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 Chinese government could easily appeal to the widespread nationalist sentiment that exists in the Chinese community to deflect responsibility away from them. They would simply shut down as much contact with the outside world as possible, declare that Christianity is a subversive force which will destroy the country if left unchecked, and provide some plausible but manufactured evidence to underscore its assertions – pretty much exactly what it did with Falun Gong. Enough people would probably believe this to maintain the government’s grip on power. As a further distraction, they could also claim that the 'Christian USA' is preparing to invade in response to 'the Chinese nation’s self-defence', or something along those lines. Constructing a propaganda alibi to get the Chinese government off the hook politically would not necessarily be all that difficult.

I should make it clear that I think there is a good chance that the Chinese government will decide to learn to live with the large, largely unmanageable and growing Christian population within its borders. If it does this, I think we have some reason to be optimistic about the rise of a more liberal Chinese government in the future. Nevertheless, we should not assume that the current Chinese leadership will loosen their grip on power to safeguard their country’s prosperity. In the West, it is mistakenly believed that "may you live in interesting times" is an ancient Chinese curse. In fact, no such curse exists. Nevertheless, we do live in interesting times, and the rise of Christianity amongst the masses of China will be an interesting test of the Chinese government’s priorities.

I vote for the fifth option, which is "There should not be a drinking age", on the basis that it is none of the government's damn business.

I could not help but be struck by the nice, polite, and almost friendly manner of the police officer making violence-backed threats in the video below ("If you refuse this [random] search, you will be arrested."). It may not be news to you that the face of the police state is often a perfectly pleasant one, but I think it is worth spreading the word.

(Full disclosure: I work for Qik, and it was one of our users who live streamed the above video from his mobile phone to the web using our software.)

I am more than usually depressed by the report of the parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights that is published today. A Bill of Rights for the UK? is a reaction to the present administration's kite flying for a "British Bill of Rights and Duties", and goes to confirm my suspicion that human-rights lawyers are equipped with a tin ear for political discourse as part of their education.

They do not see the fierce conditionality of Rights-and-Duties. They are in their eunoetic little universe of the kindly legislator not the populist fury. Rather than a reaction of horror at the transparent desire to entrench ergate slavery to a corporatist 'civic republican' state as a citizen's lot, there's a mild whinge that the Government isn't speaking clearly enough - no grasp that there is a different language in use:

33. We regret that there is not greater clarity in the Government's reasons for embarking on this potentially ambitious course of drawing up a Bill of Rights. A number of the Government's reasons appear to be concerned with correcting public misperceptions about the current regime of human rights protection, under the HRA. We do not think that this is in itself a good reason for adopting a Bill of Rights. As we have consistently said in previous Reports, the Government should seek proactively to counter public misperceptions about human rights rather than encourage them by treating them as if they were true.

That I could support. And the discussion in the same section makes some sense of reframing the ECHR and the Human Rights Act to give better protection to individual liberty against the state. However, it doesn't face up to the Government's agenda, which is entirely opposite. It doesn't, as any Bill of Rights worth the name would do, presuppose the implacable hostility of authority to the exercise of freedom.

The rest is horror. Chandler called the game of chess "as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency". You would need to harness a gigantic advertising group - WPP, say - for a full year, to piss away as much brain and education as has been wasted in the construction of the Outline of a UK Bill of Rights and Freedoms. Given the task of criticism and reflection, they have been reflexively orthodox. Not just the committee, but most of their witnesses, have demonstrated that, if it contingently makes the owner deaf to political meanings, the purpose of the tin ear in human-rights legal education is to pour jurisprudential treacle directly into the brain.

The increasingly strained relationship of yoked citizen and official driver is ignored. The basic principle of the Human Rights Act is deemed good enough, despite the hopeless vagueness and pliable nature of most of its provisions. What they want to add are procedural and interpretative twiddles (which it is arguable is all the HRA did anyway) to how state power is exercised. One of those would (inadvertently?) give strong constitutional foundations to administrative rule as separate empire from the rule of law - as if unspinning the fusion of law and equity. Adopted wholesale is the superstructure of "second generation" human rights, social and economic rights. This doesn't just instantiate the presuppositions of the modern European welfare state as if fundamental to human society, it does the same with the mythic functions of the late 20th century British welfare state:

• Health care
  • Everyone has the right to have access to appropriate health care services, free at the point of use and within a reasonable time

  • No one may be refused appropriate emergency medical treatment

• Education
  • Everyone of compulsory school age has the right to receive free, full-time education suitable to their needs.

  • Everyone has the right to have access to further education and to vocational and continuing training.

• Housing
  
  
  
  • Everyone has the right to adequate accommodation appropriate to their needs.

  • Everyone is entitled to be secure in the occupancy of their home.

  • No one may be evicted from their home without an order of a court.
    
  
  
• An adequate standard of living
  • Everyone is entitled to an adequate standard of living sufficient for that person and their dependents, including adequate food, water and clothing

  • Everyone has the right to social assistance, including care and support, in accordance with their needs.

  • No one shall be allowed to fall into destitution.

Note not just the presumption of state largesse, but the paternalistic trimmings: "appropriate", "compulsory", "full-time", "adequate", "allowed". This is a profoundly conservative version of left liberal doctrine: backward-looking to the golden age of 1978 (precisely datable by its implicit assumption that coming into force of the Protection from Eviction Act 1977 represents the effectuation of an eternal moral insight); assuming the dominance of the state (these "rights" are bizzarely to be judiciable but not enforceable; and throughout unquestioning of the burden of doctrine.

The clue, I suppose is in the name: a Joint Committee on Human Rights cannot be expected to step outside the nostrums and quasi-religious formulae of the legal-academic establishment that calls itself the human rights movement, and sees the role of the state as promotion of that cause. The greatest horror in the report springs from there: a "duty" for the state of "Progressive Realisation" of social and economic rights:

The Government must take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to achieve the progressive realisation of the rights in this schedule.

The one addition to 'second generation' rights is also from received wisdom of the age, one that though weaned in the 70s became a commonplace of thought among the common complacent only in the 90s: an 'environmental right' to be progressively more governed:

Everyone has the right to a high level of environmental protection, for the benefit of present and future generations, through reasonable legislative and other measures that - (i) prevent pollution and ecological degradation; (ii) promote conservation and (iii) ensure that economic development and use of natural resources are sustainable.

These, in grey general and in Green particular, show forth is a new constitutional principle. Here, explicitly for the first time I am aware of in a (notionally) common law jurisdiction, is permanent revolution: not just a protective welfare state designed to succour the weak (with all the nasty side effects on human freedom that we are used to), but a teleological state with the hard-wired object of transforming society in which the whole body of the nation is laid open for cosmetic surgery.

The Committee is really building on the same New Left foundations that the Government is. The consequence is that, though it thinks that it is repudiating populism: ("... rather than encourage them by treating them as if they were true"), it is providing an apparatus perfectly suited to soft fascism.

With complete lack of self-consciousness, the chairman, Andrew Dinsmore MP has been appearing on the news this morning to say that when people appear at MPs surgeries to demand their 'human rights' they mean social and economic rights and do not understand that this is not what the current Human Rights Act covers - ergo perhaps it should. Flattering the casual demands of a clientele with the dignity of 'fundamental rights' strikes me as about as populist as one can get. The mysticism of the manor-court. As above, so below.

Following Brian's lead, I predict a legislative scorched earth as well as a financial one, when the UK parliament returns. It is not just that the present administration realises its days are numbered and will try to get more of The Project through, and to construct extra-parliamentary power structures as bunkers to occupy in opposition. All over Whitehall, departmental pet projects will be being dusted-off (e.g) and presented to weak ministers, the hope being to get them through before a new, critically-minded, Government takes office and crowds them out with plans of its own.

The question I have for Samizdata readers is this: what will the neo-puritans set out to regulate... suppress... ban next? Smoking is nearly fully suppressed. The work on alcohol has truly begun. Government intervention into our personal lives: what's next?

