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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Blair’s speech echoed Hayek’s warnings that managerialism bypasses the checks and balances designed to prevent the erosion of liberty and miscarriages of justice. Like any good communitarian, the Prime Minister defined liberty as the balance between freedom and security, a political equation that is often on the lips of our tyrannous leaders. The fragile institutions of criminal justice and the common law were dismissed with disdain:
The theory is basically treating Britain as if it were in the 19th or early 20th centuries. The practice however takes place in a post-war, modern, culturally and socially diverse, globalised society and economy at the beginning of the 21st century. The old civic and family bonds have been loosened. The scale, organisation, nature of modern crime makes the traditional processes simply too cumbersome, too remote from reality to be effective…
Yes, in theory, that is what is supposed to happen through the traditional court processes. In practice it doesn’t. We are fighting 21st crime with 19th century methods.
Blair criticises the traditional court system for protecting the accused and takes great pride in “reversing the burden of proof”. To deal with the communally defined ‘anti-social behaviour’, the tool of social engineering is summary justice with a right of appeal, presumably to the same inefficient, cumbersome courts that, according to our Prime Minister, do not work in the first place.
Blair and New Labour take pride in smashing the checks and balances which protect civil liberties in this country. If you have misunderstood the man and still believe that he is located in the liberal tradition as some of the comrades do, think again. His first instinct is order, social and authoritarian, covenanted by the community and upheld through the state, in a mantra of rights and responsibilities, derived from Hobbes and cemented by Blair’s favourite socialist, R H Tawney.
Respect is a way of describing the very possibility of life in a community. It is about the consideration that others are due. It is about the duty I have to respect the rights that you hold dear. And vice-versa. It is about our reciprocal belonging to a society, the covenant that we have with one another.
More grandly, it is the answer to the most fundamental question of all in politics which is: how do we live together? From the theorists of the Roman state to its fullest expression in Hobbes’s Leviathan, the central question of political theory was just this: how do we ensure order? And what are the respective roles of individuals, communities and the state?
Legal stricture will never be enough. Respect cannot, in the end, be conjured through legislation. Government can provide resources and powers. It can do its best to ensure that wrong-doing is detected, that its powers against offenders are suitable, that its systems are expeditious and its enforcement strong. And the British system, like others, in the modern world, has not been good enough against these standards.
Despite the loathsome outcome of this campaign and the manifold injustices that will result, one can pity Blair as an agent who follows the path laid out before him. The transition from a high-trust society to a low-trust society is a consequence of the welfare state and the expansion of moral dependency on the part of many individuals. The state lacks the tools to remedy and offset the pernicious consequences of its systems. It returns to the mindset that has served it so well: controls, shortcuts and arbitrary regulations designed to solve the defined problems. If existing systems like the courts are outside the executive control, they are bypassed for more malleable solutions.
Blair treads the path that has been written for him.
“I think this nanny state business, you know, is just nonsense.”
– Tony Blair, today’s BBC2 Newsnight, responding to the allegation that he is creating a nanny state
Britain’s Tony Blair has taken a further step in his self-declared role of father, and quite possibly mother, of the nation. He wants to introduce new laws to regulate anti-social, yobbish behaviour and introduce training (this is not a joke) for particularly wayward parents.
Given the recent Orwellian remarks of Lord Gould, this all makes perfect sense. Blair and his ilk have no conception of civil society as a network of individuals, mediated via institutions, evolving slowly across time. He has no idea of how in such a society, values of self-restraint, civility towards others, concern for the weak, can be internalised rather than be handed down by dictat.
This is not to say that yobbery, uncouthness, family breakdown and other pathologies are not serious problems. Of course they are. Ask anyone who has walked through a major UK city centre on a Friday evening. There is now a large and impressive body of work pointing to both the problems and some possible solutions in this regard. (Go and read Theodore Dalrymple or James Bartholomew, for instance). What these books and other studies have in common is an understanding that the top-down model of social reform, with its legions of officials, laws, agencies and so forth, has manifestly failed. There is little prospect of further efforts in this mould working either. Yet for Blair and so many others – including Tory leader David Cameron no doubt – problems of yobbery or mass drunkeness call for an “top-down” set of “solutions”. All the while the behaviours that are crimes, such as murder, burglary and violence, are frequently met with police indifference or punished only haphazardly by the courts. The law turns topsy-turvy.
It may amaze some readers to think that Blair was once thought of as a highly intelligent politician back in the mid-1990s, and there is no doubt that to this day, he remains – on tactics at least – one of the most astute political figures of modern times. In terms of his grasp of human nature, however, he presents a pitiable sight as he grasps for that “eye-catching” gesture.
This was the text of what I submitted for inclusion as an ‘icon of Britain’ via the Department of Culture, Media & Sport website mentioned by Guy Herbert yesterday:
The CCTV camera is the perfect icon for Britain today, summing up the nature of the changing relationship between civil society and political state. They are an innovation in which Britain leads the world both technologically and in usage and are the visible manifestation of so many things which happen out of sight. It is almost impossible to avoid their gaze for an entire day and sitting like steel crows on their perches above us, truly they are emblematic of modern Britain.
