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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Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies, The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
– C.S. Lewis
A lot of people have been talking to me about the pubs of Yeovil this week. Not because of my unwise enthusiasm when young for rough cider. But because of this, first covered at the beginning of the year:
Revellers in the Somerset town of Yeovil, often seen as Britain’s answer to the Wild West on a Friday and Saturday night, were this weekend getting to grips with a unique scheme which is more science fiction than Wild West. Customers entering the town’s six main late-night drinking and dancing joints were being asked to register their personal details, have their photograph taken and submit to a biometric finger scan.
That’s from a report in The Guardian in May, which went on to explain:
The clubs and Avon and Somerset police, who are supporting the scheme, argue that it is not compulsory. Nobody can be forced to give a finger scan, which works by analysing a fingertip’s ridges and furrows. However, the clubs admit they will not allow people in if they refuse to take part in the scheme.
But things have moved on. “Don’t like it? You can drink elsewhere. Let the market sort it out… let these awful surveillance clubs go out of business and free-wheeling ones thrive,” was my immediate reaction. It appears that was naive. While it may be “voluntary” for drinkers, it appears that it is not voluntary for pubs and clubs. Not any longer. The Register explains,
“The Home Office have looked at our system and are looking at trials in other towns including Coventry, Hull & Sheffield,” said Julia Bradburn, principal licensing manager at South Somerset District Council.
Gwent and Nottingham police have also shown an interest, while Taunton, a town neighbouring Yeovil, is discussing the installation of fingerprint systems in 10 pubs and clubs with the systems supplier CreativeCode. […]
The council had assumed it was its duty under the Crime and Disorder Act (1998) to reduce drunken disorder by fingerprinting drinkers in the town centre.
Some licensees were not happy to have their punters fingerprinted, but are all now apparently behind the idea. Not only does the council let them open later if they join the scheme, but the system costs them only £1.50 a day to run.
Oh, and they are also coerced into taking the fingerprint system. New licences stipulate that a landlord who doesn’t install fingerprint security and fails to show a “considerable” reduction in alcohol-related violence, will be put on report by the police and have their licences revoked.
The fingerprinting is epiphenomenon. What’s deeply disturbing here is the construction of new regimes of official control out of powers granted nominally in the spirit of “liberalisation”. The Licensing Act 2003 passed licensing the sale of alcohol and permits for music and dancing – yes, you need a permit to let your customers dance in England and Wales – from magistrates to local authorities. And it provided for local authorities to set conditions on licenses as they saw fit.
Though local authorities are notionally elected bodies, and magistrates appointees, this looked like democratic reform. But all the powers of local authorities are actually exercised by permanent officials – who also tell elected councillors what their duties are. And there are an awful lot of them.
Magistrates used to hear licensing applications quickly. They had other things to do. And they exercised their power judicially: deciding, but not seeking to control. Ms Bradburn and her staff have time to work with the police and the Home Office on innovative schemes. I’ve noted before how simple-sounding powers can be pooled by otherwise separate agencies to common purpose, gaining leverage over the citizen. I call it The Power Wedge.
They are entirely dedicated to making us safer. How terrifying. “A Republic?” said the Seagreen, with one of his dry husky unsportful laughs, “What is that?”
GIve me the foul air of corruption, if that is the only way I may be permitted to breath at all.
The occasions where I am prepared to wade in on the side of a bunch of a civil servants are as rare as hen’s teeth but this one is truly no contest:
THE Ministry of Defence has banned Britain’s biggest commercial news broadcaster from frontline access to the nation’s forces, The Times has learnt.
In an unprecedented move that risks accusations of censorship, the Government has withdrawn co-operation from ITV News in warzones after accusing it of inaccurate and intrusive reports about the fate of wounded soldiers…
“As bad a hatchet-job as I’ve seen in years. Cheap shots all over the place, no context, no reasonable explanation…”
In other words, the standard operating procedure of the MSM. The stink is now so bad that it is finally getting in to some very lofty nostrils.
