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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It’s bad therefore it should be banned. No hesitation, no intervening punctuation. Just add -nne- to bad and you’re there. That’s the meme we have to hack to death.
An article in yesterday’s Sunday Times (News Review, 5.7) spreads this same poisonous little idea, far more poisonous than anything in junk food itself. Junk food, says Medicine Today editor Jerome Burne, is bad for you. It contains too much sugar and screws around with the way your brain cells operate. People who have given groups of children non-junk-food diets have seen remarkable improvements in their behaviour. Ergo corporation chasing American lawyers are launching class actions against junk food makers, and Congress is considering taxing junk food.
That is the kind of legislation Alan Simpson, MP for Nottingham South and chair of the reform group Food Justice, would like to see in this country. “It is time the government took the side of society rather than the food industry,” he says. “I would support a tax on junk food, on sugar or on snack food advertising. That could then fudn effective campaigns to promote healthy eating.”
But what is wrong with simply saying that you think junk food is bad, and saying why, as publicly as you can, if that is what you think? Why do you need government money to say something? Why should people who like junk food and don’t misbehave as a result be hit by the law and by the tax man merely to sort out all those kids who eat badly? I read the article. It had me convinced about everything except the need for the lawmakers to get involved. What’s wrong with that as a general strategy?
Next to this junk article about junk food there’s another one about why sleep is a good thing. (I know. There we all were thinking we didn’t need any.) Presumably they couldn’t think of any laws to pass to make us sleep better. So they just had some advice: sleep better. That’s the way to do these things.
The Labour’s government’s Extradition Bill is a legal obscenity and a dire threat to the liberty of everyone, says the Libertarian Alliance, the radical free market and civil liberties think tank and pressure group.
Libertarian Alliance spokesman Dr. Sean Gabb and Libertarian Alliance Director Dr. Chris R. Tame, say:
“This bill formally applies the EU wide arrest warrant proposals to the UK. What it means, simply and crudely, is that British citizens can be carted off to other European countries on the say so of a foreign judge without the slightest benefit of any legal due process in this country. Moreover, they could be arrested for an array of so-called offences that are not – and never should be – crimes in this country.
In addition to such vague nonsense as “environmental crime” and “computer related” crime the Bill explicitly
allows for the extradition of UK citizens for PC-thought-crimes of “racism and xenophobia”. It is clear that the EU, and this government, is using this phrase in an obscene attempt to smear critics of the EU as “racist” and any advocacy of the virtues of hard-won British liberties as “xenophobia”. Other “crimes” for which British citizens could be deported to Europe include advocating “holocaust denial”, selling Nazi memorabilia and advocating a wide range of unpopular (and sometimes silly, offensive or nasty) opinions – and, of course, plane-spotting. The legal system of Britain, whilst far from perfect, seems a paradise in comparison to the politically corrupt and ruthlessly illiberal Code Napoleon systems of Europe – where you are deemed guilty until proven innocent and can be incarcerated without trial for absurd periods of time.”
Drs. Gabb and Tame conclude:
“If the British government succeeds in passing this tyrannical and obscene legislation it is clear that the social contract has been abrogated in an unprecedented act of treason by our own government. Nothing less than mass civil disobedience and physical resistance by any means necessary is justified by this attempt to allow the abduction and incarceration of British citizens by foreign powers.”
Although I am not an uncritical fan of Lew Rockwell‘s flavour of libertarianism, he has written an excellent article about that most inconsistent of the many conservative intellectual inconsistencies… conscription.
His article about acceptable face of state slavery is on the Lew Rockwell.com site.
It is interesting that some of the same people who claim the United States is the ‘freest country in the world’ seem to have no problem with supporting so many American ways of denying the very concept of self-ownership and replacing it with state ‘social’ ownership rather than ‘several’ property… and even extending to a person’s actual body.
…So what? British Home Secretary David Blunkett has been disarmingly frank about the fact he has had to back down on the horrendous planned extension to the already Draconian Regulation of Investigative Powers Act (RIPA). Some commentators have actually been patting him on the back for his admission that the whole plan was ill conceived .
Yet it should be clear that this is in no way a realisation on his part that he was wrong to try and extend this authoritarian infringement of civil liberties on moral grounds, but rather an admission of a failure to read the political support for such an action.
Blunkett and Blair still do not actually see any ethical/moral problems with such people as local councils and the Food Standards Agency being able to read your e-mails and tap your phone calls. No, their contrite remarks are nothing more than acceptance it was foolish of them to assume they could count on widespread political support for such a move.
