Hartnett wants the citizenry to stop giving cash to their cleaners, gardeners, and to small tradesmen and other potential tax cheats and economic criminals so that they can no longer avoid paying taxes. Hartnett’s vision of Britain is a society of snoops and denunciators. “Households have a duty to ensure that other people do not evade paying their share of tax. The people who are worried about it should use our whistle-blowing line to tell us. We are getting better and better at finding people who receive cash.” Nice touch. A tinge of the former GDR’s Stasi culture for the British way of life?

- Detlev Schlichter

I suppose it'll add some spice to history exams though. Get the wrong answer and you not only fail: you get carted off to jail as well.

- The concluding sentences of a piece by Mick Hartley criticising a new French law which, once President Sarkozy signs it, will make it a criminal offence to deny that genocide was committed by Ottoman Turks against Armenians.

Anyone looking for evidence that the current Conservative/Liberal Democrat government in the UK has the same tidy, but severely limited intelligence of its predecessor need do no more than read this story suggesting that thousands of jury trials held in the country could be axed to save what appears to be a relatively paltry sum, when measured against the dangers and cost to individuals of being wrongfully convicted.

I can understand why jury trials can be an easy target. In my distant past I had a spell covering court cases in the UK and watched several juries at work. It struck me - especially in the more complex fraud cases - that there are clear problems. And maybe - although no politician will dream of saying so - that the British are not as law abiding as they presumably were 50 years ago and therefore the average jury panel reflects this fact. But historians would point out that juries in, say, early 19th Century England could be an awkward bunch. But therein lies the strengths of trial by jury - it is one of the few elements in which ordinary members of the public can be brought into the affairs of civil society by sitting in judgement on the alleged guilt or innocence of their fellows. Juries remind the powerful and the legally sophisticated about the proper order of things.

As I remarked the other day about the dangerously misconceived move by the previous Labour government to scrap the double-jeopardy rule, the ongoing attempts by administrations of all political hues to gut the English Common Law, and the checks and balances of the system, remain one of the most foolish trends in our public life. And that such an idea is being contemplated makes a mockery of the idea that having the Lib Dems in the government coalition will increase, in any way, the supposed liberality of this administration.

Nag, nag, nag:

If you click on that, you will see that this snap was snapped in a hardware store. A randomly selected one, as it happens, near to where I live.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, health and safety is, among other things, a business, and therefore an interest. If it diminished, money would be lost, money which knows it would be lost and which would therefore speak up against it being stopped.

But of course the big complaints, if they now tried to moderate this crap, would come from all the big businesses which have now got used to all this excessive nagging and know how to handle it, unlike smaller potential competitors who, poor innocents, know only about making good products.

One of the more dispiriting processes I regularly notice in confrontations between Good and Evil is when Evil concedes that it has done something evil, and Good promptly turns round, in the spirit of fair play, and concedes something else evil. It's like Good is a football team, and when it goes one-nil up, it feels that the fair thing to do is to give the other fellows a goal. To make a game of it. Or something.

So, for instance, if Evil concedes that, I don't know, "socialism hasn't turned out very well in practice", Good, in a burst of bonhomie and generosity and brotherhood-of-manliness, concedes that socialism was a nice idea "in theory".

No it wasn't. An idea that turns out badly in practice is a bad idea. Especially if the badness was a predictable and predicted consequence of that bad idea.

Often, in circumstances like these, Evil even asks for an equalising goal.

Evil offers a pairing of ideas - good twinned with evil, like socks emerging from the laundrette - as a package: "I'll concede that socialism has turned out badly in practice if you concede that socialism is a nice theory."

The proper way to behave, if you are Good, and go one-nil up in an argument, is to press for a two-nil lead.

The proper response to going one-nil up in the above argument about the practice and theory of socialism is to say: "Socialism has indeed turned out badly in practice. Now, about this evil notion of yours that socialism is a nice theory. Let's talk about that. And let's you admit that you are wrong about that also. We told you you were wrong from the start, and we were right that you were wrong. We predicted that socialism would turn out badly in practice, on account of it being a bad theory. You pressed on. You were wrong. In theory as well as in practice."

Like I say, press for two-nil.

So, all hail to Mark Meckler. (And further hail to Instapundit for linking to the story, today, and earlier.)

Meckler, arriving in New York and learning that he must not carry a gun, handed his gun over to the New York goons. (That much, he was willing to concede.) The goons promptly arrested him, for carrying the gun up to the point where he stopped carrying it, or something.

Faced with a determined Meckler, and a huge outcry of rage and contempt from the forces of Good, the New York goons have dropped their evil charges. One-nil to Meckler. But Meckler is now being subjected to another evil injustice. The goons still have his gun, and are refusing to return it.

Instead of thanking the goons for being so nice about not arresting him any more, Meckler now wants his gun back. Quite right. New York goons, give the man his gun back! (This is now an international campaign. I am international and I now say this.)

Saying "now give me back my gun" is not only the good thing for Good Mr Meckler to do; it is also excellent tactics. He is now one-nil up. He faces the chance to score another goal, and go two-nil up against the forces of Evil. He is now pressing to do just that.

Quite right. When you have argumentative momentum, against a team that is saying (or in this case also doing) not just one bad thing but many bad things, use it. Thereby keep it, and build it.

When the New York goons do hand back Meckler's gun, if they ever do (and actually, even if they don't), the proper next response, from all of us who have now rallied around Meckler, is: "Now, about all these other gun-carrying people, against whom you have not dropped the charges, and whose guns you have not returned …" Three-nil. Four-nil. Five-nil …

If the New York goons don't hand back Meckler's gun, perhaps because they sense that if they do, Meckler's team will then get more momentum, then the New York goons will be digging their heels in in an argument that they will hate but which the Meckler team will relish.

Also good. Shame about the stolen gun, but also good.

Says David Cameron:

Government can't tell people what they should be paid but...

His excuse for meddling is that there has been a "market failure", as indicated by a Guardian article that says that FTSE 100 directors' pay increased by 49% last year. And that is not right. People just will not stand for this sort of thing. What about the shareholders? The board should be forced to let them vote on pay and termination packages, he thinks, otherwise it is just crony capitalism and stealing from shareholders.

It is perfectly obvious that all of this is factored in to the share price already, and perfectly obvious that there are no principles on display here. From Cameron's Tory party we get the same envy politics as from the other parties. But I repeat Perry.

This story is more than a week old, but the case of how a line from the movie "Serenity", based on the moronically discontinued TV series Firefly, was used in a free speech crackdown is still worth a mention. Here is a video with Neil Gaiman, the SF writer, about the controversy. (H/T, Huffington Post).

More commentary from FIRE, the group supporting individual rights in the US education system.

Maybe I should wear my own Western-style "browncoat" coat in sympathy. I bought it in Ireland and it gives me a nice "Clint Eastwood" sort of appearance.

This morning I was prodded by the scourge of epidemiocracy, Chris Snowden, to read this piece by Theodore Dalrymple. What most struck me was not the main argument (I find predictable agreement almost as wearing as disagreement) but this piece of supplementary information:

A higher proportion of the Dutch population smokes than average for a developed country (27 percent), and fewer Dutch people are aware of secondhand, or second-lung, smoke — that breathed in from other people’s tobacco — than any other comparable country.

Why should that be? I think it demands an explanation. Certainly the Dutch population cannot easily be classed as ill-educated or poorly-informed. (I have been sworn at by a drunk tramp on an Amsterdam tram who switched instantly to English invective when he realised that it was going to be more effective in my case.) My mind leapfrogged towards ideas about the Dutch liberal tradition. They choose not to know, because they do not like to hassle people about their private behaviour, perhaps...

Unfortunately there are no sources quoted. When I looked for stats and background info, I found something even odder. That remarkable factoid contains no truth.

The OECD statistical library agrees with that 27% average - if it is actually daily smoking for males 15 and over. But it places The Netherlands fractionally below average, equal with Germany and slightly above Belgium for the proportion of males who smoke (26%), with slightly more women than either (20%).

How about "awareness of second-hand smoke". The points in the article about "relatively high" Dutch smokishness appear in less critical articles such as this one in Salon. (Which itself hints that it relies as a source on one Lies Van Gennip, director of the national tobacco control center.) Here we have a hint of the source for the "awareness" figure.

In a global survey on smokers’ awareness, only 61 percent of Dutch smokers agreed second-hand smoke was dangerous to non-smokers — much lower than smokers elsewhere, including Mauritius, China, Brazil and Mexico.

“Dutch smokers are among the least informed about the harms of smoking and second-hand smoke,” said Geoff Fong, at the University of Waterloo in Canada, who heads a program that monitors smoking policies worldwide.

Note the built-in interpretation: failure to agree counts as being ill-informed. I googled down the global survey mentioned. It appears in the BMJ for 4 April 2011 under the headline "Dutch smokers are "alarmingly" ignorant of harms of passive smoking, study finds." The original findings do indeed appear under the aegis of the University of Waterloo here (pdf) But are published on behalf of 'The International Tobacco Control Policy Evaluation Project: ITC Netherlands Survey' — the presentation of which suggests it is intended to drive Dutch policy, and the naming of which suggests we should worry about that 'global survey' point. Some (more) cherry-picking, perhaps?

Inspecting a bit further suggests there is reason to worry. See here. The ITCPEP doesn't do a global survey. It surveys different countries at different times using different methods. The most recent French survey (2009) was a telephone poll with respondents reimbursed; the most recent Dutch one (2011) was an online survey. The critical common question is not "Do you think your smoking harms others?" but "How often, in the last month have you thought about the harm your smoking might be doing to other people?" In both surveys, the critical question is preceded by questions about respondents' attempts to give up and their degree of addiction, but in the Dutch survey that is the beginning. In the French survey there is much prequalification apparatus including emphasis of the importance of the survey itself, and information sought about the individual respondent's household. Longitudinal comparisons on a single country might make sense if individual surveys are consistent; but comparing attitudes in two countries on this basis does not.

We know nothing from the ITCPEP about the beliefs of either Dutch or French smokers concerning the dangers of environmental tobacco smoke. They were not asked. But we cannot even compare their relative preoccupation with whether they may be harming others—what they were asked—because they were asked at different times, in different ways, in different contexts.

The only reason for making the comparison in the first place was to condemn Dutch views as "ignorance", but even the variance in views is a pseudo-statistical phantom, if you can be bothered to look into the detail.

I am interested in variation in public attitudes and in political culture and their relationship to policy. But it is devilish hard to find out about those relationships when even critical discussion, such as Dr Dalrymple's, is predicated on 'facts' whose selection and interpretation is determined by the attitudes of interested researchers. Even specialist commentators are seldom suspicious enough to do more than re-word the press release and cast it in the light of their own attitudes.

Let us imagine you are working on software for a mobile phone. When an SMS text message comes in you might think it would be cool to display it and highlight any email addresses or phone numbers in it. The user would tap an email address to add it to his address book, or tap a phone number to call it. It is a fairly obvious idea.

There are a few different ways you could implement it in software. I would probably have a bunch of regular expressions that matched phone numbers and email addresses, and for each type of match there would be a list of things that you could do. Have a think about what you might like to appear in a pop-up menu after you tapped an email address that appeared in a text message on your phone. I bet you can think of two or three things. Later you might think of new things to do with an email address, or new things that appear in a text message that could be highlighted so the user can tap them to perform actions on them. For example if someone sends a message saying "meet me at 7pm", the user could tap where it says "7pm" and this time could pop up in the calendar to show whether there are already any appointments at 7pm. There are lots of things like this you could do.

To handle the possibility that you will think of these new ideas in the future, you write your software in a general way. You design general concepts like a pattern matcher that can look at some text and decide whether it is a phone number or an email address or some other text that you have not thought of yet. This sort of thing is done so often in software that the regular expressions I mentioned above were invented. This is a notation for describing strings of characters. For example the expression [0-9]+pm matches one or more of the digits 0 to 9, followed by the letters 'pm'. Because this is done in software so frequently there are freely available software libraries that anyone can use and that given a text message and a regular expression will spit out a list of all the matching items in the text message.

There is some work in hooking up the various parts, but the point is that all the parts are known to programmers. We all know when regular expressions are useful, and we can all imagine how you would use lists of items that display actions such as "Add to address book" on the screen and then perform the action when activated by the user. I could write some code that would solve this problem in a general way in less than a day from first hearing a vague description of it.

The point is that it is obvious to anyone who writes software. Solving problems like this involves putting together some well known pieces in well known ways. I am emphasizing how obvious this sort of thing is.

The existence of patent 5,946,647 is not obvious. I can not really think of how I would find out about it without reading every single patent and I can not think of a guaranteed way to even know what to look for.

But if I write my obvious code in half a day, there is a good chance I would violate patent 5,946,647.

It is not certain. I have read the patent and it manages to convey the obvious idea in far too many words. So many that I would never be sure whether any given implementation fitted the patent. But there are only so many ways to do something this simple in software, and truly original ideas are rare. So the likelihood is high.

And Apple sued and a judge ruled that HTC has violated the patent and as a result will not be allowed to import devices with this software into the USA. This sucks.

This afternoon I attended an event in the House of Commons organised by the Adam Smith Institute, to launch their publication (published in partnership with the Cobden Centre) entitled The Law of Opposites: Illusory profits in the financial sector, by Gordon Kerr. Kerr himself spoke.

Alas, Gordon Kerr is a rather quiet speaker, and he did not use a microphone. Worse, after the talk had begun, I realised that right there next to me was some kind of air conditioning machine whirring away, in a way that made following Kerr's talk difficult. Live and learn.

But I got the rough idea. Bad accountancy rules make disastrously unprofitable banks seem like triumphantly profitable banks, and those presiding over these banks are paid accordingly, even as their banks crash around them. And much more. The ASI's Blog Editor offers further detail.

Good news though. I, like everyone else present, was given a free copy of The Law of Opposites. See if you can spot why I am reproducing the cover here. I am sure this will not take you long. I was interested to see if the effect in question would survive my rather primitive scanning skills. It does:

This publication is quite short, less than a hundred pages in length. Even better news. You don't have to buy a paper copy like the one I now possess if you don't want to. You can read the whole thing on line.

The internet has been buzzing for a while about the incident of a woman, Emma West, who, as shown in a video, shouted abuse at people on a tram. It is not exactly clear from the clip what might have led to this, but regardless, it is pretty nasty and a young child sits nearby as she delivers these words. She has, according to reports, been subsequently arrested and charged.

Some people out there in the blogosphere are outraged by this turn of events - that West has been dealt with by the authorities, I mean. Initially, the libertarian in me agreed wholeheartedly, regarding this as an appalling attempt to enforce codes of conduct, including speech, in public places. It does make me deeply uneasy and I wonder whether the law would have come down like a ton of bricks on her had she just left, say, litter on the floor.

The blogger Old Holborn expresses such a view, for instance. Some people seem to suggest, in fact, that people like this woman have been provoked beyond endurance by the impact of mass immigration. Well maybe, although as a supporter of the freedom of people to move from A to B - so long as they do not expect state benefits - I don't see why immigration should be halted because it offends people like this woman. After all, given that she lives in London, and that it is, thankfully, a cosmopolitan city and one of the financial capitals of the planet, she will have to face up the chance of meeting lots of foreign-looking folk on a fairly regular basis, immigration or not.

I had second thoughts about this business, however, when I considered that under the old Common Law (which libertarians often praise), and other laws too, an offence of "breach of the peace" might apply to this woman's conduct; such a situation should, perhaps, involve no more than a rap over the knuckles from a magistrate and told to be of good behaviour. The same used to apply to people who got very drunk and disorderly, etc. This would not have anything specifically to do, as such, with being politically correct, as far as I can see. (There may have been elements of PC-ness in this case, of course.). The issue would be simply whether her behaviour was deemed likely to cause disorder, and of what the risk of that really was.

Also, from a property rights point of view, if a train/other service is run by a private company, say, then I would argue that the train company should be free to decide such matters, just as, in a perfect liberal world, pubs and clubs and other such places could so decide. (Alas, such principles have already been partly destroyed as in the outlawing of smoking in privately owned commercial premises). If I own, say, a theatre, and I saw a customer shout abuse of any kind at another in the bar, then I'd be within my rights as the owner of said property to kick the people out and if necessary, ban him/her from re-entering.

The context is also important in such cases, or it can be. It is one thing, maybe, to trade insults with someone in a fairly open place; it is another business if you are on a confined space such as a train carriage or small office and have to hear such abuse, in close proximity. The smaller the space, the more good manners matter. Indeed, think of how the word "civility" and "civic" run together - manners are a function of having to live close to one's fellows. Institutions such as navies, where people have to sleep cheek by jowl, understand this point almost instinctively - hence all the seemingly petty rules.

These are issues where a healthy civil society is one in which certain behaviours are internalised, reducing the need for rules on such conduct to be enforced by things like police. We should not need to legislate so that mothers do not swear in front of their young children while verbally attacking strangers, or dumping litter on the pavement, or spitting, or urinating in public. And to a degree, the fundamental problem is that this internalisation of moral conduct has been hit by a variety of forces, including the Welfare State, breeding an often oafish, whining sense of entitlement. And it also leads me to the view that one of the most effective ways to restore civility is through private, non-state ownership of public spaces.

By the way, on a related topic, I can recommend Edward Shils' classic, The Virtue of Civility.

An old friend of mine, now living in Texas, gave me several links on Face Book that show there really is a revolt going on over the Edison bulb issue. It is one of those small things that everyone can easily understand. It is the hand of Big Brother reaching into their own personal space.

The rebellion is catching on at the State government level in Texas and South Carolina and Georgia and Arizona too.

Let the NoGreen war banners unfurl! Onwards to victory!

Do institutions have a will that transcends, and can run contrary to, those who create and staff them?

In the early seventies my high school participated in a program that allowed students to access the Illinois Institute of Technology computers for instructional purposes. In a room off of the school library sat two Teletype 33 terminals, one of them equipped with foam telephone ear cups and a modem. We would code our programs onto paper tape and then, during our school's allocated time, feed them into the IIT mainframe for compiling and executing. The second thing I learned after how to get the mainframe to understand that I was sending it a program, was that computer programs have a will of their own that is totally apart from my will. My will is to get the answers to the formulas I am trying to solve. The program's will is to follow the next instruction. Occasionally, to the programmer's embarrassment and the rest of the computer club's amusement, an errant program would set off in a Quixotic attempt to consume all of our allocation of CPU clock time, empty the box of paper and wear out the printer ribbon, in an infinite pursuit of pointless activity. An example of this might be if I told the program to stop when a particular value reached "25", but then inadvertently instructed it to count up in units of two. Since the counter stepped from "24" straight to "26", it never did reach "25" and the program tripped merrily along, consuming all of the resources it could acquire. Later I was employed working on a Burroughs computer. It had a lovely missile-launch style red button labeled "CLEAR MEMORY" shielded underneath a spring-loaded, hinged, clear plastic cover. When programs ran amok, we could lift the cover and administer an instant memory wipe to the CPU, returning control to the system operator.

How does computer programming pertain to Institutional Will? Institutions, whether they are small temporary government programs, or über institutions like a constitution, are nothing but computer programs executing procedural instructions on a societal mainframe. Just like electronic programs, institutions can evade their constraints and wildly consume resources, until a counter-procedural force stops them.

Years ago I promised to Veryretired, a long time denizen of the Samizdata commentariat, an essay on why civil disobedience is wrong. He has yet to receive that essay from me - and he never will, because I encountered the problem of Institutional Will. When institutions, like errant electronic programs, slip their intended constraints, it is only through disobedience to procedural instructions on the part of human individuals that they can be stopped.

I am not saying that institutions have any moral presence: as an individualist I believe moral presence and agency must be assigned exclusively to individuals. Institutions do, however, have a will that transcends the wills of the individuals acting within them. How can this happen?

Legislation is horrifically complicated in these later times of our republic. But even worse, much of it is "enabling legislation" that puts in place institutions that set their own parameters in pursuit of an ambiguously defined goal. Whether through complexity or non-specification, there exists the possibility that institutional "programmers" will create a runaway institution, freed from all constraints.

Usually institutional errantry is the result of a complex interplay of processes, where no single individual understands them all, but it is possible to demonstrate it with a simple hypothetical case. Imagine that an institution's governance puts in place a policy called "Policy F". "Policy F" specifies that anybody who challenges "Sub-chapter XII(b)" is to be terminated from any further participation in that institution. Perhaps because a different sub-committee moved "Policy F" to page 231.76.0.1(A(c)) of "Sub-chapter XII(b)", the rule has been put firmly in place without open and thoughtful review. Eventually somebody reads down to page 231.76.0.1(A(c)) and says "Hey! Wait a minute! This is a really bad idea!" At this point, in order to comply with the rules, he is immediately expelled from the institution. After all, "rules are rules", "of laws and not of men", etc. This happens a few more times, and that institution is soon disproportionately staffed with people who by nature are disinclined to challenge the system. An institutional mindset is forming that diverges from that of the institution's creators.

In any living organism, some mutations are beneficial and some are not. In an institution, procedural mutations that serve to perpetuate the institution's existence will be selected for, whereas the absence of self-perpetuating mutations will allow an institution to eventually fade, as the underlying need it serves fades. As time passes, institutions form and dissolve, but some of them will mutate to serve their own continuance. After enough time passes, we will be (in fact, are) overwhelmed by the accretion of institutions whose sole remaining function is to perpetuate their own existence. It is not that procedural mutations will lean in that direction, only that the long-term institutional survivors are the ones whose mutations prioritized institutional perpetuance over the original purpose their creators assigned to them.

To be clear, my point is that Institutional Will is, and can be, neither benign nor malevolent, merely that it exists. Institutional Will is to amorally follow the decision tree; to apply at every decision point the specified action and to proceed onward to the next decision point. Whether in a computer program or in a major governmental institution, this process will continue until it either terminates itself or is terminated in defiance of its internal processes. When an institution is no longer beneficial and yet refuses to be terminated, that defiance must sometimes take the form of civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is the opposite of unquestioningly following orders. Civil disobedience is a sometimes necessary application of one's moral agency, required of anyone capable of knowing right from wrong.

So in case you were wondering, Veryretired, I have reversed myself on civil disobedience. Sometimes it is not merely acceptable, it is imperative to defy errant institutions that have rejected their Constitutional bindings and are trampling original intent. It is about the survival of individuals qua individuals in the face of an institutional leviathan.

The UK Labour party's conference is underway in Liverpool, and party bigwigs are presenting their proposals for reinvigorating Labour after its crushing defeat in the last election. The stupidest of these proposals to date will be presented today, when Ivan Lewis, the shadow culture secretary, will propose a licensing scheme for journalists through a professional body that will have the power to forbid people who breach its code of conduct from doing journalism in the future.

Given that "journalism" presently encompasses "publishing accounts of things you've seen using the Internet" and "taking pictures of stuff and tweeting them" and "blogging" and "commenting on news stories," this proposal is even more insane than the tradition "journalist licenses" practiced in totalitarian nations.

I'm all for hanging up Murdoch and his phone hackers by their thumbs, but you don't need to license journalists to get that done: all you need to do is prosecute them under existing criminal statutes. In other words, the only "journalism code of conduct" the UK needs to avert another phone hacking scandal is "don't break the law." Of course, it would help if government didn't court favour with the likes of Murdoch, as was the case under Labour (and is the case with today's Tories).

For a party eager to shed its reputation as sinister, spying authoritarians, Labour's really got its head up its arse.

- Cory Doctorow

This is so mad it is being noticed everywhere, not just in Britain. Instapundit says they should have a read of Areopagitica. Well, we can hope. Not that they will read Areopagitica, merely that they might not like making themselves look like sinister, spying authoritarians, all over the world.

LATER: Lewis's Loony Licensing Plan Disowned By Miliband. The derision was not confined to the internet. The Labour Conference was derisive too. Good on them. Someone tell Instapundit.

I am a sarcastic cow, I am used to being a sarcastic cow and I am comfortable being a sarcastic cow. When the time comes to simply recommend an article in the Guardian my non-sarcastic mooing sounds all funny in my own ears. But, here goes: I recommend you read 'Freedom of information is for businesses too' by Heather Brooke.

A request by tobacco giant Philip Morris International has reignited concern about the use of freedom of information laws. The data it was interested in was collected as part of a survey of teenagers and smoking carried out by the university's Centre for Tobacco Control Research.

The UK's FoI law is meant to be applicant blind. This means anyone can ask a public body for official information and there should be no discrimination based on the identity of the person asking. In the case of scientific research conducted and funded in the public's name, there is a strong argument that the underlying data and methodology should be disclosed. It is precisely this transparency that grants research reports their status as robust investigations.

People going to fancy dress parties do it. The blogger Old Holborn does it. I am talking about face masks.