The thing is, I am not taking the piss, this really is modern Britain…
A Samizdata editor sent me a communication from his current secret mountain lair, drawing my attention to this item from the Boston Review The Drifters: Why the Supreme Court makes justices more liberal by Jon D. Hanson and Adam Benforado.
Justices O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy—though they remain tied to their conservative mainstays on certain issues, such as federalism—both seem to have embarked on similar leftward journeys, particularly with respect to individual rights and liberties. Appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1981, O’Connor struck a resoundingly conservative chord in her early opinions on women’s and racial-minority rights, only to join with liberal colleagues in cases touching on the same issues over the last 15 years—most strikingly in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which upheld Roe’s central holding, and Grutter v. Bollinger, which vindicated a law-school affirmative-action program. Kennedy, also a Reagan appointee, was initially celebrated by conservatives as “Bork without the beard.” Yet he later provided key votes to knock down anti-sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas and overturn the death penalty for juveniles in Roper v. Simmons—prompting Dr. James C. Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, to rechristen him “the most dangerous man in America.”
[…]
Virtually everyone who dons the judicial cloak recognizes that, like most uniforms, it carries significant responsibilities and behavioral expectations—what social psychologists call a role schema. A judge’s role schema includes requirements of objectivity, balance, and restraint that powerfully frame a judge’s actions. As Justice John Roberts put it in his opening statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee during his nomination hearings, “Judges are like umpires. Umpires don’t make the rules; they apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules. But it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ballgame to see the umpire.” To guard her own legitimacy and that of the judiciary, a judge must create the impression that her decisions are the inevitable consequence of fair, non-ideological legal reasoning. A nominee who was a fervent advocate before becoming a judge will often learn to present decisions as neutral and arising naturally from the rule of law.
It is an interesting piece, which repays reading the whole thing. As the extract shows, the authors are taking tips from Roland Barthes.
It is a continual source of interest to me that American conservatives are so much distressed by social liberalism, wanting iron rules upheld in personal lives, when they are happy with particularistic treatment for collective entitities (and even pseudo-entities, such as religions, nationalities). But then I want judges to be socially liberal, without being “liberals” in the US sense.
I think the comparative law points are mistaken, but interestingly so. They do not make the error that British journalists often do, of supposing judges in Civil Law systems are just like Common Law ones. But they don’t seem to want completely to acknowledge the radically (literally: at root) different legal and institutional context.
Perhaps this is because it is an uncomfortable fundamental truth that ‘drift’ is the soul of Common Law. Common Law adapts principles derived from facts to new facts. And facts are messy and infinitely varied. Common Law is compromise. “If the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?”
The hidden assumption of conservatism here is that there is an eternal right answer ex cathedra, against which sinful people must be measured. It is not too far from the way Civil Law purports to apply first principles to every case. And I submit it has a similar consequence: the elevation of the prejudice of the authorities, the suppression of the authority of considered precedent and of real life.
Soi-disant ‘conservatives’ detect enemy action in compromise. They complain about “activist judges”, but define activism as failure to enforce the extra-legal norms that they endorse. Give me Justice Roberts’ conception of the judge’s role as limited, arbitral, pragmatic: dealing with cases, not causes. If you abandon the rule of law and make the justice system into an instrument of social control (as in this more explicit example), you abandon the open society.
It is in the progressive state, while the society is advancing to the further acquisition, rather than when it has acquired its full complement of riches, that the condition of the labouring poor, of the great body of the people, seems to be the happiest the most comfortable. It is hard in the stationary, and miserable in the declining state.
– Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations.
The Telegraph reports that the government has spent £1 million on a website inviting public nominations for English national icons. At time of writing, this vital cultural event, masterminded by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport is down, though you would think you could get quite a decent service-level contract for one… million… pounds. If by the time you read this it is up again, then look here for it.
Now you may say this is utterly fatuous. Why should we have a dcms at all? (Yes, that’s right: lower case initials in the logo. It is modern, you know.)
I beg to differ. This is an opportunity for the English people to express themselves and send a signal to the world about how seriously we take our national identity and native religions, and how much we value this Government’s intention to foster them. The last Census recorded nearly 400,000 Jedi in the UK. It is time for them to speak again.
Since I live in Australia, I am not particularly up-to-date with the ins and outs of British reality television. Hell, I am woefully uninformed regarding television produced in my own country. So it came as a surprise to see Scott Burgess poking fun at George Galloway, who is appearing as a contestant on Celebrity Big Brother. What is Galloway playing at? I do not doubt that for washed up entertainers and discarded spouses of stars, something like Celebrity Big Brother is a potential second, third or fifteenth chance. However, I cannot understand the benefits for someone like Galloway (or anyone in a position requiring credibility) of becoming involved in such a tacky programme. Contrary to popular belief, not all publicity is good publicity – especially in regards to politicians. Surely this must be mightily unimpressive to Galloway’s constituents. Shouldn’t he be representing them rather than swanning around some birdcage with a microphone strapped to his belt, making a tit of himself? Admittedly, he probably does less damage surrounded by morons in “The House” than in the House of Commons. Three words spring to mind – why, why, why? The only answer I can think of is that the man’s a bloody fool and an egomaniac, to boot.