These people should be abominated for what they tried to do, regardless of the fact they failed. The government are profoundly authoritarian and if the Tories were smart (which they are not), they would use the vast exposed flank Labour has to make this a key issue… but then of course these are the people who have the likes of Ann Widdecombe and Michael Howard in their ranks so I would not hold my breath if I were you.
At the last two Putney Debates, the ones addressed by Simon Davies of Privacy International on May 10, and by Mark Littlewood of Liberty on June 14, I have heard myself giving a little speech and have liked what I heard. This speech has gone approximately as follows.
Current debate about the proper limits of anti-terrorism, internet snooping, sharing of such information by different government departments, and so on and so forth, is now framed as a conflict between the demands of, on the one hand, the ever more centralised and ever more powerful state, and on the other hand, the freedom and the privacy of the individual. The first is assumed to be necessary for the satisfactory achievement of public safety. The second is presented only as a privately desirable benefit that must inevitably be sacrificed to a lesser or greater degree, the argument being merely about how much of this private benefit should be sacrificed. “Is this a price worth paying?” “Are we paying too big a price?” That an improvement in public safety will be purchased with this price is assumed.
The likes of Simon Davies and Mark Littlewood are both painfully aware that they spend their lives saying “yes but”. “Yes”, protecting the public is indeed important. “But”, we shouldn’t be quite so ready as we seem to be now to sacrifice personal freedom and personal privacy for public safety. Adriana Cronin‘s piece just below this one is also a good example of the kind of fighting-a-losing-battle agonising that I have in mind. And Samizdata’s most recent Slogan of the day also embodied this assumed relationship, which we were urged to defy, but not to disagree with as a false assumption. Once again, safety was presented as a price worth paying, although by including the word “temporary”, Ben Franklin at least hinted at a contrary theory of how things might really be.
I believe that if public safety and liberty continue to be regarded, even (especially!) by libertarians, as things that the people in general are to be asked to choose between, liberty is bound to be the loser.
This dangerous contrast reminds me of an earlier time, somewhat less than a century ago, when liberty was widely regarded as being a private benefit that ought to be sacrificed for economic reasons. Centralised state control of the economy was presented as being essential to achieve the maximum of public prosperity, in much the same way that large convoys were a better way to protect wartime merchant shipping than individually scattered vessels. (By the way, the convoy parallel is not my illustration only. I distinctly remember reading George Bernard Shaw, in a preface to one of his plays I think, using this illustration to make this exact argument.)
There then followed the “Economic Calculation Debate”, in which the likes of Hayek and von Mises did something that they are still not perhaps fully appreciated for. As academics they eventually triumphed. They stated their theoretical objections to centralised economic planning, and enough people in the West were convinced to keep capitalism bumbling onwards, thus enabling it to triumph utterly against centralised economic planning. In short, Mises and Hayek were right, and were proved right. But they also triumphed as propaganda street-fighters. What they did was turn the argument about economics from being freedom-versus-prosperty into freedom-is-necessary-for-prosperity. In order to have yourself an even semi-satisfactory twentieth century economy, you had to have freedom, if not for political stirrers then at least in the form of “economic freedom”, for people such as businessmen and industrial investors.
I wonder, might the same thing apply to public safety? Is centralised power the answer to achieving the defence of good people against bad people, or is centralised power actually one of the biggest problems? It is now being said, and I’m most definitely one of the ones saying it, that the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington were not completely missed. Quite a lot of people observed various fishy things going on. The problem was that the one almighty, all powerful, all knowing, all seeing Washington Public Protection Apparatus had its single, collective, bureaucratic mind on other things.
But suppose that the power to act had been as dispersed as the power to observe. Consider those people who picked up those vital stories that were actually not acted upon by the great Washington Security Monster, about strange Saudi Arabians taking flying lessons but being indifferent to the usually somewhat essential art of actually landing an airplane. Suppose that those people had been allowed simply to announce, perhaps to their local media, that these guys sure were behaving strangely, and suppose they’d urged the local media hacks to chase the story up. Hey, what are you guys doing? Who are you? What are your real names? Would those strange Saudis have had such an easy ride, so to speak? I think not. I think it distinctly possible that they might have called the whole thing off.
You’ll never prove this kind of thing (although you can illustrate your generalised theory/suspicions) merely with individual anecdotes. What’s needed is a transformed theoretical framework, a repainted big picture, a different and utterly contrary way of looking at things to the way things are looked at now. A new meta-context.
The widely reported attempt by the state to extravagantly expend the list of state bodies with access to e-mail and telephone intercepts has been withdrawn in the face of strong cross-party opposition from politicians with a modicum of respect for at least the fiction of civil liberties.
