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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Ministers are planning to implant “machine-readable” microchips under the skin of thousands of offenders as part of an expansion of the electronic tagging scheme that would create more space in British jails.
Amid concerns about the security of existing tagging systems and prison overcrowding, the Ministry of Justice is investigating the use of satellite and radio-wave technology to monitor criminals.
But, instead of being contained in bracelets worn around the ankle, the tiny chips would be surgically inserted under the skin of offenders in the community, to help enforce home curfews. The radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, as long as two grains of rice, are able to carry scanable personal information about individuals, including their identities, address and offending record.
This is beyond belief, or, at least, it would be if we had not been covering the various madcap schemes coming out of Whitehall the past few years. What we have here is a government that believes that the rights and liberties of its people ought to be ordered to suit the priorities of British police forces.
Now if you take this to be a good idea, you are going to be hard pressed to deny the logical conclusion, that if we were all implanted with RFID tags, it would be much easier to solve and prevent crimes in the first place. This is very probably true, but it also degrades the individual to the point where humans become mere vassals of the almighty British State.
Given the trend of affairs in the UK, that is probably the way things are going to go- give it a decade or two. Early adapters should get themselves arrested and tagged early, to beat the rush.
I, Perry Anthony de Havilland, hereby declare that in the event I die and my body comes into the possession of the State, under no circumstances whatsoever may the State, in the form of the National Health Service or any other component of the State, harvest my organs on the grounds of implied consent. I explicitly and absolutely refuse consent for my organs to be harvested.
This is because the State’s plan to assume default ownership of my mortal remains is wholly and monstrously unacceptable. I reject the claim of the State to own my body just as I reject the legitimacy of its various claims to own my person whilst I am alive. Consent to harvest my organs for medical purposes may, however, be granted (or refused) by my designated next of kin, and no one else.
I have written before of the nationalisation of politics in Great Britain. In short, I think Peter Oborne’s thesis in the the Political Class is almost right, but back to front. We are much closer to the authoritarian “no-party state” advocated by Brian Crozier, realised, however by Djilas’ New Class sucking up consumerism and the New Left rather than through caudillo-corporatism. But I did not realise it had gone so far: how much the constitution has changed in that particular respect the last decade; how much in public discourse the government and the governing party are now identified.
Peter Hain MP is in trouble. His inexplicably luxuriantly financed campaign for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party, turns out not to have counted over £100,000 in donations. It is all over the newspaper and the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, and the Electoral Commission are both investigating. I’m sorry? Apparently the failure to account is a criminal offence. It what?
Now maybe it couldn’t happen to a nicer bloke, Mr Hain (an African by birth) having moved from being the leader of the Anti-Apartheid Campaign in the UK in his twenties to one of the leading advocates of a new pass-law system for his adopted country. But I am outraged on his behalf in this case.
Someone has to be. All Mr Hain has done is to say he was too busy to notice the alleged offences being carried out in his name, not challenge, as the younger man would have done, the ludicrousness of the context. All the media has done is have vapours about the wickedness of using money to send leaflets and not reporting it to officials, and ridicule the poor man’s “orange” complexion in a way they would think disgusting and itself borderline criminal if he were an ethnically darker African.
Maybe I have not been paying enough attention, but I have not read anywhere yet the obvious point. … → Continue reading: Party = state?
A smaller state in Victorian terms isn’t on the cards. The electorate would take flight at such talk. What the electorate is after, however, is a redrawing of the state’s boundaries. There is no fall in demand for collective services like health and education but voters are seeking two clear advances in their freedom from such a redrawing exercise. The first is to gain greater freedom from a centrally run ration book-type state service where there is a set menu, often a single item, that has to be consumed at a certain time. The second demand is for taxpayers to use their own money to run their own services.
– Frank Field, Labour MP. He is probably right, but once people get into this habit of choosing to live their lives as they please, who knows where it may end up.
This item in the FT reminds us that the spirit of enterprise has not reached all pockets of British society:
More than half a million young Britons are officially too sick to work and claiming incapacity benefits, a higher tally than the number claiming unemployment benefit, according to figures obtained by the Financial Times.
The word I think the FT is looking for but reluctant to use, I think, is “lazy”.
The figure, which includes more than 300,000 young people claiming for “mental and behavioural disorders”, shows continuing high levels of worklessness among the young, in spite of 10 years of steady economic growth and a concerted attempt to move people off welfare and into work.
I will not dismiss problems of mental health – this is a serious subject, but 300,000?
