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You cannot trust any agency with people’s personal data.
– Frank Abagnale, quoted in The Daily Telegraph.
The quote of Britain’s political week. There is a massive breakthrough in the public understanding of the database state, and the Government is finding it a real struggle to contain it. BBC journalists (Eg. Newsnight, The World Tonight, etc) are making an explicit connection between the three real monsters: the National Identity Scheme, Connecting for Health, and ContactPoint. My personal touchstone for success is when Criminal Records Bureau disclosure starts to be criticised in the public presses.
Bonus quote:
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,
Or close the wall up with our English dead!
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility;
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger:
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood.
Now is not a time to rest.
And anyway I wanted to see what it would feel like ordering a three hundred quid starter
– Giles Coren, reviewing the St James’-Ukrainian restaurant Divo for The Times.
The capacity at will to do something improbable (and quite possibly stupid) in order to find out what it feels like is to my mind the measure of a society worth living in. Mr Coren did not have to consult religious authorities about that starter, and no government inspector determined for him whether it was fair or appropriate fo him to do so, or insisted on him having counselling first, or afterwards. He is not confined in a fixed universe of approved experiences. For how long? The vigilantes are abroad, though they are coming for the poor first. And everyone ought to be free to be daft, not just oligarchs.
Maybe I am misinterpreting it, but is there not a vast increase in taxation for the middle classes in HM Government’s legislative programme? Mysteriously it was one of those measures left out of the Queen’s Speech, but there it is, plainly, in the list of Bills:
National Insurance Contributions Bill
Would harmonise the upper earnings limit (UEL) for national insurance contributions with the higher rate income tax threshold. The UEL will rise in phases, to match the higher rate income tax threshold by April 2009. The measure would extend across the UK.
Since this will not be part of the Finance Bill, either, so not caught by the media feeding frenzy round The Budget, when will it be covered? But it is a rise in the marginal income tax rate for the employed middle classes of 10% (or 20% if you look at the impact on their employers wages bill, which really determines what they can get paid). Since there are no other details currently, who knows what other effects on other groups might be?
It is a classic example of the bureaucratic governmental stealth technique. Announce things nominally openly but in circumstances when you hope no-one will pay any attention. Execute them in silence, by stages, as if inevitable, to minimise resistance. If people later squawk at all, they can be told, “It was announced; there was a consultation; the vast majority of consultation responses were favourable; it went through parliament where there was an opportunity* for debate; it is now the democratically decided law.”
The only cure for this is media attention. Where are the Capitoline geese?
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* Of course there is always opportunity for debate in Parliament, but since 1997 the Party has steadily, increasingly, chosen to restrict debate.
Further to my recent post about new measures from our Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families. Foreign readers may be surprised that we have a department for children schools and families (sic). I, on the other hand, am alarmed: even the name indicates the totalitarian intent of the New British state.
Prompted by a clip on TV news, I have now found the full text of Ed Balls’s speech given to the Fabian Society yesterday. Didn’t the resolution to announce new policy to parliament, not outside bodies – in this case a para-Party body – last a long time? It bears close reading:
Excerpt I:
Our ambition must be that all of our young people will continue in education or training.
That is what our Bill sets out to achieve – new rights for young people to take up opportunities for education and training, and the support they need to take up these opportunities; alongside new responsibilities for all young people – and a new partnership between young people and parents, schools and colleges, local government and employers. ….
But it is important to make clear that this is not a Bill to force young people to stay on at school or college full-time. They will be able to participate in a wide range of different ways through:
* full-time education, for example, at school or college
* work-based learning, such as an apprenticeship
* or one day a week part-time education or training, if they are employed, self-employed or volunteering more than 20 hours a week.
But the Education and Skills Bill is a bill of responsibilities as well as a bill of rights.
Because if young people fail to take up these opportunities, there will be a system of enforcement – very much a last resort – but necessary to strike the right balance between new rights and new responsibilities.
Phew – not necessarily locked up in schools then, but on probation otherwise (as will of course any employers be – they’ll have to have enhanced CRB checks, of course). This is enlightening as to what Mr Brown means when he talks about a Bill of Rights and Duties, “building upon existing rights and freedoms but not diluting them – but also make more explicit the responsibilities that implicitly accompany rights…”. It confirms what many listeners will have guessed: you have the right and freedom to do exactly what the big G tells you to. This is the traditional line of Calvinism and Islam, is it not?
Don’t you love that “our young people”? Völkisch, nicht wahr?
Excerpt II:
The second building block [after mucking around with exams and the curriculum some more – GH] is advice and guidance – so that young people know and understand what is out there, and can be confident that they can make choices that will work for them.
First, this means local authorities taking clear responsibility for advice and guidance as part of the integrated support they offer to young people – making sure that youth services, Connexions and others who provide personal support to young people come together in a coherent way.
