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Nothing, absolutely nothing, is immune from state interference. Not even in the Land of the Free. Not even the past.
The original story here seems to be the tip of a bureaucratic iceberg. Last weeks further comment from the New York Times (which I can not find online, sorry):
[A]t the [US] National Archives, documents have been disappearing since 1999 because intelligence officials have wanted them to. And under the terms of two disturbing agreements – with the C.I.A. and the Air Force – the National Archives has been allowing officials to reclassify declassified documents, which means removing them from the public eye. So far 55,000 pages, some of them from the 1950’s [sic], have vanished. […]
What makes all this seem preposterous is that the agreements themselves prohibit the National Archives from revealing why the documents were removed. They are aparently secret enough that no-one can be told why they are secret – so secret, in fact, that the arrangement to reclassify them is also secret. According to the agreement with the C.I.A., employees are also prohibited from telling anyone that the C.I.A. was responsible for removing reclassified documents.
Next time you hear that saw about the price of freedom being eternal vigilance, remember eternity is outside time. You do not just have to keep watch on this moment.
I am not the fondest of the Home Secretary. But he does serve his providential purpose, which of late has been to bluster to bully and to sneer at anyone who dare suggest there was anything wrong with the Blair administration’s attitude to liberty. This has been a valuable service to the nation, as it seems to have woken the liberal chattering classes from their torpor to realise that People Like Them (the New Labour elite) will do infinite evil with the best intentions. We need to keep Charles Clarke.
On the other hand, the Home Office itself should go. The spiffy new office in Marsham Street should be levelled, and the the glass pieces, broken small, preserved on the site as a sterile three-acre monument, eternally reminding us that it is more useful than what it replaced. Some parts a reasonable state needs, and they could be transplanted to places they might flourish.
What parts of the Home Office would we be better without?
The entire Communities Directorate for a start. Whether you like the CRE or not, it is hard to see any benefit in a subdirectorate in the Civil Service for “Race, Cohesion, Equality and Faith”. Are those things anything a government can, let alone should, control?
Then there is the Office for Criminal Justice Reform, a nasty project to seize control over the Criminal Justice system and get rid of all that inefficient unpredictable matter of fair trials, messily standing between the police and the prisons that the department owns. It is at best Home Office empire-building, at worst a threat to the rule of law.
Everone here knows my views on the Identity Cards Programme by now. The state has no right to determine who you are, permitting it to keep a life-long permanant record on you is a recipe for totalitarianism.
Without a department one would not need a mountain of shared and administrative services. They probably would not be missed. Entirely incidentally, those most offensive bits of the Home Office, the organs that originate sheaves of new criminal offences every year, and continually tweak the law to make convictions easier, would be gone.
What’s left? Crime. ‘Offender Management’. Immigration. Passports. → Continue reading: Save Charles Clarke!
Mr Clarke pointed to recent articles in the Guardian, Observer and the Independent newspapers which made “incorrect, tendentious and over-simplified” statements about Labour’s record on civil liberties.
– BBC Online
The pieces I’ve seen there were actually considerably more accurate than his rebuttals, and relied not at all on the circularity and misleading literalism that is the foundation of any Home Office statement. But maybe he’s worried about anyone else getting into the business of tendentiousness and over-simplification in relation to civil liberties. That’s his (and Mr Blair’s) job.
This morning Andy Burnham MP was quoted by the Financial Times as saying that the government intends to make the British ID card an unrepealable fait accompli before the next general election:
I’m keen to see plenty of ID cards in circulation come the next election” […] The whole landscape will have changed by the time if – and it’s a big if – the Tories ever get anywhere near power.
This evening the NO2ID campaign launched its response:
There has been a chain email doing the rounds. It seems to have caught the public imagination to the extent of being used as a source by at least three well-known national columnists to my knowledge.
There are some unwarranted speculations in it, however, and it is worth going through and picking out what’s not true, because what’s left is quite frightening enough. This is long, sorry.
You may have heard that legislation creating compulsory ID Cards passed a crucial stage in the House of Commons.
Actually it is now the Identity Cards Act 2006, and (after a strange and unprecedented delay in getting the final text published, and, unlike all other Acts at time of writing, only in pdf) is now available on the Cabinet Office website here (pdf).
You may feel that ID cards are not something to worry about, since we already have Photo ID for our Passport and Driving License and an ID Card will be no different to that. What you have not been told is the full scope of this proposed ID Card, and what it will mean to you personally.
The proposed ID Card will be different from any card you now hold. It will be connected to a database called the NIR, (National Identity Register)., where all of your personal details will be stored.
Not, quite, all. → Continue reading: Fisking ‘the anonymous email’
Not content with bullying its own population, the British Government is now spending taxpayers’ money to export the culture of fear. This from the website of Her Britannic Majesty’s Embassy to Romania:
With approximately 100 illegal immigrants deported from Britain to Romania every month and 250 Romanian asylum seekers registered last year in the UK, the Home Office and the International Organisation of Migration (IOM) decided to launch this publicity campaign in March 2005.
