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.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Spiked carries a fascinating, if frightening, piece by Charles Pither, a private doctor, on the invasive requirements of galloping regulation on those working in the healthcare sector. Just being able to check and list their employees (and their own) slave-number online will no doubt come as a relief.
What I hadn’t appreciated, until the man came to make his inspection, was all the personal data that we needed to keep for our staff (in a locked cabinet, of course). Two references, a recent photo, a copy of their passport, copies of their qualification certificates, a curriculum vitae with explanations for any gaps, a copy of their contract and job description.
Including the cleaner? Yes, including the cleaner. ‘It’s not me who makes the regulations’, said the man from the HCC. ‘The onus is on you to comply with the statutory requirements as set out in the standards of care regulations.
Read the whole thing, as they say.
What’s most disturbing is how suddenly these bureaucratic personal checks have sprung up, and how it has happened with no resistence. The Health Care Commission was created by the Health and Social Care (Community Health and Standards) Act 2003, and started its interfering on April 1st 2004. The Criminal Records Bureau was established under the Police Act 1997, but its functions have been rapidly widened, in legislation on children, education, financial services, and health, but also notably by a series of Exceptions Orders to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Acts that have made the idea of a spent conviction (an old, minor one you need not acknowledge) pretty much obsolete. The operative Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations are dated 2002.
Never mind 1890, it would be nice to get the British state back to the size it was in 1990.
Here is an interesting contrast between the UK and the US.
The Boston Globe, a Democrat newspaper in a Democrat town, is attacking President Bush’s Supreme Court nominee, John Roberts. Nothing particularly exciting or shocking about that. You might not agree with them, but it’s legitimate, and that is how things are done there.
What intrigues me is the manner of the most recent attack:
Roberts, as Reagan aide, backed national ID card, yells the headline.
It is plainly the Globe’s assumption that its readers will take this is a sign of a fundamentally illiberal personality, not fit to be entrusted on the bench with the defence of American liberties. British popular assumptions, even in the liberal press, have a long way to go. It is still not appreciated much here that state control of personal identity is a big deal, never mind that its fans are poisionous advocates of evil.
While I am inclined to think that flat taxes are not as easy in practice as they are cracked up to be, and I would in any case prefer to scrap personal income tax altogether, a radically simplified tax system would benefit everyone but tax-collectors and accountants. (Even the holy skoolznospitles, and the policemen doing £80,000 of overtime a year, would approve of more net revenue from the same tax burden.)
However, Revenue officials in Britain are trying to censor even the discussion of flat tax:
According to yesterday’s account in the Daily Telegraph
The original version of secret work by officials posted on the Treasury website – after freedom of information request – pooh-poohed the claims of flat tax advocates as “misleading”.
But large parts of the work had been removed. The complete version reveals that most, but not all, of the elements which were blacked out present compelling arguments in favour of the flat tax.
Some ‘freedom of information’!
The Telegraph concluded that since such political excisions must have been at the orders of the Chancellor, Gordon Brown MP, but today this is officially denied in a letter from the permanent civil servant who heads HM Treasury:
The Chancellor had never seen any version of the released documents and no minister had any involvement in the decisions regarding their release. To suggest otherwise is completely false.
Should we conclude that the elected Government is being kept in the dark about its policy options too?
Next time someone tells me that Tony Blair does not run the country, Gordon Brown does, I reserve the right to be skeptical. Government by officials, for officials, subject to no law but Parkinson’s, is nearer the mark.
There is a gap that is rarely acknowledged between the nominal powers of officialdom and their actual powers in practice. Unless we are vigilant, and the rules are tightly drawn powers will be (not may be, will be) used for broader purposes than those for which they are granted. What’s more ways will be found to use the leverage of one power to enhance another. New police powers do not merely add to the force of those that already exist, they multiply and magnify them.
Last night an example of systematic police intimidation was proudly displayed as PR for the police on the most popular British TV channel (ITV1, not the BBC).
The program (“Inside Crime”) was one of those encouraging people to assist with current investigations and appealing for witnesses to various murders and robberies. Fine. I don’t think I have a problem with that: seems like a genuine public service. But of a 25 minute programme something like a fifteen minute segment was devoted to cameras accompanying police in Dartford as they “cracked down” on drugs and illegal working on one evening.
A sergeant swaggered around in a head mic proudly demonstrating how new technology allows the detection of traces of cocaine in pub lavatories. It was then revealed that “with the cooperation of landlords and managers” that night everybody wishing to enter a pub or club in the centre of Dartford had to submit to police swabbing their hands for drugs as a condition of entry. Those who tested postive were then formally searched under “reasonable suspicion”.
