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For me, by far the worst aspect of the recent re-trial of the Stephen Lawrence murder case has been the fact that it demonstrates the dangers of the decision, by the former Labour government in the UK, to end the old double jeopardy rule. Some of the perpetrators of the crime may now be behind bars, but the wider issues worry me.
The writer Brendan O’Neill, a Marxist who writes at at the online journal Spiked, sees this in class terms:
“It is clear from the orgy of post-conviction self-congratulation amongst the chattering classes (Dacre says yesterday was ‘a glorious day for British newspapers’) that the trial of Norris and Dobson was a political trial. It was a showtrial, or at least a showy trial, which was relentlessly used to advertise and entrench the morality of the new political elites. Just because Norris and Dobson are lowlifes, whom no one will much miss when they are banged up, doesn’t mean we should give the nod to this bending of the justice system to the whims of the cultural elite.”
And another:
“It is fitting that the Lawrence case should end with a political trial, because this was the most cynically exploited and politicised murder in living memory. Lawrence was not the first young black man to have been murdered by racists, nor was he the first black murder victim to have been failed by a seriously botched police investigation. But he was the first black murder victim whose tragic demise was cynically milked by the cultural elite and used as the lynchpin of a moral crusade against Old Britain and its foul, backward inhabitants. In a triple whammy of murder-milking, Lawrence’s death was used by the elites to demonise the white working classes as the new ‘brutes within’; to redefine racism as a disease of the brain rather than as a relation of power; and to dismantle long-standing legal principles that were once seen as central to the justice system.”
He’s got a point, although I would add that, not being as het up about class as Mr O’Neill is, I don’t see the disgust that many feel about race-related murders as some sort of ruling-class plot to stamp on lots of white proles. There is more than just a whiff of a new victimology here of the sort that far-right groups like to pander to.
There is real danger in ending the DJ principle, as it means the Crown Prosecution Service will not be under the same pressure in future to get all of its legal and evidential facts lined up as strongly as possible when bringing a case for trial, because it knows there will always be a chance that if it does not get a conviction on the first occasion, it can always have another crack at it later if something new turns up. It is a bit like European Union referendums: if the voters don’t give the “right” answer the first time, they can always be polled again. (As argued by a commenter on Tim Worstall’s own post on the issue).
A real concern for me is that the original case is over 18 years old. That is a long time and all kinds of issues about memory recall arise. Like I said, I don’t doubt that the guilty persons are the scum that they are but there are broader issues of due process of law at stake.
Here is another look at double jeopardy. And there has even been a film made using the title, Double Jeopardy. The CATO Institute has written on how this issue plays out in the US legal system.
…the phrase that Geoffrey Howe used when discussing the best policy for Liverpool in the 1980s?
Yes, that’s right: the word “managed”. It is not for the state to decide where people should live or where they should do business and certainly not for the state to use violence to force them to do so.
Dan Mitchell, of the CATO Institute and an excellent defender of those much-maligned tax havens, has a list of predictions for 2012 about the global scene. I agree with all of them apart from the sports one. Here are mine:
Obama will be re-elected by a whisker, but the GOP will cement its control of Congress. Hopefully, a credible, free marketeer Republican will be chosen in the next election who does not carry some of the baggage of Ron Paul regarding his more unusual supporters or his flaky views (in my opinion) on foreign affairs. But in fairness to Paul, his achievement in getting the libertarian message out there on issues such as the economy, role of the Fed and the bailouts will continue to resonate, for which he deserves great praise.
Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged will continue to sell lots of copies; Detlev Schlichter will continue, hopefully, to spread good sense among the financial community and among some policymakers.
China’s property market and wider economy will slow down markedly, though I think it will avoid a hard landing. I am not sure that the country will fully float the yuan in 2012, although it should do so.
The UK coalition government will struggle on, although at least one high-profile Lib Dem minister will resign. I hope it is Vincent Cable, who is an idiot.
Brazil’s economy will continue to grow rapidly. The Latin America economy will gain momentum, apart from such wrecks as Venezuela.
The London Olympics will go off largely without incident and as predicted, the British taxpayer will be paying for it for many years. Boris Johnson will try and milk it for his own political purposes, probably with some success.
Sarkozy will lose the French presidential elections unless the economy improves. The French National Front will again get a lot of votes.
Mobile technology will continue to change the banking industry.
Italy’s public finances will remain a mess. And yet in spite of it all, the northern part of Italy will continue to be the rich, beautiful place it often is, confounding some of the doomsters.
Greece will leave the euro; possbily one more country may do so. Turkey’s efforts to join the EU will continue to founder.