However it is very important that people not judge the government just by the laws it has passed but by the laws it has tried to pass. The Regulation of Investigative Powers Act (RIPA) is bad enough as it stands without the latest astonishing power grab by the state, yet it shows once again if anyone doubted it that no matter what the state says about its modest intentions when taking upon itself new powers, the belly of Leviathan is filled with an insatiable hunger for more.
Bob Ainsworth, the Home Office minister is using The Big Lie technique to claim this is not in fact about crushing civil liberties but ‘protecting’ us all, so do not kid yourself that the advocate of a Panopticon Britain will give up so easily. What we need protection against is the British state or we will soon have a system of pervasive surveillance and intrusion that rivals that of the INS and IRS in the United States. Tony Blair was not joking when he promised to bring us ‘joined up government’. The line being drawn between those dots being joined up runs through the centre of our lives.
 When the state watches you, dare to stare back
Where can I lay my hands on a copy of the Devil’s Dictionary? Is it a shortcoming on my part that I have never encountered this particular lexicon before? Maybe, maybe not but that would explain why its definition of the Common Law as ‘the whim of judges’ came as such a revelation to me.
Having had the benefit (or otherwise) of a legal education, I have always subscribed to the view that the Common Law was a body of law consisting primarily of judicial decisions based on custom and precendent. I know this cannot be too far wide of the mark because it bears an uncanny resemblance to the definition of the Common Law according to Websters.
You see, Antoine, there is nothing ‘whimsical’ about the process at all. In fact, it developed, from the ground up I might add, in order to preclude whimsy and provide certainty. Your charge that many judges are ‘social justice creeps’ is most certainly true but I would hazard that this is a problem which is generational rather than systemic. Those warming the benches in our Courts now were manning the student barricades in 1968 and they have simply completed their long march through the institutions with their imprimaturs largely intact. This is a problem, granted, but it is a universal problem because for sanctuary from judges we beg the mercy of politicians in parliament and dare I suggest that there might be the odd ‘social justice creep’ in there as well, or should that thought perish? Besides whilst you are free to look up any relevant Statute, what, may I ask, is stopping you from reading law reports for the precedents?
To blame Britain’s litigious culture on the Common Law is rather like blaming the poor performance of the NHS on tax cuts. Rather it is State Law or Statute (or Napoleonic Code) synthesised by politicians and handed down to us like the miserable serfs we are, that has stomped all over so many of the sound, long -established Common Law principles that used to protect us from frivolous or vexatious claims as well as nationalising lawyers and judges alike and rendering them mere amplifiers of state policy.
When a burglar sues a homeowner because he tripped over their carpet, we are rightly outraged but you should blame the Occupiers Liability Act. Similarly, when an entrepreneur is hauled in front of a tribunal and forced to pay a hefty fine for failing to provide adequate childcare facilities or a sufficiently happy work environment it is not the Common Law at work, rather it is the various Employment Acts. And would it be indelicate of me to point out that the phalanx of Anti-Discrimination Acts have given birth to not just a litigious culture but an entire (taxpayer-funded, I might add) grievance industry?
Nobody, to my knowledge, has made the absurd claim that the Common Law would ‘automatically sort everything out’. Nothing will ‘automatically sort everything out’. But I would venture that the Common Law was more organic, more reasonable and better fitted to serve a healthy and prosperous civil society than the instruments of social engineering that have largely replaced it. Was it fallible? Yes. Name me a system that isn’t.
‘Judge Ling‘ from Ally McBeal is no more ridiculous than her more pompous colleagues, but both are the products of the common law. One of the sillier libertarian/conservative claims is that ‘the common law’ will automatically sort things out. The heck it will!
The Devil’s Dictionary defines the Common Law as ‘the whim of judges’. As most judges are either social justice creeps or doddering fools it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the common law ‘discovered’ or ‘interpreted’ by such people is as much a threat to freedom than the drafted statutes are. Except that at least one can look up the statutes, whereas only lawyers have the time and means to ‘interpret’ precedent.
Scrapping written legislation in favour of common law solutions is only a good idea for professional lawyers and full-time litigants: the sort of people who walk on cracked pavements hoping to trip up, chip a bone and sue.
Libertarians who want ‘the common law’ and decry ‘the litigation culture’ are like vegetarians asking for steak tartare.
This letter not just to, but in, today’s Daily Telegraph is worth reproducing in full. Its relevance to earlier posts here about “joined up government” is obvious.
Re: Government assists sinister Euro plans
Date: 13 June 2002
SIR – The Government intends to give public sector bodies the capacity to find out what we access on the internet, who we e-mail and who we phone.