Face masks have been targeted as one of the things that the authorities may try to ban in the wake of the riots. Enforcing such a rule, even if it makes sense, strikes me as difficult. Perhaps the only way to interpret and enforce such a law would be to say that anyone wearing an item obscuring most of the face during a time of public disorder would be at risk of prosecution. (Wearing a ski mask should be illegal in the middle of a riot, but not on the slopes of Chamonix, for example). But again, how to decide when to impose the rule? Perhaps a public official, preferably a magistrate, has to read out what used to be called the riot act and after the reading of said act, anyone wearing a mask or suchlike is in trouble.

But it may not be so cut and dried as that, alas. There is the issue of public versus private space to consider. Owners of private property, such as shopping malls and the like, are entirely within their rights to insist that people entering the premises should show their faces, and comply with whatever codes of behaviour might be stipulated, however rational or otherwise, just as private members' clubs and other places ought to be able to insist on dress codes, for example. Banks will typically insist that motorcyclists take off their helmets, if I recall correctly. (That makes perfect sense, for security reasons).

But as I know some regulars will ask, how does this ban on face masks apply to Muslim women who cover their faces behind a veil or other such form of costume? If such a person enters a shop, say, does this mean the police will now insist they show their faces? I'd like to see how that's going to work. What about Islamist demonstrators against, say, military actions in the Mid-East? I cannot honestly see how the cops are going to successfully enforce a mask ban without a serious ruckus.

Like a lot of ideas that sound good to politicians in the heat of the moment, the notion of banning people from obscuring all or part of their faces is difficult as a general aim of the law, even if owners of private spaces are entitled, as they are, to make such demands. I can see all kinds of issues of interpretation coming up: what about a guy who wears a baseball cap with big sunglasses - is that illegal, or not? What counts as a "mask"? Surely, any law would need to consider the full context here, but it is not always obvious whether wearing a certain item signifies intent to avoid detection.

Instead of such silly measures, the government must focus its attention, as has been pointed out ad nauseam here, on the following areas:

--T ougher sentences for crimes of all kinds, including theft, which in far too many cases is treated as a minor matter. Such punishments must include restitution of the victim(s);
-- Drastic cuts to welfare benefits combined with a big rise in tax thresholds at the bottom of the scale to make work pay. Even the dimmest thugs operate under some sort of cost/benefit analysis. Make work pay;
-- Lowering the compulsory school-leaving age; change to labour market rules to encourage apprenticeships, vocational training;
-- Allow people to use force in self defence, including firearms;
-- Legalise (most) drugs. Yes, this is probably the most controversial idea, and maybe I would not enact this until the moral hazard-machine of the Welfare State has been seriously changed, but it is a key issue. If gangs don't control the drugs trade, it undermines the gang culture more generally;
-- Tax cuts more generally so that married spouses don't feel under such pressure to both work to keep a decent income. This may also reinforce marriage and provide a better environment for children;
-- Scrap the various quangos, race relations organisations and other tax-funded institutions that far from alleviating tensions, often inflame them by the manufacture of various grievances for classic bureaucratic empire-building reasons;
-- Zero tolerance policing. Get some guys from New York over to London for some rapid tutorials.

I am sure there are more ideas on how to strengthen the family, encourage positive behaviours and deter bad ones, but it seems to me that trying to regulate dress codes in the streets is one of the most pointless unless the conditions can be very clearly defined in law and avoid arbitrariness. Not a good idea, Prime Minister. There are other, more urgent things to do, and time is short.

If you have been unfortunate enough to be following the UK media's breathtakingly awful attempts to say something useful about the riots... such as tut tutting about 'social media' for enabling the looting to be organised (cue calls from that hideous Janus-faced Guardian/Daily Mail Chimera to "Do Something")... well you might get a giggle from Alec Muffet's take on that subject.

Sound fellow, that Muffet bloke.

Writing in today's Times behind a paywall, Natascha Engel, Labour MP for North East Derbyshire, relates how she stood in the rain outside a miner's welfare hall smoking with a angry but partially mollified constituent.

...he told me about his father in law who used to come to the welfare every night and spent all evening drinking one pint of Guinness. He was a chain smoker. Since the smoking ban he's never been back.

"He's can't stand outside in the rain like this. He's an old man." He told me about how his father-in-law never goes out any more. "He's lonely and miserable. And he still chain smokes."

Natascha Engel now says that, given the chance again, she would not vote for the ban. It is good that she has the empathy to see and the courage to state that reason the smoking ban is wrong is that it makes people more miserable than they would otherwise have been. Just that. That is reason enough. Arguments about health are very interesting, and I have no doubt that the dangers of passive smoking have been exaggerated, but the fact that an old man has had the solace of smoking in company with his friends denied him trumps all that. I do wish Ms Engel had been able to perceive this at the time when her vote might have done some good, but better late than never.

Reading about the arrest of what appears to have been an extremist planning an attack on Ft Hood, Texas, I was struck by the contrast with the Oslo attack last weekend.

Private First Class Naser Jason Abdo, was arrested Wednesday after making a purchase at Guns Galore in Killeen, Texas, the same ammunition store where Maj. Nidal Hasan purchased the weapons he allegedly used to gun down 13 people and wound 32 others on Nov. 5, 2009.

The point being that a legal gun shop owner is more likely to call the police than a black market arms supplier would. Now if we could only get all the gun rights people in America to realise the advantages of legal outlets for drugs as well...

Steve Baker, the MP whom we here actually rather like, has a piece in the latest Jewish Chronicle, which makes what seems to me like a very important point. I have this point alluded to vaguely, but never spelled out. It is that the outrageous behaviour of the merchant banking fraternity in recent years is as much a product of bad bank regulations as it is of mere capitalistic greed.

It being the Jewish Chronicle he's contributing to, Baker alludes to some scales that are criticised at the beginning of the Book of Proverbs, Chapter 11 (which American readers may consider rather appropriate, what with the times we (and they) are now living in).

The particular rules that Baker zeroes in on are the accounting rules that define profit:

Among other problems, IFRS accounting rules incentivise trading in derivatives by enabling unrealised, perhaps fake, profits to be booked up-front, leading to large but unjustified bonuses and dividends. They grossly inflate profits and capital and discourage banks from making prudent provision for expected loan losses. They also discard the time-honoured principle of prudence embodied in UK company law. In doing so, IFRS gravely weakens the audit function and the vital check it imposes on bank management. This undermines effective corporate governance in banking. The upshot is that IFRS makes bank accounts highly unreliable; no-one has a true view of our banks' financial strength. All this contributed greatly to the financial collapse. IFRS made banks appear more profitable than they were. This led them to imprudent expansion, to payments of bonuses they could ill afford to make and to inadequate provisioning for likely losses.

I am not qualified to second guess Baker on this. But I do know, as a general principle, that when one observes something going wrong with the world, one should not immediately assume that yet more laws and regulations are needed to curb whatever it may be. Rather, one should ask what laws or regulations - laws or regulations already in place - are causing or at the very least greatly exacerbating the problem in question, and should accordingly be got rid of.

I did some coke, and slept with a whore. But that's what a superinjunction is for!

- Robbie Williams, at last week's Take That show at Wembley, mocks the legalised suppression of free speech. Quoted by Fraser Nelson in his obituary for the News of the World, in the News of the World.

Bohemia has been banned.

- David Hockney denounces the smoking ban.

... no, it was the highest institutions of the Netherlands who were on trial with their credibility and very legitimacy at stake.

Although I am delighted he was acquitted of all charges, frankly it is a disgrace that he was ever put on trial in the first place for simply stating his views about Islam and multiculturalism.

And the fact the BBC calls him 'far right' tells you nothing useful about Geert Wilders' views but speaks volumes about the BBC.

A few days ago Phlip Davies MP suggested that disabled workers or those with mental health problems could get work more easily if they had the right to voluntarily opt out of the minimum wage.

He said,

"Given that some of those people with a learning disability clearly, by definition, can't be as productive in their work as somebody who hasn't got a disability of that nature, then it was inevitable that given that the employer was going to have to pay them both the same they were going to take on the person who was going to be more productive, less of a risk, and that was doing those people a huge disservice."

Within hours so much outraged commentary flowed out of newspaper columnists, charity representatives and politicians of all parties, including Mr Davies' own, that you'd think there'd been an outbreak of indignation dysentery.

Let us look at a few of the responses.

"A lower minimum wage if you're disabled? Not acceptable, sorry," says Lucy Glennon in the Guardian.

"It is a preposterous suggestion," MIND spokeswoman Sophie Corlett was quoted as saying in the Yorkshire Post, "that someone who has a mental health problem should be prepared to accept less than the minimum wage to get their foot in the door with an employer.

"People with mental health problems should not be considered a source of cheap labour and should be paid appropriately for the jobs they do."

"Philip Davies's comments are another obstacle to disabled workers being treated as equal," said Paul Farmer, chief executive of MIND, writing in the Telegraph. He added, "He has caused offence to many people who work with a mental health problem and those who want to work on an equal footing, yet struggle to overcome the stigma they face."

Jody McIntyre in the Independent was also outraged. His suggestion that Members of Parliament should work for less than minimum wage was not bad, though. Of the mentally disabled, he said "A strong test of any progressive society is how it’s most vulnerable people are valued for their worth, rather than pitied for their faults. Philip Davies clearly places little value on the role of people with learning difficulties in our society; instead of celebrating their diversity, he chooses to reinforce the discriminatory myth that people with learning difficulties are more of a risk to employers."

There was more, much more. After reading loads of responses I noticed something that they all had in common... as not having.

Not one response of all the many I read even tried to argue that Mr Davies was factually wrong. They were outraged, disgusted. They asserted what no one denies: that mentally disabled people are equal citizens and often prove to be hardworking employees, valued by their employers. But I could not find one article that argued that Davies' description of the way things go when a person with an IQ of 60 or a history of insanity seeks a job was inaccurate, or gave reasons to believe his proposal would not increase their chances of landing one.

"Philip Davies is right, of course," says Tim Worstall. "But so profoundly unfashionable that no one will say so". He then goes on to argue that Davies is right. His views will not be purist enough for some libertarians, but the novelty of reading someone bother to put forward a chain of reasoning when talking about this topic is a bit of a thrill. The fact that he bothers to think about what will actually happen to disabled people, particularly mentally disabled people, under various scenarios shows a thousand times more compassion than the people whose response is mostly concerned with their own emotions.

A quote from Charles Murray: "It seems that those who legislate and administer and write about social policy can tolerate any increase in actual suffering so long as the system does not explicitly permit it."

BBC:

Women in Saudi Arabia have been openly driving cars in defiance of an official ban on female drivers in the ultra-conservative kingdom.

My thanks to Antoine Clarke for the h/t. Antoine's Norlonto Review has been only occasional in recent months, but is now active. And Antoine adds this observation:

SAUDI ARABIA NEEDS A BURQA BAN. Women defy government ban on driving and post videos of themselves driving around town. Of course the veil makes it harder to identify them.

I guess those Islamic scholars who insisted that the burqa was a liberation have a point.

Heh.

Too many of our internet dreams depend on the internet being far less vulnerable to governments than it actually is.

- August, commenting on a posting at my place about Bitcoin.

I suggest comments about what August says about the internet: here. Bitcoin comments: there.

Aren't we all?

I always knew there was money being made by various people, out of all this Health and Safety activity there has recently been. Someone, I have long been muttering to myself, is making a fortune printing all these signs. And there are "consultants" making a fine living explaining all the legal complications involved. Big building contractors, in particular, have lots of money and no huge public popularity, and if they break even one letter of one of these laws I imagine it can get very expensive.

This snap, taken a fortnight ago during that canal trip I went on, confirms my suspicions:

Another Van of the Times, to put beside this earlier one.

It seems that these guys began just selling legally mandated fire extinguishers, but you get the feeling that they are now branching out, don't you? The company name certainly says to me that they always saw fire extinguishers as their way into a much bigger market, which they knew was getting bigger all the time.

This was one of the more splendid comments that we have had on Samizdata in quite some time: David Gillies, regarding this manifest steaming pile: the deceptively named "World Health Organisation" claiming mobile phones increase the risk of brain cancer.. even though there has been no observed spike in brain cancer despite the explosive growth in the use of such phones world wide....

This has been headline news in every newspaper I have seen, including the leading daily here in Costa Rica, and none of 'em have been fit to wrap fish in (I'd wager there's a far higher carcinogenic propensity in the ink used to print this shit.) Non-ionising radiation? Check. Sub-milliwatt power levels? Check. No causative mechanism that survives the laugh test? Check. Decades of use and no detectable increment in tumours at the lax 2.0 relative risk for publication in a halfway-reputable journal? Check. Defeats the null hypothesis at the 95% confidence interval? Ha ha ha, oh my sides. Soundbite-ready quacks straining in their traces to leap into the running on CNN and Fox and Sky and the Beeb to peddle doom-mongering (but possibly book-selling) crap? Mais bien sur, a regiment of them. The disgusting WHO ready to dip its grubby fingers into the whole stew of idiocy and rent-seeking? Ho, yus, my chilluns, and when were they ever not? Pathetic.

If you cannot, within say 30 seconds, get a ballpark figure for the photon energy in microelectronvolts of an 1800 Mhz photon (and why that matters), or describe qualitatively what a femtowatt is (not quantitatively, oh no, that won't do at all) or give a fairly robust description of what '3 dB/octave' means when it comes to microwave absorption coefficients then shut your face, crawl back under your silly epidemiological stone, and die of something real and not imagined. Maybe the publication-hungry pseudoscientists that infest this field might be able to do all of the above as some sort of parlour trick, but the notion that your average journalist could is as laughable as spaniels doing differential equations. And this isn't the argumentum ad verecundiam, like it is with the global warming zealots. There's practically no-one in the hard sciences who thinks that microwave radiation is a causative agent in cancers. It's lies, sophistry and nonsense. The really big question to ask (like with the AGW scam) when you see a scientific fraud being perpetrated on this scale is, as ever, cui bono?

- David Gillies

Though a World Health Organization study concluded cell phones may cause cancer, some are wondering why, if their truly is a link, there not been a significant worldwide increase in brain cancers.

Go figure. But of course providing excuses for more regulations, and more funding for further studies, is the reason bodies such as the World Health Organisation exist.

While some minorities become popular political causes, other minorities are on the receiving end of negative political populism. Politically correct campaigners will loudly support the "good minorities" such as GLBT or immigrant groups, but they are equally loud in their condemnation of the "wrong minorities". This seems to indicate that we are not becoming more tolerant... we are simply switching our bigotry on to other areas.

- John Humphreys

Read the whole thing.

The Internet threatens their power and perks. That’s far more important than problems that merely threaten the world’s wellbeing.

- Instapundit comments on a piece called As world burns, G8 leaders fiddle ... with the Internet. Seriously?

Indeed. Ignore the messages. Silence the messenger.

Besides which, it's asking a lot to expect the people who caused the problems, and whose first attempts to solve the problems multiplied the problems, to solve the problems.

Recently, I've been exploring the area around the Royal Victoria Dock, which now has lots of houses on its south side, between it and the River Thames, and the ExCeL (apologies for the correct spelling there) Centre on its north side, where they hold big exhibitions like, most recently, this.

The area abounds with photo-opportunities of the sort that I like. To the West, there is the Dome and the Docklands Towers. Beyond them, other more distant towers nearer to London's centre can be spotted, by me anyway. To the East, interestingly obscure airplanes land and take off from the City Airport, often flying the length of the Dock in the process, near enough for me to actually see some detail in my snaps of them. All around the Dock, large but idle cranes stand, reminders of more muscular and industrial times for this stretch of water, which now advertises itself on the outsides of nearby building sites as being a venue for sporty little sailing boats.

Best of all, there is a big footbridge, half way along the Dock, north to south, with a span high into the sky which is reached by lifts at each end. The views from this bridge, especially those looking West into central London, are very fine.

And all around the Royal Victoria Dock, as everywhere else in Britain that I have visited lately, there are official signs of all sorts (a more recent photographic enthusiasm of mine), urging this, forbidding that, threatening and warning and nagging and cajoling.

Are you a building worker? Be careful in there:

Building workers seem often to get bombarded with the visual equivalent of a Fidel Castro speech, in the form of huge clumps of warnings about every imaginable infringement of safety they might choose to indulge in.

The rest of us are of course nagged on a similar scale, but each nag tends to have its own separate notice.

So, at the Royal Victoria Docks, we observe, if we choose to, dozens of nags and official imprecations of all kinds...

Are you the kind of person who thinks that jet airplanes in the vicinity of airports are always silent? They are not:

Were you thinking of doing some fishing? Think again:

And be warned that "but I was doing it at night" will not wash as a defence:

This being a big stretch of water, there are signs upon signs, too numerous to count, all saying:

All of the above drops in the ocean of signage in and around the Royal Victoria Dock are signs that I made a point of noticing, but which others would not. But, in among all these very ignorable signs, I came across this next sign. It also concerns swimming, but I think that this is a no swimming sign with a difference:

That is a sign which I think I would have noticed even if I had not been noticing signs generally at all.

It's as if its creator was, while creating it, thinking and feeling something rather unusual. He actually cared about people reading his sign and about people doing what he said. He really wanted to communicate something.

He thought about it. How can I word it, he said to himself, to make sure that people pay attention, refrain from swimming in these truly dangerous waters, in which, I know for a fact, in 1995, no fewer than seven - seven - people were drowned? How can I get that across? Lives are at stake here. Before I die, I want to make the world a slightly better place. This is my chance.

You can see the scene in his office, in 1999 or whenever it was. "I'm stuck," said he. Stuck? Relax, said his less committed colleagues. It's only a sign. Nobody reads signs. They're only there to avoid legal liability when some idiot does whatever it is. "But I really want people to read it! What can I put?"

I like to think that at this point, a wise and experienced sign writer said: "Put your pen down, and tell me what you are trying to say? Say it it out loud."

"Say it out loud?"

"Yes."

"Well, what I want to say is that during 1995 there were seven deaths in docklands waters due to people ignoring these signs! These waters are dangerous! No swimming!"

"Well, why don't you put that?"

"Eh?"

"Put what you just said. That'll get their attention. Your sincerity will shine through."

Seriously, there is a real problem with all these signs, not unlike the problem of too many laws. People just switch off. They screen them out. Call it: sign inflation. So many warnings add up to ... no warning at all.

This, come to think of it, is one of the reasons I have taken to snapping these signs and sticking them up on this (or my own) blog. I'm saying: do what you never do normally, and actually read some of this crap. Isn't it weird? What's the world coming to? (There are some very pertinent answers to that question here.) The signs say something in a blog posting, because these signs are typically ignored. If they worked, and everyone read them, there'd be no point in me reproducing them. As it is, it's quite a laugh, albeit rather a troubling one.

Which means that when there actually is a real problem of some kind (and not just the fear of law suits or a quota for how many signs your department has erected this year or a "compliance officer" with no-one else to torment snapping at your heals and threatening to ruin you), when quite a few people actually have died due to not being scared enough about doing this or that, a sign that merely says don't do it will not suffice.

Most public officials, presumably, just say to hell with it. I did my bit. I organised a hundred signs saying: no swimming. If people ignore all that, how can I be blamed?

But the question my sign-composing hero put to himself was not: How can I evade responsibility when people die? His question was: How can I actually save people from dying?

That's what I like about this particular sign. It cut through the background noise of the usual health and safety signage, and actually spoke to me. It actually convinced me that swimming in the Royal Victoria Docks would be truly unwise, as opposed to merely being troublesome to plan for and officiate over. It got me thinking about tidal currents in that part of London, and the cost of a big rescue operation when someone who fears he or she is about to drown cries out to someone on land to fetch help, a lot of it, quick. I started imagining the early evening news reports, with photographs and little clutches of flowers where the body was washed ashore.

I quite realise, before anyone says, that in a libertarian world, such things might be handled very differently. The right to take risks might, at any rate in some parts of town, be taken a whole lot more seriously than it is now, along with the obligation to live or die with the consequences of taking risks. Not my point here. Sometimes the public sector does something I admire. That's what this posting has been about.

There is also the suggestion of an acknowledgement - is there not? - both in the wording of this sign and in the fact that as the years have gone by it has not been updated with news of more recent safety insubordinations, that ignoring no swimming signs in 1995 was a truly culpable act. Whereas now, in 2011, only a fool - or a weirdo photo-blogger - would pay any attention to all the relentlessly ubiquitous official nagging of this sort.

Unless, that is, it got through to you, and truly convinced you of the wisdom of heeding its advice.

This worthy project is about trying to get folks to examine their underpinning meta-context... the unspoken 'givens' that we all use to frame our view of the world that almost always go unexamined: well if you think that, then surely this should follow, no?

... and if you manage to reach people on that level, you can change many of their conclusions about a great many things.

I'm looking forward to spotting (and snapping) my first one of these on the streets of London. The telephoto lens and the iPhone, I mean, not the mere iPhone.

I was expecting such an add-on to be priced at well over a hundred quid, if only because it has such a rich-guy's-toy vibe about it. But actually it's around fifty. But, does it work well? As yet, there appear to be no reviews. But click here to read the press release. In German.

My hope, and actually my expectation, is that as the years roll by and as cheap and cheerful camera technology continues to develop, my immense archive of cheap and cheerful snaps of cheap and cheerful cameras in action will get ever more fun to look back at.

A drawback of this lens might be, for some, that it makes it clear that you are definitely using your iPhone to take photos. There is no doubt that many of the powers that be would like to ban photography in public places altogether, by everyone except their noble selves, either because they really would or just for something to do. Historically, one of the more significant achievements of mobile phones with cameras may prove to be that they have made it impossible for some goon in a uniform to tell if you are taking photos, or merely texting or some such thing. If challenged while doing the former, you can protest that you were merely doing the latter. Simply, they couldn't and can't ban public photo-ing because they can't spot when it's happening.

The gradual but inexorable illegalisation of smoking is arriving at its end-game, as many bloggers of the sort I like have been complaining about, and no doubt as many bloggers of the sort I don't like have been celebrating.

Here is the Radio Times, describing a show done by Panorama last Monday (March 7th) entitled Smoking and the Bandits:

Criminal gangs are believed to be supplying half of all hand-rolled tobacco and in five cigarettes in the United Kingdom. ... their products are also up to 30 times more toxic than ordinary cigarettes.

I saw that coming in 1987. Under the bit in that pamphlet entitled THE BENEFITS OF ADVERTISING, AND OF PROPERTY (page 3) I wrote about how gangsters would, if the illegalisation process I was writing about even then continued, soon be running the tobacco business, supplying "these now genuinely lethal products". Not that I was alone in possessing these prophetic powers. Just about every libertarian then writing saw this coming. Illegality equals toxicity. You merely had to apply what everyone already knew about other drugs markets that already were, even then, illegal, or for that matter acquaint yourself with a one page summary of the story of Prohibition, and the pattern of future events, if they insisted on continue to bear down on smoking with the force of law.

But going back to that bit in the Radio Times, where I put "…" above, it also says this:

However, not only are the criminals depriving British taxpayers of £4 billion in revenue, ...

That's right, there goes the exact same warped logic as Natalie Solent noted in her posting earlier today, immediately below this one. No, Radio Times, depriving taxpayers is what you do when you tax them. These "bandits" are thriving because, unlike our tyrannical government, they are not doing that.

It seems that the commenter quoted by Natalie is mistaken. It is not "only in the mind of Ms Lucas" that such warped thinking is being thought.

Matt Welch, over at the Reason Hit & Run blog, comes across this piece of nuttery from the land that gave us Dan Ackroyd and John Candy. How sad and oppressive that nation appears. Of course, there is no reason for anyone else to gloat: in Britain, we have more than our fair share of censors and wannabe controllers of supposedly offensive messages.

Canada does seem to be prone to a lot of this sort of nonsense. Mark Steyn, a Canadian national now living in New Hamshire, has had his problems with self-appointed guardians of what is considered to be acceptable to say and write.

My old man, when in the RAF in the 50s, once nearly emigrated there to serve in the Canadian air force. You might now be reading me with a Toronto or Vancouver dateline. Oh well, Dad chose to move into farming instead.

Erratum: I previously said John Belushi was Canadian. He was not. Sorry for the error.

There is furious debate in the comments to this article in the Guardian by Naomi Wolf, in which she argues that "Julian Assange's sex-crime accusers deserve to be named".

Do they? He has been after all.

I just don't know. Neither about Assange's case, or the general case.

On a point of fact, Wolf is quite wrong in claiming that the rule of law by which the plaintiff in a rape case is given anonymity is a "Victorian relic". Commenter "snoozeofreason" said that anonymity was introduced, for what were seen as feminist reasons, in the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 1976. This link to RapeCrisis, an activist group, confirms that fact. It also argues in favour of anonymity for the accuser but not the accused. I reject that. The only thing of which I am sure is that the accused and the accuser should be treated the same: anonymity for both, or for neither.