The issue of the “education bubble” will remain one of the biggest domestic policy screwups in nations such as the UK and US. Policymakers will tinker with it.
Cheap flights will remain one of the main positives about living in Europe.
Pope Benedict’s failing health (he looked absolutely shattered in his Christmas address) will become more of a talking point.
AGW alarmists will continue to lose ground. A major politician in a big country will take on the Green lobby. (Well, we can hope so).
There will be continued big advances in areas such as nanotech and medicine, mostly shockingly under-reported.
Parts of Africa will get more prosperous.
Commercial space flight will loom even larger as a reality. Hooray!
Piracy in the Indian Ocean might abate as countries adopt harsher methods to deal with it. More merchant vessels will be armed or escorted by vessels that are as insurance premia adjust.
Argentina will occasionally make sabre-rattling remarks about the Falklands, which will be largely ignored.
England might actually do quite well in the European Championships soccer tournament; England’s cricket team should have a decent year. People from Northern Ireland will continue to win lots of golf majors. Roger Federer might – as he has shown from recent form – win Wimbledon again, confirming he is the greatest sportsman of our time and the most famous Swiss person in the world.
Lady Gaga will start dressing demurely as a way of shocking her fans (I am one of them).
The quality of driving in Malta will continue to get worse.
Latin will make a comeback as a subject in UK state schools.
Finally, more of a hope than a prediction: Hollywood will make a decent hard science fiction movie this year and Ipswich Town will avoid relegation, just.
Happy New Year to you all (apart from the trolls).
A reminder of earlier dramas in London and surrounding parts this year:
A court on Wednesday sentenced a rioter who was caught on video pulling a man off his scooter during the summer riots to almost six years in jail.
The footage of Ryan Kitchenside, 18, chasing his victim before yanking him to the ground during the August riots in Croydon, appeared on video-sharing website Youtube, leading to his eventual identification.
Equally depressing is how other rioters joined in to help, as in to help Ryan Kitchenside.
It won’t end up as six years, but it will still be something. I recall reading elsewhere, somewhere, that the regular criminals are beating up rioters in prisons, because regular prisoners don’t like their own neighbourhoods being trashed either, and because regular prisoners are having to be moved around to accommodate the new arrivals.
Read the story and view the video here.
Here is the same video at YouTube, with added sound. That video looks like it was done by a human, rather than any CCTV machine. I am not YouTube savvy enough to find out who held the camera and what the story was there. Anyone?
When I heard Gordon Kerr speak in the House of Commons a week ago, I wished that he had done so with a microphone attached. Very early this morning he spoke in public again and this time he did have a microphone attached, because he was on Bloomberg Television. Turn up the volume on your computer and you’ll find it a lot easier to hear what he said this morning than I did last week.
Kerr confirmed my definite impression that the Austrianist team is now starting to win this argument. (By “this argument”, I mean, approximately speaking, this argument.)
Whereas regular academic economists talked about how this banking crisis was all over bar the recovery in 2008, the Austrianists have consistently predicted further disasters. As these disasters have duly occurred, the books and writers and ideas that the Austrianists keep referring to in their increasingly frequent public performances (Kerr mentions Hayek in this performance) are now breaking out of their academic-stroke-hobbyist ghetto and reaching the mainstream.
My favourite moment in this quiet little early morning Bloomberg TV conversation was when the man whom Kerr was arguing with said: “But if banks told the truth about the value of their assets, that would cause chaos.” His argument being that therefore making the banks tell the truth is a disastrous policy. Which it sort of is. But Kerr’s point, the point made by all Austrianists, is that disaster can’t now be avoided. The decisions that have made disaster inevitable have all now been made. By postponing the recognition of disaster, you only make it all the greater when it finally erupts.
Intellectual self-confidence is hugely important in a battle of ideas, such as we are witnessing now. The Keynesians, anti-capitalists, the more-of-the-samists, the borrowers-and-spenders and the rest of them, all want to believe that capitalism has to be managed by them if it is to work properly, in approximately the manner in which these people manage it now and have been managing it for the last few decades. Some of them still want to believe that capitalism itself ought to be smashed up, and entirely replaced by a planned economy. But how many people really think that this kind of thing would actually make the world more prosperous? The point is: the hatred of truly liberated, untramelled, uncontrolled, un-managed capitalism is all still there. But, the conviction that there is a superior statist alternative, not strong before this crisis became evident but briefly puffed up by the early stages of the crisis, is now fading away in front of our eyes.