… is they are all racists, apparently. The paradox inherent in such a declaration might not be lost on Trevor Phillips, were he not now one of the official arbiters of what is and is not forbidden thought and speech in Britain.
How extraordinarily coincidental that this line should emerge from a New Labour appointee just before the Home Secretary is due to announce that settlement of Bulgarians and Romanians here will still be controlled after they become EU citizens.
I believe it was the late Ray Charles who bewailed his melancholy lot in the song lyric, “If it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all”. Looking back over the last hundred years or so, one could readily draw the same dismal conclusion about ideas.
At one level, this is to be welcomed. The 20th Century was not short of idea, most of them ranging from bad to downright horrific and which have now been defeated, discredited, marginalised or have just plain run out of steam. Gulags ‘R’ not us, thank you very much. Fine, except that it leaves us standing on the other side of the equation with no ideas at all, merely an awful lot of inertia and a dour determination to just carry on from one day to the next. Yes, it’s all very ‘end of history’.
In fairness that sort of works but only until the point where that persistent bloody nuisance history starts all over again. In other words, until about now:
John Reid has issued a dire warning that the Government risks losing the “battle of ideas” with al-Qa’eda.
The Home Secretary spoke out at an emergency meeting of ministers and security officials amid an ever-growing threat from home-grown Islamist terror groups.
He called for an urgent but controversial escalation in the propaganda war and said al-Qa’eda’s so-called “single extremist narrative” was proving ever more attractive to young British Muslims.
I suppose it is entirely consistent that a former communist like Mr. Reid has the capacity to understand the power of ideas, though perhaps his use of the term ‘Al Qaeda’ is entirely diplomatic when what he really means is Islam itself. For Islam is not only an idea, it is a big idea and very powerful one to boot. It is not going to be defeated by Western soldiers traipsing around in the dust of Basra or Helmand provience, regardless of how well trained, armed and motivated they may be. Nor will be it defeated by outright persecution in the West (should that be the next course of action). The Romans tried that in response to Christianity and look where it got them.
No, something else is needed though, precisely what, I cannot yet say. I can say that the official UK government effort, which, thus far, consists of this rather feeble outreach effort is bound to go nowhere. ‘Moderation’ is not an idea, merely a temperament. Appeals not to rock the boat are futile when set against a determined plan to sink the boat. Besides, the very fact that it is driven and financed by HMG means that it will almost certainly have the very opposite of its intended effect.
If this was a ‘battle of guns’, then we have all the best and biggest guns and there would not be even a trace of reasonable doubt about the eventual outcome. Whatever happens, we have got the Maxim gun, but so bloody what?
Mr. Reid is nearly right. This is a not a ‘battle of idea’ it is a ‘war of ideas’ and we are in the midst of that theatre of war completely unarmed.
Henry Porter, the British journalist, gave a lecture recently, which is reproduced in the Independent newspaper here, which lays out in trenchant terms the sheer magnitude of the Blair government’s assault on civil liberties. None of the broad points will exactly come as a surprise to regular readers of this blog but I link to it because it is a pretty good primer on the issue for those who have not thought much about this issue.
Here are a couple of excerpts:
There will be many reasonable people among you who will argue that the fight against terrorism or some other compelling problem makes the removal of a fragment of liberty the best option available to us. A little bit here, a little bit there doesn’t really matter, particularly when it involves somebody else’s rights. Without thinking very deeply, we say to ourselves “if you’ve done nothing wrong you’ve got nothing to fear from these new laws”. Not true. There is something to fear – because someone else’s liberty is also your liberty. When it’s removed from them, it’s taken from you even though you may not be able to conceive of the circumstances when you might need it. A system of rights must apply to bank managers, illegal immigrant cockle pickers and every type of defendant otherwise it doesn’t count.