Naomi Wolf is an icon of feminism. In making this argument she has broken ranks with other feminists. Schadenfreude at the the sight of them rending each other is never far away, but schadenfreude does not actually give me an answer as to whether anonymity in rape cases is a good or a bad thing. I have bitterly criticised feminists and anti-rape activists in the past for their wilful denial of the possibility of false accusations of rape. I sneer at Naomi Wolf's late discovery of this type of possible injustice. Yet she makes a strong argument:

"Though children's identities should, of course, be shielded, women are not children. If one makes a serious criminal accusation, one must be treated as a moral adult."

Against that is a more nebulous pressure, but one with deep roots in the human psyche: rape is different from other forms of assault. The trauma of a rape victim, male or female, does not arise only from the physical injuries received. Harm is done to them by having the fact that they have suffered such a violation made public. Some victims would feel unable to come forward if it were to be made public.

Yet other rape victims argue that this reluctance merely reinforces the barbaric idea that there is something shameful in being raped. We use the word shame to mean too many things.

Just before Christmas, I spent a few days in Belgrade and Budapest. It was extremely cold, and I had quite a bad cough and sore throat. As a consequence, beautiful as these cities are when covered with snow, I was inclined to stay inside.

No real problem there. The Central Europeans almost invented the cafe, and the options varied from little places that you enter by stumbling down a set of stone steps that lead to a cozy basement, to huge, spacious places that have ceiling murals that appear to have gotten a little lost after being originally planned to decorate the Sistine Chapel. (These specific ones tend to be more in Budapest than Belgrade, The Austrian Empire persists).

In any event, in both cities, cafes, bars, restaurants and taverns seem to invariably be filled with smoke. I am not a smoker, and although I generally prefer a venue without tobacco smoke, I am capable of putting up with it. However, with my sore throat, being in a room full of smoke led to quite a bit of discomfort. It would have been nice to find a cafe which was not full of smoke.

Of course, home in London, there is a complete smoking ban in bars, cafes, and restaurants. I would have been fine, but a smoker looking for a place to smoke that was not his home and was not indoors would have been out of luck. One cannot smoke even in premises specifically designed for the benefit of smokers: smoking clubs and cigar clubs are essentially illegal. Proponents of anti-smoking laws who claim that an exception for smoking clubs would be taken advantage of to allow smoking in other venues are correct of course. In places (eg Bavaria) where there is a smoking ban and an exception for smoking clubs, paying what you think is a cover charge when entering a jazz club, and discovering later that you are now a fully paid up member of a smoking club is not an unknown experience. On the other hand, I am hard pressed to see how this matters. There is no shortage of genuinely non-smoking venues in Bavaria.

When I go to Spain, I find what appears to be a far more satisfactory experience. Spanish law does not impose a complete smoking ban in bars, restaurants etc. The law there states that large venues shall be non-smoking, but there may be a smoking room. With respect to small venues, the owner of the property may decide whether smoking is permitted or not, and there shall be a clear sign near the door stating whether it is.

I find this a very satisfactory outcome. If I want a non-smoking venue, I have little difficulty finding one. I doubt smokers have much difficulty finding a venue that allows smoking, either. If I am in a large party of people that contains both smokers and non-smokers, then I can be away from smoke and smokers are free to go off and have a smoke in the smoking room. If I am in a small party of people that contains both smokers and non-smokers, then we can choose our venue between us. The non-smokers can choose to put up with some smoke, or the smokers can decide to refrain from smoking indoors for the evening. Non-smokers can freely associate with smokers, or not, as they choose.

However, there is still a slight problem. The Spanish legislation is far less heavy-handed than the British legislation. Requiring cafe owners to put up signs indicating whether smoking is allowed is far less objectionable than forcing a non-smoking policy on everyone, willing or not. Allowing smoking rooms is less heavy handed than insisting that entire venues are non-smoking. However, there is still coercion. The owners of private property are not entirely free to run their businesses on that private property as they please.

My gut feeling is that a genuinely free market would result in a situation similar to that existing in Spain, without any coercion at all. Some venues will allow smoking, and some will not. Different customers will choose to patronise venues with different policies, and different venues will cater for these different customers. In short, greater freedom will lead to greater choice.

And yet, in places like Belgrade and Budapest, this is not what seems to happen. Virtually all venues allow smoking, and as a customer I have little choice. Do cultural factors overwhelm freedom? I certainly hope not. Or are there some other regulatory or legal factors that lead to uniformity rather than freedom. I would be interested in people's opinions on the matter.

An American friend of mine, Andrew Ian Dodge - known to several folks around here - has recently undergone a deeply unpleasant encounter with airport security types in the US, thanks to those lovely folk from the TSA. A few years back, Andrew had surgery for cancer treatment, and bears the scars of that. It seems that he suffered a lot of discomfort when a TSA character tried to pat him down, as they say. What the TSA goons may not have realised, since Andrew is not your regular stiff in a suit as he dresses more like a rocker clad in plenty of leather, is that he has some pretty weighty political connections, and will use them. There will be consequences.

I am not an expert on the pros and cons of scanner technologies, or whether they flood the body with dangerous radiation, and so on. What I do know is that this sort of outrage will always happen when certain persons, such as TSA officials, have that moment of supreme power over anyone else, as in a queue for security at a busy airport. What I suspect is different, however, between the USA and the UK is that the former country, as demonstrated by the recent successes of the Tea Party movement, has not yet entirely decided to kowtow to the conventional wisdom. So there is a decent chance, I think, that Congressmen and women might try and smack the TSA down, and hard. We can only hope. Back in the UK, there seems to be scant chance of this occurring. Our sheeplike habits are now too ingrained.

There is a good article in the Wall Street Journal on the same issue. And NickM, of Counting Cats, has an absolute blinder of a post on the subject. As he says, whatever excitements may once have attended air travel - at least the nice kind of excitements - are dead. The only people who can enjoy such travel these days are the mega-rich and politicians. As for the rest of us, we get the dubious pleasure of being felt up by the state's functionaries.

The Royal College of Nursing has just won a case against a bureaucratic body in England that many may not have heard of, the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA). The victory is a fairly minimal one: it has been ruled that the ISA must confirm to some elements of fair procedure, and may not ban people from their professions automatically without hearing. None of the professional bodies or establishment human rights organisations such as Liberty appears to be challenging the principle of state vetting in employment. They are fussing about the procedure.

But to me this is an epitome of the degree of state intrusion into our lives that is now accepted in Britain as completely normal.

Here, from the Nursing Times report, are summaries of the cases on the basis of which the most recent ruling was made:

Mr O is a nurse with an exemplary record. Mr O’s wife left their children alone for a short time while Mr O was at work. Mr O’s wife was arrested and detained overnight and subsequently cautioned. Mr O attended the police station the following day voluntarily and was also cautioned. There is no suggestion that Mr O was aware that his wife intended to leave the children alone. However, on 2 March 2010, over nine months since Mr O accepted the caution, the ISA wrote to inform him that it had automatically included his name on the Children’s and Adults’ Barred Lists for a full 10 years. Mr O remained on the Barred Lists until 24 July 2010 until his name was removed after representations were made by the RCN. During this time he was unable to work as a clinical nurse.

Mrs W is a nurse who was automatically included on the Barred Lists for 10 years by ISA on 7 June 2010 after she had accepted a caution for leaving her 11-year-old son at home on his own when she went shopping. Mrs W’s case was referred to the Nursing and Midwifery Council which made a finding after an investigation that she had no case to answer. Mrs W was unable to work as an agency nurse as she was prior to being placed on the Barred Lists and remained on unpaid leave. This placed her under significant financial pressures as a single parent responsible for her son. Mrs W was removed from the auto bar list on 18 August 2010 after the RCN made representations on her behalf.

For those who are unfamiliar with English criminal law, "accepted a caution" is a sort of plea bargain in the hands of the police. If one accepts a caution, one is admitting an offence in return for no further action being taken by police (except keeping a record on you, fingerprints and DNA, till you reach the age of 100). One might believe one was avoiding punishment. That would almost certainly be suggested by police (whose figures are improved and paperwork decreased by disposing of offences by caution). Nevertheless the routine admission of a minor offence can be used by distant bureaucrats (whether they give you a hearing or not) to deprive you of your career (and in the case of British nurses wasting hundreds of thousands of taxpayers money in training). And not only that but such a decisions makes it a criminal offence for anyone to employ you in any capacity in medicine, education or social care. Mr O and Mrs W would have been barred not just from professional nursing, but scrubbing the lavatories in a school after hours, or driving a bus for the elderly. (Or even, by a bureaucratic version of magical contagion, a bus for carers for the elderly. see pdf Q.35)

And cautioned for what? In the one case leaving a near teenager alone for a short while. In the other for allowing (allowing!?) one's wife to leave the children for less than a working day. Who knew these were criminal offences?

I want children to grow up to be independent. That means them learning to manage themselves as early as they can. Leaving your children on their own for short periods, perhaps overnight or for a weekend, with proper provision and knowledge of who to call in case of problems, is not criminal. It is fine. It is laudable.

But we live in a state that demands you not use your judgement, that cannot bear the possibility of error and learning. It fears mistakes enough that there are now rules about how you may bring up your family, requiring all minors to be treated as needy infants. All adults, on the other hand, whether at home or in their working lives, are deemed to be cruel monsters unless restrained by the threat of excommunication from the benevolent database.

The state knows what is right. The ISA was originally to use a checklist to assess lifestyles for 'risk', though that has been deferred for the moment. You are either among the elect, or you are damned - and the ISA has a list saying which is which.

Recently, I was wandering along a back street in the former Vietnamese Imperial capital of Huế, perhaps best known outside Vietnam as the site of one of the bloodier battles of the Vietnam War. This was a street full of the sort of shops that would once been have referred to as a "General Stores" in English: shops full of many goods that are likely to be useful to many people, but that sometimes seem to have a tenuous relation to one another.

In such a store, I stopped and started photographing a colourful display of western trademark violating motorcycle helmets. After I had been doing this for a short while, the shopkeeper came up to me, basically just to say hello. He didn't mind me photographing his merchandise and was not putting any pressure on me to buy anything, but he clearly didn't get Westerners wandering into his shop to take photographs every day. Huế is a tourist destination, but despite its easy accessibility (the Americans having built an airport) it is not nearly as big an attraction as places such as the nearby ancient town of Hoi An. One does not have to walk far from the centre of town for the presence of foreigners to be rare.

What happened next was more interesting. He gestured for his son to come over and pose for a photograph. The lad must have been only about two years old, but there was a serious amount of proud father syndrome on display. This gentleman wanted the whole world to see how proud a father he was. So they posed and I took a photo. Alas, the white balance isn't perfect.

As an added bonus, the father decided that he would pose for the photograph with a cigarette in his mouth.

Of course, this gentleman had no idea how many western taboos he was breaking. If he had, I am sure he would have thought we were all idiots. Quite accurately.

Geert Wilders is on trial today for telling it like it is with his film 'Fitna'.

If you are a blogger, read up on the subject and get out the support. Europe may not have Freedom of Speech with teeth in it, but perhaps you can provide that poor benighted continent with implants.

From the Telegraph: 'Koran burning': men expect to be charged with inciting racial hatred

From the BBC: Men arrested in Gateshead over suspected Koran burning.

From the Guardian... nothing that I can see right now (9.45 am). This absence is being remarked upon in the comments sections of unrelated Guardian stories.

Correction - upon searching I see the Guardian did have a story yesterday. The remarks I mentioned are on the absence of comment or commentable pieces dealing with this story in today's paper. Quite right too. This is a big story for two reasons. Firstly, who would have thought it? After all that buildup, Pastor Terry Jones, the ticks-every-stereotype gun-toting American pastor, did not burn any Korans. Instead the deed was done in the car park of a Gateshead pub. The second big aspect of this story is explained in this line from the Guardian story I did not see earlier:

Northumbria police said the men were not arrested for watching or distributing the video, but on suspicion of burning the Qur'an.

All usual caveats apply. I consider burning a religion's holy book to be a nasty deliberate insult. People should still be free to do it. They should also be free to video themselves doing it and distribute the video, whether or not it spreads religious or racial hatred. I am not in favour of the hatred. I am in favour of the freedom. Anyway, I sort-of knew that the video distribution was probably illegal upon grounds of spreading religious hatred. I did not know the burning itself was.

Further update: Confusingly, there is now another Guardian story illustrated by exactly the same picture as the first one but directly contradicting it in what it says about the actual grounds for arrest: Quote:

The six men were arrested on suspicion of stirring racial hatred, police said, which is outlawed under the 1986 public order act. They were not arrested for the actual attack on, and burning of, the Qur'an, but in connection with the posting of the video. Section 21 of the 1986 act reads: "A person who distributes, or shows or plays, a recording of visual images or sounds which are threatening, abusive or insulting is guilty of an offence if he intends thereby to stir up racial hatred, or … racial hatred is likely to be stirred up."

Last update, I promise: Yet another confusing aspect of this story is that according to the second Guardian story, the men have been charged with stirring up racial hatred under the 1986 Public Order Act, not religious hatred at all.

Will the prosecution be able to make that - the racial angle - stick? Do they even want to? So far as I know, scarcely anyone has actually been prosecuted under the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006. One might have thought this would be an ideal opportunity for the authorities to try out the Act in the courts, if they were serious. Could it be that the racial hatred charge is intended to fail and is merely a piece of theatre to placate Muslims and protect our troops in Afghanistan?

Can anyone offer any confirmation or contradiction of this observation, which is one of the comments on this posting about the rights and wrongs of smoking bans:

One of the things I learned when going through insurance sales training was that life and health insurance companies do not take exposure to secondhand smoke into account at all when determining risk categories. Insurance companies have all sorts of super-detailed actuarial information for use in setting rates. None of this information shows any health risks associated with secondhand smoke.

I am actually a bit surprised if that is true. One of the reasons why there has been so much talk of "passive smoking" is that it makes such perfect sense that if smoking is very bad for you, smoke near you day after day would also be somewhat bad for you. This suggests no badness for you at all. Can that really be right?

This comment concerns the USA. I assume there is no particular arrangement there which actually forbids "passive smoking" being inquired into by insurance companies.

LATER: As I should have included in the above, the author of that comment also has a blog.

I have been thoroughly enjoying reading this book about how the Allies sought - very cleverly - to throw the Nazis off the scent ahead of the invasion of Italy, hence saving potentially thousands of Allied soldiers' lives. An extraordinary cast of characters is involved, conjuring up the sort of plot-lines that would do credit to any writer of spy fiction. And indeed several of the protagonists on the Allied side were novelists with vivid imaginations.

A current controversy intrudes. Back in WW2, the Allies had the priceless knowledge via the code-breakers of Enigma about the enemy's plans, and even more vitally, the fact of having cracked Enigma was kept a secret for many years under the various pieces of legislation controlling such matters both during the war and into the Cold War era. So when I read today about the latest moves by the Wikileaks website to publish all kinds of classified military information on the Web, I wonder about what would have happened if, say, a Wikileaks kind of outfit had been around during WW2 and had stumbled upon the kind of facts as described in the book I link to?

Of course, if we had had the internet back in 1939 or earlier, and had the ability to spread information and views around outside the conventional channels of the MSM that existed back then, maybe this would also have been used to weaken or undermine the enemy side as well. (Would a Hitler have prospered in the Information Age?). I remember that in David Friedman's recent interesting book (also available in an online form) about various trends, he addresses both sides of this question: what happens to privacy in an age of good encryption and ever-increasing attempts by states and other groups to put folk under surveillance.

But even so, it should trouble anyone concerned with security to think that a Wikileaks outfit can put out this sort of material and seems to have no compunctions about doing so. And while Wikileaks may think it is performing a sort of public service, if we are in a war for national survival, say, and we use deception techniques to win, and some self-appointed characters decide to blow the lid on those techniques, then what should the response be? In my view, this is a treasonable act or at the very least an act of aiding and abetting enemy combatants. It goes beyond, I think, the sort of opposition and free speech, including the right to condemn what a government is doing, during wartime. (And by the way, even under anarchism, secrets might be of importance to certain people, so it is no answer to say that such issues are made redundant if we get rid of states).

And it is not just about issues of national security that I think this website is running amok on. Take the world of banking. Some time ago, for instance, Wikileaks published data on individuals who have accounts at an Icelandic bank. Now no doubt the website will claim that it was acting in the public interest, but there are perfectly honest reasons for why people have private bank accounts, such as not giving out valuable information to oppressive governments/criminals (but I repeat myself, Ed) trying to grab that money, or kidnap them for ransom, etc.

And perhaps the man who runs Wikileaks should be glad that some of the older punishments for treason no longer are used in this country. Very glad, in fact.

Wrapped up in some fairly predictable lawerly laments about Thatcher's Cameron's heartless cuts in legal aid there is a fascinating examination of the rise of the crowd-sourced legal advice website here: Tricks and cheats are the price of culling legal aid

Motoring trials are more frequently now defended by people who are making use of public special-interest websites such as PePiPoo which give advice to motorists both prior to and during a trial. Some advice is sound, some not so sound, but with the capacity to share approaches to defence has come the temptation in forums to share advice which, if followed, would result in a miscarriage of justice.

and

In some ways sites like these are a good thing: mass participation to help individuals to establish their legal rights is laudable, but to the extent that they encourage bad-faith practices, and ultimately provide tools to undermine the already buckling justice system, they are a serious problem – a price to be paid for legal aid cuts. The insatiable demand for help with litigation has given rise to websites on which anyone can offer their opinion on the law whether it is correct or misleading. In those circumstances it's the individuals in need of help who will lose out, running trials on a hiding to nothing, which will leave them worse off than when they started.

The author, the barrister Rupert Myers, whose articles for the Guardian are usually more friendly to civil liberties, concludes that "the government must find ways to curb the spread of tricks and cheats, while replacing these sites with the benefit of reliable help for those that need it." I suspect the call to replace these open websites with government ones is his professional self-interest talking. It does not matter. The government cannot replace these websites. Oh, they could find some legal grounds to close down these particular ones, PePiPoo (weird name) and Child Support Agency Hell, and "replace" them with government information website number four million and six, which rather fewer people would trust on account of the legal advice being sought in these cases being advice on how to legally fight branches of that same government. But unless the government is willing to censor the internet to a degree hitherto unprece- OK, better stop there for fear of giving 'em ideas.

As I was saying, now we have the internet people are going to discuss their problems on it, including their legal problems. Other people are going to give them advice. Have you noticed that about the internet? Rather sweet, I always think; the only thing people like doing on the internet more than talking about sex is advising others on everything from plumbing to childbirth for no reward. Of course some of the advice you get from unqualified strangers is bad. That, however, has also been known to be true of advice from qualified professionals.

Further to what I, and Johnathan Pearce, and Natalie Solent, have all being saying here about cricket corruption, and about how this is a story about more than mere cricket corruption, I just noticed this report from a few days ago, at cricinfo.com. Cricinfo is one of my regular haunts, so sorry for not linking to this earlier:

Betting in cricket and other sports should be legalised in India, a Delhi court has said, pointing out that the police have failed to curb illegal betting in the country. Legalising betting, the court said, would help the government keep track of the transfer of funds and even use the revenue generated for public welfare.

"It does not need divine eyes to see that 'satta' in cricket and other games is reaching an alarming situation. The extent of money that it generated is diverted to clandestine and sinister objectives like drug trafficking and terrorist activities," said additional sessions judge Dharmesh Sharma, of a Delhi trial court. "It is high time that our legislature seriously considers legalising the entire system of betting online or otherwise so that enough revenues can be generated to fund various infrastructural requirements for the common man and thus check the lucrative business in organised crime."

Now I will willingly grant you that this is anything but a pure libertarian argument, of the kind that would prevail in Brian-Micklethwait-world. Judge Sharma is emphasising the revenue gathering opportunity inherent in legalisation just as strongly as the anti-crime point. But for what it is worth, I also much prefer a legalised and quite heavily taxed and state-regulated betting regime to total illegality, if those are the only choices I am offered. And they are, given the current state of the world and of its predominant opinions.

This comment by Tim Sandefur pretty much captures my own view on the row over the "Mosque" at Ground Zero (or whatever this building is meant to be called).

In a separate forum, I got into quite a heated debate with folks over the fact that I said that while I defend the rights of owners of property to do what they want with said property, that does not mean I cannot be angry at the gesture of say, building a Islamic centre right next to the scene of an act of mass-murder by Islamic fanatics. My anger, apparently, has led to a few folk calling me out as a sort of bigot. Not so: I can see both sides of the argument here: the families of 9/11 victims feel, with cause, that the location of this building is a fairly crass and provocative gesture and are concerned at the possible choice of name - the Cordoba Center, and about the possible sources of funding for it.

On the other, let's not forget - and this is a point that needs to be made regularly - that Muslims going about their lawful business were murdered on that terrible day, and their families might want to have that fact acknowledged in some sort of way by having a place to worship in a place that gives meaning to their grief.

But it would help things if those who are concerned about the motives of this centre would not automatically be dubbed as stooges of Sarah Palin or some sort of great right wing conspiracy. Part of the annoyance that folk feel about this is that there is a sense of injustice that while Islam benefits in the West from the broad protections of freedom of expression, that that tolerance is not reciprocated in the countries where this religion holds sway. Try building a Catholic church in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia, after all, is a country that has funded dozens of mosques and other places, including those encouraging some of the most extreme forms of Islam. Saudi funding is akin to a government grant rather than a donation from a private individual.

We can confirm that eight of the nine people quoted on the website at the time either worked for the Identity and Passport Service (IPS), the Home Office or another government department or agency.

- A spokesman from the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) of the Home Office, in answer to a Freedom of Information request from Phil Booth of No2ID, asking how many of the people quoted on an IPS website expressing enthusiasm for the wonderfulness of their ID cards did in fact work for the government.

Actually, this was not a direct response to the FOI request, but was only admitted after the good Mr Booth demanded an internal review from the IPS after they answered the question with several lengthy paragraphs of content free bureaucrat babble the first time. Details thanks to The Register here.

I am watching Newsnight with my wife. Kirsty Wark does the intro - something like: "When a Syrian university bans the niqab on campus, why is Britain defending it?"

"Good point," says Sue.

"Because we're not bloody Syria!" I yell, "thank God!"

Glad to see a fully veiled Moslem woman interviewed in the street making exactly the same point.

Beyond satire.

A superb video from the TaxPayers' Alliance asks...

... how long do you work for the tax man?

"The process is the punishment", and Dale McAlpine has been processed.

Charges have been dropped against a Christian preacher who told a police officer homosexuality was "a sin".

Of course they have. So long as someone pushes back, the police will retreat. They know that they would lose in court - they also know they do not have to win in court in order to intimidate. Being arrested is not nice, is it? The mere arrest is quite enough to spread the idea around that saying homosexuality is a sin is illegal.

Dale Mcalpine, 42, was accused of a public order offence after speaking to a community support officer (PCSO) in Workington, Cumbria, in April.

...

Mr Mcalpine was preaching to shoppers in the west Cumbrian town on 20 April when he said he was approached by the PCSO, who told him he was a liaison officer for the local lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community.

"He told me he was homosexual," Mr Mcalpine said.
"I said 'the Bible says homosexuality is a sin'. He said 'I'm offended by that and I'm also the LGBT liaison officer within the police'.
"I said 'it is still a sin'."
He said three uniformed police officers then appeared and accused him of using homophobic language.
"I'm not homophobic, I don't hate gays," Mr Mcalpine said. "Then they said it is against the law to say homosexuality is a sin. I was arrested."

Kudos to gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, who "condemned the arrest and urged the home secretary to issue new guidelines to the police" - although it is a pity that Mr Tatchell does not follow through the logic of his argument to the case of property rights.

Once freedom goes it becomes a matter of elite fashion just who the police harass. In 2010 it was Baptist street preachers. Twenty years earlier it was homosexuals. Twenty years later it may be homosexuals again. Get yer multiculturalism right and it could be both.

I am fairly seriously prosopagnosic. That may be why I am so skeptical about identification in general, but the research into the condition is beginning to militate quite strongly against the presuppositions many people in the law-and-order business make about the utility of photo-ID.

The BBC has an interesting radio programme on how bad people are at facial-recognition, here:
Health Check

The points in this that I suggest are important for policy are:

1. Most people are not in fact very good at matching strangers to their photographs. People tend to be much better at recognising people they know than people they do not know, and mistakenly generalise what you could call 'Easy Matching' from their experience with their familiars. This is not a mistake you would make if, like me, you find recognising people you know hard.

Looking at someone's 'photo-ID' on a one-off occasion will ordinarily be hit-and-miss, unless you are one of the rare people the radio programme calls "super-recognisers".

