entirety. What is happening should be of concern to all Libertarians and open source folk as well as civil liberties advocates of all stripes. The media industry is up to nothing less than buying congress so they may seize control of a resource (the Internet) they could not otherwise conquer. If they wished to build their own infrastructure from scratch, using their own money, we would have no complaints. That is not even remotely a picture of what they are attempting.We agree wholeheartedly with law school professor Glenn Reynolds position. The media industry is ripe for a RICO. This is far more real than the so called Enron "scandal". Enron failed to buy support. The market took its course and they are gone. The media industry is apparently much better at the bribery game and have a number of congressmen (Hollings and Stevens in particular) actively on their payroll. - Ed]
Friday
I have only a fuzzy and rather amateurish understanding of Chaos Theory but I do believe that it attempts to explain the process whereby a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon and, some time later, as a direct result, a hurricane lays waste to Poland. Or something. In other words, it is an exposition on how tiny, insignificant events can, through a cumulative series of knock-on effects, eventually become really big, major, world-changing events.
On the assumption that I am right (or, at least, not too hilariously wrong) then I think we are witnessing something in reverse by the UK governments sudden resurrection of the proposed ban on fox-hunting.
Now it is fair to say, that fox-hunting has been under the cosh for some time now. It has been priority No.1 for animal rights groups for years but, since Labour came to power in 1997, it has also been the target of the Labour left who see it as a decadent hobby for the cruel and arrogant rich; a totem of class privilege. This is a charge which is neither true nor fair but it has played well within the context of the Politics of Envy and, even if it were true, it deserves to be protected from state bullying.
But, faced with some determined opposition, the government has shied away for forcing through a ban of the sport in England and, until the last few days, the issue appeared, if not dead, then dormant.
All of a sudden, though, it is back on the agenda and with indecent haste, the government announcing a House of Commons Free Vote on March 18. Not through any sense of principle, mind. Tony Blair is known to be, at best, agnostic on the issue. No, it has everything to do with the War on Terror.
Blair has committed himself to supporting a US attack on Iraq but knows full well the unholy ruckus that support is likely to cause within his own party. This is a trade-off. Blair is telling the left that, if they keep quiet over the fate of Saddam, he will throw them some red meat in the form of the ban on fox-hunting they have always lusted for. In other words, give me Baghdad or the fox gets it.
It may not work. First, cynical ploys are the life-blood of the left and this may simply not be enough to buy their silence. Secondly, the principled opposition that rallied before is already rallying again and dark mutterings of civil disobediance fill the air.
But is this not an example of Chaos Theory only in reverse? Crazed terrorists kill thousands of people in America and, as a result, an old English tradition faces state-mandated oblivion.
Wednesday
The calm acceptance of tyranny is often more scary than its imposition in the first place. I saw the following letter in the online edition of the Daily Telegraph, the right-leaning broadsheet not normally known for excessive idiocy. The following letter on ID cards was written by a certain R.E. Parker who clearly regards libertarian concerns about ID cards as so much paranoia. The letter is a classic:
"I had an identity card for years during my time working in the Gulf states and I didn't feel that my civil liberties were being infringed. During a recent trip to Oman I wished I did have an identity card as the bank would not change my money without formal identification."
This surely misses the point. As a freedom-lover I don't mind being asked for ID in certain cases and indeed, in a free market, all kinds of institutions would make it commercially sensible for persons to carry ID of some kind, such as banks in Oman. But what the letter-writer is interested in, I assume, are state cards, imposed by force.
Tuesday
Lots of good but wrong stuff...
...In Kevin Holtsberry's blog. I would like to join battle with the redoubtable Mr Holtsberry on several issues, but can I start with just this one. I am as he is of sick of e-mails headed "heya..." and "hi?" that turn out to be porn. These e-mails disgust me when I see them, waste my time while I delete them, and mean that my children cannot be let out even for a moment from the kiddie-ghetto of Kids' AOL. I don't deny there is a problem. His proposed solution is to have a law. I have to point out that there probably are laws already, dozens of them. How long does a new one take to come in? How effective will enforcement be? Is there any special reason to suppose that it will be any more effective than the laws prohibiting drugs?
Slowly, imperfectly, but definitely, the market has provided solutions to related problems before. We first hooked up to Compuserve in 1995. At that time you paid for every message you received. We received a lot of junk, got sick of it, and quit. (Our family would be classified in advertiser's jargon as not so much "early adopters" as "early rejecters".) When we came back five years later the payment structure problem had been solved, and the quantity of junk mail much decreased. (Yes, really.) It's an arms race. At the moment the attackers are winning - but who is going to be more motivated to research on means of defence: AOL, who are going to lose my custom one of these fine days if they don't get a move on, or the government?