I worry that we are not alert to the possibilities of social control. No matter how discreet this surveillance, it increases the spectral presence of the state in the everyday consciousness of each individual. I grant that it is a slow process and that it is nothing like the leaden omnipresence of the Stasi in the GDR. But I think we’re heading for a place from which we will not be able to return: the surveillance society where the state will crowd in on the individual human experience and threaten the unguarded freedoms of privacy, solitude, seclusion and anonymity. We may continue to attest to the feeling of freedom but in reality we will suffer more and more restrictions. Inexorably we are becoming subjects not citizens, units on a database that may be observed and classified by a Government which is taking control in areas where it has never dared in democratic times to trespass before.
I like the way that Porter directly confronts the nonsense ‘argument’ that “only the guilty have anything to fear” line that one hears being trotted out in favour of things like abolition of Habeas Corpus or eroding the presumption of innocence in the Common Law. This is a fine article that deserves to be widely read. At the end, Porter recommends, among other things, a wholesale effort to teach children about how the laws protecting liberty were acquired, and why they were acquired, in the first place. For it is in its attempts to obliterate history, or make us feel deeply ashamed of it, that the real menace of New Labour’s modernisation obsession first revealed itself. It may strike some critics of libertarianism as paradoxical, given that libertarians are usually seen as fans of modern life, that any defence of freedom must be steeped in an understanding and appreciation of history, including the Classics. Perhaps our modern legislators would be far less of a menace if they had bothered to study the speeches of Pericles or Cicero.
Having given up trying to stay PM and handed over the kulturcampf to Mr Brown, St Anthony now wishes to save the world:
In his strongest warning yet on the environment, the prime minister will tell fellow EU leaders that the world faces “conflict and insecurity” unless it acts now. “We have a window of only 10-15 years to take the steps we need to avoid crossing catastrophic tipping points,” Mr Blair says, in a joint letter with his Dutch counterpart, Jan Peter Balkenende.
I am not interested for this purpose in whether he is right about ‘catastrophic tipping points’. It is entirely possible he is. It is interesting that this is certainly not from his own knowledge. And since actually no one knows enough about climate to say under what conditions, never mind when, a catastrophe, bifurcation, flip, transition… whatever you would like to call it… might occur, then the fact the firm limit of years is reported as as little as 7 in some places, and up to 25 elsewhere, should not worry us.
What should, is the contradiction between the millenarian rhetoric and the irrelevance in its own terms of the hair-shirt policy that we are being exhorted to adopt. If the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere will cause catastrophe at some threshold level, then capping emissions from human activity merely postpones reaching the threshold. By not very much.
If things are that bad either: (1) We should find ways yet unknown to make global human greenhouse-gas emissions close to zero or net negative. (Sorry, no cooked food – except sun-baked and geyser-boiled – until we do.) Or (2) we should enjoy the party at the end of the world. But it seems those in charge do not know the difference between quantity and rate.
Now that is really scary. Reality I can cope with. I am aware I’m going to die, and probably suffer disease and loss first. That the course of my life will be determined not by biology, physics and economics, but by messianic imbeciles with no grasp of any of them, is harder to bear.
For me; the non-exclusive or: technofix plus fun.
For the Head Boy; “Repent, o ye sinners or burn in hell on earth! Go, and sin no more. (Than you did in 1990).”
Mary Ann Sieghart has written an interesting article about the rush to subject more or less everyone who comes in contact with children to checks by the state. She rightly points out what a paranoid example this sets by presupposing that people are pederasts. I heartily agree with her article and see this as one of the more extreme examples of the state replacing social interactions with politically mediated ones.
One of the nicer aspects of being a child used to be the random acts of kindness offered by adults outside the family: the friendly shopkeeper who ruffled your hair and gave you a sweet; the enthusiastic PE coach who gave up time after school to help with your gymnastics and was constantly – and wholly innocently – adjusting your body position to get the moves right. These adults were generous with their time and their affection. We knew who the pervs were and took pains to avoid them. Now all adults are deemed to be perverts unless they can prove that they are not. Most will now avoid contact with other people’s children and will refrain from touching them for fear of the action being misconstrued.
