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.
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No, it is not a streamlined version of the answer to life, the universe and everything. It is the maximum number of aspirin in a bottle available at the local Clear Pharmacy. According to the Pharmacist on duty, that is the largest number sellable without a prescription.
I am sure I looked perplexed with my jaw hanging open during the few speechless moments before I came out with the only answer I could think of: “You must be joking.”
Before you get too uppity about freedom in America… the last time I bought 24 Hour Cold Capsules in Manhattan I had to sign a register so the government could make sure I was not going to use them to make ‘speed’.
“We’re from the Government. We’re here to help you.”
Not.
PS: Can anyone confirm this is really, genuinely true? I am still having trouble believing it myself. It is just, too absurd.
Much has been said about David Davis’s motives for doing what he’s doing. He is vain. He is mad. He is bored. My opinion? He is a politician. Politicians are vain, often mad. Politics is mostly very boring. I say: Who cares what Davis’s reasons are for saying what he is saying, and doing what he is doing? What matters is what messages he is sending out and what impact, if any, they will have.
I applaud Davis for communicating a general unease concerning civil liberties. What Davis said in his campaign blog yesterday about the DNA database will surely please our own Guy Herbert, if it has not done so already :
…why should a million innocent people and 100,000 children be kept on the DNA database? This is the state exceeding its powers.
Indeed. However, Herbertians may also be somewhat surprised and not a little distressed by what Davis said in that same posting, immediately above that bit about the DNA database, on the subject of CCTV cameras:
… I have been explaining that I am not against CCTV – but if it is going to be used the cameras should be able to provide clear images and all of the evidence should be usable in court. Currently only 20% is usable. At the moment we just have a placebo effect for Citizen UK.
His objection to the cameras is: that they do not work well enough! We are not, in this matter as in so many others, getting as much government as we are paying for. Of the possible damage to British society that might result from it being constantly spied on by officialdom, with very good cameras, for which David Davis will surely not have to wait long, he says, at any rate in this posting, nothing.
As I say, David Davis is a politician. Be thankful for small mercies, but do not assume any large ones from this man.
So the Supreme Court’s opinion in Heller really has me wondering. Will this have any effect on the practice of so many police departments, especially big city ones with bright shiny SWAT teams, to use middle of the night no-knock raids when a less dramatic approach might have been a better choice? Will it encourage better investigations of exactly who’s home they are breaking into before they begin battering down doors?
I suspect but haven’t checked that most of these raids occur in jurisdictions that do, quite likely to soon be ‘did’, not permit armed self defense in one’s home. I further suspect the unspoken reasoning was too often, ‘Don’t worry about it. If they’re not bad guys, they won’t be armed’.
Up to a quarter of all adults are to be vetted to ensure they are not kiddie-abusing maniacs, as part of an effort to protect youngsters under the age of 16 in cases such as voluntary organisations and so on.
And people wonder why there is sometimes a shortage of volunteers for things like youth clubs and the like. The destruction of civil society, of the bonds of trust that are vital to such an organic, grass-roots cluster of non-state institutions, is remorseless and deliberate. This government, in its totalitarian way – I use that word quite deliberately – wants to make all human interactions subject to its tests. The consequences for the long term health of civil society, and of the ability of people to grow up normally, are ignored.
None of this is to say that the issue of child abuse is not serious, nor deserving of legal action to protect children from child abusers, who deserve the strongest punishment. I really do wonder, however, whose interests are served by the sort of vetting processes that the state is embarking upon. One hears examples of how adults are sometimes reluctant to help a kid because they are frightened they will get some sort of complaint later on. That cannot be good.
It is sometimes lazily assumed that this present Labour government is not “radical” like its predecessors. But that is only a superficial issue. In substance, this is arguably the most dangerously radical government in modern times in terms of its view of how individuals interact not just with the state, but with each other.
The BBC reports that our mad government is about to attempt to warp time by the application of law:
The government is to bring forward new legislation to outlaw all forms of age discrimination, the BBC has learned. Equalities Minister Harriet Harman is expected to announce the plan on Thursday as part of a package of measures in an Equalities Bill.[…] Travel, health and motor insurance is also expected to be included, where cover is simply withdrawn beyond a certain age or is prohibitively expensive.