The existence of the IOM ‘Managing migration for the welfare of all’ is unwelcome news to me.
[…] But how does a state achieve the balance between the need for control of its borders and the need to facilitate movement across its borders for legitimate purposes such as trade, tourism, family reunion and education?
…asks the IOM, seeking to explain its purpose, but begging the question. The assumption is that states will naturally ban travel and trade (which is what ‘control their borders’ means) and then decide what are ‘legitimate purposes’ for permitted movements. But this is a convenient doctrine invented by states in the 20th century, a generalization of the conditions of the Tsarist police-state and the petty, nationalist bureaucracies that emerged in the 19th.
Where – let alone why – I choose to live or travel is no business of states, unless I am doing injury to their citizens. By going from place to place I do accept that places are different legally as well as culturally and physically. If there were no differences there would be no point in travel. But the natural condition of borders is openness. They are just lines on a map.
Just when I thought e-government couldn’t get any sillier, I happened upon this site.
“Anti-social behaviour practitioner” is a particularly glorious piece of tin-eared bureaucratic jargon. “Tackling alcohol disorder” is alternative to “Taking a Stand Awards”, suggests to me that many of those approaching this site are expected to be unable to stand.
But apart from being stupid and unintentionally funny, it is another scary glimpse into how unlimited is the appetite to regulate and manage social life in Britain.
When the British left is worried about getting its vote out, a standard tool in the box is the scare story about “the extreme right” (meaning not us but the racist parties), being about to break through. This is not generally convincing nationwide, but that does not stop it being tried. Before the general election the New Statesman published an absurd story/slur that 1 in 5 Britons could vote far right – which spintastic headline involved counting UKIP, Veritas, and the English Nationalist Party as the much the same thing as the BNP and the National Front.
Now they are at it again for the local elections. Margaret Hodge, an impeccably New Labour minister, is quoted more or less everywhere today. (Though, now the story is more or less everywhere, she seems to have resiled from it somewhat. Strange that, a highly experienced, high profile minister mis-speaking in a set-piece interview for a national.)
As the BBC has it:
White working class voters are being “tempted” by the British National Party as they feel Labour is not listening to their concerns, a minister has said. Employment minister Margaret Hodge said the BNP could win seats in her Barking constituency in May’s council polls. She told the Sunday Telegraph many constituents were angry at the lack of housing and asylum seekers being housed in the area by inner London councils. The BNP said Labour were ignoring fears over “mass immigration” to the UK
You might think she is trying to have it both ways – and succeeding – by pretending to worry about xenophobia, while simultaneously acknowledging it, and suggesting it may be catered to. As anyone who had read the Labour general election manifesto might suppose it would be, what with half a page on e-borders, asylum and ID cards as immigration control.
But there is another possibility. The working-class voters of Barking and Dagenham might genuinely prefer the BNP. Not for its racist tendencies, but because they would rather vote for a less authoritarian variety of socialism than that offered by Mrs Hodge and her colleagues.
The world is becoming a very disturbing place. I never thought to find myself in full agreement with the lefty journalist John Pilger – whose name was turned into a verb by the late Auberon Waugh: to pilger, to utter whining, systematically-slanted, effusions blaming western capitalism for all the trouble in the world. Yet here he is in The New Statesman this week:
The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill has already passed its second parliamentary reading without interest to most Labour MPs and court journalists; yet it is utterly totalitarian in scope.
It is presented by the government as a simple measure for streamlining deregulation, or “getting rid of red tape”, yet the only red tape it will actually remove is that of parliamentary scrutiny of government legislation, including this remarkable bill. […]
Those who fail to hear these steps on the road to dictatorship should look at the government’s plans for ID cards, described in its manifesto as “voluntary”. They will be compulsory and worse. An ID card will be different from a driving licence or passport. It will be connected to a database called the NIR (National Identity Register), where your personal details will be stored. […]
The ID card will not be your property and the Home Secretary will have the right to revoke or suspend it at any time without explanation. This would prevent you drawing money from a bank. […]
A small, determined and profoundly undemocratic group is killing freedom in Britain, just as it has killed literally in Iraq. That is the news. “The kaleidoscope has been shaken,” said Blair at the 2001 Labour party conference. “The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us reorder this world around us.”
Meanwhile Michael Moorcock writes in The Spectator on becoming American, of his unexpected admiration for the “constitutional fundamentalism” of Ron Paul and how:
I have a feeling that Americans will be putting their house in order rather sooner than the British, because once the People realise there is a problem, We are usually surprisingly quick to fix it.
Given the passivity of our own rather less sovereign people, and the sanguinary noises from all quarters, I do not find myself as hopeful.
Chronicling the poison spreading through the British system is a bizarre alienating experience. One feels like one of HP Lovecraft’s narrators. The horror is unnamable; we lack the words to describe what is happpening; but horror it is. The independent souls of individuals and institutions are being inexorably, ineluctably, supplanted by something dark and destructive, mirroring and subordinate to the great evil beneath Whitehall.