* [This is an allusion, so I pray our editorial pantheon will let the contraction stand. I'm I am not about to write anyone an email like this one, however funny it might be. And I suspect they'd they would take my login away if I did]

As of July 15th, it is no longer possible for a European to fly in a vintage DC-3. Air Atlantique ran a very successful farewell tour around the UK and its flights were sold out.

Perhaps one continent's loss is another's gain and these passenger-worthy classics will find a home across the pond where they can continue to bring the joy of flying in the most marvelous working airplane every built.

Maybe we should start a tradition like that of the Muslims, but instead of bowing towards Brussels at a given hour each day, we could give them the other end to show the full depth of our respect for them.

Did you know DC v Heller was a Libertarian plot?

The case that became D.C. v. Heller was the brainchild of three lawyers at a pair of libertarian organizations, the Cato Institute and the Institute for Justice. All were busy with other matters, so they hired Mr. Gura. "Alan was willing to work for subsistence wages," Cato's Robert Levy tells me, "in return for which he got a commitment from me that if the case went anywhere, it would be his baby. It turned out that that commitment was very important."

My hat is off to James Taranto for getting the story right. Perhaps one of these days my New York schedule (and that of one of our journalist readers) will fall out in such a way that we can toast our natural born right to carry a BFG.

Good article about the nonsense being proposed in the US about civilian "volunteering" programmes which are not in fact, voluntary. It is worth keeping an eye on this issue because I recall that David Cameron, Tory leader, might be keen on a sort of non-military version of national service as a way to deal with problems of teen crime and lack of personal responsibility. Bad move. See my post below for how it is working in a free market that is what is required. Treat people as free adults: it works

Glenn Reynolds links to a video interview of numerous Louisiana citizens whose property was stolen by the police and sometimes destroyed. It was a time when that property was most needed.

Just because you have a badge does not mean you are not a criminal. The New Orleans police are storm troopers in my book and cowardly ones to boot. What else can you call heavily armed men who beat up an old lady and steal her revolver?

Now that some people have recovered their stolen property, it is perhaps time to severely punish these warriors without a clue. Criminal prosecution could be possible in a few cases. As to the rest, perhaps there are grounds for a class action suit for cost plus and triple damages against the city. At the very least, these 'officers' should be told to their face that their actions were illegal, unconstitutional and not even close to being American.

They really need to be taught a lesson about who runs things in a free country. The fellow at the end of the video said it succinctly. It is not our country any more.

It is damn well time we took it back.

It may be disgustingly authoritarian, but it is risibly incompetent too. It appears the Home Office has just spent a very large amount of UK readers' money making a vast online advertisement for NO2ID. We'd despaired of reaching 'the youth' ourselves, too expensive. I'm very glad they decided to do it for us.

With audience participation. Which embarrassingly for the Home Office shows 'kids' not to be quite the suckers they'd hoped. Enjoy.

I have spent twelve of the last sixteen years of my life living as a foreign citizen in the United Kingdom. I have spent this time on a mixture of student visas, the "UK ancestry" visa (which allows citizens of Commonwealth countries with a British grandparent to live and work in the UK) and for the last two and a half years as a permanent resident (or with "Indefinite Leave to Remain", as the British immigration jargon has it). My immigration status has always been pretty uncontroversial, I have never been a drain on the resources of British taxpayers (quite the opposite, given the taxes I have paid). This has not stopped the Home Office from insisting that I jump through a whole variety of bureaucratic hoops, answer a large number of impertinent questions, and suffer an assortment of petty humiliations with a fair amount of regularity. The level of competence of the Home Office in administering all this has never been high - when I was studying at Cambridge, it was well understood that the usual way of renewing a student visa involved sending your passport to the Home Office, and then applying to your country's embassy a few months later to replace a lost passport before making a quick trip to France to get your paperwork processed at the border on the way back - but in recent times (the start of which coincides quite closely with the Labour Party coming to power) the frequency with which hoops must be jumped has increased and the fees that must be paid to jump through each hoop have become ever higher.

However, last week, my need to deal with the Immigration and Nationality Directorate of the Home Office came to an end. At an in truth rather touching ceremony at Wandsworth Town Hall, I affirmed my allegiance to Queen Elizabeth the Second and was naturalised a British citizen. This does not affect my Australian citizenship, and I now have dual nationality. A couple of days later, I did what most new citizens do fairly quickly, and sent off an application for a British passport. The fee that is payable in this instance is not nearly as high as that payable when renewing an immigrant visa these days, but must none the less be paid. The passport application form came with another form on which I could fill out credit card details to pay the fee. The form stated that I could check the current fees on the website of a different section of the Home Office, the recently renamed Identity and Passport Service, or that I could alternately leave the amount blank on the form. The amount of the fee is not printed anywhere on either of the forms: this presumably makes it easier for the Home Office to increase the fees repeatedly without the trouble of reprinting forms. If I did this, the Home Office would charge the correct amount to my credit card and there would be no delays due to the possibility of my incorrectly sending the wrong amount. I therefore left this blank. On Tuesday, I noted that the approximate amount that I expected had been charged to my credit card, and I was set to receive my new passport within a couple of weeks.

However, yesterday I received a letter stating that my passport application could not be processed because I had not paid the correct fee, and this would not be done until I sent an additional £3. What apparently happened was that someone received my form, filled in an incorrect amount, and then somebody else noted that I had paid the incorrect amount and sent a letter to me demanding more money. If I had filled in the form with the correct amount in the first place, this would not apparently have happened. I was able to rectify this today by calling the enquiry line of the Identity and Passport Service, explaining the situation, and giving them my credit card details again so I could be charged the additional £3. My passport will hopefully still come in a couple of weeks, but it has been delayed by this and I have been inconvenienced. The enquiry line was an 0870 number, for which the charges are high and the called party receives a portion of the charge for the call, so I have paid a small amount of additional money for this, too.

This is all mildly amusing, but there is perhaps a moral. Theoretically, when I became a citizen, one thing I gained was the right not to suffer the petty humiliations and bureaucratic hassles and incompetence from the Home Office that a non-citizen goes through just to live here. I would personally argue that such humiliations and hassles are no more justified in the treatment of non-citizens than they are in the treatment of citizens, but the population as a whole does not generally seem to agree with me, and politicians seem to believe that there are electoral points to be gained in actually increasing and enforcing such hassles.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps this is just a demonstration of the nature of our government and our bureaucrats. It is not hard to see the ID card as little more than a way to extend the humiliations and hassles that non-citizens receive to the time after people become citizens, and to extend them to the native born as well. The Home Office body that will implement and enforce the ID card and associated database is of course the Identity and Passport Service. It is not terribly encouraging that my first interaction with this Service after becoming a citizen involved their making an error for which they blamed me, charged me, and inconvenienced me, even though I had done everything correctly. I suspect we should all get used to it.

Pretty gruesome stuff happening. This is old news:

The ongoing Google/YouTube-Viacom litigation has now officially spilled over to users with a court order requiring Google to turn over massive amounts of user data to Viacom. If the data is actually released, the consequences could be far more serious than the 2006 AOL Search debacle.

But this not so. And happening via backdoor of telecoms regulation.

The Telecoms Package (Paquet Telecom) is a review of European telecoms law. [...] buried within it, deep in the detail, are important legal changes that relate to enforcement of copyright. These changes are a threat to civil liberties and risk undermining the entire structure of Internet, jeopardising businesses and cultural diversity.

The bottom line is that changes to telecoms regulations are needed before EU member states can bring in the so-called "3 strikes" measures - also known as "graduated response" - of which France is leading the way, but other governments, notably the UK, are considering whether to follow. A swathe of amendments have been incorporated at the instigation of entertainment industry lobbying. These amendments are aimed at bringing an end to free downloading. They also bring with them the risk of an unchecked corporate censorship of the Internet, with a host of unanswered questions relating to the legal oversight and administration.

