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.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Christopher Booker in the Telegraph has another forced adoption story. Or rather he did on Monday, but now he doesn’t.
…Social workers were about to seize a newly born baby for no more reason than their claim that it might be “at risk of emotional abuse”. Just for once, because no court papers had yet been issued, I would be able to report this case in detail, naming names and explaining why it appeared to be yet another appalling miscarriage of justice.
I spoke at length to the horrified mother, who told me how the local social workers wanted to remove her child which, since it was born prematurely three weeks ago, is still in a hospital intensive care unit. She has already happily brought up three other children, the oldest of whom, a bright 21-year-old who has just got a First at university, is doing all she can to help her mother win the right to keep the new addition to the family.
The next day, however, the court papers arrived, imposing a complete blanket of secrecy.
Do you think in your heart of hearts that there must be something more to it than that? Surely these social workers, while twits, cannot be as malicious as this story seems to imply? Have you ever thought, when reading about such a case, “well it sounds shocking, but one can never tell”?
That is the point. One can never tell. One can never make an assessment of these stories because the ancient protections of open justice have been thrown away.
Since the secret system of the Family Courts has denied the press and public the opportunity to assess the evidence in any other manner, one must make a guess as to the likelihood of social workers really behaving in this appalling way based on other cases where details have leaked out.
Here are two accounts of similar cases, in which professionals – an independent social worker and a GP in one case, a judge in another, who were in a position to tell described the behaviour of social workers as “appalling injustice” and “disgraceful […] about the worst I have ever encountered in a career now spanning nearly 40 years.”
Oh, and a sample of the sort of evidence that is held to be damning, as if the Cleveland scandal and the others like it had never happened:
One particularly bizarre psychiatric report was compiled after only an hour-long interview with the little girl. When she said she had once choked on a lollipop, this was interpreted as signifying that she could possibly have “been forced to have oral sex with her father”.
Wrapped up in some fairly predictable lawerly laments about Thatcher’s Cameron’s heartless cuts in legal aid there is a fascinating examination of the rise of the crowd-sourced legal advice website here: Tricks and cheats are the price of culling legal aid
Motoring trials are more frequently now defended by people who are making use of public special-interest websites such as PePiPoo which give advice to motorists both prior to and during a trial. Some advice is sound, some not so sound, but with the capacity to share approaches to defence has come the temptation in forums to share advice which, if followed, would result in a miscarriage of justice.
and
In some ways sites like these are a good thing: mass participation to help individuals to establish their legal rights is laudable, but to the extent that they encourage bad-faith practices, and ultimately provide tools to undermine the already buckling justice system, they are a serious problem – a price to be paid for legal aid cuts. The insatiable demand for help with litigation has given rise to websites on which anyone can offer their opinion on the law whether it is correct or misleading. In those circumstances it’s the individuals in need of help who will lose out, running trials on a hiding to nothing, which will leave them worse off than when they started.
The author, the barrister Rupert Myers, whose articles for the Guardian are usually more friendly to civil liberties, concludes that “the government must find ways to curb the spread of tricks and cheats, while replacing these sites with the benefit of reliable help for those that need it.” I suspect the call to replace these open websites with government ones is his professional self-interest talking. It does not matter. The government cannot replace these websites. Oh, they could find some legal grounds to close down these particular ones, PePiPoo (weird name) and Child Support Agency Hell, and “replace” them with government information website number four million and six, which rather fewer people would trust on account of the legal advice being sought in these cases being advice on how to legally fight branches of that same government. But unless the government is willing to censor the internet to a degree hitherto unprece- OK, better stop there for fear of giving ’em ideas.
As I was saying, now we have the internet people are going to discuss their problems on it, including their legal problems. Other people are going to give them advice. Have you noticed that about the internet? Rather sweet, I always think; the only thing people like doing on the internet more than talking about sex is advising others on everything from plumbing to childbirth for no reward. Of course some of the advice you get from unqualified strangers is bad. That, however, has also been known to be true of advice from qualified professionals.
A simply astonishing story from Alex Deane of Big Brother Watch: Smokers harrassed – with the encouragement of a school, and the co-operation of the police
On one perfectly reasonable reading of this story, “harrassed” is too mild a term. The correct word is “assaulted”. I am no lawyer, but this looks to me as though it could involve multiple crimes – not just assault but also theft, and encouraging minors to commit assault and theft, if those are separate charges.
Outrageously the fagins here are not underworld characters but the Hundred of Hoo Comprehensive School in Medway (cute name, shame about the Special Measures), Kent Police, and something called “A Better Medway”, described as “a joint initiative between the council and NHS Medway that encourages healthy living”. “A Better Medway” part-funded the project, paying for filming equipment.
