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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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A downside of laws against “misinformation”

· Civil liberty, Law & Regulation

You can rest assured this is true because there is a law guaranteeing it that no-one would dare violate.

October 26th, 2024 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)

Reminder: the prohibitionists never give up

· Aus/NZ affairs · Civil liberty, Law & Regulation · Environment · Health & medical · Self ownership · UK affairs

The news today is full of stories that laud the proposal in the Tobacco and Vapes Bill to ban disposable vapes. The first link takes you to a Guardian report, the second to an almost identical BBC report that says,

“Disposable vapes are difficult to recycle and typically end up landfill, where their batteries can leak harmful waste like battery acid, lithium, and mercury into the environment, the government said.

Batteries thrown into household waste also cause hundreds of fires in bin lorries and waste-processing centres every year.”

I am glad that the BBC has discovered that lithium-ion batteries can cause fires, but I think their focus on the tiny little batteries in disposable vapes might be missing a bigger problem. A report on the British Safety Council website says that,

“Batteries that power electric vehicles such as e-bikes, e-scooters and electric cars were responsible for almost three fires a day across the UK last year, according to data collected by [Business Insurer] QBE from freedom of information requests sent to UK fire services.”

After quoting the Circular Economy Minister (did you know we had one of those?) about how disposable vapes need to be banned to discourage “this nation’s throwaway culture”, the BBC finally gets round to talking about the original reasons that prompted Rishi Sunak’s government to table this legislation and Sir Keir Starmer’s government to continue with it:

“It is already illegal to sell any vape to anyone under 18, but disposable vapes – often sold in smaller, more colourful packaging than refillable ones – are a “key driver behind the alarming rise in youth vaping”, the previous government said when it first set out its plan.

The number of people who vape without ever having smoked has also increased considerably over recent years, driven mostly by young adults.

Vaping is substantially less harmful than smoking, but it has not been around for long enough for its long-term risks to be known, according to the NHS.”

So, vaping is certainly less harmful than smoking, but it might not be completely harmless. The reason I am confident that it is largely harmless is that vaping has, in fact, been around for twenty years at least, and if they had solid evidence of harm they would have told us faster than an e-bike explodes. Personally, I think people have the right to make their own judgement of risk against pleasure in their own lives, and hence should be allowed to buy e-bikes, disposable vapes, non-disposable vapes, and tobacco.

The Sunak/Starmer government disagrees. The long title of the Tobacco and Vapes Bill, as stated on the Parliamentary website, is “A Bill to Make provision about the supply of tobacco, vapes and other products, including provision prohibiting the sale of tobacco to people born on or after 1 January 2009; and to enable product requirements to be imposed in connection with tobacco, vapes and other products.”

The British law is modelled after a similar age-discriminatory tobacco prohibition law passed in New Zealand in 2022 when Jacinda Ardern was prime minister: “New Zealand passes legislation banning cigarettes for future generations.” It was reversed by Christopher Luxon’s government. We should be so lucky.

October 24th, 2024 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)

Liberal Authoritarianism – the British State expands

· Civil liberty, Law & Regulation · Privacy & Panopticon · Self ownership · UK affairs

The article titled Liberal Authoritarianism from Uncibal should serve as a foundational understanding of where not just the British state is but to a fair extent much of the Western World.

Starmer, it is plain, is one of those socialists for whom the appeal of socialism lies not so much in its amelioration of poverty, but rather in its provision of a rationale for the imposition of a perfect order on society – the construction of a ‘great social machine’, as Sydney Webb once put it, within which every individual must be made to fit. There is the touch of the Javert about him; he is one of those men who, all things considered, prefers the stars, who ‘know [their] place in the sky’, to people, who have an irritating tendency to exhibit free will. There is also in the air around him a quality that CS Lewis called ‘Saturnocentric’, which Michael Ward summarised as a combination of the ‘astringent, stern, tough, unmerry, uncomfortable, unconciliatory, and serious’. It is no surprise at all that Starmer should once have made his living as England & Wales’ Director of Public Prosecutions: this is a man who would take to the political task of steering public policy regarding criminal prosecutions like a duck to water.