Passionate and sincere belief in a viable, partly or wholly statist alternative to capitalism used to exist, in the early part of the twentieth century. Then, Marxists really believed that capitalism was colossally wasteful and inefficient, as well as colossally cruel and unjust and unfair, and that replacing it with a world run by small clumps of smart people with dictatorial powers, based in small but dictatorially powerful offices, would genuinely be a colossal improvement. They really and truly thought this. They believed it with the same certainty that naval tacticians, then and since, have believed (rightly) that vulnerable merchant ships are safer, during a merchant shipping war, if they all sail together in a convoy, rather than if every merchant ship sails alone. That being one of the arguments they used. This colossal Marxist and statist intellectual self-confidence was contagious and, when crisis hit Russia during World War 1 and the West at the end of the 1920s, it was hard to resist.
Now it is the Austrianists and only the Austrianists who have any genuine confidence in the correctness of their own ideas. Tiny in number but growing in number by the day, we Austrianists (I count myself a very junior member of this team – a fan rather than any sort of player) truly believe that we are right about how the world works, and about how it could eventually be made to work a lot better. This is why we are winning.
By winning, I don’t just mean convincing of our rightness third parties with no stake in how things are being done now and no power to make any difference, although that also will happen, in the fullness of time. I mean making our now hugely powerful opponents (powerful in the sense of having the power to go on doing huge damage) realise that they themselves are entirely wrong, and that we Austrianists, who until recently they had never even heard of, are right. I mean especially them. The bewildered onlooker tendency, vastly more numerous than any of the intellectual teams directly involved in this debate, is likely to remain confused about all this for a much longer time. They’ll only hear about this argument after we have won it. But the powerful people who presided over this long catastrophe, and who made and continue to make it ever worse with their ever more panic-stricken decisions, are mostly going to emerge from the wreckage with no doubt in their minds that their Austrianist critics understood everything far better than they did. They may not admit it out loud, still less formally surrender, although there will probably be some very public changes of mind. But most of these people will know in the privacy of their own minds that they were utterly defeated, by events, and by those who proved with their prophecies, observations and post mortems, that they understood these events, as they did not begin to until it was far too late.
It was like this with that earlier collapse of statist power, the fall of the USSR. The people who presided over that collapse had no doubt concerning the inferiority of their own economic arrangements, which was a big part of why those arrangements collapsed. It wasn’t merely that Soviet communism collapsed because it was hopeless. It collapsed because the Soviet communists who ran Soviet communism themselves came to realise that Soviet communism was hopeless.
Perhaps this is why Gordon Kerr talks so quietly. He is right. He knows he is right. He feels no need to shout.
Allow me also to remind you about Jamie Whyte‘s recent radio performance. He also spoke with utter certainty in the rightness of what he was saying, and he never once felt the need to raise his voice either.
LATER: Steve Baker MP comments.
Why don’t [union leaders] be selective and call out only those members who can cause damage to the government? There are places in the public sector that could go on strike for years and it would make little difference.”
– Letter in the New Statesman, 12 December 2011
Assuming the unions were to agree with that—which I suspect they dare not, and is indeed one strategic reason why one-day strikes are preferred—in what places in the public sector would staff striking for a significant period damage the government more than the unions? Maybe there are some. But it is hard to think of any.
“Putting Meryl’s performance aside – I’ve raved about it enough, plus it was only a pie, and there was no custard – you do not get any sense of Thatcher’s political coming of age. Why did she believe what she believed, and why so vehemently? Why go to war, for example, over an island no one in Britain cared about? You also get no sense of the human cost of her policies, how she disadvantaged the poor and took a hammer to the society she did not believe in.”
Deborah Ross, writing a review of the film, The Iron Lady (about Margaret Thatcher), page 88, The Spectator (behind the paywall). Here is the Spectator link for those who pay for the thing.
It is quite amusing, in a grim sort of way, to see how a writer such as Ms Ross is torn by her admiration for the film as a piece of moviemaking art and its sympathetic portrayal of Lady Thatcher, and her own leftist opinions concerning the alleged impact of this person on the United Kingdom (her remarks about the Falklands presumably indicate Ms Ross would have let the Argentine junta just take the Falklands, but she never tells us in the short space available).
As a free market liberal, I certainly do not revere this politician (the government share of GDP at the end of her time in office was barely different from at the start and some thumpingly bad domestic legislation, like the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, got passed), but it is nevertheless rather striking how certain film critics have had their heads messed by this film.
I am definitely going to see it. US-based movie reviewer Kyle Smith really liked it, and for the sort of reasons that, I suspect, upset Ms Ross.