2. A significant number of people (the programme suggests 3%) are sufficiently bad that it handicaps them in everyday life, but generally they do not realise it. I was 30 before I understood I had a problem, though I can recall incidents back to 6 or 7 years old that are examples. Yet officialdom assumes that anyone can recognise others from pictures, to the degree suggested by the false Easy Matching supposition. There is no testing of passport control staff, police, security guards, bar-staff... anyone, who is expected to do the matching.

Yet 3% or thereabouts not only are ordinarily useless at it but are being put to an impossible task. They may well compensate intuitively by responding to other behavioural or bodily clues that have nothing to do with facial features—the Clever Hans syndrome. I know I do. But I was not always aware that is what I was doing, or that I was different in that respect from other people.

Some Hypotheses:

Photo-ID for age-checking is rather like voice-stress or polygraph "fraud detection". There is no real evidence for its accuracy, yet the story that it 'obviously' works is so plausible to so many, that few even question it. There is a massive confirmation bias, and it is probably not acting as more than an intimidatory deterrent.

Software facial-recognition is thought of as pretty bad for the purpose that it is put to (fact) - but it may well be better than 90%+ of people under the same circumstances of matching strangers in large numbers, and infinitely better than the small fraction of checkers who, unknown to themselves and their employers, are getting it wrong almost all the time. Criticisms of the technology are often as based in the mistaken Easy Matching idea as support for it. Both sides of that argument assume people are better than machines. But in practice ID-ing travellers and drinkers doesn't do a lot. It is an imposition and a cost on everyone, but the attitudes struck in security theatre do not stop competent imposture.

Flash and dash is close to useless, but there's a huge industry of ID badges built on it. The false assumption is that replacing a doorkeeper who knows everyone (and in most cases will therefore recognise them quite well), with picture-passes that 'anyone can check', is more efficient and more secure. Quite the reverse. But look at the reception area in any large firm and what to you see? Picture passes with RFID tracking of the pass and bored temps concerned that you display a badge properly, operating on the assumption that your badge is you.

(Technology keeps ever more track of those tokens, however. So, as long as you are compliant, regardless of the fact that linking ID with people does not work, ID does work as surveillance.)

There is now in the system a prejudice and an interest in not facing (ha!) these ideas. Everything in fact tends towards dismissing them. The authoritarian mindset is particularly prone to confirmation bias (Cf. the catastrophic DNA database arguments), and Clever Hans will sucker them every time. The most modern fashions in government are close to superstition.

The notion that it is the state's business how fat people are is grotesque but we can thank athlete James Cracknell for giving us a superb example of why it does not matter a tinker's damn which of the three clowns actually ends up in Downing Street:

Tories have what it takes to tackle obesity. The Conservatives have a sporting solution to Britain's ticking health time bomb, says James Cracknell

The same relentless statist chipping away at civil society will happen regardless, egged on by countless busy bodies like James Cracknell.

Mind.your.own.business.

Until the first annual Let's Draw Mohammad Day!!!

Can you outdo the humor of Danish cartoonists? Be sure to try your hand at this global effort to raise a scream of maddened agony from people with minds too small to comprehend anything outside of their circularly reasoned unreality.

Be the first on your block to drive a Jihadi so berserk his head spins around and pops like a champagne cork!

Waitrose sells Horse and Hound magazine.

Huh?

Didn't they ban hunting, like, years ago? Yes. Yet Horse and Hound is still there on the hotly contested shelves of the Waitrose magazine rack, and in the posh aspirational section right next to Country Homes & Interiors to boot. I suppose some of the reason for H&H's survival must be down to upping the quotient of writing about Princess Zara and her horse Toytown and downing the quotient about hunting. Even so, it must be galling for the anti-hunting activist community. Not what they imagined back in the heady days of 2004 when they were offering to help the government and police enforce a hunting ban.

At this point I could either launch into a detailed, link-filled account of whatever it is hunts actually do these days or I could just vaguely mutter some half-remembered stuff about how there is some get-out clause that allows them to chase the foxes with as long as they don't actually kill them, or if they do it's collateral damage or done for research or something. I shall do the latter and make a virtue of it, because vague half-remembered perceptions and their political consequences are what this post is actually about.

It didn't stick. Thirty years plus of campaigning, thousands of letters to the editor, millions of Ban Hunting Now badges, at least three private members' bills, Royal Commissions galore, keeping the faith in the dark days of Thatcher, then the dawning hope that this Bill might be the real deal, First Reading, Second Reading, Committee, Third Reading... then that last minute farrago with the Parliament Act when the Lords cut up rough, then finally Royal Asssent (through gritted Royal teeth, yeah)... all that and it still didn't bloody stick. The hunts are still there, shooting foxes by firing squad or whatever they do, and the sabs are still there cutting off peoples' heads with gyrocopter blades or whatever they do, and when the Tories get in, as they almost certainly will in three months time, they will repeal the ban.

I will rejoice. I have never seen the appeal of hunting, still less hunt-following, but hundreds of thousands of my fellow-citizens seem to like these pastimes, as their ancestors did, and a large proportion of the human race still do. The anti-hunt argument that does have some power to move me is the one about preventing suffering of a creature who can suffer. I myself prefer not to think too deeply about Mr Fox getting killed by dogs - but I do not see that it differs much from what Mr Fox does to rabbits. It's a predator thing. As for the argument about humans, get lost. On those grounds the new puritans had about the same moral right to stop their fellow humans hunting foxes as they would have to stop their fellow mammals, the foxes, hunting rabbits. Another thing, it bugged me to hear people who, if they were to learn that Amazonian tribesmen, having been forced to give up their ancient traditions of the hunt, had taken to soccer and Playstations instead, would be heard from here to the Amazon squealing about Western cultural oppression - it bugged me to hear these same people cheering on the Western cultural oppression of their own tribesmen.

As well as rejoicing to see these puritans discomfited, I will rejoice because the repeal of the ban is a retrograde step. When one has gone in a wrong direction a backwards step is a good thing. Every generation or so the progressives have the presumption buried in their name for themselves knocked out of them and the whooshing noise is pleasing. Yet for most of the my lifetime their presumption has been justified. The progressive ratchet slips a little but mostly it moves on. What a liberation it would be to see the clock turn back, just to show it could! What strange new vistas it might open if one bad law were repealed. We could repeal some more. The smoking ban... the European Communities Act 1972... it might even have an effect overseas; at present most people seem to assume that President Obama's historic achievement in passing the US healthcare bill is just that, historic. A historic change is a change that stays changed. But history turns round sometimes, as the original puritans found out to their cost in 1660.

So the repeal of the hunting ban will be a fine thing, and on that morning even I shall hear something of the

..long-drawn chorus
Of a running pack before us
From the find to the kill.

But the end of a bad law and the good example its end sets will not be the only reasons to rejoice. Sure, repeal will annoy the progressives but - as the fox understands the huntsmen - a law going against them for once in a while leaves their worldview intact. What I really will value in the repeal is that it will be symbolic completion of a process that has already happened. The Royal Assent on this one may be good fun for her Maj, and me, but the really subversive thing is that people will say, "Oh, they've got rid of that law... didn't know it was still on the books, actually. I'm sure I saw Horse and Hound on sale on Waitrose."

It is a melancholy fact to face that while most of us, most of the time, like to imagine that we live our lives by some sort of moral code, and respect our fellows as beings deserving of respect if they do not threaten our lives or property, some people do not live by such a code, nor care. One particular species of maggot in our world is the person who likes to verbally and physically abuse disabled persons.

The issue of care and protection of the mentally and physically handicapped, raising as it does issues of personal autonomy, concerns about abuse of state power and medicine, etc, is too big an issue to push into a blog post. No, the point I want to address is the narrower one of whether it makes any sense at all to create another "hate crime": the crime, as it were, of hating disabled people. In brief, I think creating such a "hate crime" is foolish, albeit an understandable move driven by those with honorable motives to protect the weak.

Let's be clear from the get-go that I regard those who hate, and who act on that hate, of disabled people to be scum of the earth. It does bother me, though, that a crime of say, assault on a person and his property should be treated as being far more serious because the state has tried to measure, or establish, the hate that exists in the mind of the attacker. A crime is a crime, surely. If an able-bodied man is mugged in the street, does it make any specific difference in terms of sentencing the criminal, assuming the criminal is caught? The area where physical or mental disability comes into play in sentencing a criminal is where, say, the disability clearly meant that the disabled victim could not defend himself. That is why assaults on the aged and infirm, and on children, are treated - at least supposedly - more severely than assaults on say, the holder of a karate black belt. Of course, in investigating a crime, the fact that a suspect has a motive such as hate of group X or Y might be useful in helping to narrow down a list of suspects. However, as a factor in sentencing, the idea of "hate crime" strikes me as nonsense.

What next - political hate crimes where a person is sentenced for the crime of "hating" those in public office or who are members of certain ideological/political groupings?

One of my current top bloggers Richard North points to a new blog, Political Facts, where posting number one is about the Convenient Criminal. And since Richard North is now one of a lot of other people's top bloggers also, that means that news of this new blog will spread fast, perhaps faster than its writer might have preferred.

The story its first posting tells if of how the British police, animated by the desire to meet targets rather than to mete out justice, have resorted to arresting the easiest persons to arrest, rather than the guiltiest. The guilty ones flee before the police arrive but the victims of the villainy stay, waiting for help and support, unpractised in the arts of obstructing the police. So they, or their angry sympathisers, get arrested, basically for being a bit angry about having been set upon by actual criminals.

Police arrive. One police officer tells the violent drunk, now a few yards away, to leave the area. The bleeding victim is helped to his feet and tries to point our his attacker but by now he has already left the scene as instructed by a police officer. Not good for the police who have attended an assault but now have no boxes to tick.

One girl tells the police they are useless and is arrested for a Section 5 Public Order Offence for screaming and swearing at the violent drunk as he assaulted the young man. A female bouncer from the nightclub who has witnessed this rushes across the street and tries to tell the police they have the wrong person. (Captured on CCTV) Police tell her to go away and proceed to issue a Fixed Penalty notice. Another Convenient Criminal without police having to take the time and effort of now trying to find and arrest the violent drunk. Effortlessly ticks all the boxes the officers need ticked for their performance targets while justice is thrown away.

But are that event and another similar one outside a pub real events, or were they merely, as they say in the movies, "based on fact"? Are these actual people, or merely composites. This first posting is strong on principle, not so strong on chapter and verse. A widespread set of prejudices about how the police now operate is eloquently laid out. But where are the actual reports of actual events, in local papers or in other blogs? At first glance, the posting looks to be full of links, but all that bold-and-in-colour stuff turns out merely to be bold-and-in-colour. It doesn't lead anywhere.

But, as I say, it's early days for this blog and with luck it soon will start to lead somewhere. More to the point those facts alluded to in the blog's title may start gravitating towards it. After all, the blog's readers now at least know the kind of facts being sought. The man can obviously write, and with luck, he will turn out to be well placed enough, near enough to the kind of dramas he now describes in a generalised way, soon to be deploying some serious facts and making some serious waves.

Incoming from Rob Fisher, to whom thanks (and oh look, I get a mention in Rob's latest posting), alerting me to this.

This is worth a look. The chap handles himself very well.

Indeed. His name is Bob Patefield. It comes across rather strongly that his real crime is not "being anti-social", but telling the first semi-police-officer, a "Police Community Support Officer", very politely, that he wasn't prepared to give his personal details, because he didn't believe that the semi-police-officer had the right to demand such details. That semi-police-officer then told a real police officer about this act of defiance, and the real police officer then moved in, inventing the claim that the photographer was taking pictures in an anti-social manner.

He was held in custody for eight hours, and then released without charge.

What a difference an internet makes. Not just in spreading the news of such harassment, but in rewarding those who resist it with a bit of glamour and attention and praise, from the likes of us. And punishing the police for such behaviour in an equal and opposite way.

The bottom line of all this, I believe, is that none of us actually believes that the way to stop terrorists, any terrorists, is to stop people taking photos of buildings. There are just too many people who take such pictures for entirely innocent reasons for such harassment to make any sense. Contrariwise, have terrorists ever crept about the scene of their subsequent crime, taking snaps? If so, I sure we would now be being told about it relentlessly. I like to take pictures of tourists taking pictures in the centre of London, and they constantly take pictures of buildings that are surely a lot more likely to be attacked by terrorists than is Accrington town centre. Like: the Houses of Parliament. The police never seem to bother them.

Maybe the police want to establish a track record having harassed lots of people who they have no reason to suspect of being terrorists, so that when they really do suspect someone of being a terrorist, who is also taking photos, and they ask him who he is, they can avoid accusations of racism, Islamophobia, etc. But if they have reasons for such suspicions, why all this kerfuffle when they haven't? These PCSO people in Accrington should perhaps be told about this.

Maybe the truth of this is that these PCSOs are simply picking fights with people, in order to prove that they are doing something other than just wandering about rather aimlessly and not really earning whatever they are paid. Maybe it's that simple.

"Being tried by 12 good men and true sounds brilliant but if, God forbid, you were to find yourself in the dock charged with a crime you did not commit, would you want to be tried by 11 dinner ladies and Trigger from Only Fools and Horses? Or Wayne Rooney? Or Piers Morgan? Speaking personally, I’d far rather plead my case in front of nothing but a judge. I know that some are a bit doddery, and that many live in houses with no central heating, but most are more astute than the alternative: 11 lunching ladies and Benny from Crossroads."

- Jeremy Clarkson

Read on, and he nevertheless defends trial by jury, despite his rather bracing opinions of our fellow men and women. For our non-UK readers, I should explain that Wayne Rooney is a footballer, Trigger is a character from a comedy show, Piers Morgan is a journalist and arsehole, and Benny is also a character from a forgettable soap opera. I hope this information proves informative and enlightening.

The Royal Society for Public Health no doubt sees itself as a worthy collection of people who are axiomatically on the side of the angels. I mean, who could be against public health?

In truth they are a terrifying and truly totalitarian outfit who operate with a presumption that the state has super-ownership of the physical bodies of everyone in Britain. Now I am of the view that defence against infectious plagues is a legitimate role of the state because it is a collective threat... a plague, like a fire or an invading army, does not respect property lines and so this is the whole reason to have a 'nightwatchman state'.

But that is not the view of people like the Royal Society for Public Health. No, they take the view that 'public health' follows on naturally from state run medical care and gives the state the right to decide pretty much anything that can impact on an person's health, regardless of that individual's preferred choices, even if those choices are personal ones that do not place other people at risk.

They have issues a manifesto for nothing less than the nationalisation of your body and the intrusion of the state, on grounds of protecting your health from yourself and others who agree to be around you.

1. A minimum price of 50p per unit of alcohol sold
2. No junk food advertising in pre-watershed television
3. Ban smoking in cars with children
4. Chlamydia screening for university and college freshers
5. 20 mph limit in built up areas
6. A dedicated school nurse for every secondary school
7. 25% increase in cycle lanes and cycle racks by 2015
8. Compulsory and standardised front-of-pack labelling for all pre-packaged food
9. Olympic legacy to include commitment to expand and upgrade school sports facilities and playing fields across the UK
10. Introduce presumed consent for organ donation
11. Free school meals for all children under 16
12. Stop the use of transfats

Of all these statist policies, number 1 is particularly invidious, with our technocratic masters seeking a sumptuary law on alcohol (i,.e. a tax to stop poor people drinking), number 12 seeks to regulate our choice of what we eat.

But by far the worst of all is number 10, this is the one which tells you everything you need to know about these people and the profoundly, unabashedly thugish nature of their world view... the state can help itself to your body parts by default. Post mortem conscription. Frankly I am all for organ donation, but at the moment, I carry a card expressly forbidding my organs to be harvested post mortem as the very notion these people are presumptive owners of any of my mortal remains is simply intolerable.

But then as they demand the right to regulate everything about your physical existence prior to death, I suppose it is no surprise they think nothing of helping themselves to your carcass after you die.

These people are the very worst kind of self-righteous technocratic curtain twitchers, the true spiritual heirs to the folks who in the first half of the twentieth century had people with birth defects sterilised or has troublesome people lobotomised, on 'scientific grounds' of course 'for the public good'. Naturally such Guardian reading caring sharing folks would see drawing such analogues as a grotesque calumny, but in truth they exhibit the same intrusiveness and obsession with controlling the lives of others, it really is the same psychopathology, just repackaged for the 21st century with the current notions of 'best practice'.

These people must be opposed... but not just politically, they need to be seen socially for what they are and abominated for their desires to regulate the lives of everyone around them. They presume to occupy the moral high ground but they do not and the more people who openly and publicly reject their axiomatic presumption of state controls over the very bodies of people, the sooner we can start to reclaim the culture of people who belong on a psychiatrist's couch to help them deal with their abhorrent desires to use force against those who wish to live their lives without interference and according to their own judgements, with the positive and negative consequences of that accruing to themselves alone, like real adults.

The people behind this manifesto are detestable and they need to be told that to their faces.

We don't have to show the slightest respect for other people's views – just for their right to hold them. Respect, after all, must be earned. It's only freedom of speech that's a right. When someone says something which you find stupid or offensive, you can say something back. You can tell them to fuck off. They don't have to, but they've still been told.

- David Mitchell, writing about the self-publicising Islam4UK. As Mr Mitchell says, we should have the right to be offensive, and we should have to put up with being offended sometimes. A pity that we don't.

Freedom of speech has ceased to be a right in Britain. In practice you are no longer permitted to be offensive, if you are within the grasp of the authorities. You may be threatened or arrested, have property seized, or forced to defend a criminal trial. Sell or wear a mildly rude T-shirt, and you may find public order legislation stretched to make an example of you. Write down "inappropriate" fantasies in a blog, or a poem, and prepare to defend a serious criminal charge. Quarrel with someone, a planning department, say, and if they can even suggest you hinted at forbidden speech, they can use the police to intimidate you.

Ho hum! The letter is barking mad but it still needs hours of constructing a careful response, the net effect of which will be the same as two Anglo Saxon words.

- Richard North responds to a lawyers' letter in a comment on this posting. My thanks to Bishop Hill for an email that got me noticing this latest twist in the Climategate saga a little sooner than I otherwise would have.

The TSA is such a useless organization, they have to 'beat up on' bloggers with kids!

Is there not some adage about the sort of men who beat their wives? That they do so because they are trying to cover up their feelings of inadequacy by showing off their 'power'?

Why do we not just disband this worthless organization and admit it never has been nor will be of any use whatever?

If religious leaders get the urge to spout off on religious topics to the religiously inclined, well I suppose that is what they are for. But why oh why does the Church of England think it is appropriate for them to have any corporate opinion at all on purely secular matters like advertising?

Why should a bunch of clerics think they have any business demanding the state regulate the media? Exactly what biblical basis do they have for supporting the imposition of restrictions on what people do on TV? I must have missed the passage in the New Testament where it says "The Lord says tell Caesar to threaten those who sayth things you don't approve of".

I have zero tolerance for a state privileged organization who claim to speak from a position of moral superiority advocating force backed restrictions on secular life. The sooner the Church of England is disestablished the better.

There's a very important sounding letter in tomorrow's Telegraph from hundreds of photographers who are angry that the government is violating their rights with anti-terrorism powers. Alex Singleton says it’s significant because "the signatories are not a bunch of lippy anarchists, but a roll-call of establishment figures". The letter writers are demanding a change in the law and the recognition that terrorists don't need to lug about heavy Nikons and tripods.

Timothy Garton Ash, writing in the Guardian displays the jarring sensibilities that comes inevitability from holding the sort of fuzzy authoritarian statist views that prevail these days. On the subject of the Swiss ban on new minaret construction...

That is to put the clock of religious toleration back 300 years, to a time when even protestants in Catholic France could not worship in public. Of course, planning regulations and the local townscape must be respected. Architectural tact and syncretic innovation are desirable, as brilliantly exemplified in the new buildings of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies or Boston's Islamic Cultural Centre. But this vote was not about urban planning.

Actually it is about 'urban planning', just not for the sort of reasons the writer approves of.

But what makes me laugh is that Ash has no problem whatsoever using the force of the state to make people build in ways he approves of. It is clearly axiomatic to him that the state gets to have planning regulations over what you can build on your own private property, even over mere aesthetic issues (i.e. he likes the fact the political trumps the social completely when it comes to your property). He just wants what people like him thinks is 'desirable' to be allowed.

Yet somehow when that political process he accepts as axiomatic produces something he does not think is 'desirable' to his Guardianista sensibilities, I doubt it occur to him that maybe it is his acceptance of people exerting force backed political power over others in pretty much every aspect of life where the problem lies.

Muslims in Switzerland wishing to build minarets on buildings dedicated to praising the words of their mass murdering Dark Ages warlord only have the problem they now face because people like Timothy Garton Ash think it is perfectly alright that the state to be allowed to 'plan' what people can do on their own property.

Are nation states more trustworthy now than in previous times? I am of course asking a rhetorical question. No, they are not more, or less, trustworthy. People, in particular the sort of people who seek political power or to in some way wield the authority of the state, are essentially the same sort of people who have always sought such things.

And so, when the Scottish state tells us that the venerable prohibitions against double jeopardy, being put on trial more than once for the same crime, must be abolished due to improvements in methods of forensic science, they are actually saying "we, the state, can be trusted with the power to just shuffle the deck and try again if we do not like the outcome of a criminal trial because of course our motives could never be anything less than a relentless search for truth and justice, right?"...

That is in actually what they are saying, because DNA cannot possibly be planted or falsified and our priestly class, sorry, I mean scientific experts are always simply concerned with the dispassionate facts (like say, the good folks at the CRU).

What could possibly go wrong with being able to keep retrying people until the "right" result is gained, eh?

And then ask yourself: What is to be done? What can I do? How far am I prepared to go?

John Osimek reports for The Register:

The government obsession with collecting data has now extended to five-year-olds, as local Community Health Services get ready to arm-twist parents into revealing the most intimate details of their own and their child’s personal, behavioural and eating habits.

The questionnaire – or "School Entry Wellbeing Review" – is a four-page tick-box opus, at present being piloted in Lincolnshire, requiring parents to supply over 100 different data points about their own and their offspring’s health. Previously, parents received a "Health Record" on the birth of a child, which contained around eight questions which needed to be answered when that child started school.

The Review asks parents to indicate whether their child "often lies or cheats": whether they steal or bully; and how often they eat red meat, takeaway meals or fizzy drinks. [...]

One of the morals that can be drawn from the analysis of totalitarian madness is that any reasoning system that is uncritical of itself turns into utter madness. Cold-eyed self-perception is the most important thing, especially when it comes to criticism.

- Sergei Averintsev

Anyone who doubts Britain is spiralling ever faster into totalitarian madness should consider this case:

Paul Clarke, 27, was found guilty of possessing a firearm at Guildford Crown Court on Tuesday – after finding the gun and handing it personally to police officers on March 20 this year.

The jury took 20 minutes to make its conviction, and Mr Clarke now faces a minimum of five year's imprisonment for handing in the weapon.

In a statement read out in court, Mr Clarke said: "I didn't think for one moment I would be arrested.

"I thought it was my duty to hand it in and get it off the streets."

This is not a case about whether law-abiding people should be allowed to have weapons (or even, in accordance with the 1689 Bill of Rights, whether Protestant people should be allowed to). It is closer in smallness of spirit to the sort of vindictive prosecution that occurs in petty dictatorships when you have failed to bribe the right people. But here the motive is the much more dangerous one of nominally altruistic bullying. A case where the populist fad of arbitrary fixed sentences for strict liability offences has met its reductio ad absurdum

Lest you think you are safe, recall that politicians are still involved in auctions of severity in relation to drugs, immigration, alcohol, offensive speech and writing and pictures - and knives. The sentence for possession of a knife in a public place without an excuse acceptable to the authorities can be 4 years in prison in England. In Scotland, the Labour Party is attempting to make imprisonment mandatory, deeming a severe new Scottish Bill insufficiently savage. Criticism is effectively not permitted. No voices in either parliament are raised for sanity. The moral busybodies are indeed omnipotent.

A 'knife' for this purpose is any sharp or bladed instrument, except a folded pocket knife with a blade less than 7.62cm (3 inches) long. So most tools are covered.

If you spot a potato peeler, chisel, or pair of scissors lying on the pavement, do not pick it up. That would be a crime. And you could be disturbing evidence of crime. Call the police. You cannot be too careful.

Germany is particularly odious when it comes to censorship and allowing legal interference with freedom of expression, but his one takes the biscuit for sheer absurdity...

Some 19 years ago, a man in Germany, together with his half brother, reportedly murdered an actor named Walter Sedlmayr. The man was convicted and served 15 years in jail. Now he is free. And, according to Wired, he has exercised that freedom by instructing lawyers, the elegantly named firm of Stopp and Stopp, to sue Wikipedia.