This is part of a broader drive by the European Union to give its fledgling police force, Europol, the capacity to accumulate information on all EU citizens. The Europol Convention gives that organisation the right to keep a database of information on any individual, including “sexual orientation, religion or politics”. Europol was also charged last August by the Council of Ministers with adding the names of “troublemakers” to the Schengen Information System, so they could be “tracked and identified” with a view to preventing them leaving their home countries shortly before major EU summits.
Under the existing EU Convention on Mutual Legal Assistance, Europol and any national police force can request information on any citizen living in another member country. The legislation being introduced by the Government will greatly assist this sinister process.
On May 30, the European Parliament voted for a new directive granting the police and others the powers referred to above. The Labour leadership instructed its MEPs to support a measure that, until recently, the group had rhetorically opposed. Only Arlene McCarthy abstained. The Tories also voted for it, with the honourable exception of Lord Stockton. To their credit, the Greens, the Lib Dems and UKIP voted against it.
From:
Marc Glendening, Democracy Movement, London SW6
Marc Glendening was one of the speakers at that Liberty Conference we’ve been going on about. According to what people said to Chris Tame, who was also a speaker but didn’t hear Marc’s talk, it was extremely good.
For as long as I can remember, every change of importance imposed upon Britain by its political rulers has been (a) something to do with European integration, but (b) announced without the European Union being so much as mentioned. This joined-up government crap seems to be no exception to that rule.
Here we go again… ever-expanding government surveillance powers and reduction of privacy as part of the drive for greater security. This time it is the US government digging deeper into the Web to capture and corral more of our digital detritus in the name of fighting terrorism.
The new FBI guidelines currently examined by the Senate Judiciary Committee would give federal investigators new licence to mine publicly available databases and monitor Web use. Civil liberties advocates warn that last week’s proposal is the latest step along a worrying path back to the 1950s and ’60s – days when investigators compiled dossiers on innocent American citizens based on their religious and political practices. FBI guidelines from Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI director Robert Mueller would allow field agents to gather information outside of criminal investigations, relaxing regulations set in the 1970s. Those rules, named after then-Attorney General Edward Levi, barred the FBI from attending political meetings unless they had a reasonable suspicion that a crime was being planned.
The new rules, by contrast, would authorise field agents to attend public meetings freely and request warrants with less interference from the main office. In addition, they would allow the FBI to monitor public Internet sites, libraries and religious institutions. Jim Dempsey, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology protests:
“I hate to be in a position of telling people ‘don’t go online and speak’ or ‘watch what you say,’ but you have to take from this that on an arbitrary basis, the FBI is going to be tagging people as terrorists based on what they say online,”
Well, actually, I am not sure what is wrong with that. Your mother told you (or should have told you) not to speak to strangers and be careful about what you say in public. And the Web is a public place whether because of its interconnected structure or because no communication is entirely secure and therefore private. I do want to be able to say what I want and where I want, as that is the most immediate and tangible demonstration of my individual and personal liberty. But at the same time, I also want the government that takes my money in order to ‘protect’ me to pay attention to any communication containing information about an event that could jeopardise my security, life and property.
So the same reforms can be seen as a long overdue end to restrictions that have hobbled investigators and denied them access to research tools available to anyone with an Internet connection. Intelligence failures in the FBI and CIA have come under the spotlight (and fire) amid new questions over who knew what in advance of 11 September suicide hijackings, which left more than 3,000 people dead.
I can imagine the phalanx of hard-core anti-statist libertarians bristling with indignation at the mere suggestion that I might consider any legislation that expands law enforcement’s ability to monitor communications anything but an infringement on privacy and individual liberty. Despite my sound libertarian track record on these issues (see related articles below), I would like to explore this issue further.
 It seems to me that the problem is not merely removing restrictions on investigators to monitor, gather and analyse information. Surely, amassing and making use of publicly available information with research tools available to anyone does not constitute abuse of powers …or does it? The difference between Joe Bloggs carrying out his equivalent of obsessive monitoring of other people’s communications and the FBI’s agent J.B.1984 is that whilst the former cannot do much with it (unless he is a cyber-freak villain in a Hollywood movie), the latter has access to considerable resources and monopoly on force that enable him to act on it. On the other hand, isn’t that what the US citizens are paying him to do?!
The issue here is not just what information is collected, by whom and for what purpose but the nature of the state and its authority. We don’t trust the state and its agencies to use the information for the designated purpose, i.e. our security and protection. We fear that information will instead be used for other purposes, namely, to increase the state’s hold on its citizens. There is no guarantee that after the crucial information about the terrorist plans has been extracted from the monitored data, the information about our private lives, incomes, interests etc, will be discarded. National security has always been used as a cloak for such exercise and it was mainly the US judicial system embedded firmly in the US Constitution that provided some recourse for the most flagrant breaches of individual liberty by the state.