It should also be no surprise that Starmer was once a human rights lawyer. Some have found it difficult to square these two aspects of his character. Silkie Carlo, the prominent civil liberties campaigner, for instance, remarked in a recent interview concerning the use of live facial recognition how strange she found it that Sir Keir, who purportedly is a human rights advocate, would embrace a technology that seems almost designed to usher a Chinese total surveillance system into the UK.

But this confusion is based on a complete misunderstanding of what human rights are all about.

– David McGrogan.

I heartily recommend reading the entire linked article as it is penetrating indeed. But I do lament the loss of the term ‘liberal’ to now mean someone intolerant of all unlicenced opinions and behaviours, i.e. to mean someone who is profoundly illiberal.

This excellent article brings two other quotes to mind, one from a certain Italian leader and the other modestly from me.

Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state (Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato)

– Benito Mussolini (speech to Chamber of Deputies – 9 December 1928)

…and…

Socialism must be the most ironic use of language in the history of human linguistics: it is the advocacy of the complete replacement of social interaction with political interaction, the very negation of civil society itself.

– Perry de Havilland

October 18th, 2024 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)

Even China realises that brute state control carries a cost

· Chinese affairs · Civil liberty, Law & Regulation

Well, maybe this is a sign of the times. A Communist dictatorship, which has gone after pesky entrepreneurs such as Jack Ma and many smaller firms, realises that this is bad for business. Who would have imagined that? It is a bit like Lenin realising, in around 1921, that shooting and jailing entrepreneurial people was not smart, so we had the New Economic Policy for a few years until Stalin turned the repression back on to full power.

The question I have, however, is whether this is a temporary change, and bad habits will resume:

China is cracking down on behaviours from law enforcement seen as detrimental to the ordinary function of private businesses, a crucial step in restoring confidence as the country embarks on a whole-of-government effort to ensure a steady, sustainable economic recovery.

– The South China Morning Post ($).

October 11th, 2024 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)

Samizdata quote of the day – free speech threat edition

· Civil liberty, Law & Regulation · Slogans & Quotations

“Today’s censors wield cudgels with the word ‘information’. Content they don’t like they call ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’. The justification is fake. The protection is faux protection. Pretending to protect people from bad information by means of censorship may be called infaux thuggery. The cudgels are hidden, of course, but it is not hard to see through the pretence and discern the underlying message: knuckle under or we will hurt you.

The UK’s Online Safety Act exemplifies infaux thuggery, as does Brazil’s recent action against X (formerly Twitter). The Australian government is dominated by another gang of infaux thugs. The UK, sadly, not only practices infaux thuggery at home, it tutors the world in infaux thuggery.”

– Daniel Klein

October 6th, 2024 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)

We need the state so that…

· Civil liberty, Law & Regulation · Sexuality · UK affairs

Those who suffer injustice can be compensated:

Non-binary customers win compensation for being asked if they are male or female

Financial services firms have been forced to pay hundreds of pounds in compensation to non-binary customers over “discriminatory” application forms.

MoneySuperMarket (MSM), the comparison website, and Transunion, a credit union, were hit with separate complaints because their application forms did not include options for non-binary customers in their gender section.

Both cases were escalated to the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) which awarded the complainants compensation for “distress and disappointment” incurred from the forms.

MSM was ordered to pay £200 to unnamed non-binary customer Mx B who was asked if they were male or female.

And those who commit injustice can be punished:

Council rejects appeal of mother fined £500 for leaving free cabinet out for neighbours

A council has rejected the appeal of a mother who was fined £500 for leaving a free cabinet outside her house for neighbours to take.

Isabelle Pepin, 42, placed the white piece of furniture from Ikea in front of her house in Southbourne, Bournemouth, in August.

