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]
|
The Dissident Frogman has returned from his trip to Normandy, where he visited, among other things, the Musée Mémorial de la Bataille de Normandie (Memorial Museum of the Battle of Normandy) in Bayeux… He is, as always full of interesting observations and has a new game for his readers. It is called “Guess what’s missing at a museum dedicated to the Battle of Normandy, 1944?”
The game consists of three incredible pictures. My first reaction was – ‘surely, they could not go that far’. But alas, it is true. What’s more, he couldn’t get any lucid and convincing explanation for this “fortuitous” accrual.
Please go here to ‘play’ and perhaps engage in shooting off a few emails to the Mayor of Bayeux…
The Telegraph has an update about the vote in the House of Lords on the European Union curbs on the sale of vitamins and mineral food supplements.
Peers voted by a majority of 53 last night to call upon ministers to revoke regulations due to implement the EU’s Food Supplements Directive in August 2005. But Health Minister Lord Warner said the vote would make no difference.
The UK is obliged to implement the directive. Failure to transpose its requirements properly would be a serious breach of our obligations under the EC Treaty and would result in infraction proceedings against the UK and in the likelihood of our facing heavy fines. Ultimately, implementation would be forced upon us.
The Washington Times reports that the FBI has concluded that the Matricula Consular card, issued by the Mexican government to Mexicans living in the United States, “is not a reliable form of identification” and poses a criminal and terrorist threat.
Steven McCraw, the assistant director of the FBI’s Office of Intelligence, said the identification cards are easy to obtain through fraud, and lack adequate security measures to prevent easy forgery. He cited examples of alien smugglers being arrested with up to seven different cards and an Iranian national who was arrested with a Matricula Consular card in his name.
Opponents of the cards’ use say they have turned into a back-door amnesty that allows illegal aliens to blend into society by letting them obtain bank accounts and some state and local services. Rep. Elton Gallegly, California Republican said:
The only people who need these cards are illegal immigrants, and sometimes criminals or terrorists.
None of the witnesses at a House immigration panel held last week could dispute that claim and the State Department admitted they have not studied the issue.
Link via World Watch Daily.
Last week, Connex became the first private rail operator to be stripped of its franchise after being accused of financial mismanagement and poor service. The company, which carries 300,000 commuters a day, has become a byword for crowded, dirty and late-running trains.
What caught my eye was the fact that Connex is a French-owned company and the main reason for its demise is its contant pleas for funds. Connex has lost its franchise mainly because of its financial management. The SRA (Strategic Rail Authority) decided the extra £200 million of public subsidy demanded by the company would not be wisely spent (after it has already spent £58 million of public money received last December).
In the last couple of weeks we have had some interesting exchanges among commenters attacking and defending France. The trains were held as an example of French superiority in matters of public policy and generally as the evidence of higher civilisation in France. Ross Clark points out in yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph:
If there is one good thing to come out of Connex’s humiliation, it will be that it should stop British railway passengers whining: “Why can’t we run our trains like the French do?” Connex, of course, is a French company, which brought with it to Britain experience of running commuter services in Paris.
The superiority of French trains is hugely overstated. TGV trains may be rapid and relatively inexpensive to use, but that is an inter-city service with few stops and it operates thanks only to state subsidies which would make a British taxpayer squeal. Most other French trains run on slack and infrequent timetables which ensure punctuality but at the cost of providing little amenity for the passenger. On holiday in Brittany two years ago I took my family on a 15-mile train ride from Paimpol to Guincamp. The journey took well over half an hour, excluding the 10 minutes that it took to buy a ticket. It cost £17 for two adults and two children; and there were only three trains a day.
The problem with travelling by train in London and the South-East is the millions of passengers being transported over an increasingly large urban area. The rail network is far from efficient but comparing it to the French equivalent is misleading at best. I am sure the guys from the Transport blog could supply all the relevant comparative statistics but even without them one can see that conveying commuters in London is, at least when it comes to size, a slightly different proposition to doing that in Paris, Rome or other European capitals.
