We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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In what might come as a surprise to some, and I would suggest is a counter to a broad narrative, an Employment Tribunal (a form of Labour Court) in England has upheld the principle that criticism of ‘unreformed’ Islam is legally protected. The Tribunal considered a preliminary point as to whether or not the Claimant (Plaintiff in old, sound [ 🙂 ] money) could in principle bring a claim on the basis that he held a belief that had sufficient cogency as to be worthy of respect in a democratic society. As far as can be discerned from the judgment, there was an issue (which is very much now an issue for a determination on the merits at a later hearing) as to whether the employer was taking action against the Claimant (the circumstances of which we know nothing) because of his manifestation of his belief, (which is permissible) rather than because he simply held those beliefs, which is not permissible; e.g. a nurse who is a devout Christian being sacked for being a Christian rather than specifically, sacked for e.g. saying to a seriously-ill patient ‘Convert or face Hell-fire soon!‘ which could well be a manifestation of a belief at which offence might be taken.
The issue that the Tribunal considered is set out in the judgment (linked above) as follows:
“The belief that Islam, particularly in a traditional form – rather than a reformed, modernised, moderate and Westernised form – is problematic and deserving of criticism in so far as it fails:
(i) To recognise a separation between religion (sacred) and politics (secular) and/or the Church and state,
(ii) To value and respect fundamental human rights such as:
• freedom of conscience and of speech,
• to eschew and condemn violence in the name of religion (Islam),
• to treat and respect women and girls equally when compared to men and boys.”
The Claimant appears to have been ‘hauled up’ by his employer over his Twitter/X usage, there is reference to a file of 141 pages showing his Twitter feed, which the employer sought (at this stage) to use to argue that his belief in the need for a ‘reformation’ of ‘unreformed Islam’ was not genuinely held, i.e. that he was using this ‘belief’ as a shield for views that would not be protected. That is yet to be determined, if it is continued with by the employer.
The main points of the Claimant’s case were the following which he considered problematic were noted at paragraph 13 in the judgment:
‘In his witness statement [C/14], the Claimant has cited the following
“traditional and unreformed Islamic belief[s]” that are that are incompatible with “Western values” in that they:
(i) advocate or justify violence against non-believers or apostates;
(ii) promote unequal legal status for women;
(iii) call for the death penalty for apostasy, blasphemy or homosexuality;
(iv) reject the separation of religion and state, and seek to impose religious law;
(v) promote antisemitism or hatred towards groups including reformed Muslims;
(vi) condone child marriage;
(vii) permit forms of slavery or indentured servitude;
(viii) justify domestic violence, including wife-beating and female genital mutilation (“FGM”).’
It is important to note here that the Claimant’s belief isn’t about hostility towards Muslims as such, but to the holding and promotion of the ‘unreformed’ version of Islam that he is objecting to.
The issue for the Tribunal hearing the final case is summed up at paragraph 17:
‘The degree to which the Claimant will be able to establish that these tweets were a manifestation of the pleaded belief or that the Respondent will be able to show that these were inappropriate manifestations of, or otherwise separable from, the belief, are matters which fall to be decided at the final hearing.’
I.e. was the Claimant criticism of the ‘unreformed’ Islam that he weighs in against inappropriate, which takes into account the position that he held in the employer that he worked or works for.
There is nothing in this judgment that surprises me, it seems to be a legally-sound decision that the principle of criticising a belief on the basis of its incompatibility with ‘Western values’ (whatever they might be) is one where not only is it lawful, but an employer who acts against an employee for doing so (unless the manifestation is inappropriate) is itself acting unlawfully. Clearly, given that Courts are holding that such expression is legally-protected in principle, any notion that such comments are criminally unlawful are unfounded so any police action arising from those Tweets would be wholly unlawful.
