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Apparently, somebody claiming to represent the Scottish National Liberation Army has admitted responsibility for sending packages of ‘caustic substances’ through the post to Tony Blair and several other MPs.
I wouldn’t go as far as to call this an attempt on the life of Our Glorious Leader (especially as he is in Australia at the moment) or, if it was, then it is a pathetically ham-fisted one.
No, if reports are accurate, then it is obviously some sort of pointed message. But what message?
Things are getting a bit racey over here.
I have only a fuzzy and rather amateurish understanding of Chaos Theory but I do believe that it attempts to explain the process whereby a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon and, some time later, as a direct result, a hurricane lays waste to Poland. Or something. In other words, it is an exposition on how tiny, insignificant events can, through a cumulative series of knock-on effects, eventually become really big, major, world-changing events.
On the assumption that I am right (or, at least, not too hilariously wrong) then I think we are witnessing something in reverse by the UK governments sudden resurrection of the proposed ban on fox-hunting.
Now it is fair to say, that fox-hunting has been under the cosh for some time now. It has been priority No.1 for animal rights groups for years but, since Labour came to power in 1997, it has also been the target of the Labour left who see it as a decadent hobby for the cruel and arrogant rich; a totem of class privilege. This is a charge which is neither true nor fair but it has played well within the context of the Politics of Envy and, even if it were true, it deserves to be protected from state bullying.
But, faced with some determined opposition, the government has shied away for forcing through a ban of the sport in England and, until the last few days, the issue appeared, if not dead, then dormant.
All of a sudden, though, it is back on the agenda and with indecent haste, the government announcing a House of Commons Free Vote on March 18. Not through any sense of principle, mind. Tony Blair is known to be, at best, agnostic on the issue. No, it has everything to do with the War on Terror.
Blair has committed himself to supporting a US attack on Iraq but knows full well the unholy ruckus that support is likely to cause within his own party. This is a trade-off. Blair is telling the left that, if they keep quiet over the fate of Saddam, he will throw them some red meat in the form of the ban on fox-hunting they have always lusted for. In other words, give me Baghdad or the fox gets it.
It may not work. First, cynical ploys are the life-blood of the left and this may simply not be enough to buy their silence. Secondly, the principled opposition that rallied before is already rallying again and dark mutterings of civil disobediance fill the air.
But is this not an example of Chaos Theory only in reverse? Crazed terrorists kill thousands of people in America and, as a result, an old English tradition faces state-mandated oblivion.
The British government feels it no longer even has to hide the fact it wishes to be the centre of a vast spider web of surveillance. Gone are the days of ‘no comment’ regarding Echelon and Carnivore. Now the state is demanding the ability to control all communications between British scientists and foreign colleagues on pretty much any subject the state deems appropriate.
The situation is little better in the USA and as the editorial in the latest print edition of New Scientist aptly puts it:
The government there is withdrawing thousands of technical papers that amount to cookbooks for chemical and biological weapons. It has also asked journal editors to leave out details from papers that would be essential for anyone replicating the work. This undermines the whole notion of ensuring that research results can be checked by others. It also raises a paradox: terrorists, it seems, are deemed smart enough to understand arcane science, but too dumb to fill in the gaps in research papers
The deadening effect this will all have on a vast swathe of scientific progress is not hard imagine. Inevitably some types of research will just migrate to places where the state does not impede its development resulting in more, not less, diffusion of critical knowledge and technologies. Rather than a narrowly targeted moderation of clearly weaponised technologies, the state has elected to implement an Orwellian oversight on all technical discussions on subjects to be determined by semi-qualified bureaucrats who will always have a presumption of the legitimacy of intervention. A disappointing response but hardly a unexpected one to someone such as myself who assumes the worst of states and is rarely surprised.
When The State watches you,
dare to stare back
In the early Spring of 1998, when I was still a jobbing scriptwriter, I was invited to a showbiz party held in the home of a TV producer who had hired me to work on some his projects. During the course of the evening I got into conversation with an actress who had just finished filming an episode of a TV cop drama. She told me that she had been trained to handle a gun convincingly and I replied that that was the type of training we could all do with and for real. I could not have caused her more offence if I had stuck my hand up her skirt.
“So you think we should all go around shooting each other then?” she exclaimed.
That’s what it is like over here. Anti-self-defence is the default position. It is the accepted norm. It is so universal and unquestioned that even unarmed self-defence is often referred to as ‘vigilantism’. It is uncivilised and neanderthal. We don’t need to defend ourselves; we have our marvelous police to do that for us.