An opinion piece in today’s Telegraph alerts the readers:
A dangerous and disagreeable piece of legislation comes before the House of Lords today. In order to implement the EU’s directive on higher-dose vitamin supplements, the Government proposes to ban nearly 300 products currently on sale in our health stores.
The proscription of these vitamins is the first in a series of EU regulations dealing with alternative remedies. A second directive, covering herbal medicines, is already clanking its way through the machinery of state. There are proposals to regulate homoeopathy, and even to require a standard European qualification for herbalists (who, in England and Wales, have operated under a statute dating from Tudor times).
These restrictions are driven by something called “the precautionary principle”. The concept, emanating from Brussels and very popular with the EU types “holds that nothing should be legal until it can be shown to be safe”. In other words, it reverses the burden of proof.
The issue is not one of science, but of freedom. Here is a horrible demonstration of how the EU system can work, elevating corporate interests over individuals, and tossing aside all considerations of liberty and fairness in pursuit of harmonisation.
Voting against the legislation is, alas, only a gesture, since EU rules come into force automatically in Britain, but it is a gesture that should be made none the less.
According to the Adam Smith Institute, public sector jobs such as “walking officers”, “anti-social co-ordinators”, “diversity co-ordinators” and an army of other such appointments are costing the British taxpayer more than £1 billion a year.
The job section of the Society Guardian supplement has been monitored by the researchers at the ASI for a month. They calculated that public sector jobs whose purpose it at best vague, at worst utterly non-sensical amount to around £1bn a year.
How did this come about? Dr Madsen Pirie, the president of the institute, explains that one enters “the twilight zone of political correctness translated into situations vacant“.
In some issues the Society supplement consists of over 100 pages. Each page features several jobs. The sheer volume of them is immense. It is like entering into another country. One leaves behind the world of productive activity, of goods and services for which people are willing to pay. One leaves the wealth-creating process which sustains our present and future livelihood and Britain’s economic position in the world. One enters instead into a world of public sector services, some of which seem to be of dubious, if any, economic value. The pages take the reader into a world inhabited by anti-social behaviour co-ordinators, of racial equality officers, of social inclusion officers and community liaison officers.
Indeed, job descriptions sound all pretty barmy, here are some of my favourite ones:
Durham County Council – Young People’s Substance Misuse Tier 3 Service Manager (£30k)
Chorley Borough Council – Anti-Social Behaviour co-ordinator
East Kent Coastal Care Trust – Smoking Cessation Specialist: Inequalities (£20k)
Herefordshire Council – Public Rights of Way Developments Officer (£14.8-20.5k)
EU Observer has an article about the European Commission’s proposal to treat European citizens as criminals or at least as criminal suspects. No really.
Apparently, the heads of state for EU countries who met in Greece last week have given the ‘green light’ to the process of collection of biometric data such as fingerprints, iris scan or DNA for a chip inbedded in the passports of all EU citizens.
Thomas Rupp of the European Referendum Campaign is not impressed:
Somehow – obviously – I suffer from a clash of realities: Didn’t a lot of people last year talk about “democratisation” of the European Union and making it more “citizen friendly”? – Right: this event was called the “Convention on the Future of Europe”. Obviously the future of Europe now begins with the need of EU citizens to provide their most intimate data to the state.
[…]
Provided this law will pass and they ask me for my personal data… Shall I give my fingerprints – or even my DNA – to a growing state which does not fulfil the minimum standards of a modern democracy? Where there is no separation of powers? That has a parliament, which has no right to initiate law? Where – instead – non-elected public servants have the monopoly to initiate law, which in the end is decided by the executives of the member states – avoiding control by their national parliaments?
[…]
Suppose I refuse to give away my fingerprints? What would happen? Would I immediately be classified a criminal? Someone who has to hide something, with bad intentions? Would I have to go to jail? Would I have to leave the European Union?
Well, rhetorical questions aside, there are no surprises here from the European Commission.
Link via World Watch Daily.