The lawsuit claims that German privacy law, designed to help criminals re-integrate into society, prevents the man being named in association with Walter Sedlmayr's murder. Wired quotes Jennifer Granick from the Electronic Frontier Foundation as saying that the lawyers are not only demanding that publications change whatever they write now, but that online archives must endure revision, too.

And just for the record, the people in question who were convicted of murdering Walter Sedlmayr are Wolfgang Wehrle and his half brother Manfred Lauber (just to add yet another place in the google cache where that information can sit). This is wacko enough on its own, but the linked article in turn links to geek.com, quoting the EFF, where they make the much broader point as to why this latest legal excess cannot be tolerated...

As the EFF beautifully puts it: "At stake is the integrity of history itself. If all publications have to abide by the censorship laws of any and every jurisdiction just because they are accessible over the global internet, then we will not be able to believe what we read, whether about Falun Gong (censored by China), the Thai king (censored under lèse majesté) or German murders".

As the world networks together, increasingly we cannot tolerate legal attacks anywhere because the repercussions will not stay neatly within national borders, so neither can our hostility to such assaults on our liberty... now let us also do something about Britain's intolerable defamation laws.

The BigBrotherWatch campaign has a rather neat idea for a networked protest against the bully state, designed to encourage people to notice how much of it has insinuated itself into everyday life.

You put a standard sticker on some physical evidence of intrusion, threat, surveillance, overregulation, nannying... by or authorised by, an official body. You photograph it. You send in the photograph to them and/or publish it by other means... and that's it. There's a running competition for the best pics.

It is a smart use of the networked world to do something that is not quite the direct action loved by old-fashioned activists, but more directive action, to get the public's attention on the world around us and how needlessly oppressive it has become. And it is a game, too.

Alex Deane of BBW tells me he has already had hundreds of requests for stickers, and some very serious and respectable think-tankies appeared to be taking them at a meeting I attended last night.

I wonder whether anyone will manage to tag an FIT unit?

The latest power grab by what the news simply calls 'the experts' is photoshopped images.

Calling for advertising rules to be changed to restrict the use of airbrushed images, the group of 44 academics doctors and psychologists say that the pictures promote unrealistic expectations of perfection, encouraging eating disorders and self-harm.

I think this does not go nearly far enough. Clearly the company behind Red Bull should be closely regulated as it is only a matter of time before someone drinks one and jumps off a building and falls to their death because contrary to their claims, Red Bull does not in fact 'give you wings'.

In short, as people who are not 'experts' are moronic halfwits incapable of telling reality from advertising hype, we must simply turn over all aspects of our life to government approved self-important technocratic prigs qualified 'experts' who can determine what we are and are not permitted to see.

We must 'do it for the children' of course.

Well, I cannot say I am remotely surprised.

An estimated 11.3 million people – including parents who join school rotas to take pupils to sports events – already face having their backgrounds checked to allow them to work with children.

But Sir Roger Singleton, the chairman of the Independent Safeguarding Authority, said the scope of the database could increase significantly because companies would fear losing business if they did not have their employees vetted.

It is really hard to know how a satire publication like the Onion or Private Eye can make a living these days.

There is a superb blog posting up today by Mr Eugenides, about Trafigura, and about Trafigura's attempts to stop people voicing opinions about Trafigura. Trafigura? I know. Who are and what is Trafigura? Never heard of Trafigura? Well, if you hadn't heard of Trafigura before this week, you have heard of Trafigura now. And you've certainly heard of Trafigura now. Says Mr Eugenides, in his blog posting about Trafigura and about the libel lawyers that Trafigura has unleashed:

One day these highly-remunerated libel lawyers are going to wake up and realise that they aren't being paid in guineas any more and that, thanks to this thing called the Interwebs, they can't shut down freedom of speech the way they used to in the old days.

Indeed. The story is that Trafigura recently hired Britain's swankiest libel lawyers to tell the Guardian not to mention in the Guardian that Trafigura had been unflatteringly asked about in the House of Commons, by a Member of Parliament. You read that right. The Guardian may not report on the proceedings of the House of Commons. Trafigura has been doing allegedly bad things in Africa, it seems, and an MP asked about Trafigura, in the most supposedly public place in the land, but Trafigura want their name, Trafigura, not to be reported in this connection. To which end Trafigura's libel lawyers have told the Guardian, in a libel lawyer way that you apparently have to obey, that Trafigura may not be mentioned in the Guardian. No Trafigura, Guardian.

Here is the question, about Trafigura, recycled by Guido, in which the word Trafigura appears at the end, where its says: Trafigura. And thanks to Guido for linking to the Mr Eugenides piece about Trafigura. I would hate to have missed Mr Eugenides's piece, about Trafigura.

Guido is on a mission just now (one of many) to talk up anything even semi-coherent that anyone even semi-coherent says in favour of freedom of speech, especially if what anyone semi-coherent says involves recommending cooperation in favour of free speech by otherwise non-like-minded people. I recently discovered this to my opposite-of-cost, if you get my drift, when, to my amazement, Guido linked to this rather inconsequential posting of mine, about a bizarre woman who is trying to stop some lefties telling the bizarre truth about her. Guido's meme is: we must all unite across the spectrum against any attempts to stifle fair comment on matters of public interest, no matter how much we may all disagree with each other's ideological prejudices on all other topics. I did my bit by doing my bit about the bizarre Johanna Kaschke (as have many others and in particular many other libertarians) because she is farce, but, unfarcically for them, she is suing these lefties for basically saying how farcical she is by recycling a few farcical facts about her. Let us hope that the principle that truth is a defence against a libel accusation will save the lefties, even if at great expense of money and nervous energy (because even the most insane suer (is that the right spelling? – maybe not) can sometimes win).

Says the lefty I have been tuning into about this:

Oh, and I really am chuffed at all the good wishes, not only from the comrades but from many horrible rightwing bastards too. Thanks, guys.

You're welcome.

This Trafigura thing, on the other hand, is not farcical at all, even though I laughed out loud at the piece by Mr Eugenides, about Trafigura, today.

This posting of mine, here, now, about Trafigura, is not very full of links to enable you to understand the Trafigura story, but Mr E's piece is Bonnie and Clyde final scene machine gunned with links to what dozens of others have been saying about Trafigura, which is exactly Mr E's point. To quote him again:

... while we can argue about the wisdom of the crowd, no-one can order it to be silent.

And long may that continue. Call it the Trafigura Principle. Or the Trafigura Effect. Or just say: Trafigura. Trafigura, Trafigura, Trafigura ...

The destruction of British civil society continues apace...

New anti-paedophile vetting rules will threaten the 90-year tradition of Scout Jamborees, the Scout Association says. It has warned that major gatherings of packs from around the world may be cancelled due to the introduction of the scheme.

Under the controversial rules anyone working or volunteering with children must register for background checks. But organising checks on thousands of foreign Scout leaders was "just not possible", a spokesman said.

Good. I have nothing against the Scouts, but I do like it when people are smashed in the face by the reality of the political order they tolerate. Let people feel the consequences and start to get angry. Of course I want people to stop even trying to comply, to 'go Galt' if you like, to wilfully break laws and subvert regulations, but here we have an example where they really cannot comply, and that works too.

The state is not your friend. Are you starting to get the message?

When two working women who look after each other's children are told they are breaking the law by doing so because they are not registered with the state to do that, the only sane and moral thing to do is to break the law and to urge as many other people as possible to do the same.

Oh yes... not that it should matter, but the two women in question are policewomen.

Here is a quick thought: in the aftermath of various financial crises - the 1997 Asian crisis (remember that one?), Long Term Capital Management (1998), various business blowups (Enron, etc), and of course, the latest excitements, one invariably hears from the Great and the Good that what we need to stop is the "box ticking mentality" when it comes to regulation. We need, so the argument goes, to rely a lot less on making sure the correct forms are filled in, and to require people in business and enforcers of laws to use more common sense. So true.

And yet. Every time a new problem emerges, what happens? You guessed it right: more box-ticking. Take the case that this blog has written about in the past few days concerning the attempt to put a quarter of all UK adults under some sort of oversight in case they come into contact with children, and other groups. What is a distinguishing feature of such a bureaucratic, and in fact dangerous, development is that it is bound to involve people answering various forms, entering various answers into a sort of database. In other words, box-ticking. So if you pass the test, then voila! you are in the clear. And so certain crooks and villains will continue to get through, because they have passed the test.

So the next time you hear a politician piously informing us that we are going to "get beyond the box-ticking approach", do not believe them.

"We have an incoherent attitude to freedom in this country. We imagine that we value freedom above almost everything else and yet at the same time we are neurotically averse to risk. Every time something terrible happens, such as the murder of a child, the public clamours for something to be done to ensure that such a thing never happens again. Such unspeakable suffering must not have been in vain; inquiries must be held and systems must be put in place; all such risks to children must be eliminated. Yet the harsh truth is that risk is the heavy price of freedom."

Minette Marrin.

She points out that the development - as elaborated below on this blog by Natalie Solent - will poison civil society and discourage volunteering. I think that is actually part of the idea. I have long since abandoned any notion that such developments are introduced by well-meaning but foolish people. Their intentions are to Sovietise British society, to put all law-abiding adults under a cloud, and rip up the autonomous, private spaces that make up civil society. There is a comment I remember being made by the late Tory MP, Nicholas Budgen: "Old Labour wanted to nationalise things; New Labour will nationalise people."

The Morning Advertiser essentially reproduces what the IPS press office told them (there's a shorter version of the same flacking in The Publican), and no doubt other drinks trade press will be printing some of it in due course, so here is most of it.

National ID cards will eventually replace current ID used to buy alcohol in pubs, says the man heading the national ID card roll-out.

Identity and Passport Service chief executive James Hall also revealed that “several thousands” have already registered interest in applying for one of the new cards.

The cards, which are not compulsory, will cost £30. People in Manchester will be the first who can apply for them in the autumn, before the national roll-out in 2011/2012.

“Several thousand have registered on the website to show their interest,” said Hall. “We will be focusing on Manchester to start. We’ll then be moving forward cautiously before we start to scale this up.”

Asked if he predicted a large take-up among young people, he replied: “Yes I think there will be.

“I think it’s a little bit like the telephone. On it’s own it isn’t of great benefit to people. As they become more popular businesses will turn to ID cards as proof of age and as businesses start to ask for them more regularly, customers will find it more natural to get one.

“In the next 12-18 months we can build a virtuous circle among businesses and consumers.”

Hall said the new cards will be more convenient than passports as ID for pubs, and there is “some nervousness” about carrying driving licences because they include people’s addresses, unlike the new cards.

As for Pass-accredited cards, Hall said: “There’s lots of them about and almost in the multiplicity is their weakness. A lot of people pubs and clubs are reluctant to accept them.”

He added: “I think over time the ID card will replace these things and become the most convenient and effective form of ID.

“My expectation is in due course, people will get a passport and ID card together, keep one as their core travel document and put the card in their wallet - that will become their de-facto way of proving ID.”

Hall said the cards will be advertised across the trade within the next few weeks. Adverts will raise awareness among firms and showing where to get hold of supporting material to educate staff about the cards.

“As we get closer to the launch between now and Christmas, we will be supplementing these with direct adverts to consumers.”

Note that the existing proof-of-age cards, the PASS scheme, that he goes to such trouble to rubbish, have been supported by the Home Office hitherto, and millions have them. (One of the better ones, CitzenCard, has 1.8 million cards in issue.) They are cheap. They are private and secure, the information on them being minimal and the back-up systems being separate from anything else. Suppliers take no more information from you than necessary to establish your age. They will destroy it on request. They will in general not share it with anyone without your permission. And it is a relationship in which you have contractual and statutory rights which can't be waived to suit the supplier.

The IPS line is that drinkers will prefer to be fingerprinted at their own expense, and provide a massive amount of personal information to a government agency, which will then be held on a central register for life (and likely for ever), used to cross reference other information about them, and passed out to a range of government agencies that are entitled to ask for it. The 'convenience' of this card will be enhanced by criminal penalties if you lose it and don't report it, civil ones if you fail to inform the authorities about changes to your residence or other circumstances, a log of every time the card is used and where, and the possibility that the information required, what can be done with it, and the obligations attaching to the scheme can all be altered by regulation.

Who-whom?

"It's a no-brainer," says Alan Johnson, 59-and-a-half.

Regular commenter here, IanB - who now gigs over at CountingCats - bashes those doctors, who, claiming to speak for all doctors, want to ban alcohol advertising.

Authortarian creeps, the lot of them. If one thinks about it, the number one addiction in the world that needs to be curbed is the habit of trying to tell grownups how to lead their lives morning, noon and night.

Inevitably, they do this in the name of protecting children, so it is not censorship, you see. How conveeeenient. Look, I like children and feel parental control and guidance is fine, but can we just remind ourselves that as kids, we managed to grow up into relatively sane creatures without being mollycoddled and protected by state censorship from adverts for beer, gin and plonk? Considering the risks that send our so-called medical "establishment" off the edge, it is a wonder we made it to adulthood at all.

ELSPA director general Mike Rawlinson said:

The discovery that the Video Recordings Act is not enforceable is obviously very surprising. In the interest of child safety it is essential that this loophole is closed as soon as possible.

In this respect the videogames industry will do all it can to support and assist the government to that effect. ELSPA will therefore advise our members to continue to forward games to be rated as per the current agreement while the legal issues are being resolved.

FFS!

Watch this and weep for what once was and is now gone.

Old Holborn considers the new disposition of the state and highlights, in that Hayekian warning, of the extension of the state through arbitrary fines and the presumption of guilt. What is forgotten is that the agents of the state are still few and far between: without the ballast of a mass party to back them up, they remain an irritant, rather than a overarching totalitarianism. One can live without hearing or seeing these actions in person.

Nevertheless, state functionaries will wish to find 'efficient' ways of exercising their power. The database state is meant to replace the mass party as a vehicle for co-ordinating and controlling all activities. Yet, some means of identifying and punishing perpetrators is still required, as technology is still insufficient to achieve this goal. Hence, the rise in channels for informing and denouncing those who dissent.

After all, East Germany required ten percent of the population...

UBS has been closing the secret accounts of its American clients, forcing them into the cold, tax lawyers say. Many Americans with undeclared accounts have sought leniency by making voluntary disclosures to the IRS. Meanwhile, UBS has reported large outflows of deposits, which go beyond its American clientele.

Union Bank of Switzerland is haemorrhaging clients, not just American ones who have unwisely not stuffed their US passports in a shredder, but others too who no longer trust the bank with their privacy.

Frankly UBS was insane to do business in the USA in the first place, given the mafia-like behaviour of the American tax authorities, and the way I see it, this is just a very bad business decision being punished by clients voting with their feet money in favour of more discrete and less bombastic banks that cater to people with the quaint notion that their own money belongs to them and not the IRS... or any other rapacious state.

And any US nationals throwing themselves on the mercy of the thuggish IRS seriously need their heads examined. At the first sign of trouble, and this has been brewing a long time, they should have sold up and got the hell out of the USA for good. The weather in Costa Rica is really very nice, guys, trust me, and your money buys a whole lot more down here.

What does one call a state partially ruled by a club for police chiefs and 'law enforcement' bureaucrats who do not wish to obey the law?

Regular consumption of between 3 and 4 units a day by men of all ages will not accrue significant health risk.
Regular consumption of between 2 and 3 units a day by women of all ages will not accrue any significant health risk.

- 'Sensible Drinking: The Report of an Interdepartmental Working Group' (Department of Health, 1995) My emphasis.

----
See your doctor or practice nurse if you are drinking above the safe limits and are finding it difficult to cut down.
What are the recommended safe limits of alcohol drinking?

• Men should drink no more than 21 units of alcohol per week (and no more than four units in any one day).
• Women should drink no more than 14 units of alcohol per week (and no more than three units in any one day).

- Patient UK
---

There is a desperate desire for binary certainty in the authoritarian mind. 'Safety' is not just small risk; it is the absence of any known or projected risk. What is not defined as safe is dangerous. No possibility of a risk is permissable because if anything goes wrong the system could be blamed for not preventing it. That would be a threat to order. What is not expressly permitted is forbidden.

After working over fourteen hours today, with perhaps three hours of sleep the night before, my boss on the DC consulting job took me out for dinner at a diner, nearly the only restaurant still open in Bethesda at that hour. After dinner he asked for a Banana Cream Pie, his usual self-treat after this sort of marathon work day. The night chef told us it is no longer available. Montgomery County outlawed Trans-Fats and such pies are now contraband. For a moment I considered asking if there was a back room where one could gorge on smuggled pies, but thought better of it. Such secret places would be only for locals and those known to the Mafia, not for transient gypsy engineers such as myself.

Maybe the time has come to bring back The Living Theater: "I am not allowed to eat Banana Cream Pies!!!" they could exclaim dramatically whilst standing about naked on stage. Perhaps a Three Stooges level cream pie fight is called for. Yeah, that's the ticket! Residents of Montgomery County Arise! You have nothing to loose but your cream pies! Give your politicians the respect they have earned and deliver them their just deserts!

I hereby declare 'The Cream Pie Revolution', a proper descendant of 'The Marshmallow Revolution' (1) tradition of my youth. Yes, back to those days of yore when we hurled soft confections (probably illegal in Montgomery County) at the Pittsburgh Federal Building and Senator Strom Thurmound!

The concept of politicians with whipped cream covered visages appeals to the inner Yippee of my street theatre past. Of course, should such a terrible thing actually be done by some miscreants, it is definitely not my idea... but please send photos.

(1) 'The Marshmallow Revolution' was a street theatrical realization of a song from the 1970 Carnegie Mellon University Scotch and Soda Company BMI award winning original musical "Something Personal", written by David Spangler and Mark Pirolo, with some input from Stephen Schwartz (yes, that one).

The alternative news-agency SchNEWS, frequently offers inchoherent and borderline-mad stories, but it does carry some interesting stuff from time to time, including this well-composed and entirely plausible account* of how even hippy festivals are now closely regulated by the authorities:

In spite of these setbacks, [the Big Green Gathering (BGG)] managed to scrape themselves back off the floor with shareholder cash and some potentially dubious corporate involvement. Every effort had been made by the gathering’s organisers to accommodate the increasingly niggling demands of police and licensing authorities. The procedure lasted over six months – just check out www.mendip.gov.uk/CommitteeMeeting.asp?id=SX9452-A782D404 for the minutes of meetings held between organisers and the authorities. Demands included a steel fence, watchtowers and perimeter patrols, having the horsedrawn field inside a ‘secure compound’ and wristbands for twelve undercover police. At a multi-agency meeting on Thursday, police took those wristbands in order to maintain the pretence that the festival stood a chance of going ahead. A catalogue of other obstacles were also continually placed in the organiser’s path.

All of the businesses associated with the BGG came under scrutiny, licensing authorities contacted South West ambulances, the Fire Brigade and the fencing contractors and asked them to get payment up front from the BGG. Needless to say this caused huge problems.

For their own good, of course. One cannot just have hippies hiring fields from farmers in order to have a place to enjoy themselves as they see fit. Someone might not get hurt. And that would open the floodgates to anarchy in the UK. Or Wessex, at least.

hat-tip: Dr Geraint Bevan
----
* Though they do get the date of the vile Licensing Act 2003 wrong

You can basically sum the UK government's dilemma up as either they're going to have to tell Gerry Adams he has to have a British ID card to live in NI or tell Iain Paisley he's going to need a passport to travel from Belfast to London...

- An anonymous commenter, at The Register, discussing one of the minor obstacles to the British government's ID card and e-borders schemes.

University of Essex Professor Vic Callaghan has a paper addressing issues of privacy and intelligent environments. In his review of a video on the subject he notes:

I just watched the video of your talk “Open Source Physical Security: Can we have both privacy and safety?“.

I think you raise a number of very important points about the potential for misuse of technology. I research in pervasive computing (Intelligent Environments, Pervasive Sensing, Digital Homes, Smart Homes etc) having previously been heavily involved in robotics. In this work I became aware of how technology could be misused, in a similar way to the nanotechnology you describe. We became so concerned that we gave a talk to the UN (as we felt it needed legislation or guidance at a very high level). More recently we wrote this up as an academic paper which suffered some opposition and modification before we were able to find and outlet willing to publish it (its a rather unpopular message). We are mainstream researchers in intelligent environments, that spent most of our life promoting this technology so it was, perhaps, a little unusual that we wrote an article that might be counter to its unfettered deployment.

Although I do not think the UN is going to have the effect he would wish, the worries he expresses are ones we all need consider. The era of ubiquitous sensing has already begun.

PS: Watch the referenced Christine Peterson video for a good summary of the right way to approach this problem (and not just because she's a very old friend of mine!)

It is revealing in the coverage of the conviction of two racists for expressing their views, that there is a near complete lack of any debate over the profound civil liberties issues involved. It is being flatly reported, but not debated.

The mainstream media are always telling us how 'essential' they are for 'our democracy'. But I have yet to see anyone raise the point that just because the people stating their opinions are crackpots, maybe crackpots should also be allowed to say what they think? I was waiting for the papers to surprise me today...

But no. This is 'ground breaking' we are told, and indeed it is, but that is as far as the reports go. Does the Guardian or Telegraph not have anything to say about the broader implications?

State commissars like Adil Khan in Humberside, who is in charge of making us diverse but cohesive (or face prison if we demur) tells us:

"This case is groundbreaking. The fact is now that we've been able to demonstrate that you've got nowhere to hide; people have been hiding on [sic] the fact that this server was in the US. Inciting racial hatred is a crime and one which seems to occur too regularly. This kind of material will not be tolerated as this lengthy investigation shows."

Which is actually quite a misleading statement. The state only regards people stating their extreme opinions as "incitement" if they belong to ritually abominated groups like white racists, whose extreme views must be punished because there is no political cost to doing so. For groups who actually throw bricks when the cops come calling, well, stating their extreme views is treated rather differently.

This is hardly new of course. Incite violence with words, but be unlikely to actually do anything, well you might well go to jail... actually kill people over many years, ah, that eventually gets you invited to help govern. No? I have two words for you: Sinn Fein.

Last time I called Britain a police state, I was dismissed as overheated because, after all, I can run this blog and state my contrary opinions, so this is hardly a police state.

Yet were Simon Sheppard and Stephen Whittle not just jailed for running a website on a US server (just as Samizdata is on a US server)? If you cast your eyes back through our archives, you will find we have on many occasions called for this or that group to have fairly violent things done to them (Ba'athists for example... and certain Wahhabi folk on occasion too... and certain Serbian nationalists)... and I suspect trawling through the archives of the Daily Telegraph would turn up articles 'inciting' not just 'violence' but calling for full blown wars.

Well it is now clear that we can say what we think, not by right as 'freeborn Englishmen' (hah!) but rather at the sufferance of the likes of Adil Khan and the whole apparatus of thought control that people like him represent. They do not feel the urge to come after us because we are not unpopular enough, although I doubt they like folks like us suggesting they prose a vastly greater threat to liberty and, gasp, "social cohesion" than a couple comically wacko racists.

Have you seen this being hotly debated in the media? Even a little? Pah. So much for the fearless and 'essential' media guardians of our liberal western order.

The sooner the old media are driven out of business by the internet, the better... ten years tops... except they will of course just rent seek tax money to keep themselves alive (or more accurately undead as no one will actually read them/watch them any more) due to their 'essential role' and the 'public interest' of having newspapers and TV channels no one really needs and do who not actually do anything essential or even particularly useful.

Two men have been convicted of thought crimes by the state for daring to express what they think. I very much doubt the Human Right Industry will rally to the defence of Simon Sheppard and Stephen Whittle because the two men in question are a couple deeply unappealing white racist scumbags.

Had they merely been scumbag imams preaching in a mosque rather than scumbag white males handing out leaflets and publishing a website, I wonder if the 'head of diversity and community cohesion' in Humberside would be crowing about the latest demonstration of the British police state's ability to tell people what they can and cannot say? Just askin'.

... Aussie style, from 'GetUp!'.

It is a pity that 'GetUp!' are a profoundly statist bunch who just love state coercion just as long as it is democratically popular and 'progressive'... but one has to make short term tactical alliances where one finds them (such as on the issue of censorship). The enemy of my enemy is my friend, at least for a (very short) while.

Various forms of coercion, such as designation of the application process for identity documents issued by UK Ministers (e.g passports), are an option to stimulate applications in a manageable way. Designation should be considered as part of a managed roll-out strategy, specifically in relation to UK documents. There are advantages to designation of documents associated with particular target groups e.g. young people who may be applying for their first Driving Licence.

- 'National Identity Scheme, Options Analysis - Outcome', the Home Office document from the end of 2007 that succinctly describes its approach to the imposition of the national identity scheme onto the population.