This does rather throw the issue of economic immigration – and indeed, emigration – into sharper relief. If a significant chunk of the potential working population is mentally not the full set of cards, or lazy, no wonder it is proving easy for motiviated, not-ill foreigners to enter the UK job market. Contrary to the Rod Liddles of this world, I dread to think what would have happened to the British economy had it not been for the influx of immigrants over the past decade or so.
Via Andrew Sullivan’s blog, I came across this rather nifty map showing how different countries around the world vary in their treatment of privacy. Both Britain and America get a black. Some parts of the world are a sort of grey, like Africa (I guess the thugs that run parts of that continent have other things to worry about besides snooping on everyone). It looks as if Germany is less intrusive than France, and less than Britain. Canada is less intrusive than the USA, etc. The link takes you to the methodology that Privacy International, a civil lberties group, uses to calculate its rankings.
Here’s hoping that British lovers of liberty have rather more reason to feel less ashamed of what has happened in this nation in 12 months’ time.
I missed this when it came out before Christmas, but this crackerjack of an article by the often-excellent Martin Samuel in the Times (of London) about the hypocritical attitudes of the press towards burglaries on well-paid footballers is a good read. It had me nodding in agreement. So footballers have terrible taste in jewellery and cars? So what? Burgling their homes, particularly when family members are in the premises, is a heinous crime and should be punished with heavy restitution by the offender (if it takes the yob years to pay off such a debt, well tough). And yet the attitude of some parts of the press, if Samuel’s take is correct, is that rich sportsmen somehow have it coming. It reminds us of an unpleasant combination of anti-wealth snobbery mixed with the current loathing of “Chav” culture that brings together some fairly weird mixtures of political and cultural views. A bling-wearing Liverpool footballer is as entitled to the protection of his life and property as any Torygraph reader in Tonbridge Wells.
Read the whole thing. I like the Mossad reference at the end.
The Sunday Telegraph leads with this story about how there are reportedly more Roman Catholics living in Britain than Anglicans, based on figures for church attendance as well as census data. As a former Anglican and now atheist with a Catholic wife of decidedly liberal persuasions, I look upon this news item with a relaxed attitude. Part of the shift is down to the loss of nerve of the Anglican church, not to mention the impact of trends like mass immigration from eastern Europe, such as Poland. I am not a fan of the idea of national churches anyway – like the US Founding Fathers I support a separation of church and state – although I do believe that in certain respects, the Anglican church, and the wonderful hymns and literature it is associated with, is an often elevating part of British, and certainly English, culture. But the church was a political creation, remember, with all the faults that implies. Up until the middle of the 19th Century, recall, atheists, Dissenters, Catholics and Jews faced all manner of barriers to entering British public life, although in practice this meant that many non-Anglicans ended up driving the Industrial Revolution – like the Quakers – precisely because they had a hard time entering certain professions or going into politics. But this prejudice was still wrong even if the unintended consequences could be beneficial with the benefit of hindsight.
I am blogging this from the very decadently Catholic south of France, in Cannes. Just thought I would mention that.
Henry Porter has written an excellent take down of Jack Straw and Polly Toynbee in the Guardian Online.
The air is clearing now. Each one of us is probably more certain where we stand in the ideological divide that is opening up. Are we for the growth of state power at the expense of individual freedom, or do we believe that our democracy depends on individual freedom and an inviolate system of rights? If you agree with the following propositions you may just find yourself on the opposite side to Straw and Toynbee.
I commend the whole article to you.
I would add is that the air was always pretty clear from our perspective. There was never any doubt to us where the state was headed or what all these laws really meant. Also I would like to point out that there is scant evidence that David Cameron is not quite happy to stand on the same side of the ideological divide as Jack Straw and Polly Toynbee (whom he memorably praised) for as long as the amoral jackanapes thinks it suits his personal career interests.
Also the conflation of democracy with liberty is fallacious but I realise that we have quite a bit of work to do at the axiomatic level to bring that once obvious and widely accepted fact back into the broader intellectual meta-context. The notion that “our democracy depends on individual freedom” strongly implies that freedom should or does serve democracy. I would argue that democracy is not an end in and of itself at all but at best merely a tool by which freedom is pursued by mitigating the power of the state.
A frosty reception awaits Santa Claus in Britain this year. It seems that the much-loved benefactor of children everywhere is, in fact, suspected of being guilty of a number of illegal practices.