The Telecoms Package is currently in the committee stages of the European Parliament, with a plenary vote due on 1st or 2nd September. This does not leave much time for public debate, and it reminds me of the rushed passage of the data retention directive (see Data Retention on this site). It is, if you like, regulation by stealth.

These two items have in common the attempt to undermine the infrastructure of the net/web by controlling those who provide or maintain it. Not good.

You may not know that a Home Office minister is touring the UK holding 'consultation' meetings about the National Identity Scheme, and that it is more nonsensical than even the average government consultation exercise. She is, however, and nothing will be allowed to stand in her way. 3 members of NO2ID were arrested this morning for "suspected breach of the peace" while protesting outside the venue of the Edinburgh consultation exercise. Making ministers look bad will these days get you hustled away by police, apparently.

The reason the 'consultation' is even more fatuous than usual is this. There is no question the intention is to go ahead: the legislation was passed two years ago. And any questioning of the plan is ruled out of order - if not, indeed, arrestable. The object of this tour is to gather together "stakeholders" - businesses and voluntary organisations, and to persuade them that helping the government strong-arm their customers, staff and volunteers into enrolling will ultimately be for the good of all. In fact it seeks suggestions from them how best to get universal compliance.

Rounding up any dissidents is the last resort, of course.

Update: Apparently 9 people are still in custody at time of writing (18:20 BST). Hat-tip: Glasgow Herald, who called me for a statement.

Update 2: (06:23 BST) You can read the account of Geraint Bevan, of NO2ID Scotland, here. (The hard scientists among our readers will be pleased to know that the 'Dr' signifies Geraint just got his PhD in engineering.)

No, it is not a streamlined version of the answer to life, the universe and everything. It is the maximum number of aspirin in a bottle available at the local Clear Pharmacy. According to the Pharmacist on duty, that is the largest number sellable without a prescription.

I am sure I looked perplexed with my jaw hanging open during the few speechless moments before I came out with the only answer I could think of: "You must be joking."

Before you get too uppity about freedom in America... the last time I bought 24 Hour Cold Capsules in Manhattan I had to sign a register so the government could make sure I was not going to use them to make 'speed'.

"We're from the Government. We're here to help you."

Not.

PS: Can anyone confirm this is really, genuinely true? I am still having trouble believing it myself. It is just, too absurd.

Much has been said about David Davis's motives for doing what he's doing. He is vain. He is mad. He is bored. My opinion? He is a politician. Politicians are vain, often mad. Politics is mostly very boring. I say: Who cares what Davis's reasons are for saying what he is saying, and doing what he is doing? What matters is what messages he is sending out and what impact, if any, they will have.

I applaud Davis for communicating a general unease concerning civil liberties. What Davis said in his campaign blog yesterday about the DNA database will surely please our own Guy Herbert, if it has not done so already :

...why should a million innocent people and 100,000 children be kept on the DNA database? This is the state exceeding its powers.

Indeed. However, Herbertians may also be somewhat surprised and not a little distressed by what Davis said in that same posting, immediately above that bit about the DNA database, on the subject of CCTV cameras:

... I have been explaining that I am not against CCTV - but if it is going to be used the cameras should be able to provide clear images and all of the evidence should be usable in court. Currently only 20% is usable. At the moment we just have a placebo effect for Citizen UK.

His objection to the cameras is: that they do not work well enough! We are not, in this matter as in so many others, getting as much government as we are paying for. Of the possible damage to British society that might result from it being constantly spied on by officialdom, with very good cameras, for which David Davis will surely not have to wait long, he says, at any rate in this posting, nothing.

As I say, David Davis is a politician. Be thankful for small mercies, but do not assume any large ones from this man.

So the Supreme Court's opinion in Heller really has me wondering. Will this have any effect on the practice of so many police departments, especially big city ones with bright shiny SWAT teams, to use middle of the night no-knock raids when a less dramatic approach might have been a better choice? Will it encourage better investigations of exactly who's home they are breaking into before they begin battering down doors?

I suspect but haven't checked that most of these raids occur in jurisdictions that do, quite likely to soon be 'did', not permit armed self defense in one's home. I further suspect the unspoken reasoning was too often, 'Don't worry about it. If they're not bad guys, they won't be armed'.

Up to a quarter of all adults are to be vetted to ensure they are not kiddie-abusing maniacs, as part of an effort to protect youngsters under the age of 16 in cases such as voluntary organisations and so on.

And people wonder why there is sometimes a shortage of volunteers for things like youth clubs and the like. The destruction of civil society, of the bonds of trust that are vital to such an organic, grass-roots cluster of non-state institutions, is remorseless and deliberate. This government, in its totalitarian way - I use that word quite deliberately - wants to make all human interactions subject to its tests. The consequences for the long term health of civil society, and of the ability of people to grow up normally, are ignored.

None of this is to say that the issue of child abuse is not serious, nor deserving of legal action to protect children from child abusers, who deserve the strongest punishment. I really do wonder, however, whose interests are served by the sort of vetting processes that the state is embarking upon. One hears examples of how adults are sometimes reluctant to help a kid because they are frightened they will get some sort of complaint later on. That cannot be good.

It is sometimes lazily assumed that this present Labour government is not "radical" like its predecessors. But that is only a superficial issue. In substance, this is arguably the most dangerously radical government in modern times in terms of its view of how individuals interact not just with the state, but with each other.

The BBC reports that our mad government is about to attempt to warp time by the application of law:

The government is to bring forward new legislation to outlaw all forms of age discrimination, the BBC has learned. Equalities Minister Harriet Harman is expected to announce the plan on Thursday as part of a package of measures in an Equalities Bill.[...] Travel, health and motor insurance is also expected to be included, where cover is simply withdrawn beyond a certain age or is prohibitively expensive.

How is this going to work with mortgages, and those annuities that HMRC forces people to buy with their pension funds on retirement? Women live longer, so they get less for their money in retirement annuities, which they wouldn't with another investment.

(Digression: Annuitants also pay more tax than they might from some other forms of investment. This is one explanation for HMRC maintaining insurance companies in this monopoly. That's slightly more creditable than the one that senior tax officials and treasury ministers are accustomed to give more effort to understanding of the problems of the big financial institutions than those of ordinary pensioners because they have an eye to supplementing their own retirement funds by directorships and consultancies.)

It gets weirder:

Under plans to make workplaces more diverse, Ms Harman wants to allow employers to appoint people specifically because of their race or gender. The proposals would only apply when choosing between candidates equally qualified for the job. But it means, for example, women or people from minorities could be hired ahead of others in order to create a more balanced workforce. Some employers argue they already do this, while others may say these policies will need careful handling to reduce the risk of causing resentment amongst existing staff.

You don't say. The capacity for bureaucrats lunacy, personal distress, and horrifically abstruse legal dispute where racial and sexual discrimination is both banned and permitted at the same time is going to be vast.

I predict an efflorescence of debates between 'equalities' officials in which several contradictory standards are created. (Should recruitment 'represent' the locality or the country at large? is its current makeup relevant? Or can you hire an exclusively Kazakh workforce because they are the only Kazakhs in the country?). Ethnic and other demographic categorisation of individuals will be even more ramified. And employers will be under more pressure to collect information about people's family background and personal habits in order to ensure they are either correctly not discriminating, or discriminating correctly.

The government has faced criticism from some quarters for presiding over a society which has arguably become more unequal.

All animals are unequal, but some animals are more unequal than others. All it requires is an official licence.

The assault on liberty could be worse than it is in the United Kingdom. We are nothing like Zimbabwe, say - or Jersey.

Jersey? Yes. And I don't mean the partly imaginary lawless land of the Sopranos and Frank Sinatra. The supposedly sleepy tax-haven and holiday resort a few miles off the Normandy coast, the oldest possession of the English Crown still in hand*, has entirely astonishingly, and almost secretly, converted itself a police state in the last fortnight:

The report in the Jersey Evening Telegraph is so concise it can only be quoted in full:

The Home Affairs Minister has sent shock waves through the legal profession by authorising the indefinite detention of suspects without charge.