It's not the case that I deny any role for law in this issue. Separate contracts, enforceable in law, between ISP and users as to what could and could not be sent by the ISP's services, would be fine by me. Different ISP's could compete on their various brand contracts. "We always prosecute pornographers who send unsolicited mail!" some would boast. Others could proudly say, "You choose: this service is completely unrestricted and unsupervised." Contrast that with the obvious dangers of blanket supervision by not just the present government but all future ones. But the law is always likely to trail behind the power of angry customers (like me) with the right of exit. The lowlife that Mr Holtsberry rightly describes as being "creative and dishonest" in evading the software barriers that Internet Service Providers try to put up against them are scarcely likely to be less creative and more honest in evading legal barriers.
Monday
Libertarians will be deeply concerned to learn that the authorities of the Orwellianly-named "Samizdata" have hidden from their readers that Natalie Solent's most recent reading matter was not "?" as appeared in the summary of what all the Samizdata posters just read (an obvious ploy; the world public has long known that "?" is a Pokemon, silly). It was actually a whole pile of 1997 copies of House and Garden given to me by my next door neighbour. Clearly the powers-that-be considered this insufficiently intellectual. In a compromise move Ms Solent has offered a real-life clever person's book she read just too late for the deadline: Getting the Message, a history of communications by Laszlo Solymar. It's full of interesting nuggets. Here, for example, is an excerpt from a law passed in France in 1837:
Anyone who transmits any signals without authorization from one point to another one whether with the aid of mechanical telegraphs or by any other means will be subject to imprisonment ...
And here is the text of a warrant issued by the British Government to the Post Office during the Boer War:
to produce, for the Information of the Intelligence Department of the War Office, until further notice any telegrams passing through the Central Telegraph Office (in London) which there is reason to believe are sent with the object of aiding, abetting or assisting the South African Republic and the Orange Free State.
Plus ça change...
Tuesday
In an EU Observer report, the authoritarian nature of the European 'Union' is demonstrated yet again as Swedish citizen, Per Johansson, has been expelled from Belgian and can no longer travel in 14 European countries after pasting up an anti-EU poster at a Belgian police station.
The Belgian police in Brussels arrested the Swede, who is an active member of a legal Swedish left wing party, just three days before the Laeken summit. The police expelled the man for only one reason: he had been helping friends putting up the poster, announcing an anti-EU meeting.
Hopefully such cack-handed suppression of dissent will just encourage more resistance against the EU by people who value freedom of expression, free association and reject unaccountable socialist diktats governing every aspect of civil life.
Monday
An article in Wired reports a victory against the 'forces of darkness' with a US court refusing to allow the French state to impose Internet restrictions across the world. Does this mean I think wacko groups like the KKK or Nazi historical fantasists are ok? No I don't. However I do not want my judgement and prejudices to have force of law, unlike the lawyer for the forces of statist authoritarianism, Stephane Lilti.
"If this ruling, which we will appeal against in the United States, is upheld, it will give total impunity to all those who seek technological asylum in the United States," Stephane Lilti told Reuters. "This would make America a haven for all types of people on the extreme right and racists ... for us French it will be extremely difficult to ensure our justice system's decisions are respected because we will be dealing with someone who can take refuge in a U.S. computer."
Excellent. Every time we can make a repressive law in France or anywhere else unworkable, the light of liberty shines a little brighter across the entire world. Why should anyone respect the French justice system's decisions to repress free speech? Notice Lilti does not seem to worry about 'the extreme left'. I guess this means a post to the Internet in support of the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot is just fine by him.
What force advocating statist lawyers like Lilti do not choose to realise is that the best way to destroy irrational buffons like the KKK is not by forcing them underground but by actually shining the light of day on them. Let them out into the open where everyone can see what preposterous little people they are by reading their own words... sort of like the way Stephane Lilti is exposed by his words as a noxious enemy of liberty who rails in fury against the rest of the world's refusal to be a party to the repression of French internet users.
As Sinead O'Connor put it in a song:
Though their own words.
they will be exposed,
they've got a severe case
of the 'Emperor's new clothes'
So I would like to raise my glass to all you technological asylum seekers, yearning to speak free...the brave ones, the oppressed ones, the articulate ones and yes, even you stupid hateful ignorant ones.
And to those who would gag us, censor us and unplug us... fuck you