I rarely write about party politics as I think it is a waste of time, given that the two and a half main parties in Westminster are largely interchangeable and simply despise them all with an icy passion. But I will make an exception today…
Cameron, far from being a smart political operator, could not even gain a majority for his party against a detested Labour government at the last election. But by saying ‘no’ to Merkozy, he has actually done something that almost 60% of the country appear to approve of. And it has made his LibDem coalition partners publicly incandescent with rage… and therefore also uniquely vulnerable.
So the smart move is to finally tell Nick Clegg to get stuffed and to call a snap General Election. Go ‘nuclear’ and do it right now, whilst the advantage is for once very clearly in the Tory Party’s court. If the LibDems and Labour want a shot at forming a coalition, well give them what will be a ‘hospital pass’ and let them try.
But then this is the Tory Party we are talking about of course, and it would be fair to say they rarely miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. More likely he will just sit there looking smug and wait for the initiative to pass over to his political enemies once again.
I am on the Cobden Centre email list, and I have to be careful about confidentiality with regard to many of the emails I read. However, the one I just got today from Jamie Whyte is presumably intended to get around:
I’m on BBC’s Radio 4’s PM programme tonight, discussing the report on the FSA’s failure to notice that RBS was about to fail – up against some former official of the FSA. I am afraid they are going to edit what I said (fingers crossed on that) and also that I cannot tell you the exact time my item will come on the programme, which starts at 5pm, I think.
The FSA is the British financial regulator. RBS is the Royal Bank of Scotland. According to the man from the FSA, the Royal Bank of Scotland’s woes were caused by poor decisions.
I’m guessing that Jamie Whyte will be a bit more informative than that. I am out and about this evening, but it looks like there’ll be a recording available, for a while. If nothing else, this is further evidence that the Cobden Centre gang are putting themselves about.
LATER: I managed to listen to Jamie Whyte’s performance, and better, to record it. Here is what he said in his opening statement:
[The FSA] did fail. But I don’t blame it on the individuals of the FSA. I think that they have an impossible task. What’s happened in banking is that because of government guarantees to those people who lend money to banks, explicitly in the case of retail depositors – you and me with our ordinary money in the bank, and implicitly and pretty reliably in the case of wholesale lenders to banks, because they’re government guaranteed, there is no price mechanism any longer in the banking market for risk. So banks can take as much risk as they like and without paying a price for it. Normally what would happen in a free market is that it would become more expensive for banks to borrow money. And that doesn’t happen. There’s no risk premium for banks taking larger risks, because the people lending the money realise that the government will bail them out.
Now the effect of this is that basically the government is subsidising bank risk taking on a massive scale. And the job of the FSA is to counteract that. There are these rules – the Basel rules and so on about capital requirements. And then there are supervisors, regulators, people who go into the banks and check they’re complying, and their job is to counteract the massive incentive towards risk taking that the government has already provided. Now the question is: can they do it? They obviously failed to do it. Can they, if they do a better job? And I think they can’t.
And the reason they can’t is that there are almost infinitely many ways that banks can take risks. The rules will always specify some particular ways, and regulators will go in, looking at that stuff. Are they doing this or that? But the bankers are very clever and they can always come up with other ways of taking risks, and I just think it’s a hopeless task that they’ve been given.
Whyte’s opponent in the debate, a Mr Jackson, got off on the wrong foot at the start of his reply:
I think it’s very easy to blame the regulators.
Which many are indeed doing, but not Jamie Whyte. His point was that their task is impossible.
Mr Jackson went on to say that he thought that the regulators could do better, by, you know, doing better. And the BBC gave him the last word. Which was him saying that the regulators could indeed … do better.
But Jackson never really said why he thought this. There was talk of cats and mice, and of how the mice are very numerous and very incentivised and the cats unable to cope. The general idea was aired of making regulators less numerous, better paid and above all “better trained”, and of having these few regulatory titans apply only one simple all-embracing regulation, rather than lots of regulations (with lots of omissions), namely: Banks must behave well! Putting the regulators entirely in charge of banking, basically, although that was not quite spelt out. It was classic Road to Serfdom stroke Economic Calculation stuff, with one guy saying that calculation is screwed and should be unscrewed by the state retreating rather than advancing, and the other guy saying: we can still regulate better in the future (despite the evidence of the recent past), by making the arbitrary power of the state even more arbitrary and even more powerful (and hence even more likely to screw things up on an even grander scale in the future).
Just who “won” this argument is anybody’s bet. I think that Whyte made a much stronger case than his opponent, but I would, wouldn’t I?