I look forward to Blair apologists spinning this unsurprising revelation.
Town hall bureaucrats are to be given sweeping new powers to investigate homes for identity card evasion and to impose heavy fines on occupants found without one. The revelation, in an obscure Whitehall consultation paper, calls into serious doubt the Government’s repeated promises that planned ID cards, already hugely controversial, will be voluntary and that no one will be forced to carry one.
But we should trust the government because… well, just because.
At least the Telegraph is putting out bloggy articles like this one in opposition. I wonder, is the rest of the Fourth Estate going to sleep through this?
The loathsome Philip Gould, a man who is like something out of Orwell’s 1984, has written a letter to the Guardian pointing out what Tory Blair David Cameron has made obvious over the last few days: New Labour’s ideology of regulatory statism and the incremental replacement of several rights based civil society with democratic omni-political interactions has completely won the argument amongst the professional political classes. David Cameron’s announcements of ‘belief’ in the purest form of socialism in Britain (the National Health Service) and his effortless assumption that it is the role of politicians and the state to tell companies what choices of food they may offer to customers to select from are not ‘clever politics’ but rather the total whimpering surrender to the ideology of Blairism. As Philip Gould points out, his side has won and won utterly. The entire meta-context within which political debate goes on has been conceded by the Tories, dooming them to always fight on ground of their ‘enemies’ choosing.
I have never been more certain that my conviction is correct that liberty, individuality and several rights can only be fought for outside the democratic political process. Although being in office matters to people like Philip Gould, to the rest of us the truth is we might as well be living in a one party state.
New Labour has indeed won in Westminster, regardless of who wins the next election, but of course as Gould cannot imagine anything beyond politics, there is still a civil society out there that needs to be defended against people like him and you cannot do that by voting for different sections of the political monoculture. I hope his article will be read by many of the remaining Conservative activists who are still quixotically clinging to the absurdity that a Cameron victory would change anything. To fight Tony Blairism first we have to destroy Tory Blairism. If you care anything for liberty and opposing the growth of a panoptic pooled database regulatory state, the worst thing you can do is vote for a Blairite like David Cameron and his intellectually defeated political party.
As the report stage of the Identity Cards Bill approaches in the Lords, a reminder of one highlight from the first day of the committee stage Hansard, 15 Nov 2005, Col.1012:
Lord Gould of Brookwood: Both the previous speakers—the latter with great emotion—were arguing for freedom. We have to ask what greater freedom is there than the freedom to place a vote for a political party in a ballot box upon the basis of a mandate and a manifesto. That is the crux of it: the people have supported this measure. That is what the noble Earl’s father fought for. But that is too trivial an answer. I know that. The fundamental argument is that the truth is that people believe that these identity cards will affirm their identity. The noble Lord opposite said that he likes to be in this House and how he is recognised in this House because it is a community that recognises him. That is how the people of this nation feel. They feel that they are part of communities, and they want recognition. For them, recognition comes in the form of this identity card. Noble Lords may think that that is strange, but it is what they feel. This is their kind of freedom. They want their good, hard work and determination to be recognised, rewarded and respected. That is what this does.
Of course it is right and honourable for noble Lords to have their views, but I say there is another view, and it is the view of the majority of this country. They want to have the respect, recognition and freedom that this card will give them. Times have changed. Politics have changed. What would not work 50 years ago, works now. It is not just me. I have the words of the leader of your party:
“I have listened to the police and security service chiefs. They have told me that ID cards can and will help their efforts to protect the lives of British citizens against terrorist acts. How can I disregard that?”.
This is not some silly idea of the phoney left. It is a mainstream idea of modern times. It is a new kind of identity and a new kind of freedom. I respect the noble Lords’ views, but it would help if they respected the fact that the Bill and the identity cards represent the future: a new kind of freedom and a new kind of identity.
This is the sort of rhetoric that makes my blood run cold. Here’s a prefiguring example:
In our state the individual is not deprived of freedom. In fact, he has greater liberty than an isolated man, because the state protects him and he is part of the State. Isolated man is without defence.
– Benito Mussolini.
Terry Eagleton (from a review of Paxton’s Anatomy of Fascism in the New Statesman) elucidates the connection:
Conservatives disdain the popular masses, while fascists mobilise and manipulate them. Some conservatives believe in ideas, but fascists have a marked preference for myths. If they think at all, they think through their blood, not their brain. Fascists regard themselves as a youthful, revolutionary avant-garde out to erase the botched past and create an unimaginably new future.
All supporters of the old-fashioned conception of individual liberty, whether they think of themselves as left or right, conservative or progressive, must do what can be done. Resist. We should not expect any quarter for outdated ideas under a new kind of freedom.
[cross-posted to Samizdata]
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