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Sometimes it is worth plagiarising yourself.
I was asked in a pre-interview chat the other day, about 30 seconds from live TV, “Why is the government doing this? ‘Terrorism’ doesn’t seem to make sense; there has to be something more to it.” It’s hard to be snappy on the point even without crazy pressure, so mumbled something about my interlocutor going to Google and typing “Transformational Government”. I do recommend it, but I have a fairly neat explanation for why Transformational Government too. Just not quite neat enough to recall and pitch in 30 seconds on a GMTV sofa at 6:30 in the morning.
I actually wrote it about 3 years ago, in the days when I had time to think, as a comment on Phil Booth’s (whatever happened to him) blog, the Infinite Ideas Machine:
My answer arises from a pub conversation a while back with the post-Marxist commentator Joe Kaplinsky. He maintains “they” don’t know what they want the information for, they are just collecting it just in case it should ever come in useful, because that’s what bureaucrats do. There is much in that, but I think there’s slightly more.
The slightly more is a glimpse of bureaucratic fundamentalism to rival the more explicit fundamentalisms of religious and political fanatics. The administrative class (“class” in the cultural not economic sense) in Britain, but also in Europe more generally – and from which New Labour is almost exclusively drawn – holds it as self evident that the life and personality of an individual is a unitary object capable of being better managed if only there is enough information collected and enough “best practice” followed.
It is a fundamentalist faith in that if the world is out of line with the model, the world is wrong; that written rules and established methods are unquestionable from outside the tradition; and that forcing people to live within the categories determined by the faith is justifiable for a general and individual good that is evident to the elect.
It’s not that control is sought for its own sake, more that they yearn for the best well-ordered and coherent society, and believe this can be determined and imposed given sufficient expertise and information. Hence joined up government. They really do believe that efficiency is achieved by connecting everything to everything else in a giant bureaucratic system. It is the Soviet illusion, dressed up in “new technology” and market-friendly initiatives that co-opt corporate bureaucracies into the dream rather than setting them up as enemies.
The same people who claimed to have absorbed Hayek’s explanation of why 5-year plans can’t work during their turn away from Old Labour are too dull (or too intoxicated by the vision of the power to make a good society) to see that replacing some of the clerks with machines and the telegraph with the internet makes no difference to the basic proposition.
My sparser (even) than usual blogging lately is largely the result of the expanding demands of NO2ID. Thank you to everyone (including several Samizdata contributors) who has added to the avalanche of cheques into our legal fund. The bank clerks in Marylebone High Street are grateful for the work, too.
We (NO2ID) are about to make things even more fun by recruiting a new cohort of refuseniks to join those 10,000 immortals who committed themselves in 2005. In the aftermath of the HMRC data-sharing scandal, the British public is ready for the message that the only way to stop the state from debauching your personal information is not to give it a chance.
When Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne vowed to defy the ID scheme recently, it quickly became clear that not many people really understood what this meant. We have formulated a nice clear promise that anyone at all can make, and set it free, online and off. It will be an interesting exercise in network effects.
What follows is a piece I wrote for public distribution explaining the point of the whole thing:
You might be prepared to go to gaol rather than have an ID card. But you can’t.
David Blunkett has been smugly pronouncing that there will be no ID card martyrs because the intent is to have a system of penalties – like monstrous parking fines – hard to contest in court. So further punishments would relate to failure to pay, not ID cards. That silly distinction is currently irrelevant, since powers of direct compulsion have been dropped, for now. It has not stopped Mr Blunkett repeating it, though.
Subtler minds have been at work. The Home Office plans to make you to “volunteer”. It hopes almost all the population will “volunteer”, before most people have even noticed what is happening. Well before it rounds-up and force-fingerprints a few pariahs. Official documents will one by one be “designated”, so that you cannot get one without at the same time asking to be placed – for life – on the National Identity Register.
The civil servant, Sylvanus Vivian who originated this idea in 1934 – yes, that’s right, nineteen thirty-four – called it “parasitic vitality”. In other words, the scheme is a vampire. It has no life of its own, and thrives only if it feeds. → Continue reading: Just say no
Not since Sue Lawley invited him on to Desert Island Discs can Gordon Brown have agonised for so long over his CD collection.
– Alice Thompson.