I do not believe that I was entirely convinced by the argument of the noble Lord, Lord Wilson of Dinton, that the bureaucracy can be trusted to safeguard our liberty… I believe that, beyond anything else, the preservation of liberty is the business of Parliament and of others who are not concerned with government or, in other ways, with the powers in the land. They must ensure that this critical part of our being a free and worthwhile nation is preserved.
When we consider legislation which, in particular, poses a danger to liberty, we must not give the Government blanket permissions; we must justify each and every trespass. We must ensure that the Government do not only do things because they can but that, when they do things, they are effective. We must also ensure that the Government consider all possible ways of achieving the same end without the diminution of our liberty.
It is common that authorities do things because they can or that they choose to do the things that they can do rather than the things that are important.
– Lord Lucas in Security and Liberty debate in House of Lords, 26th March 2003
Link via FIPR
Another opinion piece by Stephen Robinson in the Telegraph, this time about John Wadham who resigned this week as director of the human rights group Liberty. He salutes him for his efforts at Liberty:
Mr Wadham argues that the threat posed by the state to individual liberty transcends political allegiance, so he worked hard to make Liberty less of a sectarian pressure group of the Left since his appointment as director eight years ago. He has been a good friend to the Telegraph’s Free Country campaign, dismissing the protests of some of his allies on the Left, who would prefer to exclude any conservative voice from the debate about the state and individual liberty. Thanks to him, the Telegraph has been welcomed at Liberty conferences to speak out on issues such as foxhunting and gun ownership.
This is a good sign. White Rose has been set in recognition of the need to address civil liberties across the widest political spectrum. As long as the common ground is the concern about the state and its impact on invidual liberty, we welcome those with different political opinions. We also add our voice to that of Stephen Robinson:
It would be much better if an independent or conservative figure could emerge and to make the point that individual liberty cannot be protected so long as it is popularly understood to be a concern only of the Left.
A dispiriting reading by Stephen Robinson in yesterday’s Telegraph:
To mark Orwell’s birthday, I rang around some of the people who have featured in The Daily Telegraph’s Free Country campaign since we launched it two years ago. It seemed a good moment to conduct a sort of “freedom audit” and gauge if those who seek to stem the tide of government encroachment on our liberties are managing to hold the line. It was a depressing experience.
[…]
At the beginning of last year, letters and e-mails began pouring in from unpaid parish councillors around England, enraged at being required to sign up to a new Whitehall Code of Conduct and declare all their business dealings. It is when considering the “best practices” aspects of New Labour’s “modernising agenda” that you pass through the looking glass into a world far weirder than anything Orwell could have imagined.
For the list of individual cases the Telegraph Free Country campaign has publicised or was involved in read the whole article.
The head of civil rights group Liberty, John Wadham, is to take a top job in the new organisation investigating complaints against police. He is to be a deputy chairman of the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC).
The IPCC, which will replace the existing Police Complaints Authority next April, is designed to improve transparency because for the first time civilians will investigate allegations made against the police, rather than inquiries being conducted by other officers.
Telegraph reports that civil liberties campaigners accused the Government last night of compiling a national DNA database “by stealth” as police prepared to enter the two millionth profile into the system. Police powers to keep DNA samples have been strengthened considerably since 2001 when they were first allowed to keep the information indefinitely from suspects who were not convicted.
The new Criminal Justice Bill now before Parliament extends this rule to people who are arrested but never charged. David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, said the importance of DNA profiling to criminal detection outweighed the civil liberties objections.
The DNA and fingerprint databases have become vital weapons in law enforcement, making our communities safer by helping to put thousands of repeat criminals behind bars.
That would be fine, no one disputes the usefulness of advanced technology in crime detection. The problem is, as Gareth Crossman, a spokesman for Liberty, points out:
The Government is hell-bent on creating a national DNA database by stealth. It claims that only criminals will be listed, yet is passing legislation so DNA samples will be retained indefinitely for anyone who is ever arrested, whether guilty or innocent.
If you have any doubt about the government’s intention – the new Health Secretary, John Reid, plans to ask the genetics watchdog to consider the case for DNA screening of every newborn baby. All in the best possible taste, of course…
|
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.
|