Prior to today, promoting the right to bear arms was only marginally less controversial than promoting legalised child sex abuse. Given that context, the appreance of this column may reasonably be regarded as something of a turning point.
“Given this scandalous situation, it is time for the Government to confer a new right on the people: the right to bear arms. Gun control in this country is in any case a joke. There is far more gun crime now than there was before the idiotic law passed by the Major government to ban handguns after the Dunblane massacre”
One has to be living in Britain to appreciate exactly how ground-breaking that statement is and it is made all the more significant by the source. Simon Heffer is not a Libertarian, he is more of a traditional paleo-Conservative but he is a high-profile commentator and is generally regarded as a serious voice. He is the kind of man TV producers want on their talk shows when they need a bit of gravitas. He can be excoriated and villified and, indeed, he will be both but he can’t be ignored and that matters.
Despite this pleasing development, I have a quibble and an important quibble. Mr. Heffer invokes the state to grant us a right to bear arms. This is wrong. It is not a licence and what the government gives, the government can take away again. We already have a right to bear arms, bestowed upon us by our ancient common law heritage and exercisable by the mere act of being born. All the government has done is to deprive us of it. Now, if Mr. Heffer can get his head around that concept as well, we will really be cooking with gas.
That said, he is to be heartily congratulated for saying what was, up till now, not even thinkable. In doing so, he has prised open a door that was previously glued shut, nailed over and padlocked. The restoration of our common law rights is still a journey of a thousand miles but the first few steps have been taken.
Courteous policemen, red telephone kiosks, afternoon tea, cap-doffing and genteel bucolic stability. That is the cartoon image that many non-British people seem to have of Britain.
I don’t suppose they will want to read this
“Gun crimes during the first 10 months of the annual period have trebled in most of the urban areas which have so far submitted statistics to the Home Office. Sir John Stevens, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, said gun gangs were spreading across the country whereas, until recently, they were confined to a handful of London boroughs”
Drug running, gun culture, drive-by shootings, rampant robbery, burglary and car-crime. Not very ‘Mary Poppins’ is it?
I would, ideally, like to write something satirical and witty about all this but I can’t. First of all, because the galloping erosion of our civil society is no laughing matter. Secondly, I am just too furious. I am furious at the way that the failure of one government prohibition (drugs) reinforces the failure of another government prohibition (guns) and to the detriment of all.
But I am even more furious at the despicable lies that were foisted on us during the campaign to ban private gun ownership. “It will make the streets of Britain safer” they said; “It will put an end to gun culture” they promised; “It will reduce crime” they assured us; “Criminals will find it harder to procure weapons” they proclaimed.
Ad-hoc justification was heaped upon egregious falsehood by every politician, pundit, lobbyist, talking-head and self-appointed ‘expert’ as they all jostled with each other for a place in the Pantheon of the Righteous.
But they won the day. It was no-contest. We few voices of principled reason were pilloried as apologists for child-murderers and psychopaths and who wants to line up with people like that?
So you foreigners can just disabuse yourselves of any lingering image of ‘genteel Britain’. This is a country where, on one side we have a national police force that is overstretched, politically hamstrung, misdirected and, like all nationalised industries, primarily concerned with protecting their own monopoly. They have guns. On the other side, we have growing gangs of ruthless and violent bandits set loose in a playground of grabbable booty. They have guns. In between, is the hard-working, law-abiding taxpayer, naked, and hoping for the best.
I do not believe that this is what was intended.
Well, in the light of the recent crime problems in the UK and the punishment of people for trying to defend themselves, perhaps our police should have a new motto: “Crime is not our business”.
The London based Libertarian Alliance has issued a press release about an outrageous case in Britain in which a man who defended himself from knife wielding home invaders finds himself on the wrong end of the law:
“Drop all charges against householder who killed burglar. This man is a hero“, says free market and civil liberties think tank.
58 year old John Lambert, of Spalding, Lancashire, has been released on bail following two days of arrest after the death of one of two burglars who had broken into his home and put a knife to the throat of his wife, according to press reports.
During a struggle to defend himself and his wife Mr. Lambert killed the burglar with his own knife. Rather than suffering the indignity of arrest and police inquiries Mr Lambert should be hailed as a hero and public benefactor. So claims the Libertarian Alliance, Britain’s most radical free market and civil liberties think tank.