I am old enough to remember the run-up to the 1979 general election, and a lot of what swung that for Thatcher was the feeling that our country seemed about to descend into a state of South Americanness. This extraordinary lost data discs business is, I think, particularly wounding to the Brown regime, for it gives off that same vibe, of a government descending into anarchy, and not in a good way. The whole world is now sniggering at Britain.
However, good news for Brown comes from a commenter on this posting at Guido’s:
There are about 13million children under the age of 16, most of whom have two parents. So that gives us about 25million individuals listed. However, only about a quarter of these will have bank details listed, so the BBC’s claims that the bank details of 25million people have been lost is actually misleading. It is probably about 7million.
Oh, only seven million. That’s okay then.
This comment reminds me of an amazing peacenik meeting I once attended, almost as long ago as the 1979 election, in which the speakers on the platform all took it in turns to explain how ghastly a nuclear explosion over a built-up area would be and that therefore we should chuck away our nuclear weapons, and a particularly bonkers middle-aged woman in the audience, called Daphne if I remember it right, got up to explain that actually, if you got lucky with the prevailing wind, and if proper civil defence measures were taken, it might not be that bad. The looks on the faces of the platform speakers were truly treasurable. I got up and said that the speakers certainly had me convinced me that nuclear war would indeed be rather nasty, and how about the replacement of Soviet communism with liberal democracy, as the least implausible way to end the nastiness? But that’s another story.
Getting back to this lost discs thing, I agree with everyone else here who is, quite rightly making such a fuss of this business. Don’t collect the damn data into these huge compulsory gobs in the first place.
Whatever David Cameron, says now …
Mr Cameron said people were “desperately worried” and they would “find it frankly weird” that Mr Brown still wanted to go ahead with plans for a national ID cards scheme and register.
… his conclusion if and when he becomes Prime Minister (which this whole thing makes that much more likely) will presumably be that it will be a sufficient answer for his noble self to be in charge of the government’s compulsory databases, and that all will then be well.
But it does occur to me, just as Black Wednesday saved the pound from being swallowed up by the Euro – which it surely did, whatever you think about that – this fiasco might just have done something similar to the database state. Not abolished it, or even reversed it seriously, but at least thrown a bit of a spanner into its works. Suddenly, ID cards are looking truly scary, combining malevolence with incompetence – Soviet even – to Mr and Mrs Average. I wrote that before reading what Guy Herbert said in the previous posting but one here, and I see that he reaches an identical conclusion. If so, good. Campaign for Database Disarmament anybody?
You cannot trust any agency with people’s personal data.
– Frank Abagnale, quoted in The Daily Telegraph.
The quote of Britain’s political week. There is a massive breakthrough in the public understanding of the database state, and the Government is finding it a real struggle to contain it. BBC journalists (Eg. Newsnight, The World Tonight, etc) are making an explicit connection between the three real monsters: the National Identity Scheme, Connecting for Health, and ContactPoint. My personal touchstone for success is when Criminal Records Bureau disclosure starts to be criticised in the public presses.
Bonus quote:
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,
Or close the wall up with our English dead!
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility;
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger:
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood.
Now is not a time to rest.
A commenter on Samizdata wrote the following lines, which got me thinking:
Has anyone here heard anyone (other than another libertarian) suggest that child benefit should be abolished so that this never happens again?
No I had not, but now that you mention it….
I don’t think it’s difficult to follow the argument that child benefit is a waste of everybody’s money except that of net welfare recipient families.
I do not have a problem with welfare for poor families – it is state welfare that is the problem. The all-important word “state” is the problem.
It certainly cannot operate without a database of every child and their parents.
Indeed. As the late Ronald Reagan used to say, a state that is powerful enough to give the public everything it wants is powerful enough to take it from them too. And I think that one, perhaps unintended insight of this debacle is how it demonstrates that 25m British citizens receive some form of state benefit, or ‘tax credit’ (ie, benefit). That is a shocking statistic in its own right. 25m people, the vast majority of whom are not poor by any objective basis, now are caught into the welfare system. I am not saying, of course, that if the welfare system is rolled back, that disasters like this will not happen, but the need to hold so much data on us in the first place would certainly be greatly reduced, if not eliminated.
It goes without saying that this fiasco is a gift to opponents of ID cards. The sun was shining on my way to work this morning.
I have just sent NO2ID a cheque. Now might be a good time for many people to do the same, whether or not they took the pledge.
