Over on White Rose I have put up some remarks by Josie Appleton of Spiked On-Line regarding ID Cards. To which all I can add is… yeah!
And while you are at it, you might like to check out Trevor Mendham’s worthy anti-ID cards campaign on iCan.
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Compulsory state ID cards are a monstrous assault on individual liberty, as well as useless in protecting us from the increasingly sophisticated terror groups who threaten us. That much is clear. So here’s a question. At every possible occasion, we should ask Conservative MPs, including new party leader, Michael Howard, whether his party would abolish any such compulsory ID scheme put into place by the current Labour government. Similarly, selection committees for prospective parliamentary candidates should be urged to select those who pledge to reverse any ID card law. Of course, when he was Home Secretary in the 1990s, Howard proposed ID cards, and his record on civil liberties is, to put it mildly, dismal. But he has a chance to repent, to start anew. So to repeat the challenge – Tories – stand up and fight the ID card. November 14th, 2003 | 40 comments - (Comments are closed)
 In the comment section of David Carr‘s article here on Samizdata.net called Government Property, one of the commenters, Tim Haas, suggested the inimitable Dissident Frogman should come up with a suitable graphic… and indeed he has! 
click for larger image November 14th, 2003 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
A question for all those people who support the introduction of a national ID card scheme. Cattle get tagged.  And slaves get branded.  Which one are you? November 12th, 2003 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Today the Home Secretary, David Blunkett pushes on with his ‘scheme’ to introduce identity cards to Britain despite considerable opposition from two senior Cabinet colleagues, Gordon Brown and Jack Straw. But Tony’s behind him, so they don’t count. Natch. It might be amusing to watch the man’s pathetic stumble down the Orwellian path, if not for the fact that his totalitarian impulses have a profound impact on freedom and life in this country. And, of course, his actions do nothing to address immigration and welfare fraud, two of the poster-issues for Big Blunkett’s campaign. Not that I want him to do anything about that either, apart from to get the f*** out of that too. But I digress. The Telegraph article linked above talks about unveiled plans for a new national identity card with his [Blunkett’s] most forceful argument yet in favour of the scheme. I would expect them to reproduce or at least hint at the ‘most forceful argument yet’ in the article. This is all I found:
Indeed, that is so not Big Brother, you Big Blunkett. White Rose has a post or two about this as well as a link to the official Home Office document (pdf). November 11th, 2003 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
This may seem a minor thing. Two Florida student organizations faced the possibility their floats might not be allowed to take part in this year’s Homecoming Parade. It is not as if they were Animal House’s. One was a Young Republican group with a toppleable statue of Saddam Hussein. The others were Christian students with Jesus as their co-pilot… or at least their float topping. So did they accept the requirements of Political Correctness and go meekly to their re-education in Cultural Sensitivity? Did they demonstrate and block the street to the school? Spray paint red liberation slogans on the school windows? Nope. They called the Orlando based Liberty Council and threatened the school with a law suit. Saddam will be toppling and Jesus saving at the Philips High School Homecoming Parade, as scheduled. Freedom Is For Everyone. November 6th, 2003 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
It may be a little thing, but I’ll take my good news where I can get it.
Fight the power, brother!  November 4th, 2003 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
For reasons I cannot even begin to adequately explain, the gatherings of the increasingly angry and militant pro-hunt movement conjours up ‘spaghetti western’ images in my head; the brooding silence, the tumbleweed, the flinty, menacing stares and the ‘man’s-gotta-do-what-a-man’s-gotta-do’ atmosphere of grim resolve. Yes, somewhere out in merciless, sun-baked badlands, guns are being greased and cheroots are being lit. The Hunting Clan is fixin’ for a showdown:
Alright, it is actually the middle of the verdant English countryside, but you get the gist. Having failed in their appeals to reason, common sense and principle, the hunters are still threatened with a government prohibition that will eradicate a centuries-old tradition and the way of rural life that has grown up around it. They are being ‘run out of town’ for no better reason than that they are perceived as an easy target for a government that wants to score cultural ‘brownie points’ with the metropolitan elite. So the hunters have decided that they are not going to be such an easy target after all. I do not see what else they can do. It is fight or die and they have chosen the former:*
While the language is temperate, the intention is unambiguous: they intend a campaign of civil disobedience. It is an open and explicit challenge to the authority of the British government. What started as protest has become insurrection. It is still not clear whether the government will press ahead with the abolition of hunting in England and Wales (the ban has already passed into law in Scotland). But, if they do, and these people are good to their pledge, then they are quite capable of making life very difficult indeed for the authorities. In effect, a low-level civil war will be waged in the English countryside. Regardless of whether or not that scenario comes to pass, I get the feeling that the hunters have started something that will have consequences in the future. The Labour government’s sustained attacks on rural England have led to an awful lot of people getting angry, getting political and getting organised and of such activism are revolutionary movements born. I have no idea how long it will take or what it will become but I do strongly suspect that the countryside movement will metastasise into something much broader and wider than the issue of fox-hunting. [*The link is to the homepage of the Hunting Declaration where sympathisers can download a copy of the Declaration to sign and send in with or without a donation to the cause.] November 2nd, 2003 | 76 comments - (Comments are closed)