So what is to be done, campaigned for or against, and posted on this blog? The usual stuff – discussions about the state and the legitimacy of its authority and powers, the limited or no government and most of all how the state has expanded beyond any justification. And so although I am willing to grant the state legitimate authority for the purpose of external (army) and internal (police) security in theory, I do not trust the state in its present practice. I will therefore continue writing about the issues of privacy, security and its impact on individual and civil liberties.
When the state watches you, dare to stare back
Yesterday four of us stuffed a Libertarian Alliance mailing, chez moi. It will be going out second class mail (don’t ask), on Wednesday (Monday and Tuesday are Golden Jubilee Bank Holidays). Libertarian Alliance publications are written and edited so that they can stand any amount of delay, so I’ll tell you about them when Sean Gabb’s computer is back in business (British Telecom are messing him around royally) and we have them up on the LA website.
However, one of the fliers added to the mailing, about a conference next Saturday organised by Liberty (formerly the National Council for Civil Liberties) will hit hall carpets a lot later than would have been desirable.
This conference is bizarrely entitled “Human Rights v Civil Liberties”. What’s the “v” about? I guess by “Human Rights” they mean robbing people to pay for other peoples’ education, hospital treatment, etc. But the worst things about the conference are that you have to pay GBP35 to get in, and that it starts at 10 am (lasting until 4 pm.) That’ll keep the riff-raff away, including me. Maybe Tom Burrroughes – wearing his Reuters hat? – can talk his way in for a better price, and at a time to suit himself.
The “Workshop” subjects give you the flavour: “Hunting, Shooting, Fishing: Neglected Freedoms?”, How do Libertarians defend equality?”, “The European Union: A threat to our freedom?”, “Libertarian Right v Liberal Left: Insurmountable differences?” Speakers include: Louise Christian (Christian Fisher Solicitors), Claire Fox (Institute of Ideas), Mark Glendening (Democracy Movement) , Lord Peter Goldsmith QC (the Attorney General), Michael Gove (Times columnist), Imran Khan (solicitor), Claude Moraes (Labour MEP), Professor Conrad Russell (Kings College London), Steven Norris (former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party), Rabinder Singh (Matrix Chambers), and John Wadham of Liberty itself.
NCCL, as it was, was started by Bolsheviks for their own entirely Bolshevik reasons, and remains overwhelmingly left-of-centre. But as you may have noticed, three of those four workshop subjects push libertarian buttons, and they are apparently making genuine attempts to extricate themselves from the tag of being Blairite poodles. I asked Sean Gabb if he was going? “Oh no, a bunch of lefties chattering amongst themselves.” And in truth that is probably what it will be. Nevertheless, they are trying. (The Libertarian Alliance is affiliated to them, for its own reasons.) But what do you do if your side is now the ruling class and hence the people now most vigorously violating civil liberties? What do you do if you have friends of friends whom you are now supposed to be campaigning against? What if the man who is now stitching up asylum seekers or fox-hunters came to your wedding?
Libertarian Alliance Director Chris Tame will also be one of the speakers at this conference, so he at least will know some of what transpires. Marc Glendening, a long-time anti-EU campaigner, is also a cordial acquaintance. Maybe I’ll be able to extract something in writing from one of them about it all.
If you’re interested, ring 020 7378 3667, or email zoe@liberty-human-rights.org.uk
Don’t know how to tie your own shoelaces? Just what is the proper way to make a cup of coffee? Should a person sleep standing up or lying down? Having difficulty finding your own arse even though you’re using both hands a map? Don’t know how to barbecue sausages? Well, fret no longer because HM Government is here to help you.
“The Agency’s food hygiene campaign is going alfresco during summer 2002 with a 30-second TV ad spelling out the risks of not cooking barbecue food properly.
This should come as a blessed relief to anyone planning a barbecue this summer. After all, in a country where the mere act of lighting a charcoal briquette is enough to bring on a monsoon, only the hopelessly naive and terminally idiotic can possibly be planning a barbecue in the first place.
‘The Agency’. It sounds so sinister, doesn’t it? That’s because it is. The Food Standards Agency was established in the wake of the BSE crisis to reassure a jittery and highly risk-averse British public that the government was doing its bit to protect them from the evil bugs lurking in their own fridges. Which means, of course, that they do less of their own bit and, thanks to greater dependency and bureaucratic empire-building, today’s patronising message will become tomorrow’s law. I see Sausage Inspectors in our future.
It’s just another brick in the Napoleonic Wall behind which our collective goose is slowly being cooked.
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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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