“It [taxes on property values] is tantamount to a quasi-authoritarian reopening of settled property rights and fundamentally reorders the relationship between the individual and the state. Her scheme begins to abolish freehold property, turning yeoman-owners into leaseholders, with politicians as the ultimate landlords. Her `high value council tax surcharge’ is best understood as a rent, to be paid to [Rachel] Reeves for the right to stay in one’s home. Labour hates ordinary landlords, but is desperate to turn the state into the most exploitative of rent collectors. It’s sub-Marxist nonsense, a form of legalised theft.”
– Allister Heath, Daily Telegraph, 27 November, on yesterday’s Autumn Budget from Rachel Reeves, UK finance minister. He’s right that things such as “mansion taxes” – which in reality raise relatively paltry sums – are about forcing owners of properties deemed to be above £X or whatever into a situation where they own them at the sufferance of the State, rather than outright. And the temptation to lower the threshold on such a tax, along with everything else, will be irresistable.
On a related point, now seems a good time to introduce readers again to an essay in defence of absolute property right ownership – rather than the idea of owning it at the sufferance of the State. The essay, “Your Dog Owns Your House”, by the late French writer and classical liberal, Anthony de Jasay, is a masterpiece.
Magatte Wade is an African anti-poverty activist. No, not like you’re thinking – she’s an actual anti-poverty activist. In fact her chosen term to describe what she does is “prosperity activist”.
In a tweet made yesterday, she wrote,
https://x.com/magattew/status/1986537994984058913
The best way to keep people poor:
Convince them their poverty is someone else’s fault and only the government can save them.
I think that is true.
Imagine facing your nation’s Supreme Court for the “crime” of sharing a Bible verse. On October 30, that’s the reality for Päivi Räsänen, a Finnish grandmother, medical doctor, and parliamentarian. Her soon-to-be seven-year ordeal began in 2019, when she questioned her church’s support for Helsinki Pride and posted a Bible verse on X. That single tweet triggered 13 hours of police interrogation, two full trials, and now a third prosecution under Finland’s “hate speech” law.
Räsänen’s case might sound like an exclusively European story — but it also serves as a warning about the growing threat of censorship coming from the EU. While someone living outside of Europe might assume they are exempt from the troubling wave of censorship spreading across the continent, that assumption is dangerously mistaken.
– Lorcan Price
I find it personally deeply upsetting. Kirk was a very religious-y person and I’m an implacable atheist, so there there lots of things I disagreed with him on. But what he encapsulated to me is “free speech”. He debated with everyone, openly, without hostility, honestly, directly. He was without guile, laid it out on the table, kind to a fault, and, most dangerously of all to the left, extremely convincing. To me that makes him one of the greatest men of the 21st century. Free speech is, to me, probably the greatest virtue and basic foundation of all of society, and yesterday the men who couldn’t win the argument took out its greatest, happiest warrior.
– Fraser Orr
This is interesting.
“American businesses do not surrender their First Amendment rights because a foreign bureaucrat sends them an e-mail.”
Hopefully more sites and services outside the UK will refuse to comply with the appalling Online Safety Act.
I cannot recall a more disgusting article being published in a mainstream newspaper than this one written by His Majesty’s Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology:
Farage is siding with disgusting internet predators – Peter Kyle
Last year, Nicholas Hawkes sent photos of his erect penis to a 15-year-old girl. It’s sadly too common an occurrence, making victims feel exploited, disgusted and unsafe.
But in this case there were consequences. A month later, Hawkes was convicted under the new offence of cyber-flashing created by the Online Safety Act – the first person to be convicted.
So when Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, boasts about his plans to repeal the Online Safety Act, it makes my blood boil.
Repealing the law would benefit men like Hawkes, a registered sex offender, and other disgusting predators who contact children and groom them online.
[…]
But as well as blocking disturbing and upsetting images and messages from children’s feeds, it [the Online Safety Act] also makes huge changes to the online environment children inhabit.