However, three weeks later she was given the fly-tipping fine by Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council because she had put it on the pavement.

Both stories come from today’s Telegraph.

Heraclitus said that “The people should fight for their law as for their city wall.” With laws like this, little wonder that decreasing numbers are willing to fight for their city wall.

October 4th, 2024 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)

Sue Gray’s salary is an entirely legitimate subject of political debate

· Civil liberty, Law & Regulation · Historical views · UK affairs

“And when Sue Gray, the former civil service head of “Propriety and Ethics”, having improperly and unethically defected to be his chief of staff, demands a salary larger than his own, Sir Keir gets furious with the journalists who ask him about it. “I don’t believe my staff should be the subject of political debate like this,” he told the BBC.

Though Prime Minister, he seems not to know that it is the first duty of our elected Parliament to question how and why public money is spent.”

– Charles Moore in the Telegraph.

Sue Gray was the civil servant, at the time much lauded for her impartiality, who wrote the “Partygate” report that brought down Boris Johnson. If she had then retired, or stayed in the civil service, or got any other private sector job than the one she did, her place in history as a minor avenging angel would have been secure. But what she actually did was leave the civil service to become Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff. Her failure to declare that she had been in communication with Labour over this job offer while still a civil servant was a breach of civil service rules. Even if it had been within the letter of the rules, it was an obvious breach of their spirit, as more than one angry civil servant has said to me. Of course her salary is up for debate. She did not pass out of politics by going to work for the Labour Party, she passed into it. And her salary in her current position of Downing Street Chief of Staff is paid by the taxpayer.

September 28th, 2024 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)

If you want to destroy confidence in UK elections, censor stuff like this

· Civil liberty, Law & Regulation · Deleted by the Woke Media · Historical views · Media & Journalism · North American affairs · Self defence & Security · Sui generis · UK affairs

I did not expect to see anything like this on a fairly mainstream site like “Conservative Woman”: “Mystery of Andrew Bridgen’s vanishing votes” (Via Sara Hoyt on Instapundit.) Andrew Bridgen, for those not familiar with him, is the former MP for North West Leicestershire. He has had a chequered career. He was expelled from the Conservative Party after criticising the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines. He then joined the Reclaim Party but resigned from it a few months later. He then lost his seat in the 2024 election – which in itself was no surprise, but the spectacular scale of his loss, dropping from 63% of the vote to 3.2%, was unusual.

I said I did not expect to see this piece on the CW website. I would not be entirely surprised if I am soon unable to see it anywhere but Twitter/X. After the US election of 2020, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter (before it was owned by Elon Musk) had a policy of deleting any discussion whatsoever of the possibility of electoral fraud. Even arguments that fraud had not been significant were censored. Most of the UK media followed suit, as it usually does.

If anyone reading this has power or influence over the censorship policies of British media organisations, I humbly beg you not to repeat that mistake. My argument does not depend on taking any view on how many votes Andrew Bridgen got in the UK election of 2024.

When “Stop the Steal” and similar Facebook groups with hundreds of thousands of members were deleted overnight after the American election of 2020, what effect do you think it had on the beliefs of members of those groups? Do you think they concluded that since they could no longer discuss their suspicions, those suspicions must be groundless?

Of course it had the opposite effect. A majority of US voters think it is “likely” that cheating affected the outcome of the 2020 election. That includes 45% of Democrats. The censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story and of the hypothesis that the Covid-19 virus leaked from a laboratory (the first of which is no longer contested and the second of which is accepted as a probable hypothesis by the US and UK governments) only reinforced this.

Censorship destroys trust, and the loss of trust is not limited to the subject being censored. Once people know they are being censored in one thing, they inevitably ask, “What else aren’t they telling us?”

And they can work out that if all accusations of a particular crime are censored, it makes it more likely that that crime will be committed in future.