How is this going to work with mortgages, and those annuities that HMRC forces people to buy with their pension funds on retirement? Women live longer, so they get less for their money in retirement annuities, which they wouldn’t with another investment.
(Digression: Annuitants also pay more tax than they might from some other forms of investment. This is one explanation for HMRC maintaining insurance companies in this monopoly. That’s slightly more creditable than the one that senior tax officials and treasury ministers are accustomed to give more effort to understanding of the problems of the big financial institutions than those of ordinary pensioners because they have an eye to supplementing their own retirement funds by directorships and consultancies.)
It gets weirder:
Under plans to make workplaces more diverse, Ms Harman wants to allow employers to appoint people specifically because of their race or gender. The proposals would only apply when choosing between candidates equally qualified for the job. But it means, for example, women or people from minorities could be hired ahead of others in order to create a more balanced workforce. Some employers argue they already do this, while others may say these policies will need careful handling to reduce the risk of causing resentment amongst existing staff.
You don’t say. The capacity for bureaucrats lunacy, personal distress, and horrifically abstruse legal dispute where racial and sexual discrimination is both banned and permitted at the same time is going to be vast.
I predict an efflorescence of debates between ‘equalities’ officials in which several contradictory standards are created. (Should recruitment ‘represent’ the locality or the country at large? is its current makeup relevant? Or can you hire an exclusively Kazakh workforce because they are the only Kazakhs in the country?). Ethnic and other demographic categorisation of individuals will be even more ramified. And employers will be under more pressure to collect information about people’s family background and personal habits in order to ensure they are either correctly not discriminating, or discriminating correctly.
The government has faced criticism from some quarters for presiding over a society which has arguably become more unequal.
All animals are unequal, but some animals are more unequal than others. All it requires is an official licence.
The assault on liberty could be worse than it is in the United Kingdom. We are nothing like Zimbabwe, say – or Jersey.
Jersey? Yes. And I don’t mean the partly imaginary lawless land of the Sopranos and Frank Sinatra. The supposedly sleepy tax-haven and holiday resort a few miles off the Normandy coast, the oldest possession of the English Crown still in hand*, has entirely astonishingly, and almost secretly, converted itself a police state in the last fortnight:
The report in the Jersey Evening Telegraph is so concise it can only be quoted in full:
The Home Affairs Minister has sent shock waves through the legal profession by authorising the indefinite detention of suspects without charge.
On 5 June, Senator Wendy Kinnard amended the criminal code that had limited pre-charge detention to 36 hours.
She did so under delegated powers enjoyed by the minister under the terms of the Police Procedures and Criminal Evidence (Jersey) Law.
However, that same law states that before such changes to codes are made, the minister is required to publish a draft of the changes and consult interested parties. She did neither of these things – a failure that has left the Island’s criminal lawyers stunned.
The new code came into force on Thursday, but no statement was released to either the media or the legal profession.
Why? What crisis of state is afflicting the Channel Islands?
Suspicious British readers may note that Jersey ministers are accustomed to do what they are told by the UK government. The facts that this peremptory administrative action shortly preceded the House of Commons debate on police detention powers, and that the resistance to HMG’s policies had had some effect by pointing out there are other jurisdictions, where the gutters do not run with human blood, in which long detention without charge is unknown, may be entirely unrelated.
* Pedant’s corner: the dukes of Normandy held the Channel Islands for more than a century before they took possession of the English Crown.
Neil Glass, who writes under the pen name David Craig, is to run against David Davies with these immortal words:
My message is that the 42 days issue is not important to most people as we are unlikely to be affected by it. However, living on the national average salary as I do, I believe that what is important to taxpayers is how MPs have become overpaid, out of touch and are wasting billions of pounds of our money when the cost of living is spiraling out of control.”
So other people’s liberty, meh, who cares about such trifles? All that matters to Neil Glass is having money wasted. Truly here we have an unabashedly amoral man …who will feel right at home in politics. The fact he would give half him MP pay if he won (which he won’t) to charity is a political device, nothing more. This is not a person I would care to shake hands with, to put it mildly, as by doing this he is overtly running against civil liberties.