And then, in the next snippet by her, she writes lamenting the fact more people do not join political parties. Tellingly she mentions the two main (and largely indistinguishable) political parties.
Labour has a leadership contest coming up, in which members have a vote. Wouldn’t it be fun to cast one? And my local constituency is being split into two, so there will be selection processes for both new seats. I would love to have a say in the candidate selection, especially for the Tories. Having lectured them for years about the importance of choosing more women, it would be great to be able to make a difference.
What puzzles me is that so few people do want to join parties these days. Voters are always complaining about feeling disempowered. Here’s a chance at last to exert some power. Why not stop whingeing and take it? What puzzles me is that so few people do want to join parties these days. Voters are always complaining about feeling disempowered. Here’s a chance at last to exert some power. Why not stop whingeing and take it?
I find that interesting as on one hand she clearly laments the destruction of civil society by the regulatory state and on the other, she urges people to join the institutions who are responsible for doing precisely that. In effect she might just as well be saying: “it is terrible that gangs which threaten people with violence are invading our neighbourhoods and fostering a climate of fear… I wonder why more people are not empowering themselves over other people by joining a gang?”
It does warm the cockles of one’s heart to read a lede like this:
Political parties are so small they are “nearing critical condition” in many constituencies, a survey suggests.
Of course there is an agenda accompanying this report from an organisation calling itself Unlock Democracy. UD is a joint project of Charter 88 and the New Politics Network, and their aims are far from pure:
Revitalise local political parties through targeted state funding – Political parties are fundamental to our political system and should be funded in ways that encourage political participation and activism at a local level.
The group cannot seem to keep broken links (which are supposed to lead to their own project sites) off of their main website, but they do manage to get governmental ‘support’ for their People and Politics Day. (I have contacted the New Politics Network to ask what form that ‘support’ takes, and await a response.) The day boasts speeches from Tory chairman Francis Maude, Theresa May, various Lib Dem and Labour politicians, and even the leader of UKIP. Exhibitors include the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, British Union of Anti-Vivisectionists, and the League Against Cruel Sports.
So the good news is that political parties face death. The bad news is, there are people who are trying to keep them alive, and getting governmental support to do so. The surprising news is…nowhere to be found.
UPDATE: New Politics Network’s press officer, James Graham, responded to my query about whether or not taxpayer money is funding this event:
The Electoral Commission, DCA and PEU are indeed financially supporting the event. I don’t have the exact figures in front of me but they have contributed around £17k in total, two-thirds of which comes from the Commission. I hasten to add that we are not making any money out of this project and it is currently just about breaking even.
Well, that makes it okay, I guess! (Not.)
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:
The Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Bill, due to return to the House of Commons next week, will mean that 9.5million adults – one third of the adult working population – will be subject to ongoing criminal checks.
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.
From The Guardian yesterday:
The Department for Education has drawn up a series of proposals which are to be sent to universities and other centres of higher education before the end of the year. The 18-page document acknowledges that universities will be anxious about passing information to special branch, for fear it amounts to “collaborating with the ‘secret police'”. It says there will be “concerns about police targeting certain sections of the student population (eg Muslims)”.
There are two things I find fascinating about this. Not that it explicitly suggests staff may want to report students to the authorities for “using a computer while Asian” – something which if followed would bankrupt every scientific, economic and medical faculty in the country, from the postage and staff time used in denouncements – but the institutional presumptions involved, and the political context. → Continue reading: Love report thy neighbour
You can guess the context.
10 October 2006
Dear Sir or Madam,
YOUR ADVERTISING
We investigate complaints to ensure that non-broadcast marketing communications comply with the British Code of Advertising, Sales Promotion and Direct Marketing (the CAP Code), prepared by the Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP). We also investigate complaints to ensure that television and radio advertising complies with the CAP (broadcast) Codes.