Further to my recent post about new measures from our Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families. Foreign readers may be surprised that we have a department for children schools and families (sic). I, on the other hand, am alarmed: even the name indicates the totalitarian intent of the New British state.
Prompted by a clip on TV news, I have now found the full text of Ed Balls’s speech given to the Fabian Society yesterday. Didn’t the resolution to announce new policy to parliament, not outside bodies – in this case a para-Party body – last a long time? It bears close reading:
Excerpt I:
Our ambition must be that all of our young people will continue in education or training.
That is what our Bill sets out to achieve – new rights for young people to take up opportunities for education and training, and the support they need to take up these opportunities; alongside new responsibilities for all young people – and a new partnership between young people and parents, schools and colleges, local government and employers. ….
But it is important to make clear that this is not a Bill to force young people to stay on at school or college full-time. They will be able to participate in a wide range of different ways through:
* full-time education, for example, at school or college
* work-based learning, such as an apprenticeship
* or one day a week part-time education or training, if they are employed, self-employed or volunteering more than 20 hours a week.
But the Education and Skills Bill is a bill of responsibilities as well as a bill of rights.
Because if young people fail to take up these opportunities, there will be a system of enforcement – very much a last resort – but necessary to strike the right balance between new rights and new responsibilities.
Phew – not necessarily locked up in schools then, but on probation otherwise (as will of course any employers be – they’ll have to have enhanced CRB checks, of course). This is enlightening as to what Mr Brown means when he talks about a Bill of Rights and Duties, “building upon existing rights and freedoms but not diluting them – but also make more explicit the responsibilities that implicitly accompany rights…”. It confirms what many listeners will have guessed: you have the right and freedom to do exactly what the big G tells you to. This is the traditional line of Calvinism and Islam, is it not?
Don’t you love that “our young people”? Völkisch, nicht wahr?
Excerpt II:
The second building block [after mucking around with exams and the curriculum some more – GH] is advice and guidance – so that young people know and understand what is out there, and can be confident that they can make choices that will work for them.
First, this means local authorities taking clear responsibility for advice and guidance as part of the integrated support they offer to young people – making sure that youth services, Connexions and others who provide personal support to young people come together in a coherent way.
Second, clear new national standards for advice and guidance.
Last week my colleague Beverley Hughes set out clearly what we expect of local authorities as they take responsibility for the services provided by Connexions.
Third, a new local area prospectus available online, already available from this September in every area – setting out the full range of opportunities available, so that young people can see the choices available to them clearly in one place.
So not only will whether you do something state-approved be checked, but what you do will be subject to state advice and monitoring and made from a menu provided by the state. For the uninitiated Connexions is a formerly semi-independent, and notionally voluntary, database surveillance scheme for teenagers set up under the Learning and Skills Act 2000.
Well, actually, no. For their information. You have been warned, however. Statewatch notes:
The European Commission is to put forward, on Tuesday 6 November, a proposal to collect personal data (PNR) on everyone flying in and out of the EU. … The data to be collected is almost exactly the same as that being collected under the controversial EU-US PNR scheme.
You recall that famous passage from The Wealth of Nations?
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.
It applies with even greater force when the ‘people of the same trade’ are states and their governments.
I do not pay attention to the Libertarian Alliance Forum, but many do of course, and according to one of these guys, Sean Gabb recently posted there a link to this:
It is a video clip of a bolshy brummy filming a couple of policemen. The policemen spot him doing this and tell him to stop. He tells them to take a hike. He is breaking no laws. He also, as if interchangeably, says: “I’m doing nothing wrong”, and of course I agree. But, however right, and however desirable from the point of view of restraining the misdeeds of the powerful, how long before this kind of behaviour becomes illegal in Britain? I actually worry that too much publicity might be given to stuff like this, because it may give our meddling legislators ideas (was it wise to do this posting?)
Somebody told me last night (I think it was Perry de Havilland) that it is already illegal in some states of the USA to record the police. Commenters here often say that freedom etc. is doomed in Britain and that if you want such things you must emigrate to the USA. Hm.
At present the British Government already films whatever it wants. But cheap video cameras are rapidly becoming so small that soon everyone else who is inclined – rather than just wannabee spies and private investigators with money to burn – may be filming whatever they want, wherever they want. How will that play out, I wonder?
The ubiquity of surveillance cameras in Britain does not appear to be having any very detectable effect upon the level of crime.