The new Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, says “Holding an identity card should be a personal choice for British citizens — just as it is now to obtain a passport.” This is no change. It always has been intended that it should become the same personal choice, that any application for a passport (or another official document that you need to live a normal life) should entail an application to be on the national register for the rest of your life. As voluntary as sleeping.

There is a certain grim satisfaction in reading this story, on how one UK government minister - seen as a potential future Labour leader - has announced, without telling Gordon Brown, that the case for compulsory ID cards has been scrapped.

Of course, the real issue remains that even without compulsory ID cards, we have a state database on every person in this country; and the aggregation of data about us gets more intensive, and is unlikely to be reversed regardless of the outcome of the next election. Too much money has been spent, too many corporate interests have been bought, for that to stop.

...says the person calling himself the Right Honourable Alan Johnson MP.

Amusing comments.

I feel sure that early man would not have embarked on the road to civilisation if he had thought that, one day, humankind would arrive at a point where one man has the right to determine how much beer another man may take into a field in the middle of the night.

- Jeremy Clarkson, on the over-policing of midsummer at Stonehenge.

The Times, assisted by Mr Justice Eady, who seems to preside over the whole mess that stands in the place of proper privacy law in England, has unmasked the police blogger NightJack. NightJack had just won the Orwell Prize for his blog. I am guessing that drew it to the attention of higher authority, and such articulate dissent must be punished.

It took just six weeks, including a court-case, to reveal his identity. The blog has now been deleted, and the DC formerly known as NightJack has been disciplined in some unspecified way. Apparently it is in the public interest to maintain a disciplinary code under which police officers are not permitted to express their opinions. That is what Sir David Eady implied, obiter, in giving his judgement.

But deleting from public knowledge what has once been on the web is difficult. Here is a celebrated sample, NightJack's advice to the arrested, which Samizdata readers may find both useful and enlightening (there is a situational irony in the sideswipe at those who have learned how to use the forces of law and order to score points and extract revenge):

A Survival Guide for Decent Folk

Paul has posted a number of lengthy replies on the “Modest Proposal" thread. In these days of us increasingly having to deal with law abiding folk who have fallen foul of the “entitled poor” and those who have learned how to use us to score points and exact revenge, I thought it would be a good idea to give out a bit of general guidance for those law abiding types who find themselves under suspicion or under arrest. It works for the bad guys so make it work for you.

Complain First Always get your complaint in first, even if it is you who started it and you who were in the wrong. If things have gone awry and you suspect the cops are going to be called, get your retaliation in first. Ring the cops right away and allege for all you are worth. If you can work a racist or homophobic slant into it so much the better.

Make a counter allegation
Regardless of the facts, never let the other side be blameless. If they beat you to the phone, ring anyway and make a counter allegation against them. Again racism or homophobia are your friends. If you are not from a visible minority ethnic culture, may I suggest that that the phrase “You gay bastard” or similar is always useful. In extremis allege sexual assault. It gives us something to bargain with when getting the other person to drop their complaint on a quid-pro-quo basis. This is particularly good where there are no independent witnesses. When it boils down to one word against another and nobody is ‘fessing up, CPS run a mile and you, my friend, are definitely on a walk out.

Never explain to the Police
If the Police arrive to lock you up, say nothing. You are a decent person and you may think that reasoning with the Police will help. “If I can only explain, they will realise it is all a horrible mistake and go away”. Wrong. We do want to talk to you on tape in an interview room but that comes later. All you are doing by trying to explain is digging yourself further in. We call that stuff a significant statement and we love it. Decent folk can’t help themselves, they think that they can talk their way out. Wrong.

Admit Nothing
To do anything more than lock you up for a few hours we need to prove a case. The easiest route to that is your admission. Without it, our case may be a lot weaker, maybe not enough to charge you with. In any case, it is always worth finding out exactly how damning the evidence is before you fall on your sword. So don’t do the decent and honourable thing and admit what you have done. Don’t even deny it or try to give your side of the story. Just say nothing. No confession and CPS are on the back foot already. They forsee a trial. They fear a trial. They are looking for any excuse to send you home free.

Keep your mouth shut
Say as little as possible to us. At the custody office desk a Sergeant will ask you some questions. It is safe to answer these. For the rest of the time, say nothing.

Claim Suicidal Thoughts
A debatable one this. Claiming to be thinking about topping yourself has several benefits. If you can keep it up, it might just bump up any compensation payable later. On the other hand you may find yourself in a paper suit with someone watching your every move.

Always always always have a solicitor
Duh. No brainer this one. Unless you know 100% for sure that your mate the solicitor does criminal law and is good at it, ask for the Duty Solicitor. They certainly do criminal law and they are good at it. Then listen to what the solicitor says and do it. Their job is to get you off without the Cops or CPS laying a glove on you if at all possible. It is what they get paid for. They are free to you. There is no down side. Now decent folks think it makes them look like they have something to hide if they ask for a solicitor. Irrelevant. Going into an interview without a solicitor is like taking a walk in Tottenham with a big gold Rolex. Bad things are very likely to happen to you. I wouldn’t do it and I interview people for a living.

Actively complain about every officer and everything they do
Did they cuff you when they brought you in? Were they rude to you? Did they racially or homophobically abuse you? Didn’t get fed? Cell too cold? You are decent folk who don’t want to make a fuss but trust me, it pays to whinge and no matter how trivial and / or poorly founded your complaint there are people who will uncritically listen to you and try and prove the complaint on your behalf. Some of them are even police officers. Nothing like a complaint to muddy the waters and suggest that you are only in court because the vindictive Cops have a grudge against you. Far fetched? Wait until your solicitor spins it in court and you come over as Ghandi.

Show no respect to the legal system or anybody working in it
You think that if you are a difficult, unpleasant, sneering, unco-operative and rude things will go badly for you and you will be in more trouble. No sirree Bob. It seems that in fact the worse you are, the easier things will go for you if, horror of horrors, you do end up convicted. Remember to fake a drink problem if you haven’t developed one as a result of dealing with us already. Magistrates and Judges do seem to like the idea that you are basically good but the naughty alcohol made you do it. They treat you better. Crazy I know but true.

So there you go, basically anything you try and do because you are decent and straightforward hurts you badly. Act like an habitual, professional, lifestyle criminal and chances are you will walk away relatively unscathed. Copy the bad guys, its what they do for a living.

From: *.*@westminsterforumprojects.co.uk]
Sent: 12 June 2009 09:50
To: enquiries@no2id.net
Subject: The future role of the third sector in the UK: Don't Miss the Westminster Legal Policy Forum Keynote Seminar: The Future of the UK Third Sector - proving 'public benefit', Morning, 18th June 2009

Westminster Legal Policy Forum Keynote Seminar:

The Future of the UK Third Sector – proving ‘public benefit’

with

Helen Stephenson
Deputy Director, Third Sector Support Team
Office of the Third Sector, Cabinet Office

and

Claire Cooper
Deputy Director, Communities Group
Department for Communities and Local Government

and

Peter Wanless
Chief Executive, Big Lottery Fund

and

Simon Blake
Chair, Compact Voice

Morning, Thursday, 18th June 2009
Princess Alexandra Hall, Over-Seas House, Park Place, St James’s Street, London SW1A 1LR

[...]

For the attention of the Director

I hope you won’t mind this final reminder about the above seminar, taking place in Westminster next Thursday, but you don’t currently appear to be represented, and I do believe the issues being discussed will be of interest.

This email is being sent to a general email address because I wanted to pass along information that I thought may be of interest but was unable to secure specific contact details. Please forward this to the appropriate person, and we would be grateful to receive precise contact details if this is possible.

Whereas I thought readers of this blog would be interested, given we have previously discussed the creeping nationalisation of charities and other voluntary organisations by Britain's Borg-state. For foreign readers I hope it throws light on an icy subtle totalitarianism.

What makes this doubly creepy is that it is a legal policy seminar. That hints at further powers perhaps to coerce the 'third sector', as well as to co-opt and to corrupt it. Though the new Companies Act 2006 constrains the independence of action of commercial firms and non-profits in unclear ways, it is yet a shadow in the corner. So if you are a voluntary organisation but not a charity, don't spend money on party politics, and don't accept government or local authority or quango or bound-charity money, then you are currently still beyond state control and not obliged to provide a 'public benefit'.

Please note there is a charge for most delegates, but no one is excluded on the basis of ability to pay (see below).

Seminar

The third sector - charities, social enterprises, credit unions - have an increasingly prominent role in the delivery of services and economic development in the UK.

But now the ‘rules of the game’ are changing as the Charity Commission imposes new duties on charities to justify ‘public benefit’ and the recession threatens to squeeze much-needed donations.

This seminar takes an in depth look at the effects on charities themselves and those who support or benefit from them, at what the third sector will look like in the future, how significant a role it is set to play after the recession and at implications for UK society as a whole.

With contributions from the Office of the Third Sector outlining the Government’s strategy, and from the Department for Communities and Local Government, the meeting will bring together key policy makers in Government and Parliament with charities, their advisors and supporters, citizen groups and others with an interest in the issues. It is organised on the basis of strict impartiality by the Westminster Legal Policy Forum.

Planned sessions include:
* The current level, range of activity and scale of the third sector in the UK;
* Challenges for the Third Sector – a funder’s perspective;
* UK society’s expectations of the third sector in a recession;
* Third sector involvement in providing public services, now and into the future;
* Consequences for the sector of the Charity Commission’s guidance on ‘public benefit’ across the range of charities, from the largest to the smallest; and
* Latest views from the Office of the Third Sector.

A copy of the agenda is copied below my signature to give you a feel of the sessions planned. Updates to the agenda can all be viewed ‘live’ here.

Speakers

Keynote speakers at this seminar are:
* Julian Blake, Partner, Bates Wells & Braithwaite;
* Simon Blake, Chair, Compact Voice;
* Claire Cooper, Deputy Director, Communities Group, Department for Communities and Local Government;
* Akhil Patel, Audit Manager, Third Sector Business Development Team, National Audit Office;
* Helen Stephenson, Deputy-Director, Third Sector Support Team, Office of the Third Sector; and
* Peter Wanless, Chief Executive, The Big Lottery Fund

Other speakers include:
* Ann Blackmore, Head of Policy, National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO)
* Craig Dearden-Phillips, Chief Executive, SpeakingUp;
* Tris Lumley, Head of Strategy, New Philanthropy Capital;
* Professor Peter Luxton, Professor of Charity Law, Cardiff University;
* Mark Lyonette, Chief Executive, Association of British Credit Unions;
* Dr Richard Marsh, Independent Consultant, and former director, Impact Coalition;
* Professor Cathy Pharoah, Co-Director, Centre for Charitable Giving and Philanthropy, Sir John Cass Business School;
* David Walker, Managing Director of Communications and Public Reporting, Audit Commission; and
* Simon Watson, National Officer, Local Government Service Group, UNISON.

Nick Hurd MP, Shadow Minister for Charities, Social Enterprise and Volunteering Sector and Jenny Willott MP, Liberal Democrat, Spokesperson for the Third Sector have kindly agreed to chair a session.

Attendees

We expect further speakers and attendees to be a senior and informed group numbering around 100, including Members of both Houses of Parliament, senior government officials, representatives of third sector organisations, local government and their support services, as well as representatives from law firms, campaign groups, academia, and the trade and national press.

We have already had places reserved by several senior officials from the Department of Health and the HM Treasury. The Charity Commission are also represented at this seminar.

Places have also been booked for representatives from: Accenture, Allen and Overy, Allergy, Berrymans Lace Mawer, Bird and Co, British Lymphology Society, British Waterways, BS Social Care, Cambridge House, Children England, Citizens Advice, Commission for the Compact, Crossroads Association, Diabetes UK, Eduserv, Ernst & Young, Geldards, GHK Consulting, Hampshire Adult Services, Hill and Knowlton, Housing Associations' Charitable Trust, Linklaters, Loughborough University , Mental Health Matters, Menzies, Moorhead James, National Foundation for Educational Research , NCB, NSPCC, Penningtons, Play England, PSS, Scottish Disability Equality Forum, The Disabilities Trust, The Girls Day School Trust, and YWCA.

Press passes has [sic] been booked by Society Media and Third Sector.

Output and About Us

A key output of the seminar will be a transcript of the proceedings, sent out within a week of the event to Ministers and officials at the Office of the Third Sector, Department of Health, Home Office, Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Cabinet Office, Central Office of Information, National Audit Office, and other departments affected by the issues, and Parliamentarians with a special interest in these areas. It will also be made available more widely. It will include transcripts of all speeches and questions and answers sessions from the day, along with access to PowerPoint presentations, speakers’ biographies, the attendee list, agenda and sponsor information. It is made available subject to strict restrictions on public use, similar to those for Select Committee Uncorrected Evidence, and is intended to provide timely information for interested parties who are unable to attend on the day.

All delegates will receive free PDF copies and are invited to contribute to the content.

The Westminster Legal Policy Forum is a recently established division of Westminster Forum Projects. Following the successful model of its sister Forums, it aims to provide an inclusive and impartial environment for constructive discussion of key issues in this increasingly important area for public policy. The Westminster Legal Policy Forum is grateful for strong initial support from within both Houses of Parliament. All our Forums benefit greatly from the support and active involvement of Parliamentary Patrons.

To quote David Davis MP, three months ago, "How will we know we are living in a police state?"

Is it when the police conduct a systematic campaign of false arrests in order to gather information on people who might commit a crime? Is it when they do that, and public reaction is no more than a shrug? A couple of days ago, The Daily Telegraph reported discoveries made by my local Liberal Democrat PPC, excellently living up to the first bit of her party's vaguely oxymoronic name:

Officers are targeting children as young as 10 with the aim of placing their DNA profiles on the national database to improve their chances of solving crimes, it is claimed.

The alleged practice is also described as part of a "long-term crime prevention strategy" to dissuade youths from committing offences in the future. [...]

A Metropolitan Police officer made the claims after figures were released showing that 386 under-18s had their DNA taken and stored by police last year in Camden, north London.

The officer said: "Have we got targets for young people who have not been arrested yet? The answer is yes. But we are not just waiting outside schools to pick them up, we are acting on intelligence.*

"It is part of a long-term crime prevention strategy. If you know you have had your DNA taken and it is on a database then you will think twice about committing burglary for a living.

"We are often told that we have just one chance to get that DNA sample and if we miss it then that might mean a rape or a murder goes unsolved in the future."

Acting "on intelligence", that is, hearsay, unsubstantiated allegations, and prejudice, when they know they have no evidence let alone reasonable suspicion of any actual crime — for intelligence is not evidence, it is a substitute for evidence in its absence — the Metropolitan Police are making unlawful arrests, in order to take samples (fingerprints and DNA), that it is deemed by the human rights court to be improper for them to hold in any case. And that fact has not caused public outrage. It has yet to reach any broadcast news service, as far as I am aware.

A quiescent, compliant public and a quiescent, compliant media, are the handmaidens of a police state.

The left should be sensitive to inequality, the left should never accept liberty on a playing field that is unequal.

- Conor Gearty. Quoted in this account of a debate on liberty at the Hay Festival by Afua Hirsch (do I detect an elegant lefty lawyer's eyebrow raised in, "There was no competition for this position..."?).

Every time I hear Prof Gearty or another human rightist of his water argue for a policy with which I agree (banning torture, say, or permitting freedom of expression), I have to remind myself that they are proceeding from an entirely different foundation. The position is coherent, but coherently alien.

----
* Well, last week, actually.

Whatever else he can be called, I do not think that Mr Obama can be called a liberal. I was having a good chat with fellow blogger Paul Marks last night and he made this point. And as if by coincidence, via Instapundit, comes this story:

"The US Department of Homeland Security is set to kickstart a controversial new pilot to scan the fingerprints of travellers departing the United States. From June, US Customs and Border Patrol will take a fingerprint scan of travellers exiting the United States from Detroit, while the US Transport Security Administration will take fingerprint scans of international travellers exiting the United States from Atlanta. The controversial plan to scan outgoing passengers — including US citizens — was allegedly hatched under the Bush Administration. An official has said it will be used in part to crack down on the US population of illegal immigrants."

Brilliant idea (sarcasm alert). How will fingerprinting people make illegal immigration more difficult? Surely, if supposedly unwanted folk are leaving a country, they are doing that country a favour, so why make it more irksome for them to move away by fingerprinting them or by insisting on other evidence, details or whatnot? I guess greater minds than mine have an answer.

As Thaddus Tremayne noted on this blog not so long ago, our own marvellously-run administration is pondering the idea of getting all travellers from the UK to divulge their travel and accomodation plans, reasons for trips, etc. (So I guess eloping couples will have a lot of explaining to do). As he also noted, the day may not be far off when exit visas, of the sort that used to be applied in the Communist East, make a comeback. So if you want to get the hell out of the UK before it crashes into bankruptcy, rising inflation and tax, then it is probably smart to do so in the next few years, regardless of the outcome of the next General Election. Paranoid? Well, who would have thought that the very notion of detailed information requests from travellers would have been mooted a few years ago. The ratchet effect keeps going.

And by the way, for those who sneered at Dale Amon's enthusiasm for spacefaring the other day, it is stories like this that explain why "exit" strategies such as spacefaring and sea-steading are gaining some interest from libertarians. It may sound utopian, but the general idea of "getting out" has never been more popular. And that is why I keep banging on about the attempted assaults on so-called tax havens. They are an attack on the very notion that places of refuge from governments should exist, for rich or poor alike.

Articles like this help even an intolerant short tempered swine like me forgive the Ludwig von Mises Institute for some of its people's a priori history and America-and-Britain-are-always-wrong view of war.

I put this up as a Samizdata quote of the day, before realising that there already was one. Sorry. But, it's good and deserves plentiful copying and pasting, so here is that posting rehashed, with the quote in question as its starting point:

So, yet again, the courts are faced with a sample of the deeply confusing provisions of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, and the satellite Statutory Instruments to which it is giving stuttering birth. The most inviting course for this Court to follow, would be for its members, having shaken their heads in despair to hold up their hands and say: "the Holy Grail of rational interpretation is impossible to find". But it is not for us to desert our judicial duty, however lamentably others have legislated. But, we find little comfort or assistance in the historic canons of construction for determining the will of Parliament which were fashioned in a more leisurely age and at a time when elegance and clarity of thought and language were to be found in legislation as a matter of course rather than exception.

That is the Court of Appeal struggling to make sense of the Criminal Justice Act 2003. Found here by him (who has recently resolved to blog approximately every day and whom I recommend) via a comment on this, which is about, among other foolishnesses, the recent fashion among Them for stopping us taking photos of Them.

My dad was a Big Cheese lawyer, and I can remember him telling me stuff like this several decades ago. I vaguely recall him saying that until about nineteen sixty something or thenabouts, there was this bloke who lived in a den in Whitehall and who spent his time rewriting laws so that (a) they didn't contradict themselves, and (b) they didn't contradict each other, but (c) so far as he could contrive it, they managed to maintain the original will of the legislators, insofar as he could divine it. If he could not divine it, he made it up, as intelligently as he could. But then, catastrophe. He retired. Ever since then, the laws have got more and more incoherent and incomprehensible. And of course now, you would need about a hundred of such non-existent paragons of legal non-incontinence just to keep up.

As Rob, the above mentioned blogger quotes another commenter saying:

We are told that 'ignorance of the law is no excuse' but how can it not be an excuse when even the courts are unsure of what the law is?

In practice, I think I notice that, recently (i.e. during the time since that old bloke my dad talked about retired), They have evolved a relatively sensible way of enforcing Their laws (senseless though the laws themselves frequently are), which is based on distinguishing between real laws and arbitrary laws. The real ones, against things like murder, assault, robbery and so on, still get you arrested at once, provided They catch you at it. But the vast mountain range of arbitrary laws and rules and regulations, often in the form of policy directives from On High about what various Acts of Parliament actually mean (given that as originally written they are quite often gibberish) according to On High, are enforced by you first being given a warning. You may not park on that purple line. You must have a permit to hand out leaflets here. You can't wear that hat or that suntan lotion or eat that sticky bun or drink that drink in that sized glass or call that an artichoke. You are obliged to fill in this form. You must send it to us (i.e. Them) within one month. Etcetera, etcetera, et something angry cetera. Which means that, in practice, ignorance of the law has become the obviously reasonable defence that it obviously now is, with regard to almost all recently concocted laws. If They were to insist otherwise, They would get repeatedly involved in huge fights with people who don't want to break the law, but who don't know what it is. I.e. with everybody.

I now live my life certain that I am constantly breaking laws of this or that recently invented sort, and as far as I am concerned it is up to Them to tell me about which laws actually matter to Them. I will then, if I think that Their particular commands or demands make some sense, or if They are sufficiently menacing about them, obey them. Or, I will carry on breaking whatever idiot law it is or that They have just made up without troubling Parliament with the petty details, but a bit more carefully. I still take photos of policemen, for instance. I am just a bit more careful about letting them know I'm doing it, and am careful while doing it not to Look At Them In A Funny Way.

Decade after decade, to mention another example, I have failed to register to vote. Occasionally I read somewhere or see something telling me that this is illegal. Is it? I don't know and I don't care. Nobody menacing actually tells me that I must register and threatens me with actual trouble if I don't. So from where I stand, the mere law of the matter can go jump into the Serpentine.

If They want me to be more respectful of "the law" (which is how They typically now describe Their laws), They should reduce the number of - and reduce the incoherence and arbitrariness of - Their laws, to the point where the laws that remain mostly make sense.

One of my hobbies in recent years has been photoing tourists in London as they indulge in photography. And, given the harassment I am starting to get from uniformed persons as I wander about London snapping whatever I feel like snapping, I have for quite a while now been wondering how long it would be before I ran into a news story about the police harassing foreign tourists for taking photos and hence undermining London's reputation as a nice place to visit.

The wait is over:

In a telephone interview from his home in Vienna, Matka said: "I've never had these experiences anywhere, never in the world, not even in Communist countries."

He described his horror as he and his 15-year-old son were forced to delete all transport-related pictures on their cameras, including images of Vauxhall underground station.

"Google Street View is allowed to show any details of our cities on the world wide web," he said. "But a father and his son are not allowed to take pictures of famous London landmarks."

He said he would not return to London again after the incident, ...

You know how really shitty governments don't care what their own citizens say about them, but can sometimes be slightly shamed by what the foreigners say? Well, I tried googling "Klaus Matka", and got to a number of foreign versions of the same story, so this harassment is already being somewhat noticed elsewhere. The forbidding of photos of London's famed double decker buses ("bus rossi a due piani") is being particularly talked about. I hope this story goes right round the world, carrying with it the message of just what ghastly people now rule us.

I wonder what London Mayor Boris Johnson thinks about this.

Mr Obama's administration has released documents about details of "harsh interrogation techniques" that were used, or considered acceptable to be used, to deal with suspected terrorists. What is interesting is that Mr Obama does not intend to prosecute those responsible. I guess the difficulty here is that Mr Obama does not want to be drawn into moves to prosecute and go after senior officials in the previous Bush administration. But if there are to be no legal consequences - assuming that the use of such powers is clearly illegal as well as wicked - then it is hard to see what can be gained by all this non-action by Mr Obama. If there is insufficient evidence to launch a prosecution of those who sanctioned its use, then they are entitled to have that fact known, since a stain will attach to their name otherwise. On the other hand, if there was authorisation of torture, then the fact of there being no prosecutions will send out a message that such behaviour will not be punished and can happen again. Is that what "hope and change" meant?
(Update: or maybe Mr Obama and some of his supporters fear that punishment of torturers could be used against Democrats in the future if officials in Democrat-led administrations ever sanction such techniques, or are suspected of so doing. Mr Obama and his party are not consistent civil libertarians.)

Torture, and its use, is one of those "canary in the mineshaft" issues for me; it shows a government has no respect for law. Any attempts to try and domesticate it and limit it under strict guidelines are likely to fail. As we are finding here at home in the UK, if you give governments powers, then they will use them, sooner or later, against innocent people.

As a side-note, I would add that while some of the venom directed at the Bush administration was partisan grandstanding, there is no doubt that part of it was driven by a real worry about where the US and other Western governments were headed. It is not remotely comforting that Mr Obama has taken the course he has. We cannot be confident that torture is off-limits under his administration, and nor should we be. It is not as if he has, for instance, abolished indefinite detention of terror suspects, despite the much-touted plan to shut down Gitmo.

Some earlier thoughts by me on this issue.

A comment on this posting made me think that our US/non-UK readers value this blog's coverage of the whole business of the scandals now hammering the UK government on a daily basis. As Iain Dale, the political blogger, said the other day, we are entering a period not unlike the fag-end of Richard Nixon's time in power, with Gordon Brown playing the Nixon role, and his various acolytes, toadies and henchmen in the various roles of shit-stirrers and frighteners.