On her blog over at the Spectator website, Melanie Phillips, a writer with whom I generally agree on certain things, not least the right of Israel both to exist and defend itself, writes what I think is a poor article on David Davis’ recent decision to hold a by-election in his parliamentary seat to highlight the loss of civil liberties:
Much is being made in some quarters of the apparent gulf between the view taken of David Davis’s resignation by the political and media village (he’s lost the plot/is a one-man plot/is a monstrous narcissist) and the public (he’s a hero fighting for Britain’s ancient liberties). I can’t help but see all this as yet another example of the replacement of reason by emotion. I can certainly see that Davis has touched a popular chord among people who feel passionately – and I have much sympathy with this – that MPs no longer act in the public interest and no longer speak for them but instead are machine politicians whipped by their party leadership into a systematic denial of reality. I also sympathise with the general view that the state is encroaching more and more oppressively into people’s lives – the abuse by local councils of anti-terrorist legislation being a case in point. To that extent, the quixotic Davis is surfing the popular tide of anti-politics, which explains much of the support he is getting and is not to be under-estimated.
“Much is being made”. Yes, that is because the loss of civil liberties and the spread of the database state has reached the point where ordinary members of the public – those ghastly people – are getting riled. David Davis is a sufficiently paid-up member of the human race to have spotted this. But to dismiss his action as some sort of Dianaesque emotional display, rather than what is in fact a pretty shrewd, calculated act seems a bit patronising. And then we get to the reasoning that explains why Ms Phillips dislikes what Mr Davis has done:
Second, he says he is against 42 days because he stands for the hallowed principle of not locking people up without charge. So does that mean he is against the 28 day limit as well? And if he is, then surely he has to be against the 14 day limit that preceded it, and the seven day limit before that. Indeed, according to the principles he has laid down he has to be against any detention before charge at all. Similarly, he says he’s against the whole ‘surveillance society’ including speed cameras, DNA databases, CCTV and so forth; yet he also says he’s not against all of this, and doesn’t want to get rid of all DNA testing because some of it is perfectly sensible. So what exactly is he fighting for? And why couldn’t he do so within his own party, which largely takes precisely the view he professes? Has he given this any systematic thought at all? Despite his SAS image and multiply-broken nose, is he not merely beating his chest and emoting, in tune with the sentimental irrationality of the age?
Well, leaving aside the snide remark about his “SAS image”, I am not sure how Mr Davis would reply to all of those points but his recent remarks make it pretty crystal clear that he is against the holding of DNA on innocent people, for example, or even shorter periods of detention without trial. Ms Phillips, presumably, is in favour of all the above and more.
Then we get an argument that Mr Davis is in favour of all this “emotional” civil liberties stuff because he is insufficiently aware of the threat Britain faces from Islamic terrorism:
It also strikes me that there is a strong and quite vicious sub-text to the support he has been getting within certain political circles, which are backing him against what they call the ‘neo-cons’ in David Cameron’s circle — by whom they mean in particular Michael Gove and George Osborne. The thought-crime committed by these two is to analyse correctly the threat to this country posed by Islamism and to support America in its fight to defend the free world. The anti neo-cons believe, by contrast, not merely that Britain must put critical distance between itself and American interventionism, but that the threat to Britain from Islamism is hugely exaggerated, both from within as well as from without. It is in that context that they maintain that 42-days is unnecessary because the dire warnings about the likely threat to this country are unproven and that the extension of the detention limit is instead a Trojan horse for the willed erosion of our ancient liberties.
The reasoning is weak. It does not seem to cross her mind that one might be as concerned as the next man about terrorism – as I am – without feeling the need to chuck out long-standing protections of the individual that were not even removed – or at least only shortly – during emergencies such as the Second World War. It may be that some people on the right dislike the “neocon” argument out of some naive attitude about terrorism, or some sort of hatred of Israel/America, etc, but that does not appear to be the case with Mr Davis. As far as I can tell, he is very much from the Atlanticist tradition of conservatism.
Ms Phillips is also playing to the bad argument that to be a defender of liberty is to be a softie on security. We have to absolutely nail this terrible idea that you can trade off one against the other.