Well, actually, that is not quite right. Total surveillance does dissuade the law-abiding from straying across the line. Surveillance cameras do slow up speeding motorists, for instance. But with one exception. They do far less to slow up motorists who are already criminals. These persons have little further to fear from the criminal-processing system than the complications they already have to live with as a result of already being criminals. In the unlikely event that they are traced, driving a car that isn’t theirs or that they have not reported to the various authorities that the rest of us must keep informed about everything, they are processed slowly and clumsily by the criminal-processing system. It is noted yet again that they are criminals, which everyone already knows, and that, pretty much, mostly, is it. Any punishments they suffer are as likely to be badges of honour as they are to be truly feared.
A law abiding citizen, on the other hand, wants very much not to be tarred, even faintly, with the brush of criminality. Being law-abiding, he is not an expert on how the criminal-processing system works and cannot take being processed by it in his stride. He does not know how and when to lie to it, for instance. He does not know how to phrase the statement “Do you know who I am?” in at all the correct manner. So, the law does restrain the law-abiding. (And that is a not insignificant benefit, provided only that at least some of the laws make sense, as a lot of them do.)
The most spectacular and often newsworthy instances of this contrast between the law-abiding and the criminals occur when the law-abiding fight back against criminals when they are attacked by them. When this happens, and in those cases when both parties are scooped up by the police, perhaps because the law-abider summoned the police and the police actually turned up, the criminals often come off better, because they then know how to handle things. The criminal lies about having aggressed, and in due course walks away. The law-abider tells the truth about how he defended himself, and can land in a world of trouble.
The effect of total surveillance, then, when combined with the rest of the criminal-processing system, is not to abolish criminality, but rather to ensure that we all have to decide, as one big decision for each of us: Am I going to be a criminal, or not? If I am, that’s one set of rules, criminal rules, which I must obey. If I am going to be law-abiding, then I must obey the law, whatever that exactly is. (And at all times, now that all infractions can be photographed and recorded for ever, everywhere. If that is not the case now, it soon will be.) But, because the law is so very intrusive and annoying and so full of complexities and arbitrarinesses and injustices, that creates a constant pressure on people to say: To hell with it, I’m going to be a criminal. Meaning: someone who doesn’t care who else knows he’s a criminal, and who can accordingly relax about being totally surveilled.
Let me be clear. I do not recommend the abolition of the criminal-processing system merely because it has such severe limitations. There are not nearly enough prisons to accommodate all criminals, but there are some. And my clear understanding is that a much higher proportion of the people in them are what I understand by the word “criminals” than is the case out here in the big, progressive, open prison that total surveillance is creating for the rest of us. Becoming a criminal means buying, so to speak, an anti-lottery ticket. If you lose, that is to say if you become a criminal and the criminal-processing system decides to go after you, you can suffer, and I hope that this is not merely wishful thinking on my part, quite severe grief. But it is also now my clear understanding that the odds facing the purchasers of these anti-lottery tickets are now quite good, and that the anti-prizes, even if you are awarded one, are in many cases not that severe. None of which deters criminals very much. They have placed their bet. But it must surely deter a great many people from deciding to become criminals in the first place. It certainly deters me. (But then, I have a lot to lose.)
The above ruminations are a mixture of my own opinions and those supplied to me by Theodore Dalrymple in a recent City Journal article. If you want to read his opinions uncontaminated by mine, do.
They keep on coming on, like a sort of rank of killer insects in one of those terrible B-movies. Here is the latest shaft of wisdom from the judiciary:
The entire population of Britain – and every visitor – should be added to the national DNA database, a senior judge has argued.
Marvellous. None of that “presumed innocent” namby-pamby nonsense.
Appeal Court judge, Lord Justice Stephen Sedley, said the database, which holds the DNA from millions of suspects and crime scenes, should be extended to all residents and even tourists, in the interests of fairness and crime prevention.
Fairness? What about the state and its officials leaving the innocent alone and not demanding every greater controls over our lives? Has this judge read his Blackstone lately?
“Where we are at the moment is indefensible,” Sedley told BBC radio.
I agree. It is indefensible that such a person holds such office. Cleaning toilets might be more his line:
“Everybody, guilty or innocent, should expect their DNA to be on file for the absolutely rigorously restricted purpose of crime detection and prevention — and no other purpose.”
“For no other purpose”. Why, are there other purposes that the judge knows about?
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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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