Londoners are to be asked what they think about using force to prevent people smoking in ‘public’ places (meaning privately owned places to which members of the general public may choose to enter… or not enter). I do not smoke, though I did puff on a Havana recently, and I generally do not like smoke filled rooms. However, I do not have anyone holding a gun to my head forcing me to go into a smoke filled room against my will or compelling me to take employment with someone who allows people to smoke on their private property (such as a restaurant or bar owner). And yet millions of people see nothing wrong with legitimising threats of violence against others to force them to not smoke for nothing more than their personal convenience. To take the view that replacing social interaction (such as deciding to walk out of a bar because it is too smoky or quitting your job because you dislike smoky environments) with political interaction, namely agreeing that people can be dragged off to jail by armed men because they smoke in places you would like to enter as a matter of your discretionary ease, is nothing less than taking the view that imposing your convenience by force (and we are not talking prohibiting robbery or murder here) is okay, because anything done via political process is okay. This is what is really meant when people like George Monbiot talk about ‘a more democratic society’… what they really mean is a society in which all interaction is political rather than social. The genius of the US Constitution was not that it brought forth democracy, albeit one which countenanced slavery (for Britain was also a democracy of sorts in 1776), it was that at its core the revolutionaries tried to place whole swathes of civil society simply off-limits to political interaction… such as free speech, the means of self defence, being secure in your property etc. It recognised that liberty can only exist within the context of a functioning extended civil society, which means the messy melee of free association and disassociation, private ownership, trade and freely entered into contract, actions constrained and encouraged by social imperatives and opprobrium, rather than the stern violence backed impositions of politically derived law. For a minarchist such as myself, I see a role for democratic politics as a means of constraining the minimal state that even I concede is required to keep the barbarians from the gates of civilization. Yet until democratic politics is once more seen as underpinning a free republic and not an end in and of itself, most politics must seen as a baleful thing and the people who practice it professionally as legislators little different from Mafia Dons dispensing patronage amongst the people under their ‘protection’ In many places across the Anglosphere, civil society is dying under the cumulative pressure of decades of regulatory statism. “There ought to be a law against it” comes to the lips of anyone who dislikes anything…and yet at the same time the moral authority of states is decaying with trends pointing to ever less people choosing to participate in political processes in an ever more affluent and information rich civilization. This is one of the central contradictions of our modern information age and sooner or later those contradictions will cause something to give in ways that cannot be reliably predicted. October 28th, 2003 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
My friend Ron, a semi-retired gentlemen, who after a working life fairly high on the corporate greasy pole, now pursues several different activities including taking his pedigree dogs to shows and sitting as a magistrate, told me today about a visit he had recently from an employee of his local planning office. I should explain that first he had a visit from the local environmental health department because a lady neighbour of his had complained about the smell of his kennels. Ron has kept fairly rare pedigree dogs for showing for the last fifteen years and he is meticulous about hygiene and cleanliness. His home is in a semi-rural area backing onto some woods and running behind his house is a pathway used by some of the locals as a shortcut. This area is also frequented by foxes and the dog foxes mark their territory with a particularly pungent urine. Apparently when Ron’s bitches are in season the dog foxes make a special effort and spray the whole area thus causing the offending stink. Ron showed the environmental health officer around his kennels and the officer was apparently satisfied that he kept his dogs in a good and healthy manner. However, very shortly after this he was visited by the local planning department. His visitor told him that as he kept more than six dogs at his home he had to apply for change of usage. Ron asked for what usage he should apply and was told he should apply as a breeder. Ron explained that he was not a breeder as he only occasionally had litters and he kept the pick and sold the rest only to what he considered would be good homes. He did not do this as a commercial venture so he was not a breeder. He was told he would still have to apply for change of usage because case law indicated that local town planners could decide for what purpose he used his home and they had decided that having more than six dogs was one of their criteria. (Apparently all homes are granted rights of usage when they are registered and the local planning office can withdraw or alter these rights.) Ron asked how much this application cost and was informed that it was around £250 [note: about $400]. Ron then asked would his application be approved and was told “No” because the local planning office wanted him to appeal so that they could have a test case. The appeal application would cost Ron another £200-£300. And he could still lose the case. Ron resorted in the end to telling his officious visitor that he was a local magistrate and that under the Human Rights Act – and he made up some paragraph – the local planning office was unlikely to win the argument. This seems to have silenced the secret police for the moment, although they may just have decided to pick a softer target. Ron is anxiously awaiting further developments but as he commiserated to me, his council tax went up by nearly 20% this year which is probably paying for more little führers who cannot get a real job. Nick Timms  October 25th, 2003 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
It would seem Tony Blair has finally been sold on David Blunkett’s plans to chain us into perpetual serfdom. Along with the clap-trap flummery, the knocking of the opposition, and the other accoutrements of a Big Government leader under fire, I’m still struggling to believe I heard the following:
A ripple of comfortable applause accompanied this slogan, from the Blessed Leader, at today’s UK Labour Party conference. Welcome to Oceania. September 30th, 2003 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
This strikes me as rather draconian:
Calls to place all internet chat rooms under strict state regulation and control cannot be far off. September 24th, 2003 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
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