On 5 June, Senator Wendy Kinnard amended the criminal code that had limited pre-charge detention to 36 hours.

She did so under delegated powers enjoyed by the minister under the terms of the Police Procedures and Criminal Evidence (Jersey) Law.

However, that same law states that before such changes to codes are made, the minister is required to publish a draft of the changes and consult interested parties. She did neither of these things – a failure that has left the Island’s criminal lawyers stunned.

The new code came into force on Thursday, but no statement was released to either the media or the legal profession.

Why? What crisis of state is afflicting the Channel Islands?

Suspicious British readers may note that Jersey ministers are accustomed to do what they are told by the UK government. The facts that this peremptory administrative action shortly preceded the House of Commons debate on police detention powers, and that the resistance to HMG's policies had had some effect by pointing out there are other jurisdictions, where the gutters do not run with human blood, in which long detention without charge is unknown, may be entirely unrelated.

* Pedant's corner: the dukes of Normandy held the Channel Islands for more than a century before they took possession of the English Crown.

Neil Glass, who writes under the pen name David Craig, is to run against David Davies with these immortal words:

My message is that the 42 days issue is not important to most people as we are unlikely to be affected by it. However, living on the national average salary as I do, I believe that what is important to taxpayers is how MPs have become overpaid, out of touch and are wasting billions of pounds of our money when the cost of living is spiraling out of control."

So other people's liberty, meh, who cares about such trifles? All that matters to Neil Glass is having money wasted. Truly here we have an unabashedly amoral man ...who will feel right at home in politics. The fact he would give half him MP pay if he won (which he won't) to charity is a political device, nothing more. This is not a person I would care to shake hands with, to put it mildly, as by doing this he is overtly running against civil liberties.

On her blog over at the Spectator website, Melanie Phillips, a writer with whom I generally agree on certain things, not least the right of Israel both to exist and defend itself, writes what I think is a poor article on David Davis' recent decision to hold a by-election in his parliamentary seat to highlight the loss of civil liberties:

Much is being made in some quarters of the apparent gulf between the view taken of David Davis’s resignation by the political and media village (he’s lost the plot/is a one-man plot/is a monstrous narcissist) and the public (he’s a hero fighting for Britain’s ancient liberties). I can’t help but see all this as yet another example of the replacement of reason by emotion. I can certainly see that Davis has touched a popular chord among people who feel passionately – and I have much sympathy with this – that MPs no longer act in the public interest and no longer speak for them but instead are machine politicians whipped by their party leadership into a systematic denial of reality. I also sympathise with the general view that the state is encroaching more and more oppressively into people’s lives – the abuse by local councils of anti-terrorist legislation being a case in point. To that extent, the quixotic Davis is surfing the popular tide of anti-politics, which explains much of the support he is getting and is not to be under-estimated.

"Much is being made". Yes, that is because the loss of civil liberties and the spread of the database state has reached the point where ordinary members of the public - those ghastly people - are getting riled. David Davis is a sufficiently paid-up member of the human race to have spotted this. But to dismiss his action as some sort of Dianaesque emotional display, rather than what is in fact a pretty shrewd, calculated act seems a bit patronising. And then we get to the reasoning that explains why Ms Phillips dislikes what Mr Davis has done:

Second, he says he is against 42 days because he stands for the hallowed principle of not locking people up without charge. So does that mean he is against the 28 day limit as well? And if he is, then surely he has to be against the 14 day limit that preceded it, and the seven day limit before that. Indeed, according to the principles he has laid down he has to be against any detention before charge at all. Similarly, he says he’s against the whole ‘surveillance society’ including speed cameras, DNA databases, CCTV and so forth; yet he also says he’s not against all of this, and doesn’t want to get rid of all DNA testing because some of it is perfectly sensible. So what exactly is he fighting for? And why couldn’t he do so within his own party, which largely takes precisely the view he professes? Has he given this any systematic thought at all? Despite his SAS image and multiply-broken nose, is he not merely beating his chest and emoting, in tune with the sentimental irrationality of the age?

Well, leaving aside the snide remark about his "SAS image", I am not sure how Mr Davis would reply to all of those points but his recent remarks make it pretty crystal clear that he is against the holding of DNA on innocent people, for example, or even shorter periods of detention without trial. Ms Phillips, presumably, is in favour of all the above and more.

Then we get an argument that Mr Davis is in favour of all this "emotional" civil liberties stuff because he is insufficiently aware of the threat Britain faces from Islamic terrorism:

It also strikes me that there is a strong and quite vicious sub-text to the support he has been getting within certain political circles, which are backing him against what they call the ‘neo-cons’ in David Cameron’s circle -- by whom they mean in particular Michael Gove and George Osborne. The thought-crime committed by these two is to analyse correctly the threat to this country posed by Islamism and to support America in its fight to defend the free world. The anti neo-cons believe, by contrast, not merely that Britain must put critical distance between itself and American interventionism, but that the threat to Britain from Islamism is hugely exaggerated, both from within as well as from without. It is in that context that they maintain that 42-days is unnecessary because the dire warnings about the likely threat to this country are unproven and that the extension of the detention limit is instead a Trojan horse for the willed erosion of our ancient liberties.

The reasoning is weak. It does not seem to cross her mind that one might be as concerned as the next man about terrorism - as I am - without feeling the need to chuck out long-standing protections of the individual that were not even removed - or at least only shortly - during emergencies such as the Second World War. It may be that some people on the right dislike the "neocon" argument out of some naive attitude about terrorism, or some sort of hatred of Israel/America, etc, but that does not appear to be the case with Mr Davis. As far as I can tell, he is very much from the Atlanticist tradition of conservatism.

Ms Phillips is also playing to the bad argument that to be a defender of liberty is to be a softie on security. We have to absolutely nail this terrible idea that you can trade off one against the other.

By contrast, here is a cracking article that takes Mr Davis very seriously indeed.

A crackle of buzzwords in the braes. The Scottish government has "bold proposals to deal with the issue" of the "impact on crime and anti-social behaviour" of people drinking alcohol, which is reputedly "often cheaper than water" in some Scottish supermarkets. Where that leaves the stereotype of Scots as careful with money, I don't know. Why would they buy water from supermarkets rather than getting it near-free from a tap? Perhaps they are all drunk.

To solve the problem of cheap and plentiful products and consumers willing to consume them, it is proposed to institute minimum prices - with the enthusiastic support of specialist retailers, from whom the "cheaper than water" claim comes - and to raise the minimum age for buying alcohol to 21 in Scotland. The evidence that this will do anything to mitigate the alleged problems is, of course, lacking.

Also in the absence of evidence, I have a prediction about the effect on crime of minimum prices and reduced availability for alcohol. Crime will go up. Not only will new criminal offences have been created, but since many will find it more difficult to get booze, some of them will steal it.

Reported in the Observer

Bob Marshall-Andrews yesterday defied the Prime Minister to sack him, adding that he hoped other Labour MPs would join the former shadow home secretary's one-man crusade for civil liberties.

'They can't muzzle the whole of the party, and it seems to me foolish in the extreme in the present climate to start describing civil liberties as a stunt,' he told The Observer. 'I have had emails asking, "Why does it take a Tory to say this"?'

David Davis, the Tory shadow Home Secretary, has resigned over the issue of detaining terror suspects for up to 42 days. He is going to resign his seat as an MP, hold a by-election, in the hope that he can win and create a storm of public rage over this issue.

It is certainly a bold move, and a commendable one. I am glad that at least some Tory MPs have got some backbone. As a former Territorial SAS member, Davis has more guts than most.

Update: I see that parts of the right-leaning press are trying to sell the narrative that Davis is a nutcase, trying to create cover for himself in the offchance that David Cameron, Tory leader, hits any future problems. Well, I guess that is possible. Make no mistake, how the Tory party reacts to Davis' stance will tell us quite a lot about how genuine their commitment to civil liberties, to overthrowing ID cards, etc, really is. I cannot help but believe that David Davis, a very different animal from Cameron, has probably had a very major row with his centrist boss, who I confidently predict will not repeal most of the measures this present government has passed.