More to the point, anyone generally inclined to favour free markets, capitalism, etc., to favour rational economic calculation and to oppose serfdom, would definitely have scored it a win for Whyte on points. Such a person might even want to dig further into the argument with some internet searching. At which point the fact that Whyte is spelt with a “y”, and that Whyte was introduced only as a “financial commentator” (rather than being from, say, the Cobden Centre) won’t have helped any.
Perhaps this posting will help such searchers after truth rather more.
Knowing my fondness for pictures of London’s Big Things, taken from irregular places, South African blogger 6k (a scroll down there is recommended) has just emailed me with a link to this Daily Telegraph picture, which is a view from near the top of London’s BT Tower, of such things as the Gherkin, the more distant Docklands Towers, and the now nearly completed Shard. Yes indeed, well worth a click and a look. I know I’ve said it many times before, but I love how, with this new internet thing they’ve installed recently, people six thousand miles away can email you to tell you about interesting things in your own back yard.
But the real story here is not the view from the BT Tower. It is what the view of the BT Tower is going to look like from now on, and why:
BT Tower press officer Ian Reed said: “The huge dishes are synonymous with the tower and it truly is the end of an era. With the introduction of fibreoptic cable, the satellites have been defunct for many years and have reached the end of their lifetime. People will remember the dishes from when they were children – they were responsible for 90 per cent of the TV shown in the country. They were a landmark and could be seen all over London.”
I had no idea this was going to happen. [LATER: And either the DT or Ian Reed has it wrong also. As commenter Roue de Jour explains: “They’re not satellite dishes they’re microwave dishes. They point to similar dishes on masts on a line-of-sight. Satellites are not involved in any way.”]
Here are a couple of before and after shots of the Tower, how it looked and how it now looks. And here are two shots I took of this tower, with its big dishes, in February 2006.
I wonder what will happen next? Will they just fill in the gaps with dreary windows and office space? Or will new and different high tech contraptions be installed? I fear and expect the former, but hope for the latter.
LATER: See also another amazing London tower picture, the very first one of these. Those are the Docklands towers.
Unless, of course, you are saying that people can freely come to these islands providing they are not ill, don’t ever require homes or need education then it is fine because these services are not benefits.
Pretty much, yes. I think that people should be able to freely come to these islands to earn a living, and then should be required to pay for their own housing, schooling, and healthcare in the free market when they need it. As should the natively born. The government spends huge sums of money on these things, and all three of them are worse in quality for almost everybody than they would be if the government did not spend any of this money.
– Michael Jennings, spelling out exactly what folks in these here parts most certainly do think.
Here is what London’s Metropolitan Police say about stop and search:
Being stopped does not mean you are under arrest or have done something wrong. In some cases, people are stopped as part of a wide-ranging effort to catch criminals in a targeted public place.
A police officer, or a community support officer must have a good reason for stopping or searching you and they are required to tell you what that reason is.
Reasons include that the police officer thinks you are carrying drugs, or there has been violence or disorder in the vicinity.
It is safe to say that stop and search is a really bad idea. It is reasonable to expect to be left alone by the authorities when you are going about your lawful business. However:
Of the Reading the Riots interviewees, 73% said they had been stopped and searched in the past 12 months – they were more than eight times more likely than the general population in London to have been stopped and searched in the previous year.
Reading the Riots is a report by the Guardian and the London School of Economics who interviewed 270 rioters to find out why they said they rioted. One could argue that cause and effect are reversed; the rioters are criminals and that is why they get stopped and searched a lot.
Theodore Dalrymple, who I do not think is right about everything but is right about a lot, analyses what he calls the underclass in his book Life at the Bottom. Reading through some of the quotes from rioters in the Guardian, his analysis rings true. The essence of it is that people have decided that bad things just happen to them and it is not their fault. Their view of themselves as victims is reinforced by their social workers who get their ideas from articles in the Guardian.
From the Guardian’s report of the research:
Rioters identified a range of political grievances, but at the heart of their complaints was a pervasive sense of injustice. For some this was economic: the lack of money, jobs or opportunity. For others it was more broadly social: how they felt they were treated compared with others.
This sense of being treated unfairly is exactly the victimhood mind-set. As for jobs, Dalrymple writes:
the unemployed young person considers the number of jobs in an economy as a fixed quantity. Just as the national income is a cake to be doled out in equal or unequal slices, so the number of jobs in an economy has nothing to do with the conduct of the people who live in it but is immutably fixed. This is a concept of the way the world works that has been assiduously peddled, not only in schools during ‘social studies’ but in the media of mass communication.
So stop stopping and searching because it is a good idea anyway, but they will find other excuses to riot.
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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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