Second, clear new national standards for advice and guidance.
Last week my colleague Beverley Hughes set out clearly what we expect of local authorities as they take responsibility for the services provided by Connexions.
Third, a new local area prospectus available online, already available from this September in every area – setting out the full range of opportunities available, so that young people can see the choices available to them clearly in one place.
So not only will whether you do something state-approved be checked, but what you do will be subject to state advice and monitoring and made from a menu provided by the state. For the uninitiated Connexions is a formerly semi-independent, and notionally voluntary, database surveillance scheme for teenagers set up under the Learning and Skills Act 2000.
Well, actually, no. For their information. You have been warned, however. Statewatch notes:
The European Commission is to put forward, on Tuesday 6 November, a proposal to collect personal data (PNR) on everyone flying in and out of the EU. … The data to be collected is almost exactly the same as that being collected under the controversial EU-US PNR scheme.
You recall that famous passage from The Wealth of Nations?
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.
It applies with even greater force when the ‘people of the same trade’ are states and their governments.
Exciting news for British schoolchildren. Early leavers ‘will not be jailed’ (PA). Except of course they will be under control orders, in effect; incarcerated and enslaved part-time. “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance,” ran the old slogan. This policy is pretty clear evidence that what’s offerred to many in the state school system is not education. If you have to force people to take something, then it is not plausiible that it is of use to them. There is no problem selling education and training to those who want it. Even very poor parents in London often find money for extra lessons or private day-schooling on top of the taxes they pay to imprison other people’s children. The prison function of the system reduces its value to others.
Put aside for the moment whether it should be paid for from taxes or not. How much more cost-effective would state education be if it were voluntary, and the classes were full of eager participants and even the grumpiest teenagers present were those whose parents or peers had persuaded them it was worthwhile? How much better would the curriculum be if it had to attract an audience by being interesting or useful, rather than prescribed by bureaucrats? How much better would teachers feel about their work if it didn’t include the roles of commissar, bureaucrat and gaoler?
Teenagers who refuse to stay in education until they are 18 will not face jail, Schools Secretary Ed Balls insisted ahead of new legislation to raise the leaving age.
The reform – hailed as one of the biggest in education for half a century – will be included in the first Queen’s Speech of Gordon Brown’s premiership on Tuesday.
Mr Balls said the legislation, which will raise the age to 17 by 2013 and 18 by 2015, will be backed by a “robust regime” of support and sanctions including spot fines and court action.
Since if you are at school you are barred from employment without the permission of the authorities, I imagine they will pay the fines with the proceeds of robbery and prostitution. Well done, Balls!
The British government has just “admitted” that its figures for foreign workers employed in the UK are wrong by more than 30%, or 300,000 people. Of course we don’t know that the new figures are right, either. But it has very satisfactorily illustrated they don’t matter in the slightest.
The Liberal Democrat spokesman is telling the truth when he says: “Getting these figures so wrong further undermines the credibility of the government’s claims to be able to deliver a well-managed system for foreign workers.” But the intent behind his statement is dead wrong. It is none of the government’s business to manage any kind of system for foreign workers, and getting these figures so wrong undermines the credibility of doing so at all.
This sort of thinking is just a version of the lump of labour fallacy. More workers doing more things for other people and supporting themselves means everyone is better off, not that others are deprived of something.
Nor – as the error shows – does government need to know who people are and what they are doing in order to carry on with its other activities untroubled. It just needs to respond to provide services as they are required (and self-supporting individuals don’t really require much). The conceit of planning and censuses is undermined here, too. Demand manages itself.
Meanwhile, in the unreal world, all politicians are piling onto the current bandwagon of jealousy of foreigners. David Cameron has signed on to the idiocy with gusto. The politics of virtual threat will actually be reinforced by the concrete evidence that there is nothing to fear.
“It so much worse than we thought, that absolutely nobody noticed,” they cry. Something must be done! Starting with more counting, more monitoring and more control so that we never fail to notice nothing untoward happening ever again.
Just because we are sometimes foolish does not mean that the government is any wiser.
– Tim Harford commenting on Julian le Grand’s latest proposals. “[Le Grand] is not crazy. He is just wrong.”
The Sunday Times carries the story that two men have been remanded to await trial on charges of blackmailing a member of the royal family. They are said to have demanded £50,000 not to publicise stories about sex and drugs.
Haven’t the perpetrators missed the point of blackmail? Surely if they had anything that would stick, they could get many times that amount from the world’s tabloids? The point of blackmail is to take advantage of the embarrassment of the person concerned for gain. They seem to have attempted to do it for loss.
Sooner or later, every Marxist expresses his sense of public duty by first telling you and me what to say and then what to think.