For the first time, it gives social media platforms an obligation to proactively keep children safe. It forces them to detect and remove horrific child sexual abuse material, which has shamefully lurked on the internet, barely hidden from those sick enough to seek it out.
[…]
And these are not just warm words – it’s a regime with teeth. If companies don’t follow the law, then Ofcom, our independent regulator, has the power to fine them up to 10 per cent of their global turnover.
For the most serious of offences, allowing child sexual abuse to run riot on a platform could even see someone criminalised. Plus it gives our police forces new offences to go after online criminals.
I cannot understand how anyone can be against these measures. How could anyone question our duty to keep children safe online – particularly when it comes to child sexual abuse content and from online grooming?
“Why do you hang back from punishing the traitors, comrade? Is it because you are one of them?” Demagogues have used that line for centuries.
To win back free speech, Britain needs a new constitution, argues Preston Byrne.
The problem:
What is happening today, it seems, is that the entire population of the UK is in the midst of realizing that whether a controversial idea may be safely expressed depends, in large part, on the hearer, and not the speaker.
Current law fails the rule-of-law test:
the law hands police and magistrates wide discretionary powers to decide which viewpoints are acceptable, depending on the social or political mood at the time and on the ground.
Legislation can not seem to fix the problem:
Because every legislative fix proposed in recent years has failed to address the root problem: the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. This is the idea that the King-in-Parliament wields unlimited power with no guardrails, and has long been a foundational principle of British constitutional order. The British state does not concede the existence of any legal limits on its own authority. Individual rights have become casualties of rigid adherence to this ancient doctrine, which, plainly, no longer serves the interests of the society it governs.
Byrne goes on to argue that the application of speech laws has changed over time due to fashion. The only real solution to that is absolute free speech like that granted by the US First Amendment.
As AJP Taylor once wrote, “until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state beyond the post office and the policeman”.
That is emphatically not the case today. Having won the wars, the advocates of freedom comprehensively lost the peace. They lost to such a degree that those of us born and raised afterwards find it hard to comprehend the scale of the change.
It’s easiest to start with the size of the state. To be sure, socialism in Britain has receded from its high point. The nationalisation of coal, iron, steel, electricity, gas, roads, aviation, telecommunications, and railways has been mostly undone, although steel and rail are on the way back in.
But by comparison to our pre-war starting point, we live in a nearly unrecognisable country. In 1913, taxes and spending took up around 8 per cent of GDP. Today, they account for 35 per cent and 45 per cent respectively. To put it another way, almost half of all economic activity in Britain involves funds allocated at the behest of the government, and over half of British adults rely on the state for major parts of their income.
And if anything, this understates the degree of government control. Outcomes which are nominally left to the market are rigged by a state which sees prices as less as a way for markets to clear, and more as a tool for social engineering.
– Sam Ashworth-Hayes (£)
Police face lawsuit after former officer arrested over ‘thought crime’ tweet, reports the Telegraph:
A retired special constable is preparing to sue Kent Police after being arrested over a social media post warning about rising anti-Semitism.
Julian Foulkes, from Gillingham in Kent, was handcuffed at his home by six officers from the force he had served for a decade after replying to a pro-Palestinian activist on X.
The 71-year-old was detained for eight hours, interrogated and ultimately issued with a caution after officers visited his home on Nov 2 2023.
On Tuesday, Kent Police confirmed that the caution was a mistake and had been deleted from Mr Foulkes’s record, admitting that it was “not appropriate in the circumstances and should not have been issued”.
So long as the consequences of police misbehaviour are born by the taxpayer, not the police, why should they care? Words are cheap. They’ll settle out of court, promise not to do it again, and do it again.
Police body-worn camera footage captured officers scrutinising Mr Foulkes’’s collection of books by authors such as Douglas Murray, a Telegraph contributor, and issues of The Spectator, pointing to what they described as “very Brexity things”.
He voted with the majority. They could tell he was a wrong’un.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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