Now the counter terrorism bill will in all probability be rejected by the House of Lords very firmly. After all, what should they be there for if not to defend Magna Carta.

But because the impetus behind this is essentially political - not security - the government will be tempted to use the Parliament Act to over-rule the Lords. It has no democratic mandate to do this since 42 days was not in its manifesto.

Its legal basis is uncertain to say the least. But purely for political reasons, this government's going to do that. And because the generic security arguments relied on will never go away - technology, development and complexity and so on, we'll next see 56 days, 70 days, 90 days.

But in truth, 42 days is just one - perhaps the most salient example - of the insidious, surreptitious and relentless erosion of fundamental British freedoms.

And we will have shortly, the most intrusive identity card system in the world.

A CCTV camera for every 14 citizens, a DNA database bigger than any dictatorship has, with 1000s of innocent children and a million innocent citizens on it.

We have witnessed an assault on jury trials - that bulwark against bad law and its arbitrary use by the state. Short cuts with our justice system that make our system neither firm not fair.

And the creation of a database state opening up our private lives to the prying eyes of official snoopers and exposing our personal data to careless civil servants and criminal hackers.

The state has security powers to clamp down on peaceful protest and so-called hate laws that stifle legitimate debate - while those who incite violence get off scot-free.

This cannot go on, it must be stopped. And for that reason, I feel that today it's incumbent on me to take a stand.

I will be resigning my membership of the House and I intend to force a by-election in Haltemprice and Howden.

- David Davis MP

Quite unprecedented. An MP - and a privy counsellor - quitting in order to draw attention to loss of liberty (and he used my phrase, "the database state". A meme whose time has come, I hope).

Update: now the official text rather than Sky's slightly mangled transcript.

One begins to wonder if Krushchev was right in 1959 when he said "We will bury you". We just thought he meant economically rather than socially. I am beginning to wonder how many differences between the current Russian and American governments will be left if we have a few more years of an executive branch which ignores the Constitution. According to this article in World News Daily we are now going to have a biometric database on anyone that anyone in the adminstration does not like and it will have no oversight or means of challenge whatever:

Although the directives run over 1,700 words in length, Congress is not mentioned once, nor is there any specification of how the coordinated "framework" will be disclosed to the public.

and:

The directives also do not specify any procedures for citizens to challenge their inclusion in the biometric database or any resulting consequences, such as restricted travel or additional government surveillance.

I am certainly not anti-defense minded but I would humbly suggest that no CITIZEN should have such information kept on them and if a non-citizen becomes a citizen all such information should be destroyed forthwith and severe legal penalties should exist for violations.

I fully expect this will be as effective and as competently kept a database as the no fly list, which is to say real terrorists will walk through and free and sovereign Americans will get the treatment by some jerk with a rubber glove.

Robert Man from the European Commission speaking on this morning's Farming Today:

There is a case for allowing supermarkets to sell mis-shapen fruit and veg, provided it has a label such as "suitable for cooking" on it.

He was talking about proposals for simplifying EU produce classification regulations.

In the interests of the poor chap keeping his job, I feel I should emphasise it was a very relaxed, friendly interview, and that this latitudinarian idea was clearly being examined hypothetically as a way of reducing waste, and no impression was given that it formed part of current Commission plans. Nor did Mr Man imply that the 'simplification' proposals are completely settled. The Commission proposes, but member states dispose; and Mr Man was careful to point out that not all member states are yet convinced by the bold libertarianism inherent in simplification.

So for the moment you should be reassured that the full EC Marketing standards continue to apply to: Apples, Apricots, Avocados, Cherries, Grapes, Kiwifruit, Lemons, Mandarins (and similar hybrids), Melons, Oranges, Peaches and Nectarines, Pears, Plums, Strawberries, Water Melons, Artichokes, Asparagus, Beans (other than shelling beans), Brussels sprouts [of course!], Cabbage, Carrots, Cauliflowers, Celery, Courgettes, Cultivated mushrooms, Garlic, Leeks, Onions, Peas, Spinach, Salads, Aubergines, Chicory, Cucumber, Lettuce endives and batavia, Sweet peppers, Tomatoes, Hazelnuts in shell, Walnuts in shell, Flowering bulbs, corms and tubers, Cut flowers and foliage.

Though I know us Samizdatatistas are apt to be rude about regulators, I think it is important to recognise the merits of these noble public servants occasionally. Younger and foreign readers will not appreciate how much suffering the EC Marketing standards have saved. British television viewers no longer face peak-time magazine shows featuring vegetables with an amusing resemblance to genitalia.

The ruling can be found here.

Via Ezra Levant. Mr Levant's name, his own persecution, and that of Mark Steyn are both almost certainly familiar to Samizdata readers and probably familiar to an increasing number in the English speaking world. For that reason they may fare better in their own struggles with the witchfinders than those less widely liked.

Over at ConservativeHome there's a survey suggesting the social conservatives are doing the Guardian's work for it by trying to make one's position on abortion a party-political issue in Britain. The next generation of Conservative MPs support a lower time limit for abortions says an email questionnaire to 225 candidates, answered by just under half. I'm as irritated by this sort of spinning of some very doubtful evidence as I am by the contrary stuff - to the same effect - from the Guardian, which has recently started to suggest (as a measure of its desperation) that no-one who favours abortion choice should vote Conservative.

What really winds me up, though, is the mendacious presentation of their position by the proponents of this staged debate. The legal position of abortion in Britain is the sort of muddy compromise people with a clear ideas about the question are quite right to resent. But the approach of many abortion-banners (as they actually are) is anything but frank, and reminiscent of the step-by-step strategy of the anti-smoking lobby. For every principled (usually religiously principled) pro-lifer, there is someone who secretly shares their conviction, but makes the case for just a little cut in the time-limit now "because science tells us that babies of that age can now survive outside the womb".

It's nonsense. Without a lot of help a two-year-old can't survive outside the womb. And the prospect of those few born at the limit of current paediatric technology surviving uncrippled to live a normal life is tiny even with a massive input of medical and nursing resources. But worse, it is mendacious nonsense - they don't care about "viability" in the slightest. What they want is a plausible excuse to cut the availability of abortion just a bit.

So I have a test to flush them out. It is provided by that ghastly muddy compromise. Britain doesn't in law permit women to choose abortion, unlike most rich countries. It is an extraordinary construct of bureaucratic paternalism.

What British (mainland) law does is to permit pregnant women to petition doctors to give them permission to abort on the grounds that it will be bad for their well-being to carry the baby to term. With two doctors assenting to this opinion in writing (that is, as the doctors' professional opinion - the woman's view doesn't matter in law), you may have an abortion. Where the 'time-limit' comes in is that those two doctors can only approve an abortion to preserving the patient's social or mental well-being before a certain point. After that terminations may only occur where there is a substantial risk to life or health, or in cases of severe foetal abnormality.

So in practice, in the UK you have a choice only if you approach the right doctor armed with the right argument. A naive or poorly educated, woman who seeks help from her GP when the GP happens to oppose abortion, or who mistakenly calls a pro-life charity canvassing itself as offering help to the unexpectedly pregnant (as opposed to one of the pro-choice groups who do the same thing) may never find out how to get an abortion, or at least not until it is too late. The late abortions themselves aren't occuring as a lifestyle choice - which is another mendacious narrative element in the pseudo-debate.

My test is this: Next time anyone says they want the time-limit for abortion cut to because "science shows" the baby can survive outside the womb after X weeks. Say, "And of course you support changing the law to allow abortion on demand before that date, don't you?" Then watch them flounder.