– Henry Porter
He is speaking specifically of Ken Livingstone, but it is beginning to be clear that little of the former student left of the ’70s now in power has parted with the spirit of Howard Kirk. Mao may be the model more than Marx. The Long March Through the Institutions being near its end, we face an obsession with controlling the detail of other’s lives and eliminating the possibility of resistance. You will not escape by avoiding thought or being silent about dissident; it is necessary to act in the approved manner to show your enthusiasm for progress and democracy.
The ubiquity of surveillance cameras in Britain does not appear to be having any very detectable effect upon the level of crime.
Well, actually, that is not quite right. Total surveillance does dissuade the law-abiding from straying across the line. Surveillance cameras do slow up speeding motorists, for instance. But with one exception. They do far less to slow up motorists who are already criminals. These persons have little further to fear from the criminal-processing system than the complications they already have to live with as a result of already being criminals. In the unlikely event that they are traced, driving a car that isn’t theirs or that they have not reported to the various authorities that the rest of us must keep informed about everything, they are processed slowly and clumsily by the criminal-processing system. It is noted yet again that they are criminals, which everyone already knows, and that, pretty much, mostly, is it. Any punishments they suffer are as likely to be badges of honour as they are to be truly feared.
A law abiding citizen, on the other hand, wants very much not to be tarred, even faintly, with the brush of criminality. Being law-abiding, he is not an expert on how the criminal-processing system works and cannot take being processed by it in his stride. He does not know how and when to lie to it, for instance. He does not know how to phrase the statement “Do you know who I am?” in at all the correct manner. So, the law does restrain the law-abiding. (And that is a not insignificant benefit, provided only that at least some of the laws make sense, as a lot of them do.)
The most spectacular and often newsworthy instances of this contrast between the law-abiding and the criminals occur when the law-abiding fight back against criminals when they are attacked by them. When this happens, and in those cases when both parties are scooped up by the police, perhaps because the law-abider summoned the police and the police actually turned up, the criminals often come off better, because they then know how to handle things. The criminal lies about having aggressed, and in due course walks away. The law-abider tells the truth about how he defended himself, and can land in a world of trouble.
The effect of total surveillance, then, when combined with the rest of the criminal-processing system, is not to abolish criminality, but rather to ensure that we all have to decide, as one big decision for each of us: Am I going to be a criminal, or not? If I am, that’s one set of rules, criminal rules, which I must obey. If I am going to be law-abiding, then I must obey the law, whatever that exactly is. (And at all times, now that all infractions can be photographed and recorded for ever, everywhere. If that is not the case now, it soon will be.) But, because the law is so very intrusive and annoying and so full of complexities and arbitrarinesses and injustices, that creates a constant pressure on people to say: To hell with it, I’m going to be a criminal. Meaning: someone who doesn’t care who else knows he’s a criminal, and who can accordingly relax about being totally surveilled.
Let me be clear. I do not recommend the abolition of the criminal-processing system merely because it has such severe limitations. There are not nearly enough prisons to accommodate all criminals, but there are some. And my clear understanding is that a much higher proportion of the people in them are what I understand by the word “criminals” than is the case out here in the big, progressive, open prison that total surveillance is creating for the rest of us. Becoming a criminal means buying, so to speak, an anti-lottery ticket. If you lose, that is to say if you become a criminal and the criminal-processing system decides to go after you, you can suffer, and I hope that this is not merely wishful thinking on my part, quite severe grief. But it is also now my clear understanding that the odds facing the purchasers of these anti-lottery tickets are now quite good, and that the anti-prizes, even if you are awarded one, are in many cases not that severe. None of which deters criminals very much. They have placed their bet. But it must surely deter a great many people from deciding to become criminals in the first place. It certainly deters me. (But then, I have a lot to lose.)
The above ruminations are a mixture of my own opinions and those supplied to me by Theodore Dalrymple in a recent City Journal article. If you want to read his opinions uncontaminated by mine, do.
Just in case you missed it – and I nearly did – I feel I should draw your attention to a document issued by HM Treasury at the same time as the Pre-Budget Report that has been exciting all the British media so. It is the “Service Transformation Agreement” [pdf] setting out in fifty-eight pages a general vision and departmental service plans. The latter, forming the bulk of the document, explain how each government department will use “identity management” to collate and share information about citizens and businesses.
They will be led by the new Ministry of Justice introducing “measures to overcome current barriers to information sharing in the public sector”. Those “barriers” are not mentioned in the document, but they are four, neatly pinned down by the MoJ when it was the plain old Department of Constitutional Affairs: 1) human rights law, especially the constructive privacy protections under Article 8 of the Convention, 2) the Data Protection Acts, 3) common law confidentiality, and 4) the fundamental rule of administrative law, ultra vires.
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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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