Greenpeace UK has accused Santa of ‘environmental terrorism’ by encouraging crass global consumerism without any effort to dispose of packaging and minimise waste. They have also attacked Santa for his record of pollution output and have demanded that he take steps to lower the carbon footprint of his activities. The complaint has prompted officials at the Department of the Environment to investigate Santa for possible breaches of the EU Waste Electric and Electronic Equipment Directive, which makes the producers of goods responsible for their environmentally sound disposal.
Further trouble can be expected from the Information Commissioner who has pointed out that Santa may be in breach of the Data Protection Act by keeping records of all the country’s children. In particular, his lists of who has been naughty and who has been nice constitutes a behavioural database which cannot be kept without the unambiguous, specific and informed consent of the subject.
The Equality Commission has also weighed in with concerns about Santa’s employment practices. His policy of only working with elves is clearly discriminatory and leaves him open to prosecutions by pixies, faeries and goblins who are not being considered for employment due to their race.
The Department of Work and Pensions is also investigating the work practices of Santa on the basis that, over the Christmas period, he demands that his elvish workforce work around the clock in order to meet the seasonal demand. This is a clear and unequivocal flouting of the EU Working Time Directive which limits the working week to 48 hours and could give rise to a further prosecution.
Santa’s time-honoured habit of stopping for a drink of brandy in every household (and there are 25 million in the UK) will also bring trouble. According the Civil Aviation Authority, the alcohol limit for any pilot is 20 milligrams per 100 millilitres of blood. Police forces nationwide have been put on alert for an overweight, elderly, bearded man at the controls of a nine-reindeer sleigh and, if spotted, to apprehend him immediately.
Santa was not available for comment but a spokeself has said that Santa is seriously considering whether or not to fly over British airspace this year.
Jack Straw, it is amazing to relate, has been touted as a potential Prime Minister. Who knows, if the implosion of the Brown government gets worse, he might still be in the running for the top job. So it might be useful to realise that among his gifts is one for sublime comedy:
The constitutional expert Vernon Bogdanor has commented that when the history of this era is written, the last 10 years will be seen as heralding a “quiet revolution” in the way in which the UK is governed. He is correct.
Quiet or not, there have been major changes. In case our Jack needs a bit of assistance, here are some of them:
- Emasculation of the House of Lords
- Erosion of the right to trial by jury
- Removal of the double-jeopardy protection in court trials
- Extension of blasphemy laws
- Law enabling the creation of a centralised state database and ID card system
- The passing of more than 3,000 criminal offences
- Anti-social behaviour orders – many of which can be imposed without full due process of law
- Civil Contingencies Act, giving sweeping powers in the case of “national emergencies”
- Erosion of right to hold public demonstrations
- Erosion of rights of private property owners to use their premises as they seek fit: bans on smoking in pubs and restaurants, for example
- European Arrest Warrant
Okay, I think you get the general idea. And on the other side of the balance sheet, what can Straw suggest? He talks about the Freedom of Information Act and EU “human rights” legislation. The former is an improvement but hardly compensates for the list above; the latter is a mish-mash: some of the “rights”, as my sneer-quotes imply, are not rights in the classical liberal sense as acting as brakes on coercion, but rather entitlements, or claims, and which interfere with things like freedom of contract, etc.
The general thrust of policy over the past few years has been towards more regulation of personal behaviour in the fields of health, the environment, family upbringing, smoking and diet. About the only emphatic move in a libertarian direction is on the area of booze: 24-hour drinking; yet the government cannot get itself in a consistent frame of mind when it comes to drugs – and alcohol is a serious health hazard when consumed to excess – so we continue with a largely unwinnable war on drugs, which by the way operates to the detriment of our campaign to undermine the likes of the Taliban, etc, and the poppygrowing druglords of Asia, etc. On sex, yes, the government has lowered the age of gay sexual consent to 16 and permitted gay civil partnerships, but a properly liberal approach would be to get the state out of the business or regulating marriage completely.
Generally, an appalling record. The challenge for the Tories, if they have any gumption, is to reverse it, lock stock and barrel (oh, did I mention that the right to self defence is pretty much dead as well?).
It is gratifying to see mainstream journalists such as Alice Thomson also pointing out what we have been doing here for quite some time: people who vote for the Tory party under Cameron because they are revolted by the legacy of Tony Blair are in fact just voting for more of the same as Cameron and Blair are largely interchangeable.
I met two key Blairite special advisers from 1997 last night, they were as thrilled with the Tories’ progress as they were by recent sightings of Mr Brown’s psychological flaws. One said that Cameron would never treat the garden room girls at Downing Street in the way that Mr Brown does. Another wondered what job Cameron would give Mr Blair when (not if) he becomes Prime Minister.
All too believable.
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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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