Here is a long and quite good article at the Wall Street Journal about the recent ban on consumption of alcohol on London's underground metro system. The ban is one of the first measures of the new London mayor, Boris Johnson. On Saturday, with the clock ticking away before the ban came into force from 1 June, large numbers of young people - they seemed to be mostly a bunch of young students - were openly drinking, some playing lots of music, and generally whooping it up on the Tube. Yours truly and Mrs P. forgot all about the ban and so we got a bit of a shock when, on the Circle line, our cabin was full of these raucous, and already extremely drunk, folk. They seemed pretty good natured although I was already betting that the end would end in arrests. It did. Walking by High Street Kensington Tube station later on, I could hear the PA system blare out the message that the station was being closed. In the end, 17 people were arrested for crimes including assault.

I guess this proves Boris's point for him. Some liberal-minded folk might claim that his ban on drinking on the Tube is nanny statism, not what one would expect from the fun-loving newspaper columnist, former MP and bon viveur. Mind you, defending the right of people to drink and get slammed on the Tube late at night is not the sort of freedom I am particularly inclined to go over the top for. It is not an obvious assault on private property rights as was, say, the banning of smoking in pubs and restaurants. The Tube, after all, receives tax funds and is not a completely private entity. If it were, then the owners could of course decide the matter. They might even ban it anyway to protect the bulk of people who find it possible to travel from A to B without holding a can of beer.

Whether the ban can be properly enforced or not is another matter. I expect a raging trade in small, easy-to-conceal hipflasks.

In some countries an interest in ideas, and history, even quite recent history, can get you arbitrarily arrested. It can happen even if you are an academic whose research is being paid for by the government of the country.

On Tuesday they [the police] read me a statement confirming it was an illegal document which shouldn't be used for research purposes. To this day no one has ever clarified that point. They released me. I was shaking violently, I fell against the wall, then on the floor and I just cried.

What sort of place has 'illegal documents'? And how would you get one? In this case the document obtained by the masters student in question was published by the US government, and simply downloaded from an official website.

- China? Russia?

In the country concerned, the term 'illegal document' does not actually appear in any legislation. It is not, in theory, illegal merely to possess any document there - except for some unusually broad and harsh laws about indecent images. What sort of place is it that the police make up the law as they go along, and threaten academics for having the intention to read about the subject they are studying?

- Saudi Arabia? Egypt?

No. The country concerned is the United Kingdom; the place Nottingham, in England. Read a report here. There is more in the printed version of the paper, including these chilling words from Nottinghamshire police:

We deliberately kept it low-key and have never sought to raise the profile of these two individuals or of this case.

We are supposed to be grateful that an unofficial police PR machine did not immediately set out to blacken the detainees' names by making a fuss about their arrest, nor misrepresent what happened during it, nor spin tales of vast plots by releasing snippets of speculation to selected credulous and sensational media as if they represented evidence (there's example of the latter today). I am not.

Here are the two sides of the coin. Officialdom ought not to be able to circulate confidential information about individuals for its own convenience, and it should be an obligation of police, not a voluntary virtue, to protect privacy. And if Britain is ever to be a free country again (and I am fully aware that it is quasi-free, not China or Russia, let alone Cuba or Saudi) then possessing and communicating general information by private individuals should not be a crime, nor - which is worse - treated as a crime.

Everyone has things that they would destroy them if they were publicised. I once orchestrated a coup in a small African country from a base in an extinct volcano with the aid of a lot of fit-birds in 1960’s specs and very short lab coats, holding clipboards for no apparent reason, whilst I stroked my Persian cat. That should never be revealed. Oh, bugger! Like all Bond villians I give it away towards the end.

I love that. Readers will recognise the inimitable prose style of regular Samizdata commenter NickM, who now writes regularly at this place. This is taken from an excellent attack on the idiotic efforts of UK police to prevent people from criticising Scientology. It shows how respect for freedom of speech - which must, by definition, include the right to offend and upset - is now under serious assault in this country.

Any attempt to censor criticism of belief systems is an outrage. So long as the critics do not try to violate the lives and property of the people they are criticisng, the law should stay well out of it.

Read the whole of Nick's piece.

Gordon Ramsay, the 'outspoken' celeb chief wants the state to outlaw out-of-season vegetables. I kid you not. That the man is an arrogant little shit has always been apparent from his TV shows but this sort of national socialist volkish crap really does mark him as truly authoritarian.

The TV chef said it was "fundamentally important" for chefs to provide locally-sourced food. "Fruit and veg should be seasonal," he said. "Chefs should be fined if they haven't got ingredients in season on their menu. I don't want to see asparagus on in the middle of December. I don't want to see strawberries from Kenya in the middle of March. I want to see it home grown."

The 'I am' does not want to see something and so thinks his views should be the force backed law of the land: the psychopathology of the expert that we so often see coming from doctors is at work again. The great unwashed must be forced to follow expert opinion, which means their opinion, naturally.

I like the idea of third world farmers pulling themselves out of poverty and selling me their products whenever I want to buy them and why should a loud mouthed self important chief and a bunch of fascistic green activists get to have a say in that? Their craving to impose their will on others should stop being socially acceptable and they need to be called authoritarian thugs to their faces.

From The Times:

Jansen Versfeld, the solicitor who conducted the fruitless search for a barrister, said: “Because of the very low rate of pay for these hearings, £175.25 per day, and the amount of work and complexity involved, with no payment for preparation, none could undertake to do it.”

Mr Versfeld, who is with Morgan Rose solicitors, said that there were 6,586 pages of documents and a total of 4,548 transactions that would require arranging into a manageable form by experienced senior counsel for an estimated six-week hearing.

[...]

"So although this defendant was convicted of offences only involving a few hundred pounds’ worth of cannabis, he found himself at risk of losing £4.5 million worth of assets – with the burden on him to prove that they were not ill-gotten gains. On top of that, he was prohibited from using those assets for his own defence.”

I predict that the law will be changed. It is plainly intolerable to the state that people's property should not be seized merely because the unfair procedure is inadequately funded.

The distinction between the legal order in Western democracies and the tyrannies of Stalinist Russia or modern China or the Arab gulf states, is often thought to be stark. In Britain in particular, we are complacent that 800 years of the common law will protect us against the overreaching power of state functionaries.

Today comes a case that shows this conceit to be ill-founded. It was already widely known that the Home Secretary would like the power to lock anyone up for seven weeks on her say-so. But it is not in effect yet, and is likely to be opposed in parliament. Who knew that the British state is already punishing 70 people with effective suspension of all their economic rights on mere accusation, by freezing their assets by Treasury order without any legal warrant or process?

The Terrorism (UN Measures) Order 2006 and the 2006 al-Qaeda and Taleban (UN Measures) Order were made under section 1 of the 1946 UN Act in order to implement resolutions of the UN Security Council. These orders are not parliamentary instruments but "orders in council" - the council in question being the Queen's Privy Council, so that the rules under which (according to solicitors for the victims)...

We have the madness of civil servants checking Tesco receipts, a child having to ask for a receipt every time it does a chore by running to the shops for a pint of milk and a neighbour possibly committing a criminal offence by lending a lawnmower.

...have not troubled parliament even under the pathetic 'negative resolution' procedure by which most of our law is now made. Nor has any judge or other independent authority been in involved in these seizures or assessed the evidence (if any) that justifies them. Nor is there any time limit. Or need to bring charges to support the indefinite punishment.

Which remains, though the learned judge found it entirely illegal, indefinite:

Jonathan Crow QC, for HM Treasury, had told him the UK government would be left in violation of a UN Security Council order were the orders to be quashed immediately.

The Treasury said the asset-freezing regime and individual asset freezes would remain in place pending the appeal.

A spokesman said the asset-freezing regime made an "important contribution" to national security by helping prevent funds being used for terrorism and was "central to our obligations under successive UN Security Council resolutions".

To which I say, and not for the first time, damn the UN. Neither the UN nor Treasury officials are supposed to make our law. And if this proscription stands, then we might as well have no law.

Via the website BoingBoing is a good new directory showing where the most and least censored internet systems are. A handy reference guide for people keeping an eye on governments' efforts to control content. Suffice to say that nations like Saudi Arabia or China do not score very well.