Libertarian Alliance spokesman and Director, Dr Chris R. Tame, says:
“It is a sign of a morally corrupt society that Mr Lambert should have been held by the police for two days and is even now facing the insult of further police inquiries. In a free and moral society the individual has the complete right to self defense, including the use of deadly force, against those who attack and rob them. Any one who invades the home of another constitutes a deadly threat to its inhabitants, and should be dealt with accordingly. Mr Lambert has behaved both honourably and morally in defending himself, his wife and his property – and is a public benefactor by ridding society of one more predatory looter who threatened the safety of us all.
Yet again it is quite clear that the police, like all nationalised industries, have no real interest in their “customers”, but would rather persecute both those who defend themselves and other easy targets. Whilst the restoration of law and order in this country depends upon many things – including the removal of legal impunity from children and adolescents, the restoration of strict sentences and real punishment for real crimes, the return of capital punishment, full restitution by criminals to their victims, the abolition of victimless “crimes” and pointless persecution of politically incorrect lifestyles, and the overthrow of the culture of socialist excuses and social determinism – a great step forward would be the full legal recognition of the right of individuals to defend themselves and others – and indeed, the restoration of their right to do so with firearms and other weapons.
A message must be sent to the criminal vermin that the workers of this country are not prey, that people will fight back, and that the police and the judicial system will no longer side with the predator rather than the victim.”
A 16 year-old boy has been killed in a drive-by shooting in Nottingham. At this stage, there appears to be no motive.
I was fully expecting Steve Thoburn and the other ‘Metric Martyrs’ to lose their appeal before the Lords today. That they did, however, still resulted in my spending almost the entire day in a bug-eyed rage. I spent the afternoon doodling designs for giant siege engines that we could use to surround Brussels and reduce it to brickdust.
But, upon examining the actual rationale behind the verdict, the veins in my head have stopped throbbing with quite such gusto. I am forced to examine the small-print as both a Libertarian and a lawyer and I find myself largely agreeing with Brian Micklethwait below.
The application of EU Directives in British Law is, in fact, governed by British Law, namely the European Communities Act 1972 which rendered all British law as being subject to override by European Community Law. However, the Communites Act itself is a Constitutional Act. As such, it cannot be side-stepped by any subsequent legislation but it can itself be amended or even repealed by the British parliament.
There is a way out of the EU; all that is required is the parliamentary will.
I will disagree with Brian, though, that the Lords ruling is an implied ‘Declaration of Independence’. That ‘Declaration’ can only be made by a sovereign British parliament and, given the near-blanket commitment of our current political class to the EU project, the manifestation of that ‘will’ is still along way off.
I followed the link Perry gave us re the Metric Martyrs case, and read the piece by Helen Szamuely with interest, indeed fascination.
Now I realise that nothing involving the EU is ever quite what it seems, but my understanding of Helen Szamuely’s understanding of the case is not that the EU now rules Britain, but that the EU now rules Britain on British sufferance, which can, any time we like, be unsuffered. The basis of EU rule in Britain is that Britain switched it on with a Parliamentary Statute, and Britain can switch it off. The British Parliament is and will always remain sovereign.
At the heart of the EU project is the claim that once you’re in, you can’t leave. Not so, say our judges.
The Metric Martyrs lose, not because the EU says so, but because the EU says so and we say, for the time being: okay. But in the future, we could decide to say: not okay. Britain is not yet a province of the European Superstate, according to these judges. It would be complicated to unravel, very complicated, and it would require a great and highly self-conscious, so to speak, Parliamentary convulsion, in the manner of, say, contriving a new amendment to the US Constitution. But, say Their Lordships, we could unravel it if we chose to, and declare national independence again.
Which means that, in a sense, they just did.
It is a small matter really, just a trivial case involving some grocers who sold some fruit using Imperial rather than metric measurements. Yet the implications are staggering for the entire structure of British life.
Don’t co-operate in your own repression
The Scottish Parliament has just done what unfettered democratic institutions do: make the prejudices of the majority into laws backed by violence to suppress minority view points. They have now banned fox hunting in Scotland, refusing even to compensate the people who will lose their livelihoods as a result. On the later point I am actually glad as the immoral viscousness of this statist intrusion is made all the more stark to see.
Until people start to respond in kind and impose a physical cost on such actions by the state, and on supporters of such actions, it is unlikely much will change. Given the complete lack of viable political opposition to the socialist Labour and National Socialist SNP in Scotland, it is horrifying that only Sinn Fein, a grotesque organisation whose objectives are antithetical to liberty, provides the only viable model for friends of liberty who wish to oppose the increasingly repressive intrusions of the state.
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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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