Another day, another twist. A few months ago, a Conservative MP, Damian Green, was arrested by anti-terrorism officers after he had received material, concerning illegal immigration, that was leaked to him by a civil servant. Some of the material claims that illegal immigrants have managed to get jobs that bring them close to the very heart of government. Whatever you think about immigration - I am a defender of free migration BTW - this is a legitimate issue for a politician to make a fuss over.

Yesterday, a committee of MPs concluded that the use of such anti-terrorism powers was grossly excessive. You don't say. Of course, not all aspects of Mr Green's behaviour, or indeed that of the civil servant, are above reproach. But given that journalists, MPs and other potential "whistle-blowers" on public problems cannot do their job unless leaks occur, it does seem rather rich for a Labour-led government to operate in this way. But they just love their anti-terrorism powers, do they not? Just ask the government of Iceland.

I must admit that in recent days I have tried to post stories that take one out of the Westminster Village, not simply because I wonder whether this is a bore, but because reading constantly about the doings of Gordon Brown and his circle makes me want to take a shower to feel clean and human again.

Update: Damian Green will not be prosecuted. It should never have come to this. The position of the Speaker of the House of Commons, a product of the Labour thugocracy from Scotland, is untenable.

Further thoughts on the vileness of the government from Fraser Nelson in The Spectator, which also has a picture of Guido Fawkes on the front cover. Question to Paul Staines: when do we get the movie?

Is this just a bad video at Fox News or do any of you have problems with it as well? About 4 or 5 seconds into it after the commercial it freezes on me. I have been seeing this fairly often lately and usually on things I most want to see!

It looks like it might be interesting if I could only watch it here in the UK.

It is has surprised me that David Cameron's Conservative Party, even though it has been pretty hopeless at resisting or promising to overturn whole assaults on UK civil liberties, has not embraced the idea of a mass repeal of such odious laws more enthusiastically. A commenter called KevinB has raised this point just now.

Consider the benefits: it would appeal to liberal-leaning folk who might otherwise not give the Tories a second glance and weaken the challenge from the LibDems; it would go down well with younger people normally less inclined to vote; it would be the right thing to do anyway. So why do they not make a manifesto commitment saying that in the first session of the next Parliament, a Great Repeal Act will be enacted that sweeps away hundreds of encroachments on UK civil liberties, such as the Civil Contingencies Act and the National ID database?

Of course, some of this might require the government to pull out of certain EU laws, but remember that the vast bulk of the laws imposed by New Labour have been domestically generated and cannot be blamed on the EU, important though that dimension is.

Now at this blog we are not exactly very nice to the Tories, to say the least. But it strikes me that a Great Repeal Act, or Restoration of Liberties Act, would be a nice, catchy idea that even the most authortarian cynic in the Tory ranks might feel would be worthwhile.

Following from Philip Chaston's post immediately below, is the point that needs to be repeated as to how bad it is that the authorities are now trying - in vain, hopefully - to ban people from photographing the police. Had such photographing been prevented, then this incident, which threatens to engulf the police in further turmoil, would not have been recorded.

I cannot believe I am now writing stuff like this. This is Britain, right?

Let it not be said that the politicians gathering to celebrate an orgy (er, steady on, Ed) of Keynesian delinqency and transnational socialism are letting this current financial crisis go to waste. The G20 countries have agreed to a crackdown on those pestilential things, tax havens. I have defended them before and will do so again. What we are seeing is a determined effort to create a global tax cartel. Cartels, unless backed by brute force, tend to break down eventually. The G20 are making lots of blood-curdling threats about sanctions and so forth. What is Germany or Italy going to do - invade Switzerland? Good luck with that, gentlemen.

At the root of the hatred of tax havens is a hatred of freedom, pure and simple. If you believe a democratically elected government, say, can seize the wealth of a portion of its citizens, then you will believe that that minority can be more or less robbed, held hostage and prevented from going abroad. Socialists such as Richard Murphy believe that if 51 per cent of my fellow citizens want to help themselves to the contents of my bank account, then I am being "undemocratic" and a bad citizen if I choose to park my cash in the Caymans or wherever. Well, why not go the whole distance and require anyone who has an offshore bank account either to close it or be forced to get an exit visa if they wish to do so? We may be already reaching that point. If, on the other hand, you believe people are entitled to their property regardless of what their fellow electors think, then tax havens - "haven" is a place of safety, remember- are an important escape route and bulwark against looters. When politicians want to shut down places of safety in a time of crisis, it is well to be cynical about the motives of those involved. Especially if they happen to be such characters as Gordon Brown or Barack Obama.

The sheer cynicsm of it all is breathtaking. Whatever the cause of the current financial crisis, I think it is pretty fair to say that it did not originate in tax havens. Switzerland, in fact, has been hammered by the crisis; its biggest wealth manager, UBS, has lost an estimated $49 billion in write-downs connected to the US sub-prime disaster. The $50 billion Ponzi scheme fraud of Bernard Madoff happened onshore, right under the noses of the SEC, rather than in some far-flung island in the South Pacific. The huge losses incurred by banks have been nothing whatever to do with so-called "tax leakage". And in the US, there is already a tax haven, known as the state of Delaware. And the UK has been - well until recently - a tax haven on certain definitions. Ditto places such as Ireland or even Belgium.

Rant over. Thanks for your patience.

It is my understanding there are now five hundred cities on the tea party list. I hope all good Samizdata readers (or at least that subset of which resides in the middle half of the North American continent) get out their signs and show their anger this coming April 15th!

The 'Main Stream Media', as Glenn Reynolds approximately put it, will be hiring extra people that day to do the hard graft journalistic work of ignoring the nationwide demonstrations by hundreds to thousands of people in what may well be one for the Guinness records. There may be the largest number of simultaneous demonstrations in American history on Tax Day 2009.

It actually does not matter that MSM will be absent as no one pays any attention to them any more any way. I can literally not remember the last time I read a 'dead tree' newspaper. I do not even own a working TV anymore. I doubt I am alone. They are irrelevant and obsolete.

I you want coverage, go to Pajamas TV. I would not be surprised if Reason TV covered some of it as well. For daily information, keep an eye on Glenn Reynolds.

I will not be on that side of the Atlantic in time for the fun, but I do have a few sign suggestions. (Some are mine and some are golden oldies):

"I'm Capitalist and I'm Proud!"

"Go Galt!"

"Screw the Welfare State!"

"Legalize Freedom!"

"Pelosi Go Home!"

"The Mafia would steal less!"

"Taxation is Theft"

"Smash the State!"

Feel free suggest other sign ideas for the tea partiers!

Later: I have recently been exchanging email with J Neil Schulman and that reminds me of how prophetic his 1979 Prometheus award winning novel Alongside Night is of current events, even if we are only in the prequel stages of his story.

Kentucky Liz, one of our commentariat noted:

Actually, the "mad as hell" scene from the movie Network is circulating like wildfire on facebook. An old college buddy and I were joking around and cooked up a cockamamie idea to have the same screamfest, but when to do it? Tax Day! April 15, noon ET and equivalent times in other time zones. Noon ET--the politicians and financiers more likely to be out for lunch, to witness people pouring into the streets screaming.

Here's a link to this facebook group/event, please join us, especially Amurricans. Should appeal to the tea party crowd so active nowadays!

The face book page is here

It somehow seems fitting to have a good scream on Rape Day...

Diana Hsieh, amongst others, is justifiably outraged at the move in the US Congress to move towards an expansion of the Americorps programme, making it compulsory for all young people in the US to participate in it. It is a form of conscription, which while it may not involve an explicit military role, is nevertheless a form of draft.

Ideas, either good or very bad, have a habit of travelling across the Atlantic to the UK. I'd be willing to bet that if, say, David Cameron is the next prime minister, he will look favourably upon such ideas. It fits in well with his dreary, authortarian/paternalist version of conservatism. In fact, the worse the economic situation gets, the more likely that states will try such ideas out. And no doubt the social alarmists will latch on to such ideas as a way to address problems of violent youths and so forth.

Timothy Sandefur says the US legislation is clearly unconstitutional.

I know how the Duke of Wellington (attrib.) felt. The problem for a rational civil liberties campaigner is often not that you do not know who your friends are, but that you do - and that you worry whether, given what they actually think, they will be let out for the day and not talking to buttercups when you need their help.

Here is a breathtaking non-sequitur in the comments of the Guardian Comment is Free:
I think ID cards would be fine ... but I think they should be introduced after the constitutional reform that guarantees safeguards, PR and no monarchy.

The comment is however appended to a piece of splendid news. The entirely sane Mark Thomas has managed to persuade the Metropolitan police to delete him from the National DNA Database.

To date, we have been fortunate.

I say that because, given the consistently submissive nature of the British public, we have been blessed (yes, I do mean blessed) with a ruling political class that has been, relatively speaking, both modest in its ambitions and cautious in its actions. If they only realised how much more they could get away with we would, by now, be living in a hell on earth. This is why I say that we, so far, been very lucky.

But luck always runs out and I think ours is about to do just that:

Anyone departing the UK by land, sea or air will have their trip recorded and stored on a database for a decade.

Passengers leaving every international sea port, station or airport will have to supply detailed personal information as well as their travel plans. So-called "booze cruisers" who cross the Channel for a couple of hours to stock up on wine, beer and cigarettes will be subject to the rules.

In addition, weekend sailors and sea fishermen will be caught by the system if they plan to travel to another country - or face the possibility of criminal prosecution.

The owners of light aircraft will also be brought under the system, known as e-borders, which will eventually track 250 million journeys annually.

Even swimmers attempting to cross the Channel and their support teams will be subject to the rules which will require the provision of travellers' personal information such as passport and credit card details, home and email addresses and exact travel plans.

Another database for the sake of it? Well, possibly. But I think we all know that it will not stop there. This is, of course, a prelude and a 'softening up' process for the eventual introduction of a requirement for exit visas (Soviet style).

So, a word of advice to any of my compatriots who are planning to emigrate abroad: settle your plans as soon as practicable and make your move within the next 5 years. After that, you may well find that your escape routes have been walled off.

Britain is to cut the speed limit from 60 mph to 50 mph on most roads to 'save lives'. Does anyone seriously believe this is not in fact to raise more revenue from speeding tickets?

The solution is obvious. Break the law and smash the cameras. And when they replace them, smash them again. And again. And again. And again.

We are way way way past the point where words are enough. If you actually expect to make a difference, you better get used to the idea that this sort of 'direct action' is the only thing that will make any impact at all on the powers-that-be. Don't believe me? Well do you think radical muslims in the UK and elsewhere could have eroded deeply entrenched 'givens' on free speech if their objections to any public criticism of their religion were not backed with explicit or implicit threats of actually real world violence? No, I do not like it either but that is where we now find ourselves, so get use to it. Be willing to pick up that brick and actually throw it or you are irrelevent. Push has come to shove.

Following on directly from some of the things Johnathan says immediately below this, here is visual proof that surveillance cameras are not quite the innocent gadgets that some tell us:

The bloke who sent this in to Idiot Toys found it "somewhere on Amazon", so we may never know where this scary camera is, who it is snooping on, and what its future plans might be.

Caption anyone?

Clive Davis, who blogs at the Spectator's Coffee House site these days, reckons the concerns that civil libertarians have about CCTVs all over the UK are "over-hyped". Well maybe they are but it seems that Mr Davis does rather miss the point slightly. CCTV may not, of themselves, be a threat to civil liberties in the same way as some of other vast collection of laws now on the statute books in the UK, but they are not harmless in this respect, either. True, society has always had its snoops, its "nosey parkers" - as we Brits used to say - and curtain-twitching neighbours. Sometimes such vigilant folk performed a kind of public service, even if unintended, by creating a social network in which certain kinds of delinquent behaviour could be spotted and dealt with. But clearly there are costs to this in that innocent people can find their actions being picked on by the hyper-vigilant. On a more practical level, the obsession with surveillance can crowd out resources better devoted to deterring crime in other ways.

In fairness to Mr Davis, I am sure that readers can come up with any numbers of contenders for laws that are far worse than CCTV. My personal favourite is the Civil Contingencies Act, which confers on government a whopping collection of powers to use in emergencies; this act received virtually no serious press coverage in the MSM whatsoever. But CCTV, and the sheer number of them in the UK, is all of a piece of a move by this country towards a Big Brother state. Yes, if one wants to be nit-picky about it, one could argue that CCTVs in privately-owned shopping malls, for example, are not intrusive since a person is not forced to go into such places, whereas cameras in public streets for which the public has a right of access are intrusive. Also, there is the sheer, practical issue of information overload: there comes a point where there are so many cameras that it is hard to know if the police can physically track all of their photos all the time. So maybe panic is unjustified.

But I think Clive's sang froid on this occasion is just as mistaken as screaming hysteria. We have moved decisively towards a police state in recent years and on some measures, are already in one. CCTVs are part of this state of affairs. Trying to pretend otherwise is not very credible. I am not entirely sure why Mr Davis wants to take the line he does.

As an aside, Eamonn Butler of the Adam Smith Institute, who is a man not to get hysterical about anything, is fairly scathing about the recent British love affair with CCTV in his book, The Rotten State of Britain. It looks like a good read and I will review it later.

All those folk who voted for The Community Organiser in the hope that he would lift some of the allegedly more questionable measures enacted by the previous administration to deal with terrorism are likely to be disappointed, at least if this report is accurate.

Shutting down Gitmo is just a stunt if all that happens is that terror suspects and other folk rounded up in the Middle East etc are locked up indefinitely in a different place. If people like Andrew Sullivan, who have hammered the institution of Gitmo, try to make excuses for this by arguing that such detention is somehow "different", they deserve to be treated with contempt.

Bishop Hill comes up with a list of the legislation that an incoming UK government should get rid of to restore some of the civil liberties lost over the past decade or so. As he accepts, this is probably only scratching the surface of the issue, but still. The sheer quanity of the legislation that has been brought in, and its scope, is pretty startling even to a grizzled veteran of chronicling such outrages.

Maybe the simple solution is to repeal all the acts in one go.

I just picked this out as a potential SQOTD:

Political professionals have little time for activist true believers and their pesky principles. Freedom of speech is one of those fundamental principles in a free democracy. It requires that you especially defend the rights of those with whom you disagree. Guido has gone to the trouble of watching the Fitna video, it contains no call to violence, in fact it condemns violence.

In the past and at great cost diplomatically, a Conservative government defended Salman Rushdie's freedom of speech. It is therefore profoundly disappointing that the Tories have chosen to be officially agnostic about Geert Wilders. The decontamination strategy has turned into moral cowardice.

However, follow that last link and you will learn that the Conservative Party, in the person of Chris Grayling, may be retreating, a bit, from its former public position of craven retreat, so the Conservative bit of this story is not over yet. Yes, ban Wilders, says Grayling, but ban lots of others also. The Conservatives may well split on this, and I for one do not give a damn.

Two further quick thoughts:

First, I find all this elaborate condemnation of Geert Wilders by the Right-On tendency rather nauseating. We abominate what he says, but free speech is sacred and therefore he should be allowed in rather than being given the oxygen of publicity, but if he has broken the law then, blah blah blah, he should not be allowed in. This seemed to be the default position on Question Time last night, which I semi-watched. Usually there is only one but in these kind of weasel statements, but in this case there have often been two buts, with the second but being the but that craps all over everything before it, including whatever less ignoble turds emerged from the first but. But according to Guido, Wilders has not broken the law. And what Wilders says is that Islam is a huge problem because it preaches violence to those who do not submit to it. Which it does. Read the Koran, like this guy did. It is a vile piece of writing. People who grumble and splutter about statements like that are either Muslims or cowards or both. They just do not want to have to think about it because if this is true, which it is, it is all just too depressing.

Second: democracy. What we are witnessing here is democracy, not some perversion of it. If enough voters threaten violence, then the state will cave in, and nothing like fifty percent is required. Half a percent threatening to dig up pavements or set fire to things is more than enough, provided another five or ten percent, sprinkled around all those marginal or potentially marginal constituencies, are willing to back, defend, not condemn, such threats with their votes. Votes, in other words, are violence. I fondly remember an ancient black and white movie telling of how, towards the beginning of the nineteenth century, the plebs of Britain got votes. A key moment was when a brick came crashing through the window of a room where some political toffs were discussing it all. Either we get this organised, they told each other, in other words either we have more democracy, or the bricks will keep on coming. I am still for democracy, for the usual Churchill reason of it being better than the alternatives, but it is messy.

Personally, I am grateful to Geert Wilders, and even a little bit grateful to whichever coven of scumbag politicians it was who banned him from coming here. Some life has consequently been breathed into an argument which, while being just as important as ever, looked like it was becoming, what with all these Credit Crunch dramas, a bit passé.

Reading Johnathan's piece on 'the precautionary principle' below, I was struck by the way both it and the comments fail to come to grip with the fact that people who support precaution simply do not share the attitudes and values that those arguments take for granted. Both sides are unintelligible to the other. All sides, in fact, because there are more than two.

I am thoroughly persuaded by the distinction made by cultural theorists between two sorts of precaution promoters, the heirarchists and the egalitarians. The interaction between those two types in a media democracy very well explains how we get to the regulation of virtual risk. Egalitarians expect difference and change to be threatening; heirarchists value order and system, and hate absence of rules. Regulation promises egalitarians safety, that is - the minimisation and control of change and choice - in return for granting heirarchists power and order. Collective nightmares and regulatory bedtime stories are both the stuff of news.

The people advocating the precautionary principle adopt it because it is a neat encapsualtion of the preconception that all change is danger, or because it is a procedural pretext for change to be subject to approval so that it not be permitted to disrupt social order. That is how it is a principle so completely incapable of application. It is not intended as an axiom of rational construction for policy but to legitimate an approach.

The commentator who compared it to Pascal's Wager had it precisely wrong. It is an inversion of Pascal's Wager, an anti-rational argument for refusing to make any bets.

The whole point of tolerance is to tolerate things you find repugnant. Tolerance does not mean acceptance however, so just because you tolerate something ignorant or repugnant, that does not mean you need to refrain from heartfelt criticism of it. However tolerance needs to be conditional: tolerance of intolerance is irrational when that the aim of that intolerance is to deny tolerance to you.

And so whilst I am ambivalent at best about bullfighting, and I did watched a few in my younger years, I found myself shouting "¡Olé!" after reading these remarks by an 11 year old matador Michelito Lagravere Peniche:

"The bullfighting opponents shouldn't stick their nose in things they don't like," he said ahead of his record attempt. "No-one is forcing them to watch bullfights or to keep informed about them. It's as if I told a boy who does motocross not to do it, it's very bothersome."

I would not mind if all bullfighting opponents did was to be vocal critics, but the moment they started to try and use the law to ban this ancient Mithraic sport, they crossed the line from being critics to being thugs.

Random link-chasing brought me here. "Leg-iron" writes:

I have a pack of tobacco with no hideous picture. Instead it has a phone number and the words:

Choose freedom. We'll help you get help to stop smoking.

Freedom? Really? That would be nice. I don't have the freedom to smoke in a bar, at a bus stop, bus station or on the open platform of a railway station.

There is more, please do read it. I should explain for foreign readers that British cigarette packets must by law bear an anti-smoking slogan such as "smoking kills" or "smoking causes impotence" and often, these days, a repulsive picture showing the bad consequences of smoking. I do not smoke so I do not often need to look at these pictures, but nothing about their appearance repels me as much as the fact that our laws force people to publish material designed to humiliate themselves. Truly, that does repel me. I neither like nor dislike cigarette manufacturers or those who work for them as a category, but when I imagine whichever bureaucrat thinks up these rotating slogans sneeringly transmitting the latest one to some servile flack in a cigarette company along with orders to start the print run - then I feel a faint echo of the shame someone living in Mao's China must have felt at the sight of a wretch bearing a placard saying "I am an enemy of the people."

I scrolled down Leg-iron's blog and found another good post on the same topic:

On the first one I bought was one of those pictures that are supposed to terrify us into stopping smoking. This one shows a pair of eighty-year-old hands with the slogan 'Smoking causes ageing of the skin'.

Interesting. I was under the impression that ageing was the main cause of ageing of the skin.

After ruminating on the lameness of these propaganda efforts, Leg-iron writes that it is almost

...as if ASH have realised that, should we all give up smoking, they'd have nobody left to torment and they'd all be out of a job.

ASH refers to a body called "Action on Smoking and Health." It is a fake charity - in fact, I learn, it is the original fake charity - receiving just 2% of its money from voluntary contributions. The rest of its money is paid to it by the government. It exists in order to allow the government (I should say "the State" since it has been the tool of several successive governments of both major parties) to pretend that when enacting new forms of repression it is merely responding to popular demand; in other words, it pretends to be servant the better to be master. There are many such. Some call themselves charities, others "NGOs". As the EU Serf asked years ago, "I always thought that NGO meant Non Governmental Organisation. How come any of them get money from the state?" Some are funded by the British government, some by the European Union, although trying to to establish the extent, if any, to which the former category is not a subset of the latter, would not be a good use of anyone's time.

Devil's Kitchen is sick of fake charities. He has put forward a modest proposal, and has registered the domain name http://fakecharities.org/ in order to put it into practice. His co-blogger, "The Filthy Smoker" wrote about the staggering dishonesty and corruption that the existence of these shills brought to a Department of Health "consultation process" here.

All these lies and deceptions spread out and reinforce each other - until we come to a stage where someone can force someone else to publish the words "choose freedom" and feel no shame.

A court in the Netherlands has ordered the prosecution of Geert Wilders, leader of the Freedom Party, for daring to express his opinions. Wilders is the author of Fitna, a critical polemic against Islam.

The three judges said that they had weighed Mr Wilders's "one-sided generalisations" against his right to free speech, and ruled that he had gone beyond the normal leeway granted to politicians.

"The Amsterdam appeals court has ordered the prosecution of member of parliament Geert Wilders for inciting hatred and discrimination, based on comments by him in various media on Muslims and their beliefs," the court said in a statement.

"The court also considers appropriate criminal prosecution for insulting Muslim worshippers because of comparisons between Islam and Nazism made by Wilders," it added.

This judgement completely destroys the myth of both Dutch civil liberties and the nation's reputed tolerance for differences of opinion. It seems you can have a difference of opinion just as long as it is not inconvenient to the state for you to express it. Yet again, the Dutch state proves that when the going gets tough, the Dutch state has a backbone of rubber.

So here is Fitna for you to watch. And to the authoritarian thugs in their court in Amsterdam... up yours.

And as a little bonus...

Via the indispensable Bishop Hill blog, is this scary Henry Porter article about how many Britons, including professional photographers, are being arrested for taking photos of supposedly "off-limits" buildings. I also notice in the article that yet another Tory MP has been arrested.

The police seem to be developing quite a taste for arresting MPs on dubious charges these days. But at least some judges are beginning to tighten the screws on coppers demanding to arrest or search people in "high profile" cases. But what about the rest of us plebs?

The UK Culture Gauleiter, Andy Burnham, gives an interview in the Telegraph today in which he says:

If you look back at the people who created the internet they talked very deliberately about creating a space that Governments couldn’t reach. I think we are having to revisit that stuff seriously now. It’s true across the board in terms of content, harmful content, and copyright. Libel is [also] an emerging issue.

Actually the people who 'created' the internet did it so that parts of the state could stay in touch after a nuclear attack... the idea the net does not need the government was an emergent realisation that came later. And of course there is nothing a government hates more that being thought irrelevent, which is what this is really about. Internet censorship is never ever about 'protecting' people, it is about extending and maintaining state power. That is the whole reason why advocates of censorship pretend child pornography is vastly more prevalent than it actually is. And you may be sure kiddie porn will be wheeled out yet again in this latest attempt to expand the power of the state.

There is content that should just not be available to be viewed. That is my view. Absolutely categorical. This is not a campaign against free speech, far from it; it is simply there is a wider public interest at stake when it involves harm to other people. We have got to get better at defining where the public interest lies and being clear about it.

Which of course is indeed a naked, direct and unambiguous attack on free speech.

He is planning to negotiate with Barack Obama’s incoming American administration to draw up new international rules for English language websites. The Cabinet minister describes the internet as "quite a dangerous place" and says he wants internet-service providers (ISPs) to offer parents "child-safe" web services.

Yes, no doubt Andy Burnham dreams of marching forward with The One across the internet in a sort of virtual Operation Barbarosa, presumably with UKGov in the roll of the Loyal Ally. But then unlike Barbarosa, this attack comes as no surprise to the 'enemy' (i.e. folks like us) and there is that pesky 'First Amendment' on the other side of the Atlantic sitting like 20,000 T-34 tanks waiting at Kursk. There is a reason Samizdata is hosted in the USA and not on this side of the puddle.