Outside our web-world, some people may sneer that only geeks get upset by censorship, but given its growing importance as a communications medium, those sneers are misplaced. The loss of freedoms tends to diminish those of everyone else.

Some people I chat with in Indonesia on an almost daily basis have just told me that the Indonesian government have just blocked all access to YouTube, MySpace and Rapidshare. Apparently using proxy servers lets you get to a YouTube page but they cannot actual view the videos for some reason.

Does anyone out there have any technical suggestions to pass on to some freedom loving folks in Indonesia? If so, leave them in the comments here. Quite a few people there want to make a mockery of this blatant censorship, which is being done to pander to the most intolerant Islamist elements in that country.

I previously reported on the saga of Mikko Ellilä. Here is the trial (in English) and now the state has spoken its verdict: guilty.

So it has happened: thoughtcrime is now officially a crime in Finland. Stating your opinion, moreover stating your opinions based of government statistics, is illegal. Finns may now only express a politically sanctioned range of opinions subject to supervision by official Gauleiters like Mikko Puumalainen. The fine is small but so what? The message is clear. Dissent will not be tolerated by the Finnish state. It should not matter a damn if you agree with what Mikko Ellilä says, it is outrageous that he is not being allowed to say what he thinks.

The thing I find so nauseating is these sanctimonious pathological control freaks act as those they are not repressive government thugs using force to prevent dissent. The freedom to only state popular opinions is no freedom at all because freedom of speech is the right to say what some other people do not want to hear. It is the right to express opinions that may offend because if you cannot do that, you do not have freedom of speech.

People like Finnish bureaucrat Mikko Puumalainen exist everywhere (see the Ezra Levant case in Canada) and they must be resisted by any means necessary.

Something for the afternoon tea break:

What is it this week? Ah, tobacco again. Now displaying them for sale is to be banned. It is a public consultation - but the point of public consultation is to be able to point to endorsement of policy and to disarm objectors at the point of actual legislation, not to discover anything. Departmental minds are clearly made up:

Public Health Minister Dawn Primarolo said it was "vital" to teach children that "smoking is bad".

"If that means stripping out vending machines or removing cigarettes from behind the counter, I'm willing to do that," she said.

'Its-for-the-children!' - usually delivered in a sobbing voice on the edge of hysteria - remains an unstoppable weapon by which public life crushes private life.

Should the possession and/or distribution of child pornography be a crime in a free society?

The latest great idea from 'digital-strategy consultant' Jim Griffin, who is advising the Recording Industry Association of America on new and innovative ways of rent seeking, is to propose a piracy surcharge on ISPs in the USA.

Of course the advantage of that is if all broadband users have to pay the music industry $5 per month, regardless of whether or not you actually download any music, legal or illegal, why bother promoting music at all? Who needs products when you can just force people to pay you regardless? Is it great that we have governments around the world who are in a position to actually try and do stuff like that?

The toxic effects of collectivism rear its ugly Hydra-like heads in Finland, where the state wants to introduce a Chinese style 'Internet Great Wall' to stop people expressing political idea the state disapproves of. It also wants to prosecute Mikko Ellilä for the thought crime of expressing a dislike of multiculturalism.

It has been reported to me that Puumalainen said in a government press release in April that “racism” on the internet should be persecuted using the same methods as in the combat against child porn.Since all internet operators in Finland are required by law to block child porn websites, Puumalainen’s statement that "the same methods that have been successful in the combat against child porn should be implemented in weeding out racism on the internet as well" means that in Puumalainen’s opinion it ought to be possible for the government to establish a firewall that blocks all websites that Puumalainen accuses of racism.

In other words, Puumalainen says "racism" is a crime like child porn, and therefore "racist" websites such as blogs that mention crime statistics should be blocked by a governmental firewall.Mikko Puumalainen not only thinks that "racism" (such as data quoted from official crime statistics published by the Ministry of Justice, or by the Interpol, or by the United Nations) should be a crime, but that citizens should not even be able to access websites that Ayatollah Puumalainen has declared to be heretic

And what 'racist act' did Mikko Ellilä commit that enraged the state?

Quotes from official crime statistics published by the Ministry of Justice undoubtedly "help maintain an anti-immigrationist political climate" because they prove that e.g. the Somalis commit more than 100 times more (over one hundred times more, as in, over 10,000% more) robberies per capita than the Finns do.

Yup, he quoted official crime statistics. Given that Finland has one of the highest rates of internet usage in the world, I hope this provokes a powerful backlash against the control freaks who run the country.

You should see an ID card like a passport in-country.

- Meg Hillier MP, the minister responsible for the scheme, to the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, today.

And it is The Economist. Unlike some of my fellow Samizdatistas, I am a fan ^[1]. But then, I am a liberal - conservative only in my suspicion of social management and 'fixing' things without enquiry as to whether they are actually broken.

This week in the print edition there is an excellent supplement: The electronic bureaucrat (introduction here). It is clear-sightedly critical of e-government of all kinds, without falling into the know-nothing technophobic rants that I fear some of those who oppose the database state do:

[G]loom, fear and optimism are all justified.

^[1] Though I sincerely hope putting Martin Sheen on the cover of the Intelligent Life quarterly was one of its deadpan jokes.

The main front page story of today's Times newspaper says:

Internet service providers (ISPs) will be legally required to take action against users who access pirated material, The Times has learnt. Broadband companies who fail to enforce... would be prosecuted and suspected customers' details could be made available to the courts. The Government has yet to decide if information on offenders should be shared between ISPs.

This is a crazy proposal. The technology being used, peer-to-peer file sharing, is legitimate technology which is important for disseminating large amounts of data cheaply. For example, if you download a multiple-gigabyte edition of Linux, the chances are that you will get it using peer-to-peer. The software is being given away for free and it saves Linux companies a lot of money if it is downloaded using BitTorrent. If peer-to-peer did not exist, companies would have to pay for lots of extra servers and bandwidth. Skype, the internet telephone service, uses peer-to-peer technology to work, as does the BBC's iPlayer internet television service.

Given that the proposal does not ban the technology outright, how will ISPs be able to work out what packets of data are pirated? They may have a chance with file sharing as it standards today, but when Napster was closed down people thought that that was end of peer-to-peer. Instead, file sharing networks adapted. The geeks realised they could get rid of Napster's centralised servers, which indexed everything, and created a different architecture that could not be closed down in the same way. Hence today we have BitTorrent.

If the government introduces this new legislation, it will not be successful. Geeks will introduce encryption or other technologies that hide what is being transmitted. If the proposed law has any success at all, it will make the lives of ISPs absolute hell, massively raise the cost of broadband connections and create huge compliance departments to snoop on users' internet use. Maybe ISPs will just end up blocking all peer-to-peer traffic, killing off Skype in the UK and destroying the BBC's broadband TV service. Libertarians, even if they believe in stronger intellectual property protection, should oppose this law.

I write a lot of letters to the press. They are usually edited for length by the letters pages subs, and often improved thereby. If you can say something shorter it is usually better. However, occasionally it goes wrong. This week the London Evening Standard mangled something I wrote so badly as to remove most of the point.

The original may not be the most eloquent piece, but it should be published somewhere. I have added a few links to give blogospheric readers the context:

Sirs,

A man is held without charge at the instance of a foreign power and a visit from his MP is secretly recorded on the instructions of police acting without a warrant. A decade ago this would have been Britain only in a science-fictional parallel-world. David Davis is quite right (Article, 5 February) to condemn it. But things are still getting worse. Surveillance powers - most of which date from 2000, before the "War on Terror" was declared - are old hat.

The Government obsession now is "information sharing", connecting the numerous databases now kept on us by various departments. This "Transformational Government" multiplies the attack on privacy and liberty many-fold. Its shadow falls on almost all new legislation. The Counter-Terrorism Bill currently before parliament, for example, would allow information to be disclosed to and passed on by the Intelligence Services, regardless of how it is obtained and despite confidentiality or privilege. Meanwhile the Ministry of Justice has been given a programme to weaken in general the existing controls on information in government hands, and the National Identity Management Scheme (ID cards), the means to join it all up, is being pressed forwards on a new schedule.