Related posts here, here and here. In fact, that entire category of “Deleted by the Woke Media” is related.

Edit 25th September: The man who replaced Andrew Bridgen as Conservative candidate in North West Leicestershire, Craig Smith, has responded strongly to the Conservative Woman piece:

Mr Bridgen seems to overestimate the weight of any candidate’s personal vote. In elections most people vote for the party with a personal vote of – somewhere around – a couple of thousand votes for the candidate themselves. It’s arguably why I did marginally better than Conservative candidates in demographically similar constituencies elsewhere, because I had something of a personal vote as a truly local candidate. A personal vote is why Mr Bridgen received around 1,500 votes. To provide Mr Bridgen with a similar example to his own in 2015 Rochdale’s MP, Simon Danczuk, then standing for Labour received 20,961 votes. In 2017, expelled from Labour and and standing as an independent he received 883 votes. Using Mr Danczuk as a base Mr Bridgen could argue that he outstripped expectations!

Mr Smith goes on to say that of course he was not happy with the result – he lost to Labour – but he is convinced it was fair. He then makes some quite detailed observations about electoral procedures, both in general and specifically for that constituency. I thought he came across well. His use of Simon Danczuk in Rochdale as a comparator for assessing whether it is credible for an MP expelled from their party to have such a large drop in votes was reasonable.

That is how it should be done. That is how it should have been done in the US. Don’t forbid discussion, contribute to it. I repeat my plea for there to be no censorship of the claim that the election was rigged against Mr Bridgen.

September 24th, 2024 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)

The strange case of the gender-fluid dachshund

· Arts & Entertainment · Civil liberty, Law & Regulation · Culture Wars · Historical views · How very odd! · Mindless "Inequality" Blather · Sexuality · UK affairs

“Cambridgeshire council admits to discrimination after a woman was labelled transphobic for criticism of a ‘gender-fluid’ dachshund”, reports the Telegraph, with relish.

Tim Sigsworth’s report says that:

A lesbian social worker was harassed by her colleagues after making “non-inclusive and transphobic” comments about a co-worker’s “gender-neutral” dog, a tribunal ruled.

Elizabeth Pitt, who worked for Cambridgeshire county council, was awarded £63,000 after bosses reprimanded her for expressing gender-critical views at a meeting of the authority’s LGBT+ employee group.

She had disagreed with a male colleague who claimed his dachshund was “gender-fluid” and that he put a dress on the dog to provoke “debate about gender” in January 2023.

Ms Pitt, 62, was formally disciplined by management after complaints were made accusing her of making “non-inclusive and transphobic” remarks.

However, the council later admitted liability for direct discrimination on the grounds of her beliefs.

I am glad that Ms Pitt won her case, but how did we get to a state of affairs where a county council actually believed that one of their employees taking a less than respectful view of another employee putting a dress on his wee dog and declaring it to be “gender-fluid” had had a “detrimental impact on the mental health and well-being of the complainants”?

When I read this account, I was surprised to find out that it happened as late as January 2023. Poor old Cambridgeshire County Council, puffing to keep up with trends that more with-it London bodies like the Royal Academy of Arts dropped in 2021. But the greater question is how and why this particular form of absurdity swept round the developed world so quickly. The wave is receding now, less quickly than it arose, but still very fast in historical terms. The “dropped in 2021” link describes how the Royal Academy of Arts abruptly withdrew the work of the textile artist Jess de Wahls from sale in its gift shop because she said “humans can not change sex”. After bad publicity, it backtracked. There is a certain irony about the way that progressive artists such as Ms de Wahls (“Her work is part of a movement to depict vagina and vulva in art”) spent their whole lives changing cultural norms with such success that their vulva-themed embroideries ended up in the Royal Academy gift shop, a development which might have surprised Sir Joshua Reynolds, only to see the wind change against them in an instant. Why did that particular memo go around in 2020? It wasn’t directly related to Black Lives Matter, but maybe that movement had something to do with it.

