This anecdote from Ian Brown is just too much fun not to share: Killer wasp brings passport office to halt.
Any wasp-trainers out there? Your country needs you.
|
|||||
|
The threats to liberty in Britain are too numerous to keep track of. Thanks to Josie Appleton on Spiked! for this, which I had entirely missed before now:
It is a House of Lords Bill, but has Government backing. The Bill would create an Independent Barring Board (IBB), which would maintain “barred lists” preventing listed individuals from engaging in “regulated activities”. “In respect of an individual who is included in a barred list, IBB must keep other information of such description as is prescribed.” [cl.2(5)] As the Bill was originally presented, you would have no right to damages if you were mistakenly or maliciously included in a barred list, and nor would anyone else. And the IBB would have been an absolute finder of fact, with appeal allowed only on a point of law. So among the things the IBB would have been independent of is responsibility for its actions. Now things are slightly better, but there’s a cunning pseudo-compromise. You can sue. And you can now appeal the facts. But the criteria applied in the application of policy to an individual case – the core of what the IBB would do – is expressly (with a shade of Guantanamo) deemed not to be a matter of law or fact, and are therefore not to be subject to examination by the courts [cl.4(3)]. The schedule of “regulated activity” is 5 pages long in the printed copy. So you’ll have to look it up yourselves if you are interested. The practical effect? Well, as an example, as I understand it, if the Bill were currently law, I would be committing a criminal offence in paying someone I trust to look after my elderly mother, who is currently convalescing from an operation, without both of us being made subject to official monitoring first. Once it is in force, if you wish to be self sufficient – even if you don’t value your privacy, and are confident that theree’s nothing about you to which an official could possibly have objected in the past, and that you might not be confused with anyone else – you’ll need to know if a family member is going to be ill in sufficient time to fill in all the forms and wait for them to be processed. Better leave it to the state – which is of course always perfect. October 18th, 2006 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Mark Ballard pins it down precisely in The Register. September 14th, 2006 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
Where the people of Malaysia would be without their government to do their thinking for them, I really do not know.
It is a classic ‘Samizdata’ story which allows us to make fun of the silly politicians but behind it is the serious point that the Malaysian government is arrogating for itself the right to have a say in what a citizen calls him or herself. A person’s name is at the heart of their identity in many ways, and it is sad that governments think they have the right to interfere with whatever name a person chooses to call themselves. July 30th, 2006 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
Overseas readers often scoff at my pessimism about the state we are in in Britain. Scoff may be the wrong word. Scoffing is now under close supervision:
Perhaps the scariest thing about the article from which that comes is the vaguely approving tone. Here is information about what is being done, no questioning that it needs and should have government attention. July 16th, 2006 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Virginia Postrel, who recently donated an organ herself, writes:
Further:
The National Kidney Foundation is shamefully, unbelievably trying to put a stop to any discussion of the use of market mechanisms to reduce the national organ shortage. They even wrote a letter to the AEI, urging them not to hold a debate on the matter. Virginia has also written a column for Forbes (not available online for free, sadly) about how some prominent hospitals are actually refusing to do kidney transplants for people who have found their donors online or through other media. Hospitals which are denying patients legal, nonexperimental, life-saving surgery for ideological reasons include Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, which is affiliated with Harvard Medical School. On her blog, Virginia writes:
If you have ever seen the benefits of online conversation, through blogs or journals or message boards or chat rooms, think about that. The human kindness extended to you by another individual in that context, according to these hospitals, is somehow tainted. I thought things were bad enough with the creepazoids who want to violate every human’s civil liberties at birth by reversing non-consent to make organ donation an opt-out rather than opt-in personal decision (“You think your body belongs to you? Think again, buster. It’s just government inventory…”). This outright hostility from hospitals and the National Kidney Foundation towards methods which would resolve the shortage and save lives is downright evil. (Cross-posted to JackieDanicki.com) June 5th, 2006 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
March 29th, 2006 | 43 comments - (Comments are closed)
The headline of the print Daily Telegraph today trumpeted ‘Mini-brothels get go-ahead to operate on your doorstep’. I immediately took a peek at my doorstep but alas nothing to report yet. To recycle a well known quote: prostitution combines free enterprise with sex. Which one are you against? January 18th, 2006 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
As someone who follows such things I had expected the latest Home Office consultation exercise to go according to the standard pattern, thus:
So I was gearing myself up to write a piece on the repulsive sight of a department torn between the desire to regulate everything and to maintain PC social norms. Citing the ignominious failure of the Victorian Contagious Diseases Acts, I was going to pour scorn on the futility of a regulatory regime that licensed brothels while denying the most basic economic rights to prostitutes, and created ‘zones of toleration’ in an effort to buck the market while punishing the streetwalkers it purported to protect. The Goverment has shot my fox. And it turns out the fox was packed with explosives. Someone has overturned the (paradoxical) regulatory liberalisers and has decided puritan prohibitions are what we need. The move is instead to be to “Zero Tolerance” of ‘kerb crawlers’ – and quite without comment, the continuation of zero civil-law rights and next to zero criminal-law protections for prostitutes themselves. The Home Office minister Fiona McTaggart was quoted yesterday on the BBC as saying that prostitution “is child abuse” because many prostitutes begin selling sex below the age of consent. That is an insane argument driven by the demands of moralism. By the same token unpaid sexual contact must also be child abuse, because most people’s sex lives begin before that arbitary, if increasingly rigidly totemic, mark. Someone, somewhere, is making David Blunkett, who was responsible for the original pseudo-tolerant proposals, look like a liberal. Does the devil’s name begin with B? The emphasis on cleaning up public untidiness by bullying is of a piece with the respec’ agenda. And there have been suggestions that the inate liberalism of the Home Office – not something spotted by many commentators before now – is interfering with the operation of the Anti-Social Behaviour Unit. Just another brick in the wall, perhaps. But turning the public agenda on a sixpence, and producing plainly mad arguments for doing so, are ominous. The Head Boy is ever more a dictator, and ever more the apostle of social conformity. December 29th, 2005 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
– Lord Gould of Brookwood (most decidedly New Labour) speaking at yesterday’s Committee of the Whole House on the Identity Cards Bill. Chilling, eh? I file this under “Self ownership” because the Bill (do read it) seeks to end all that sort of thing. No more of the messy business of people deciding for themselves who they are and how much to involve the government in their lives. November 16th, 2005 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
Alexia Harriton, an Australian woman who is deaf, blind, physically and mentally disabled and requires round-the-clock care, is suing a doctor for allowing her to be born, with the full support by her mother. Never mind that rubella during pregnancy does not guarantee what happened to Ms. Harriton. I have a better idea. If she is competent to sue the doctor, she is competent to tell the people giving her round-the-clock medical care to get lost and let nature take its course. Hell, she could tell one of them to leave a nice sharp knife or a cup of water and a bottle of sleeping pills within reach if she wants to expedite things and if she cannot manage that, well seeing as how her mother is so supportive… Why should a doctor be liable for an ‘act of God’? So he did not diagnose how thing would shake out correctly. Too bad, no one is perfect. Seems to me that Alexia Harriton and her mother were born moral and emotional cripples too. Nature dealt them a seriously crap hand and that is truly tragic but it is no one’s fault. It happens. Deal with it, but please, deal with it yourself. Think I am being a little harsh? Well I do not think so and I have my reasons. November 11th, 2005 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
My previous article seems to have sparked off a discussion amongst the commentariat on the difference between being called a ‘subject’ or a ‘citizen’. To prevent that comment section from digressing too far, I thought it might be interesting to provide an article to revisit the topic even though I have written about it before. There are some historical reasons why the British have been ‘subjects’ (as they were subject to the laws of the Crown), whereas Americans have been ‘citizens’. The reality is that what the British are subject to are the laws of a democratically elected Parliament. As in truth the Royal Assent is nothing more than a historical curiosity, the actual differences between the way individuals truly relate to state in the United States and Britain is less than it might seem. The principle differences of significance are that as Britain is more democratic at the national level, individuals have less institutional defences against the power of the state, whereas in the United States, with its written constitution and clearer separation of powers, an individual has more structural defences against the excesses of democratic politics, at least in theory. In my experience most people tend to think they are citizens rather than subjects of whatever nation issues their passport. However I have always though the term ‘subject’ was a far more honest word to describe the relationship between individuals and the state rather than the prouder egalitarian sounding ‘citizen’. We are subject to taxes, we are subject to laws, we are subject to conscription of various sorts (be it military, educational or judicial). Sure, we ‘citizens’ are empowered via the glories of democracy, but quite how being out-voted and then being subject to some law you oppose ’empowers’ you is unclear to me, even if it is a reasonable law. To be a subject may seem demeaning but in truth that is what we are: subjects. As it happens, I think the term is even more appropriate for US ‘citizens’ given that at least in Britain and almost every other country, to avoid your particular state making ownership claims on the product of your labour, you just have to leave the country and live somewhere else. States generally do not claim to own you independent of your location, just the territory you live on and part of your labour within that territory in return for its ‘protection’ (capisce?). The United States, on the other hand, claims you owe them the obeisance of taxes regardless of where you are physically located anywhere on the planet, although in practice it often makes arrangements with other nations to only impose its demands if you make more than a certain amount (double taxation treaties). Yet the obligation to report your income from overseas and to pay the IRS is still there if they wish you to do so. So if it is not just sovereignty over a piece of land that the USA claims, it actually contends that it owns part of your labour regardless of where you live, making you subject to taxation for merely having the permission to live in America even if you choose to live elsewhere, then you sure sound like a ‘subject’ to me. November 1st, 2005 | 65 comments - (Comments are closed)
|
   |
||||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||