We are facing not just a surveillance state, but the building of a new phenomenon, the database state.

Yours faithfully

Guy Herbert
General Secretary, NO2ID

Gorgeous pouting Blair babe, Caroline Flint MP, is shocked by her discovery, on becoming housing minister, that 50% of adults in 'social housing' (i.e. directly or indirectly state-subsidised rental property) are unemployed. She wants them to be forced to look for work on pain of losing their tenancies.

Leave aside the typical New Labour paternalism ("You! You, there! Do what we think you should do or we will punish you"), it is the apparent incomprehension of the life of the poor from someone who purports to represent their interests , was a trades union research officer for eight years, and has been in parliament for 10. Does she have especially efficient caseworkers who keep her well-insulated? Or is she just grossly innumerate, mimophantic and patronising, even for a member of the political class?

Of course a huge proportion of those in social housing are unemployed. It would be obvious to anyone not in receipt of massive tax-free housing benefits themselves, that if you have small income, then you will live wherever is cheapest. And social housing rents are the cheapest there are, even cheaper especially after housing benefit is applied. Even if you want to sleep on the streets, New Labour has probably tidied you up.

50% of those in social housing are unemployed naturally enough because nearly 100% of people who are unemployed for any length of time are going to end up in social housing as the best deal available to them. And available to them as a priority. I might be tempted to save £250 quid a week and move to the slightly less pretty environment 100 yards away - but it ain't available to the likes of me. That is true whether their reason for unemployment is idleness, or genuine incapacity, or rational reaction to the benetax system making them worse off taking low-waged work.

Changing those conditions and letting people make a new set of their own choices is unthinkable. In our new age of moralitarianism, you are to be personally monitored, and if not doing whatever is deemed good for you, you shall be personally compelled. A British mutawa, a department for the suppression if vice and promotion of virtue, cannot be far away. The values of non-smoking, non-drinking, sexually orderly, cautious on-line, un-inquisitive, skill-seeking, non-migrant, safety-conscious, nothing-to-hide-nothing-to-fear, pro-social "hard-working families" must be defended against the pollution of those who practice other - a fortiori bad - lifestyles.

A new bill in Mississippi would make it illegal for restaurants to serve obese customers.

The legislation, introduced by three members of the state’s House of Representatives, would allow health inspectors to revoke the licence of any restaurant that "repeatedly" feeds extremely overweight people.

SCENE: Int. Day. A diner somewhere in Mississippi. A customer enters and sits down. The waitress approaches.

WAITRESS: What do you need, honey?

CUSTOMER: Hi, I'd like a steak, please, with some french fries and a side order of cole...

WAITRESS: Whoa, whoa, whoa....back up, fatboy. Everything's off.

CUSTOMER: Everything??!!

WAITRESS: I can bring you some water.

CUSTOMER: But I'm famished.

WAITRESS: I don't make the rules, sweetie.

CUSTOMER: But that man over there is eating a club sandwich.

WAITRESS: That man over there has a 32-inch waist. See the sign? 'No six-pack, no lunch pack'.

CUSTOMER: Isn't there anything you can bring me?

WAITRESS: 'Lose the guts. No ifs, no buts'.

CUSTOMER: But, look, I'm not fat, I'm just big-boned.

WAITRESS (calling out): Joe, bring me out the calipers.

CUSTOMER: Okay, okay. Listen, its my glands. I've got a glandular problem. Can I help it if my glands won't work properly?

WAITRESS: You're wasting my time here, honey. I've got plenty of slim, healthy customers to serve.

CUSTOMER: Oh please! I'm starving.

WAITRESS: Not starving enough, sweetie.

CUSTOMER: Can't I just have some bacon and eggs? Please? Oh come on, pleeeeeeeease?

WAITRESS: Listen, I'd like to help you. Tell you what, come in again next week and if you've dropped maybe five, six pounds, I can serve you a cup of black coffee and maybe a slice of dry toast. How'd that be?

ENDS.

On the face of it, who could object to a company deciding to do more to help the world's poor? Reuters has a story titled Gates calls for "creative capitalism" (which is a bit like saying 'Gates calls for agriculture that creates food').

Gates said the self-interest behind capitalism had driven multiple innovations but to harness it to the benefit of all required the system be refined. Greater focus on recognition for improving the lives of others could provide a spur for companies to focus more on making money out of providing valuable products at affordable prices to the world's poor. He urged multinationals to pledge the services of their top people to the work.

Ah, I get it. White man speak with forked tongue... "but to harness it to the benefit of all required the system be refined". Bill Gates is not in fact calling for voluntary anything, he is calling for The System to be 'refined', which means he wants to make capitalism less capitalist and more politically directed by our caring masters. Could the fact he hangs out with show biz types and politicos who are all solidly statist give us a clue to decoding his words here?

So is Billy Boy just another dissembling corporate stuffed shirt looking for more 'feel good' photo opportunities with such deep thinkers as Bono or that Guy Who Thinks He Invented the Internet?

To this piece by Frank Fisher:

When asked to name countries that impose extensive internet censorship, you might think of China, Iran, or North Korea; I doubt you'd think of the UK, but, after the home secretary Jacqui Smith's speech to the International Centre for Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence today, you really should.

Britain is not a free country. It is free-er than most perhaps, but at most free-ish; and moving steadily towards a free-esque pantomime freedom.

For the inevitable commentators who think I'm whinging about nothing because I'm able to write these lines, consider this: Britain also has an historically low murder rate. Yet generally homicide is still deplored, and we would like less of it. No politician would dare stand up and call for more gang-violence because 'known criminals' being murdered is a good thing.

In Germany recently, there was a pleasing moment of defiance in the face of the determination of the banning classes to ban smoking. Boss fires staff for not smoking is what the headline says, and this is - surprise surprise - inaccurate, assuming that the report under the headline is accurate. The boss fired the non-smokers because they were making a damn nuisance of themselves by demanding that the smokers stop smoking, and he has now announced that he will not hire any more non-smokers, in case they behave similarly. Nobody got fired merely for not smoking. Not that there would be anything wrong with that.

But this is only a very small and temporary victory for the right of employers to hire and fire at will, restrained only by whatever contracts may have been made that require otherwise.

Germany introduced non-smoking rules in pubs and restaurants on January 1, but Germans working in small offices are still allowed to smoke.

It is the little word "still" that tells the true story here. And big offices have already been sorted out. This tiresome little anomaly will soon be corrected, and Germany will proceed methodically towards making smoking illegal everywhere. Adolf Hitler (not even he was able to give legal force to his detestation of smoking) is smirking in his grave, doing no turning whatsoever.

Ministers are planning to implant "machine-readable" microchips under the skin of thousands of offenders as part of an expansion of the electronic tagging scheme that would create more space in British jails.

Amid concerns about the security of existing tagging systems and prison overcrowding, the Ministry of Justice is investigating the use of satellite and radio-wave technology to monitor criminals.

But, instead of being contained in bracelets worn around the ankle, the tiny chips would be surgically inserted under the skin of offenders in the community, to help enforce home curfews. The radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, as long as two grains of rice, are able to carry scanable personal information about individuals, including their identities, address and offending record.

This is beyond belief, or, at least, it would be if we had not been covering the various madcap schemes coming out of Whitehall the past few years. What we have here is a government that believes that the rights and liberties of its people ought to be ordered to suit the priorities of British police forces.

Now if you take this to be a good idea, you are going to be hard pressed to deny the logical conclusion, that if we were all implanted with RFID tags, it would be much easier to solve and prevent crimes in the first place. This is very probably true, but it also degrades the individual to the point where humans become mere vassals of the almighty British State.

Given the trend of affairs in the UK, that is probably the way things are going to go- give it a decade or two. Early adapters should get themselves arrested and tagged early, to beat the rush.