September 18th, 2024 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)

Dutch job disease

· Civil liberty, Law & Regulation · Economics, Business & Globalization · European affairs · Political Economy

Shocking news from today’s Sunday Telegraph:

Dutch job disease: how labour rights have undermined the Netherlands

Sacking an employee in the Netherlands is no easy feat.

Ask many managers and they will explain to you the nuisance of having to apply to the courts to obtain a “dismissal permit” for an underperforming employee.

Even if a worker has agreed to leave, they then have a two-week cooling-off period to possibly change their mind.

The process is so arduous that the Dutch are deemed by the OECD to have one of the strictest worker protection regimes in the developed world.

This might sound unambiguously progressive for the Netherlands, and a potential inspiration for Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner as she seeks to enhance workers’ rights in the UK.

However, for plenty of workers, the Dutch system has backfired.

Underpinning the problem is the fact that many bosses are increasingly reluctant to hire workers given the difficulties they later encounter when trying to sack them.

The result is that more than one quarter of Dutch workers are employed only on temporary contracts, far more than any other rich country.

September 15th, 2024 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)

The Guardian discovers the dead hand of the state

· Civil liberty, Law & Regulation · Economics, Business & Globalization · Environment · Political Economy · Self ownership · UK affairs

‘The system is the problem, not people’: how a radical food group spread round the world

Incredible Edible’s guerrilla gardening movement encourages people to take food-growing – and more – into their own hands

Pam Warhurst insists she’s no anarchist. Nevertheless, the founder of Incredible Edible, a food-focused guerrilla gardening movement, wants the state to get out of people’s way.

“The biggest obstacle is the inability of people in elected positions to cede power to the grassroots,” she says.

[…]

Her big idea is guerrilla gardening – with a twist. Where guerrilla gardeners subvert urban spaces by reintroducing nature, Incredible Edible’s growers go one step further: planting food on public land and then inviting all-comers to take it and eat.

I doubt this idea would scale up, but if growing food to give to others gives people pleasure, go for it. I cannot bring myself to feel outraged about the odd unauthorised carrot in a municipal flowerbed. And long have I waited to see lines like those I have put in bold type appear in the pages of the Guardian:

But as much as Warhurst’s idea has simplicity and wholesomeness, it also has a radical streak. At its heart, Incredible Edible is about hijacking public spaces – spaces nominally owned by communities, and paid for through their taxes, but administered and jealously guarded by public authorities.

And that is where Incredible Edible meets its biggest challenge: the dead hand of the state.

September 14th, 2024 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)

(Hvor) Var är dina papper? ‘Where are your papers?’: a glimpse of the digitally-controlled present in Sweden

· Civil liberty, Law & Regulation · European affairs · Opinions on liberty · Privacy & Panopticon · Self ownership · Totalitarianism · Transport

I recently purchased a train ticket online for a trip wholly within Sweden from Swedish Railways, SJ. The terms and conditions came in an English version, and I note the following:

‘Terms and conditions of purchase and travel
The ticket is non-transferable. On the journey, you need to show a valid ID document (passport, Nordic driving license or ID card, national ID card from an EU country or the Migration Agency’s LMA card that shows that you are an asylum seeker).

The covering email also states:

‘If you can’t show the ticket digitally, you can print it and take it with you on the journey. It’s not possible to print at the train companies’ service points.

The tickets are personal and only valid together with an ID document.

Have a nice journey!

SJ’

So in Sweden, you can become a fare dodger (i.e. a criminal) if you don’t have some form of State ID on you even if you are using a train ticket that you have paid for in full.

How long before our exciting new government finds this a useful way to limit movements, although some might think that in the UK, if you do have a passport, as a regular citizen, you soon won’t be allowed on a train in case you go somewhere nice or go to meet people of a like mind. Either way, it is a sinister development.

September 9th, 2024 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
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