Look here, if you dare. You may wish to comment on that site.
Jim Murphy MP offers up a chorus in The Times’ Public Agenda section:
Have we done enough to ensure that the children of today are not left behind tomorrow? The answer is surely no.
One way of doing this is by empowering service users through offering a choice of service and providers.
Measuring people’s experience of their local environment, school or the criminal justice system -and acting on it – is also key to securing improvement. In measuring satisfaction, however, we must ensure that we don’t hear again only from the already socially mobilised.
So we have more to do.
But we can achieve this only through greater co-operation. That’s why I welcome the Future Services Network, a partnership between the National Consumer Council, Acevo and the CBI. An important development, it will help to ensure that citizens are at the heart of all policy. That’s all of the people all of the time.
No word of the incantation has discernable meaning. But the effect on this reader was to make him feel suddenly icy, hollowed-out; and the floor beneath him appeared to heave and writhe with snakes.
More official exhortation from the British state. This a poster on the underground.
Quite an interesting case, I think, because it isn’t the standard minatory approach: Do X as the Y agency demands, or get a big fine. This has the superficially laudable object of preventing children from bullying one another.
You may think (I do) that it ought to be unnecessary to urge people to protect children against bullies, and that this is not a suitable topic for state propaganda – that most adults could be counted on to intervene as a matter of ordinary humanity. But that reckons without the passivity and inanition fostered by 60 years of welfarism, and 30 years or so of ‘child protection’ doctrine under which speaking roughly to a little boy (let alone touching him), makes one the wickedest of criminals. You might have to work on people these days to get them to do something.
But plainly that isn’t the object of the exercise here. This ad doesn’t encourage people to stop bullying. For all the empty vapourings about ‘active citizenship’ (See here for an example of the Government propaganda on that topic that is churned out by notionally independent organisations), nothing may undermine the dependency culture. What this campaign is for is to get people to report incidents they think might be bullying to the authorities. There is a website and a subsidised telephone line for you to do so.
It is obviously impossible that this could help the unfortunate smaller boy. One has to conclude that isn’t really the point. The point is to get members of the public to adopt official attitudes, and engrain them by providing a mechanism to rehearse, to act out, concern. It is for to prove you are a compliant member of society by watching others carefully and reporting deviant behaviour. The state will deal with the problem, however minor, however fleeting, however apparently amenable to personal decision.
I don’t think that this is a deliberate, explicit project. I think it is a natural outcome of the cultural assumptions of those who commission such ads. We are not just supposed to love the surveillance camera, but to identify with it. The ideal citizen is a passive tool that reports back as requested; that fits in with the total bureaucracy’s demand for record.
For those of us – left and right – who still hold to the western liberal tradition of individual moral responsibility, this is a sickening, vertiginous conception of social life. The life of ants, not human beings. For those who are broadly conservative communitarians – right and left – who would like embedded institutions, direct relationships and personal responsibilities to dominate, likewise. The possibility that we may – all taken together – be in the minority should be a source of terror.
Secure beneath the watching eyes? Not in the slightest, me.
British policemen on appointment swear an oath:
I [SAY YOUR NAME] do solemnly and sincerely declare and affirm that I will well and truly serve the Queen in the Office of Constable, with fairness, integrity, diligence and impartiality, upholding fundamental human rights and according equal respect to all people; and that I will, to the best of my power, cause the peace to be kept and preserved and prevent all offences against people and property; and that while I continue to hold the said office I will to the best of my skill and knowledge discharge all the duties thereof faithfully according to the law.
This morning sees the opening for business of the new Serious Organised Crime Agency – though it officially began existence on April 1st, it is no joke – whose spokesman was interviewed on the Today programme this morning.
He proudly stated that because its personnel will not take the Police Oath they would therefore be able to adopt ‘new and exciting’ methods. So what is to be sacrificed?
The same interview made clear that ‘once you are on their books you will be watched for life’.
Agents of SOCA will be empowered to operate without marking or uniform anywhere in the world. They are to be regarded as an intelligence service, permitted and encouraged to do anything within the law to (in the Home Office’s favourite phrase) ‘bear down on’ their targets. But the intelligence services don’t have powers of arrest or to compel cooperation. They cannot direct other law enforcement agencies or commandeer their facilities. The SOCA-man can.
Agents may operate in secret. And they may exercise any of the the powers of police, customs officers, revenue inspectors (though not bound by their rigorous code of impartiality and confidentiality either), or immigration officials. SOCA officials have the capacity to demand information from a vast variety of sources without judicial warrant, under statutes ranging from the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 to the Identity Cards Act 2006, and pass it on to whomsoever it chooses. It is a crime to fail to report to it a transaction you ought to have known was suspicious, even if you are a lawyer and asked to advise a client on a transaction. It can deputise – ‘designate’ – people freely to exercise its powers, and form ad hoc investigation teams it is an offence to obstruct. ‘Anything within the law’ is getting to be a very broad category indeed.
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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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