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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

However, I think she is wrong about the cause:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perry de Havilland wrote in this post that

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tolerance however is non-negotiable.

Update: this is something these guys understand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

With thanks to H for the picture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

William, Lord Rees-Mogg in The Times says:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jamie Whyte again:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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]

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!"

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.

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).

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.

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.

Want to see a splendid example of verbosity when the simple word arse (or even ass) would have sufficed?

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.

Via Owen's Musings.

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!

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.

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.

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...

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?

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.

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' bid

A 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.

Perhaps you think I am talking about Venezuela under the thuggish Chavez?

Nope. I am talking about Britain.

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.

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.

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.

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!"

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?

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.

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.

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.

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...

"I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered.
My life is my own."

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.