According to This is Kent, quoted by Alex Deane, the first few filmed attacks featured stooges and then they went on to “other people”. I can’t quite figure out whether or not the”other people” were members of the public who participated voluntarily as “extras” in an admitted fiction or whether they were real victims. My spidey-senses are a-tingle with the suspicion of some hasty re-writing of history after hostile attention; the comments to the sycophantic This is Kent piece are gratifyingly hostile. Also, the video admiringly profiled in Kent Online has now been removed by the user.
Irrespective of whether the videos are real or fake, videos that show apparent assaults in an approving manner incite others to commit similar assaults on smokers for real.
Indeed, they incite others to commit any other type of assault that the attackers may deem is good for the victims. The law, of course, forbids people to rip the veils off Muslim women who go about swathed – though at least as many people the veils offensive as find cigarettes offensive, and there is a reasonable case to be made – as reasonable as the case for doing good by force being made by the Ciggy Busters – that having their veils ripped off might do them good in the end and help them kick the masking habit. The law also forbids incitement to such assaults. If I were to make a “burqa busters” video the police would be round in an instant, and the defence that everyone involved was only acting would cut no ice with the Crown Prosecution Service.
Why should not that law also apply in this case?
The Audit Commission became a politicised, bloated parody of itself. After thirteen years of Labour rule, and marinated in the arrogance of the mission, they decided to employ lobbyists to combat the Pickles Terror.
If you are part of the problem, you are part of the dissolution.
Thoughtful, long article here by Alex Massie at the Spectator on the real and presumed issues surrounding Islam and the UK, and whether some commentators on the subject are seeing phantom menaces:
“To my commenters and the others worried by the “Islamification of Britain” I would ask only this: why are you so afraid and why do you lack such confidence in this country and its people’s ability to solve these problems? Perhaps my confidence is misplaced but I think we can probably do it. This is, in many ways, a better, more tolerant place to live than it has been in the past and, unless we blunder, it should remain so. The annoyances of idiotic council regulations about Christmas trees and crucifixes or inflammatory articles in the press ought not to distract us from that fact. The open society is an achievement to be proud of – for conservatives and liberals alike – but the most likely way it can be defeated is if we allow ourselves to be defeated by our fears and, thus, in the end by ourselves.”
“Diversity need not be a threat, though diversity cannot work unless all are equal under the law. But Britain is changing and doing so in often interesting ways. It is, in general, a comfortable, tolerant place made up of people with complex identities that make it a more, not less, interesting and decent place. Yeats’ famous lines do not quite apply here. On all sides, the worst may indeed be full of passionate intensity but the best do not lack conviction even if we don’t shout about it. Perhaps we should do so more often.”
Definitely worth reading the whole article. I think one point to make straight away is this: if we have more confidence in the resilience of Western civilisation and the virtues of a post-Enlightenment, pro-reason culture, and encourage support for such things in our places of higher learning and in the opinion-forming world, that in itself might encourage more moderate-minded Muslims in the West realise that the long-term trend was not on the side of the Islamists. Showing a confident front to the world is not bravado – it helps us to win.
So… the global economy has been tanking in no small measure because certain states provided perverse incentives and pushed lenders to offer vast quantities of money to people who had no realistic probability of ever paying it back… and the solution to get us out of this whole mess is to twist banks arms into making loans they would rather not make.
The Lib Dem members of the Coalition favour a more interventionist approach to banking. Having been bailed out by the taxpayer, they argue, the banks have an obligation to lend. The Tories regard it as contradictory to try to control banks while encouraging them to build up their balance sheets.
No shit, Sherlock. The lunatics have taken over the asylum.
I wish I had something new to say on the Ian Tomlinson case.
I wish the new thing was “the person who was caught on video as, unprovoked, he hit a man from behind and pushed him to the ground, with the result that the man died soon afterwards, is going to be prosecuted, and the fact that he is a police officer will make no difference at all.”
But of course I am not able to say that because it is not true.
Oh, and anyone in the government opposing [calls for Islamic dress for women to be banned in Britain] is to be conditionally applauded…
…they are right to reject this vile authoritarian notion…
…but if they opposite it because “Islamic dress is ok” then they are a horse’s arse and need to called that.
A burqua or any item of islamic dress for women is as “ok” as a Nazi arm band… and people’s ability to wear Nazi arm bands also should not be banned, but they sure as hell should not be applauded.
– Perry de Havilland
Now I am usually harsh in my criticism of the National Health Service and indeed I wish to see it abolished entirely… but credit where credit is due. This was a very, er, uplifting example of ‘Enterprise Thinking’ by the NHS.
Carry on, Doctor!