The swabbing itself didn’t count as a search because it was “voluntary”. Thus is the law perverted by those who are supposed to uphold it. The programme was silent on what happened to those who got as far as the entrance to a bar but refused the entry procedure. I’d be interested to know.
→ Continue reading: The power wedge
I gather from the front of The Sun on this morning’s news-stands that there is some kind of scandal in relation to the umpteenth series of the voyeur’s soap opera. One of the competitors, an exceedingly pretty young women called Makosi, turns out to be an actress. She may have been acting at some point, possibly in covert collaboration with the producers of the show.
You could have knocked me down with a feather. If they are selecting people for good-looks, exhibitionism, emotional incontinence, and absence of that untelevisual thing, interior life, then surely a crew of poets, pharmacists, dustmen and bankers is more likely than actors? And they are bound spontaneously to generate gossip for gay men and teenage girls without outside intervention. You only have to retell the uproarious stories of the last seven weeks at the office to realise that.
At first sight, this story is incomprehensible.
Secret terror courts considered
Special courts sitting in secret for pre-trial hearings in terror cases are being considered by the Home Office.
Forget the justice of the process–secret hearings with Home Office-selected advocates and judges–for a moment. What would the value of this be? If an actual trial must still take place under normal conditions, what’s wrong with normal committal proceedings, which rarely require much in the way of presentation of evidence?
There must be a prosecutorial advantage to be had, now or later, or the Home Office would not consider it. Is this a staging post to something more? A piece of impossible kite-flying for some bait-and-switch? Or is it a way to evade other procedural safeguards?
(A speculative example of the last: The Special Judge says there’s a case to answer. The accused is remanded in custody. A trial will take place when the prosecution is ready. Reporting restrictions are in place, to avoid prejudicing a future trial. But further evidence-gathering takes a very long time. In effect one has indeterminate imprisonment with a radically lowered burden of proof. There may be no opportunity to test the evidence. But there can be no public disquiet. No one will care, because next to no one will know–and those who do will be bound to secrecy.)
As a scientist and a practical man, I’m against manned-space flight; as a human being I’m in favour.
– Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, interviewed on Today this morning
One commentator this week suggested that Mr Blair’s administration is taking its anti-terrorism policy from Samizdata. I don’t think so. A copy of The Times for March 3rd 2009 has fallen into my hands:
Terror site closed down: Police hold 17
By Daniel Tendler, Stewart O’Neill and Sean McGrory
EVERY member of an international extremist group based in Britain was under arrest last night after an extraordinary day of police operations stretching from one of the smartest parts of West London to the United States and Australia. Charges are expected to be brought soon under the Incitement to Terrorism Act 2006, though police have up to three months to question suspects. The FBI is interviewing more suspects and has raided the group’s internet provider.
While police are jubilant following a series of successful armed raids across London, and have seized large amounts of terrorist property including a number of computers, they and their colleagues are still hunting for associates of the “sinister and heavily-armed” group. The organisation, known as “Samizdata”, runs a website showing members receiving weapons training abroad and frequently carries approving statements about armed resistence to the state–even its logo shows an automatic weapon menacingly supported on radical textbooks. The website has been shut down and all visitors for the past 2 years will be questioned, say Special Branch.
→ Continue reading: The Day After Tomorrow
Lords Chancellors are political appointees, and certainly should not be idealised. But our Dear Leader is widely believed not to know or care about the past. So that the following dialogue is fiction should not be a problem.
…
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that.
More: Oh? And when the last law was down–and the Devil turned round on you–where would you hide? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.
— Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons
Or is it more important to look tough and caution be damned?
I implied here that I would let Samizdata readers know when a new, more inclusive 😉 anti-ID-card pledge was up and running. It is now.
We are lucky to have the charming former stand-up Franky Ma as the pledge leader. As the covers of more consumer magazines, in more countries, than it is comfortable to imagine attest, you cannot go far wrong associating an attractive young woman with your product.
You can give your word to support the nearly 11,000 ID refuseniks here and you can support NO2ID itself, as ever, here.
‘Just let us put in place our hierarchy of rights. The right to live. The right to go to work on the underground. The right to have an ID card. The right not to have data abused.’
– Charles Clarke to MEPs before the second bombing, talking up data retention.
Freedom has no natural place in a “hierarchy of rights”. Freedom used to be what was left over when other people’s rights to their choices were taken into account. But the priesthood seems keen to ensure that there are “rights” everywhere, with no space for anything else, and that “rights” are not options, they are compulsions. Lenin would be proud.
“From a certain point of view, the journalist, the politician, the police chief, and the terrorist can be seen as locked in a macabre waltz of the mind, no less distorting for being unconscious. We should not join that dance.”
– Matthew Parris in The Times
Indeed. What is it that causes skepticism here about the motives of the state and its agents to collapse as soon as Islamist violence is involved? I really want to know.
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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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