This crass power grab needs to be opposed on every level and not just attacked on the sheer technical difficulty of making it happen but also assaulted morally and politically.

But I agree when he says "If you look back at the people who created the internet they talked very deliberately about creating a space that Governments couldn’t reach. I think we are having to revisit that stuff seriously now." Yes we do need to revisit that and remind everyone that if the history of the previous century teaches us anything, it is that governments cannot be trusted. Free speech cannot be left to the sufferance of political systems and venal politicians like Andrew Burnham. We need to smite any attempt to encroach on the internet at every level and distribute technical 'solutions' to every initiative the state comes up as widely as possible regardless of what laws they pass.

We simply will not cooperate.

Henry Porter, who to his immense credit has been telling it like it is on the civil liberties issue in Britain for several years, has a strong article in the Guardian on the arrest of Damian Green and the government's miserable behaviour since.

As he puts it, the arrest of one of their own has finally woken MPs up to what is going on. It is hard not to feel a certain bitterness at MPs' complacency on these issues for many years, but better late than never. The arrest of an MP in such circumstances must count as the ultimate "canary in the coalmine".

What a way to mark the State Opening of Parliament. At the time of writing I do not know if the Speaker of the House of Commons has been sacked yet or resigned.

As someone who has certainly conspired with Damian Green (and LibDem MPs too) to embarrass the Government and the Home Office. I spent some time Thursday and Friday making provision in case I were to be arrested and my property searched. The reaction from the media and parliamentarians in the Green affair has been so strong that I don't now think it likely. But it does seem possible. Before Thursday night I would have laughed at someone who suggested things had got so bad.

I was misinformed. Nick Cohen in the Observer picks up a case I should have known about:

Admittedly, when anti-terrorist officers arrested him, it was the first time they had held a suspect for trying to protect national security. But their motive was clear. Green had embarrassed the Home Secretary and made Home Office civil servants look idle fools. He and his source had to pay.

The accusations against Sally Murrer, on the other hand, were incomprehensibly trivial. The state said that Mark Kearney, a police officer and Murrer's co-defendant, had given her the story that Thames Valley Police did not intend to prosecute the star striker of the MK Dons after a fight in a hotel. It also alleged he had passed on a tip that a man who had been murdered in the town had a conviction for drug dealing.

Journalists in free countries receive similar steers every day. Yet the police bugged her phones, ransacked her home and office, confiscated her computers, interrogated her, humiliated her with a strip search, separated her from her daughters and handicapped son and left her with the threat of a prison sentence hanging over her for 18 months.

As I noted for US readers over on another thread, none of this of course required a judicial warrant. Though the charges were thrown out when a trial finally came, the process is the punishment. And someone searched under these conditions might easily end up being prosecuted for something else, if police find evidence of any other offence in the course of it. After all, a lot of very common conduct is now illegal.

As the terrible events in Mumbai have reminded us - I have some ex-colleagues who work there - terrorism remains an ever-present threat. Even while the economic stories dominated our news headlines in recent months, I had a nagging worry that the jihadis were not going to pass up the chance to strike, particularly with a new US president on the way. So terrorism is back as a topic in the most awful way imaginable.

So it is all the more extraordinary that counter-terrorist police, instead of actually trying to deal with terrorists, were instead employed in the highly dodgy arrest of Tory MP Damian Green, who had received leaked information on immigration into the UK and who, like any half-competent politician, was trying to use this information to add to the debate on immigration. Now whatever one thinks about immigration - and Samizdata has gone over this issue many times - it seems deeply sinister that a man who had received leaked details about the numbers involved should find his collar felt by Pc Plod. Considering all the vast numbers of leaks out of the government, which sometimes have direct impacts on markets and livelihoods, this is bad. This is the first time I can recall that a senior MP has been arrested on what looks suspiciously like an attempt by the authorities to shut up a political party. No wonder that Tory leader David Cameron is demanding action on this. Whether he gets it remains to be seen.

Mr Green's actions are not remotely in the same bracket as the very serious allegations of receipt of oil-for-food funds that have been levelled against the Saddam apologist, George Galloway. At least in the latter case one could see why Galloway should, at the very least, have had a little chat with the police. As for Mr Green, his treatment looks downright sinister. When people throw around the words "police state" to describe what Britain has become, it all too easy to roll the eyes. But if this case does wake this country up a bit, it will have served some purpose.

Philip Johnston in the Daily Telegraph agrees.

Update: Old Holborn puts up this graphic, via Guido Fawkes.

Suggestion to the Tories: refuse to turn up for the State Opening of Parliament on Wednesday. Seriously. Do not turn up, but tell the government to go and boil its collective head.

Things have really got that bad. Can a no-confidence motion be far off?

These are all internet problems and [internet users] think someone should do something about it. Although many internet users think the government should keep out of the internet, I suggest to you that most ordinary people who just use the internet like they use the banking system or the trains think that the government should make sure it all works properly for them and that bad things get stopped from happening.

- David Hendon, Director, Business Relations 2, Business Group , Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, speaking to the registrars' meeting of Nominet. Imagine, if the government regulated it, then the internet would run as well as the banking system and bad things would get stopped from happening. This was a speech made yesterday.

(Hat-tip: The Register)

Think TV Licensing is too bullying? If so, I've written an article you might enjoy:

No one likes bullies, so I decided it was time to turn the tables on TV Licensing - which is contracted to private companies by the BBC - and go and investigate them. First stop was to ring their brand reputation consultants, Fishburn Hedges, and ask to spend a morning riding on a detector van. I wanted to discover why some readers without televisions had received unpleasant “official warning” letters year after year, when TV Licensing could have just used its vans which it says are “capable of detecting the use of TV receiving equipment within 20 seconds”.

Read the full article here.

The Sunday Times today reports that certain celebrity TV license fee refuseniks are not being harassed, on account of being too famous and too keen on getting the splurge of publicity that they would get if arrested, taken away in chains, thrown into a government dungeon, etc.. Vladimir Bukovsky, noted dissident against an earlier evil empire, thinks the BBC is too biased. Charles Moore doesn't like Jonathan Ross.

Noel Edmonds thinks the TV licence televised threats are too threatening. Personally I don't see how those threatening 'adverts' could do their job if they were not threatening. After all, their purpose is to threaten. If, instead of threatening, and as Edmonds would apparently prefer, they emphasised what very good value the BBC is, and then only slipped in as afterthought that, oh-by-the-way just-thought-we'd-mention-it, you have to pay the license fee whether you agree with all that or not, this would be at least as obnoxious. The threatening messages Edmonds objects to at least tell the story as it is. But, he doesn't like them, and objects to being made to pay the license fee. Fair enough. He shouldn't have to, no matter how unreasonable his objections may seem to others. And nor should anyone else, whatever their disagreements with the BBC may be.

Meanwhile, guilty but too famous is an interesting verdict, nicely calculated to elicit contrasting reactions. On the one hand, one law for the famous and another for the rest, and that's bad. But, at least someone is making this point, and at least some of those doing this are not just getting away with it, but willing to say so in public. I am sure that we all await the BBC's response to this public defiance with great interest.

If the BBC does nothing, then here, surely is a great opportunity for people not just to get more famous, but to get famous from a starting point of more or less complete obscurity. It will not have escaped the attention of obcurities thinking along these lines that one of the refuseniks the Sunday Times reports on is a UKIP guy by the name of John Kelly whom you have probably never heard of in any other connection.

In particular, here is a great opportunity for a blogger. All it needs is for one of our tribe to say, there, I am still watching my telly, but have not paid the license fee, and screw you BBC, and get his mates around to video everything that then ensues, and for the rest of us to link to all the hoopla and make sure that Instapundit and Guido link to it also (the latter being a certainty because it was at Guido that I learned of this Sunday Times piece in the first place), etc. etc., and, well, ... there is surely a big slice of anti-authoritarian pro-libertarian anti-nationalised-industry fun to be had here.

Personally I like the BBC and feel that I get rather good value from it, much as people on the dole (at my expense) and bankers whose jobs have just been saved (ditto) must likewise feel satisfied. I like the classical music. I also like to copy telly movies onto DVDs and much prefer the BBC's output, because it is so much easier not to have to edit out all those annoying adverts. I even like Jonathan Ross. I regard his regular outbursts of rudeness as the price we who like him must all pay (and people like the unfortunate Gwyneth Paltrow especially) for the sake of the less tasteless and more interesting conversations that his wacky/rude style also precipitates.

I do not think that there is much future in the notion that the BBC might one day become less biased. It is a nationalised industry. Only those who favour or at least tolerate that are likely to apply to work for it in any numbers. And those who do not fit that mold but who do show up in the BBC's output are more likely to be caricatures of pro-capitalism than the real thing. No, the only answer is to dump the whole principle of compulsory payment for telly, and in the meantime for all who despise that principle to stir up as much trouble around it as we can. And here is a fine chance to do that.

Andy Burnham MP to the Royal Television Society (in questions after the speech):

The time has come for perhaps a different approach to the internet. I want to even up that see-saw, even up the regulation [imbalance] between the old and the new.

[Reported by The Register]

Twice is coincidence...

In response to a letter from the UK Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR), Nominet is announcing an independent review of its current corporate governance structure, to be benchmarked against established best practice corporate governance standards.

Three times is enemy action...

Hazel Blears MP:

There will always be a role for political commentary, providing perspective, illumination and explanation. But editors need to do more to disentangle it from news reporting, and to allow elected politicians the same kind of prominent space for comment as people who have never stood for office. [...]

Unless and until political blogging adds value to our political culture, by allowing new and disparate voices, ideas and legitimate protest and challenge, and until the mainstream media reports politics in a calmer, more responsible manner, it will continue to fuel a culture of cynicism and despair.

I take it that "adds value" means 'supports us'; "legitimate protest" means 'sneering at our enemies'; and a "more responsible manner" means 'without questioning our control of the discourse'.

Free speech is about the state dictating what is or is not acceptable, not about free people freely expressing contempt for contemptible behaviour.

- Commenter Counting Cats

You might think that with all the worries about recession, bank failures and so on, that political leaders might want to avoid making ever greater commitments on public spending. Not so. Just to remind us about the kinds of concerns that animate the political classes, here is this story:

Everyone who buys a mobile telephone will be forced to register their identity on a national database under government plans to extend massively the powers of state surveillance.

Phone buyers would have to present a passport or other official form of identification at the point of purchase. Privacy campaigners fear it marks the latest government move to create a surveillance society.

It is hardly a fear. It is a reality.

A compulsory national register for the owners of all 72m mobile phones in Britain would be part of a much bigger database to combat terrorism and crime. Whitehall officials have raised the idea of a register containing the names and addresses of everyone who buys a phone in recent talks with Vodafone and other telephone companies, insiders say.

It is important to remember that even supposedly private sector firms such as Vodafone can easily find it next-to-impossible not to co-operate with governments on stuff like this, particularly if the government can threaten to cut off licences.

The move is targeted at monitoring the owners of Britain’s estimated 40m prepaid mobile phones. They can be purchased with cash by customers who do not wish to give their names, addresses or credit card details.

So let's assume that the government has data on the 40 million-plus people who buy a pre-paid phone. Even leaving aside the moral objections to such a database, the practical issue of how on earth one can sift through the haystack of millions of such details for the possible pin of a terrorist plot does not seem to register.

But then again, one must remember that the database state is not really about terrorism. It is a beast that is now acquiring a life of its own. After all, thousands of jobs, millions of profits, are tied up with this. If the Tories really do stick to their pledge to shut this thing down - and I would not want to bet my house on it - it is going to put a lot of "consultants" out of a job. A certain grim satisfaction would be involved in that. My wife, who is a consultant, refuses to work on any such things, god love her.

Poor naive George W. Bush! For all his shambolic presidency, his dreadful mistakes, and the horrors of aggressive imperialism, his last couple of months in office could end up being the most disastrous for the world.

Bloomberg reports:

The leaders of the U.S., France and the European Commission will ask other world leaders to join in a series of summits on the global financial crisis beginning in the U.S. soon after the Nov. 4 presidential election.

President George W. Bush, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and European Commission President Jose Barroso said in a joint statement after meeting yesterday that they will continue pressing for coordination to address "the challenges facing the global economy.''

The initial summit will seek "agreement on principles of reform needed to avoid a repetition and assure global prosperity in the future,'' and later meetings "would be designed to implement agreement on specific steps to be taken to meet those principles,'' the statement said.

Just how bad this could be is already showing. The report continues:

Sarkozy and Barraso are pressing Bush for a G8 agenda that includes stiffer regulation and supervision for cross-border banks, a global "early warning'' system and an overhaul of the International Monetary Fund. Talks may also encompass tougher regulations on hedge funds, new rules for credit-rating companies, limits on executive pay and changing the treatment of tax havens such as the Cayman Islands and Monaco.

Just what has the continuation of the OECD nations' campaign to plunder smaller states and institute globally uniform (high) taxation got to do with the market crash? Nothing. Executive pay? Irrelevant, too, save in the politics of envy. Mainstream banks, not hedgies, were the ones that crashed after playing iffy games with CDOs, and governments helped pump-up house prices - with enthusiasm. Where this agenda comes in is as an opportunity to kick the resented "Anglo-Saxon" model of capitalism while it is down - even, and especially, in those places where it is not down yet. (Are we missing Commissioner Mandelson yet?)

Mr Bush has lost the thread entirely if he really thinks a transnational "reform" of the financial system can do other than damage "free markets, free enterprise and free trade". He may have a patchy record on liberty, and a bad record on limited government. His guests in November will have no interest in either. They will tempt him (have tempted him) with the mantle of world saviour, and will try to get him to bind his successors. We shall have to hope that his successor, either one of whom would be well to the economic right of the self-selected 'international community', depressingly enough, is more wily and far-sighted.

Meanwhile, where is there left to run?

It has been a memorable weekend for yours truly, nearly all for very nice reasons. Over the past few days, the weather in much of the UK - after a truly crap summer - has been glorious. There are few things to beat than walking along in a leafy park, with the autumn season turning the leaves into golds and reds, then sitting on the side of a river, cold beer in hand, in the company of close friends. I did all that in Cambridge over the weekend. The credit crunch and the worries of the financial world seemed, if only for a few hours, very far away. But then when walking with a friend around the Quad of Pembroke College, I felt as if I could have been in another century.

But perhaps I should have been prepared for a surreal weekend when I opened my mail on Saturday morning. First off, I got a letter from those admirable folk at the NO2ID campaign urging me to help contribute some money. I have already paid over a cheque and was happy to send another (please follow my example). And then I opened another, very different letter, from the UK Department Of Health. The DoH has something called a "Biobank". This is a government-run research project designed to track the health of a cohort of the UK population aged between 40 and 69. As I and my wife are both in our early 40s, we are obviously in the cohort. I was informed that a "provisional appointment" had already been made on my behalf and that I nevertheless had the option to refuse. I have refused. While checking the health of certain people and attempting to judge their vulnerability to certain diseases or conditions can be a worthwhile thing for say, a private insurer to do, I had no desire to go along with a government programme. The reason is not simply that it would involve acquiring yet more intimate health details on myself, but recent embarrassing losses of government data give me no confidence that such details will not be lost. Also, one has to ask to what purpose will the "Biobank's" findings be put? Presumably, to help drive government policy to cajole, encourage or indeed coerce UK citizens to change their personal habits. I consider that taking part in such a campaign would involve my giving my sanction to such things.

Well, at least I had the option to refuse to take part in this project, which is something. But one wonders how long such indulgence might last. Sooner or later, the DoH might consider it necessary to make involvement in such surveys compulsory.

I have just read an article here (with thanks to Glenn Reynolds) which reports some really good news:

FURTHER UPDATE: The New York State law has now gone national. A House bill declares that foreign libel judgments are unenforceable in the United States. And Arlen Specter, Joe Lieberman and Chuck Schumer want to go further still:

Indeed, the ACLU, the American Library Association, the Association of American Publishers, the PEN American Center, the Families of the 9/11 victims, and many others support the Free Speech Protection Act, 2008 (S. 2977) sponsored by Senators Arlen Specter, Joseph Lieberman and Chuck Schumer. Their legislation would allow U.S. writers to bring a federal cause of action against those who bring libel suits against them, in foreign jurisdiction for writing that does not constitute defamation under U.S. law . The Specter bill, like King’s (H.R. 5814) would also bar enforcement of foreign libel judgments and provide other appropriate injunctive relief and damages by U.S. Courts.

This has been done to put a total stop on efforts of individuals who, just to invent a hypothetical case mind you, travel from Saudi Arabia to the United Kingdom to sue a publisher in the United States. I can not imagine anyone doing something like that of course...

Congress notes that the Government proposes to require workers in aviation to enrol in the National Identity Scheme in 2009. Congress has deep concerns about the implications of the National Identity Scheme in general and the coercion of aviation workers into the scheme in particular. Congress sees absolutely no value in the scheme or in improvements to security that might flow from this exercise and feels that aviation workers are being used as pawns in a politically led process which might lead to individuals being denied the right to work because they are not registered or chose not to register in the scheme.

Congress pledges to resist this scheme with all means at its disposal, including consideration of legal action to uphold civil liberties.

Overwhelmingly carried by the TUC. Coming not very long after the British Air Transport Association (the association of airlines and airports) expressed its "joint and determined opposition to the proposal" [pdf], this suggests the current scheduling of the UK National Identity Scheme may have some problems.

Expect yet another repositioning shortly. (My guess: it'll be about "immigration control".)

On a spring day in Beijing almost a decade ago, tens of thousands of people gathered on the pavement surrounding the high-walled Zhongnanhai compound, the Chinese equivalent of the Kremlin. They were protesting, but there was barely a murmur to be heard from the enormous crowd. There were no banners, no megaphones noisily chanting demands, no unruly behaviour. It was not a typical demonstration – the participants were seated and meditating. They stayed for around twelve hours. These people were members of the rapidly expanding Falun Gong sect, and they were asking for recognition, legitimacy and an end to perceived mistreatment from the Chinese central government. The then-Chinese premier met with the group’s leaders, following which they all left as quietly as they had arrived.

Shortly after this protest, the Chinese government declared the sect a dire ideological threat to the People’s Republic of China, and a huge and rigorous nationwide crackdown followed. Practitioners in powerful positions saw their careers ended abruptly. Thousands were 're-educated'. Several, according to numerous human rights advocates, did not survive their enlightenment at the hands of the Chinese state. The sect's leader was demonised, its teachings subjected to the harshest denunciations. In response, many Falun Gong practitioners held silent protests all over China. A few caught the world's attention by self-immolating in Tiananmen Square, which explains why each of the numerous military personnel guarding the square have a fire extinguisher placed within arm's length of their positions.

Unsurprisingly, these protests failed. Falun Gong in mainland China is a massively diminished, illegal underground movement. It is still an extremely politically sensitive topic in China. It is carefully referred to as 'FG' when written about on-line, in the (probably vain) hope that such abbreviations will avoid the notice of China's vigilant internet police (who probably do not care all that much about 99% of these references, but the fact that Chinese internet users go to such lengths is revealing in itself). The government has successfully and widely propagated the idea that Falun Gong is a degenerate cult.

However, being a senior central government figure in China isn't all stomping on pesky wayward meditation sects. The Chinese leadership is still basking in the glow of the international acclaim won from most efficiently hosting the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. Not everyone is so chuffed. Several months before the impeccably presented opening ceremony unfolded, Chinese Olympics officials proudly declared that all events were sold out. Hundreds of thousands of disappointed Chinese fans packed up their overnight camps outside the Bank of China branches where tickets were fleetingly available. Countless others cursed their luck as they came up short in the on-line ticket lottery. Never mind, at least they could catch the action on television. However, they were dismayed to see numerous supposedly sold out events with almost no spectators in the stands. There were so few bums on seats in some venues that the camera had to keep taking close-ups of the same group of people when it shot the crowd. How could this be? It is most likely that the tickets disappeared, quite deliberately, down a black hole.The fact is that the Chinese government abhors a crowd or movement that they don’t feel in control of, and it will go to great lengths to prevent the formation of these. If they are too late, ruthlessly quashing anything that does manage to coalesce may become necessary. There are one or two other events in modern Chinese history that support this assertion.

As you are reading this, a well-off American couple in their 60s are most likely to be working in the not-for-profit community centre that they have established in a satellite city not too far east of Beijing. Locals are welcome to make use of the centre's table tennis equipment and other recreational facilities. The foreign volunteers also run several classes a week, however one must be a bit discreet about these, as they are illegal bible classes. Still, this is China and it is a given that the ever-persuadable local authorities (the same kind you will find all over the country) are well aware of what else is going on at the 'community centre', apart from the ping pong tournaments and English corner lessons.

Time to come clean; a colleague of mine's parents are the well-off American couple. Almost everyone who they have hired to work at their centre – from the office managers to the humble ayis (cleaners) – have embraced Christianity, and many of these people have gone home and converted their villages. That's right, villages. It is an enormously successful missionary operation. Illegal, of course, but it is operating outside the direct jurisdiction of the central government and sheltered by local authorities who are more than happy to accept the 'rates' it pays them. There are many thousands like it all over China.

Christianity is exploding in this country. It is impossible to ascertain how many tens – or possibly hundreds – of millions who have converted over the last few years, as the government is certainly not keeping score at this point, and many would not admit the fact, anyway. However, talk to someone spreading the gospel in China and they will tell you that this is Christianity’s most fertile frontier. I work in a perfectly legal enterprise in China, and something like half a dozen of the Westerners I have worked with thus far are either proselytising in their spare time or have a close relative or friend who is doing so. On two occasions, I have overheard newly arrived missionaries discussing their upcoming missions on the airport shuttle bus. These are of course criminal activities, and, if caught, missionaries are flung out of the country indefinitely. There are plenty of replacements, though.

Many who have worked in China would contend that the country could do with a good dose of Christian values, and I do not disagree, despite not being a believer myself. The central authorities currently have an uneasy truce with the practising of Christianity here. There are churches in China; those that only foreigners are allowed to attend – a foreign passport must be shown upon entry – and those for the small number of officially registered Chinese Christians. The overwhelming majority of Chinese Christians attend illegal home chapels and there are undoubtedly many hundreds of thousands of these dotted all over the country. I believe this rapidly escalating social phenomenon - that the always-paranoid central government has almost no control over – will signify a decisive fork in the road for the direction of the country’s development.

The way the Chinese government responds to the growth of Christianity represents a harbinger of what we can expect China’s future government to look like. Will it relent and accept that there are large elements within Chinese society beyond its control? This would represent a massive shift towards a liberal stance which would probably have far-reaching consequences for the efficiently repressive Chinese state. Or will it retreat back into its familiar insistence of hyper control like it did with the Falun Gong affair, going to enormous lengths to extinguish the home chapels and forcing the Chinese Christian movement deep underground?

Suppressing Falun Gong was an easy decision to make for the Chinese government, as accommodating them was clearly not necessary. Their bargaining position was weak. They had no powerful friends. There were few negative consequences in ignoring their demands and wiping them out instead. I guarantee that there is not one Chinese leader who has lost a single second's sleep over an Amnesty International report. However, a Falun Gong solution to arrest the unnerving growth of Christianity has infinitely more downsides. Christianity is the dominant religion in the Western democracies, which will, for the foreseeable future, have the ability (at enormous cost to themselves, of course) to halt China’s integration with the global market and reverse its recent economic gains. If the Chinese government started persecuting Christians en masse, the West, led by the USA, would almost certainly move to isolate China. The process of globalisation would grind to a halt.

Of course, this would spell economic catastrophe for all parties concerned. Many would assert that the Chinese government has no choice but to accommodate Christianity, if the other alternative is the utter destruction of the modern Chinese economy, along with all the political fallout that would entail. I disagree – to assume this is the only option would be to misinterpret what primarily motivates China’s rulers. Thirty years ago, the Chinese leadership did not embrace aspects of the market economy for the purpose of making the lives of their citizens better by enriching them – they did it because they realised the continued application of catastrophic Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong thought throughout society would see them thrown up against the wall, probably sooner rather than later. Stodgy communist doctrines no longer provided legitimacy to rule. The people wanted better lives and the communists promised them that via the market, which has been effective. The communists abandoned their purportedly cherished ideology to stay in power, and considering the ferocity with which they have dealt with perceived threats to their authority in the recent past, there is no reason to believe that they would behave very differently now. Therein lies the ultimate goal of China’s leaders – not upholding Mao's dubious wisdom, not a commitment to the global market economy – but maintaining their power. If viewed through that rubric, the decision to either accommodate Christianity (and relinquish a sizeable amount of control, yet maintain prosperity) or to drive it out of China (and consolidate control at the expense of recent economic gains) becomes much less predictable.

Some might argue that if the government chose the latter, the Chinese people would blame them for ruining the economy and their lives, and rise up in response. I think the Ch