We have received the attached complaint about your national press ad (copy enclosed) and we welcome your help to resolve it. If the copy is incomplete, please send us a complete version. If the copy is difficult to read, please send us a better copy.
Please also check your company name and address details at the top of the complaint notification. If they are incorrect, please let us know.
We shall consider the complaint in particular under Clause 5.1 of the Code (copy enclosed). You should be aware that marketing communications must comply with all other relevant clauses, among which are the attached underlying principles. A copy of the 11th edition of the Code may be obtained from the CAP website, www.cap.org.uk or the ASA website, www.asa.org.uk.
The Code requires marketers to hold documentary evidence for their claims before submitting an ad for publication. Please give us all the substantiation and information you would like us to have. Although it is for you to decide what to submit, you will need to comment on the complainants’ specific objection as outlined in the attached complaint notification. We shall be happy to receive anything else you think is relevant.
Please let us know whether the material to which this complaint relates was prepared/handled by you or by another company on your behalf and, if so, which company. If you have used an agency, please tell us its name. Please let us know what plans you have for future use of your ad. Can you provide us with a media schedule?
If the ASA Council upholds the complaints, its ruling might affect the acceptability of the same or similar claims/advertisements appearing in other media, including broadcast. We are telling you this now so you are aware of the potential ramifications of this investigation. Please let us know whether the same or similar claims are made or are to be made in advertisements in other media, including broadcast.
Our Complaints Procedure leaflet is enclosed.
The ASA’s effectiveness depends on resolving complaints fairly and swiftly. An unreasonable delay in responding to our enquiries may be considered a breach of the Code. So that we can conclude this matter as soon as possible, please respond in writing, preferably by e-mail to […..], within five working days. If you need more time please let us know. If you are not the right person to deal with this letter please tell us and pass the letter on to someone who is. If we do not receive a reply within five working days from the date of this letter, we shall submit to the ASA Council a draft recommendation upholding the complaint. [My emphasis]
Thank you for your co-operation. We look forward to hearing from you by 17 October.
Yours sincerely
[…………]
Investigations Executive
cc: [Newspaper]
bcc: NPA [=Newspaper Publishers Association]
Yes; they did disclose the “bcc”. The accompanying leaflet sets out the complaints procedure. It ends, inevitably, on a minatory note:
Most advertising parties act quickly to amend or withdraw their ad if we find it breaks the codes. The ASA acts against the few who do not. Broadcasters’ licenses require them to stop transmitting ads that break the codes and we can ask publishers not to print ads that dont meet the rukes. Other sanctions exist to prevent direct mail that breaches the code from being distributed and to reduce the likelihood of posters appearing that breach the codes on taste and decency and social responsibility grounds.
Ultimately, we can refer non-broadcast advertisers who persistently break the CAP Code to the Office of Fair Trading for legal action under the Control of Misleading Advertisement Regulations. Broadcasters who continually air ads that break the codes can be referred to Ofcom, which has the power to fine them or even revoke their licence.
An almost-hidden jewel in London’s collection of museums is the Gilbert collection of jewels, furniture and historic art in Somerset House, on the banks of the Thames near the Temple tube station. At the moment, there is a retrospective exhibition of the work of the great Tiffany jewellery business, going back to that firm’s origins in the middle of the 19th Century. In some ways, the rise of the house of Tiffany mirrors America’s own rise as a mighty economy, since the industrial progress of that country created vast fortunes, and naturally, people wanted to show this wealth off. And boy, did they do so. I strongly recommend this collection for anyone who wants to see the jewellers’ art at its greatest.
My only word of caution: if you are thinking of taking someone there for the start of a sophisticated date, be warned. The jewels there may give your other half Big Ideas. Very Expensive Ones. Gulp.
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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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