As I have seen before, a lot of political news coverage in the UK (and in the US, for that matter) rather resembles sports coverage, if without the tone of hysteria covering the media’s reporting on England’s World Cup horror show. For instance, over at the Spectator’s Coffee House blog on the issue of public spending cuts, it goes into a lot of the arguments about who said X or Y about cutting A or B. In fairness, the Coffee House crew are pretty good at teasing out the statistics – Spectator editor Fraser Nelson has been excellent in hammering the former government over its debt – but there is something a bit missing from its analysis. And that is this: the scale of the shift that we might see from public sector jobs to private sector. If is true that hundreds of thousands of public sector jobs are to go, and the private sector is going to be encouraged to pick up the slack by new job creation, that is surely good news.
We are not admirers of Cameron’s style of Conservatism here at Samizdata (that’s putting it mildly, Ed), but I’ll give him and his finance minister credit if, at the end of the current parliament, there has been a significant shift away from the state and towards the private sector. We libertarian ideologues are hard to please, but such a shift will be pretty tough to pull off. If it means we have to put up with a certain amount of political BS along the route, I don’t especially mind. It is the general direction that counts.
Update: Guido Fawkes points out that certain leftist publications, reliant on public sector job ads, such as with the Guardian, have an obvious reason to fear the axe. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!
“There’s a very attractive girl in the second row. Dark and dusky … We’ll maybe put a wee word out for her. She’s very attractive, very nice, very slim. The heat’s getting to me. She’s got that Filipino look – the kind you’d see in a Gauguin painting. There’s a wee bit of culture.”
Thus spake Frank McAveety, Labour member of the Scottish Parliament … unaware the microphone was on. Mr McAveety thus ended his tenure as chairman of the petitions committee and the Labour spokesman for sport at Holyrood, and began his career as YouTube star.
Silly old fool. I bet his wife had words when he got home. He must be wondering whether the voters of Shettleston will punish him come the next election. That, and the YouTube, should be punishment enough. He should not have had to resign. Yes, the girl was fifteen (not seventeen as in earlier reports) – but he did not know that. He did not refer to her in explicit sexual terms. He just said she was attractive. I do not believe for a moment that his “put a wee word out for her” was a plan to arrange an assignation. The poor old boy just wanted to give her a tour of Holyrood and bask for a few moments in her proximity, as tubby middle aged men have tried to bask in the proximity of slim young women since the stone age. This is Benny Hill, for goodness sake, not Lavrenti Beria picking out rape victims from the lines of female gymnasts who performed before the politburo.
Yet according to the Guardian a Scottish National Party MSP, Sandra White, described the comments as “sexist, sleazy and racist” (er, why racist?) and said Scottish Labour leader Iain Gray’s failure to act as soon as the incident came to light showed an “appalling lack of judgment”. Oh, and we have spokesmen from Disclosure Scotland (er, why? Just why?) and the Scottish Parliament burbling on about the “The Protection of Children (Scotland) Act 2003″ as if the mere mention of that was not damn close to libel.
How did we get here? You know the world has got weird when you find yourself defending a Labour politician. You know the world has got weirder when his being Labour is not enough to protect him from the press. How on earth did we arrive at a place where someone as old-fashioned as me thinks this all has got a little bit crazy? I used to be fond of observing that puritanism had moved out of the bedroom and into the recycling bin, but now it’s back everywhere. It’s in the air we breathe, so that every wistful little fantasy, every bumptious little burst of bravado, is potential career disaster – at least for males. Females who do this sort of thing are demonstrating the rich, raunchy sexuality of the mature woman. Just so’s you know, boys.
Added later: A comment from CountingCats sparked a further thought: how come Frank McAveety’s mere words were enough to make him resign from a chairmanship but Chris Huhne’s actual adultery has not made him resign from anything? I speculate that sex comes under the old progressive rules whereas speech comes under the new progressive rules, which are much stricter. Also, he said “dusky.”
“David Cameron is determined to make as much noise as he can, and for as long as he can, to the effect that every unpleasant thing the coalition needs to do is solely the consequence of the criminal improvidence of its predecessor. No new prime minister, especially in these circumstances, would act any differently. I wonder how long this card will remain trumps, however. After all, when Margaret Thatcher’s government cut the unsustainably vast subsidies to public sector industries – from coal-mining to car manufacturing – which her Labour predecessors had not dared to confront, it established her reputation among millions as a cruel and heartless prime minister. It will be fascinating to see if the much more soothing rhetoric of a Conservative government in coalition with the Liberal Democrats can convince the electorate that they are caring cutters; how extraordinary it will be if they carry that off while reducing public expenditure on a scale which Margaret Thatcher never even attempted.”
– Dominic Lawson
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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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