By contrast, here is a cracking article that takes Mr Davis very seriously indeed.
A crackle of buzzwords in the braes. The Scottish government has “bold proposals to deal with the issue” of the “impact on crime and anti-social behaviour” of people drinking alcohol, which is reputedly “often cheaper than water” in some Scottish supermarkets. Where that leaves the stereotype of Scots as careful with money, I don’t know. Why would they buy water from supermarkets rather than getting it near-free from a tap? Perhaps they are all drunk.
To solve the problem of cheap and plentiful products and consumers willing to consume them, it is proposed to institute minimum prices – with the enthusiastic support of specialist retailers, from whom the “cheaper than water” claim comes – and to raise the minimum age for buying alcohol to 21 in Scotland. The evidence that this will do anything to mitigate the alleged problems is, of course, lacking.
Also in the absence of evidence, I have a prediction about the effect on crime of minimum prices and reduced availability for alcohol. Crime will go up. Not only will new criminal offences have been created, but since many will find it more difficult to get booze, some of them will steal it.
Reported in the Observer
Bob Marshall-Andrews yesterday defied the Prime Minister to sack him, adding that he hoped other Labour MPs would join the former shadow home secretary’s one-man crusade for civil liberties.
‘They can’t muzzle the whole of the party, and it seems to me foolish in the extreme in the present climate to start describing civil liberties as a stunt,’ he told The Observer. ‘I have had emails asking, “Why does it take a Tory to say this”?’
David Davis, the Tory shadow Home Secretary, has resigned over the issue of detaining terror suspects for up to 42 days. He is going to resign his seat as an MP, hold a by-election, in the hope that he can win and create a storm of public rage over this issue.
It is certainly a bold move, and a commendable one. I am glad that at least some Tory MPs have got some backbone. As a former Territorial SAS member, Davis has more guts than most.
Update: I see that parts of the right-leaning press are trying to sell the narrative that Davis is a nutcase, trying to create cover for himself in the offchance that David Cameron, Tory leader, hits any future problems. Well, I guess that is possible. Make no mistake, how the Tory party reacts to Davis’ stance will tell us quite a lot about how genuine their commitment to civil liberties, to overthrowing ID cards, etc, really is. I cannot help but believe that David Davis, a very different animal from Cameron, has probably had a very major row with his centrist boss, who I confidently predict will not repeal most of the measures this present government has passed.
Now the counter terrorism bill will in all probability be rejected by the House of Lords very firmly. After all, what should they be there for if not to defend Magna Carta.
But because the impetus behind this is essentially political – not security – the government will be tempted to use the Parliament Act to over-rule the Lords. It has no democratic mandate to do this since 42 days was not in its manifesto.
Its legal basis is uncertain to say the least. But purely for political reasons, this government’s going to do that. And because the generic security arguments relied on will never go away – technology, development and complexity and so on, we’ll next see 56 days, 70 days, 90 days.
But in truth, 42 days is just one – perhaps the most salient example – of the insidious, surreptitious and relentless erosion of fundamental British freedoms.
And we will have shortly, the most intrusive identity card system in the world.
A CCTV camera for every 14 citizens, a DNA database bigger than any dictatorship has, with 1000s of innocent children and a million innocent citizens on it.
We have witnessed an assault on jury trials – that bulwark against bad law and its arbitrary use by the state. Short cuts with our justice system that make our system neither firm not fair.
And the creation of a database state opening up our private lives to the prying eyes of official snoopers and exposing our personal data to careless civil servants and criminal hackers.
The state has security powers to clamp down on peaceful protest and so-called hate laws that stifle legitimate debate – while those who incite violence get off scot-free.
This cannot go on, it must be stopped. And for that reason, I feel that today it’s incumbent on me to take a stand.
I will be resigning my membership of the House and I intend to force a by-election in Haltemprice and Howden.
– David Davis MP
Quite unprecedented. An MP – and a privy counsellor – quitting in order to draw attention to loss of liberty (and he used my phrase, “the database state”. A meme whose time has come, I hope).
Update: now the official text rather than Sky’s slightly mangled transcript.
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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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