The truth is that the NCCL was right both to have PIE as an affiliate and to defend its members against charges of ‘corrupting public morals’. Why? Because a key role of any civil liberties group worth its name is to defend the rights of association of the most loathed sections of society, to ensure that even the profoundly unpopular enjoy the same liberties, most importantly freedom of speech, as the respectable and the right-on.
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No one has willfully or knowingly disobeyed the law or tried to invade your civil liberties or privacies… There were no mistakes like that at all. This is either delusion of omniscience and infallibility, or psychopathic contempt for truth and for the ‘little people’ who are imagined to believe whatever the great and powerful Oz says. Either way, it makes him a candidate for a straitjacket, not running an uncontrolled global para-state. August 9th, 2013 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Nick Cohen is that rare and admirable thing, a genuinely liberal left-winger. Here he is in full flow today in The Observer:
Something that Mr Cohen doesn’t cover is that, we too, appear about to be regulated. Parliament is not just abridging the freedom of the press, but of the web too. As Guido Fawkes explains regulation looks likely to cover not just Fleet Street (if that were not bad enough), but:
(My emphasis.) That means ALL the blogging commentariat there, almost all charities and campaigning organisations of every political stripe who publish news comment or press releases or highlight particular stories on their websites, and maybe your personal site, too. Once you’ve read what Messrs Cohen and Staines have to say, you might feel like commenting on the news yourself. If you live in Britain an email to your MP, especially if he or she is a Labour or LibDem MP, might be worth the effort. You can write to them – including the ones who will only take a fax – easily from the site of the same name: writetothem.com Do so before they vote on the proposals. March 17th, 2013 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is difficult to accept the sincerity of the professed free market beliefs from the kind of Tory who rails against the permissiveness of our age; even on the purely economic side, the supposedly laissez-faire beliefs of some extreme Tory activists are barely skin-deep. – Samuel Brittan, in 1969 reviewing ‘Freedom and Reality’ by Enoch Powell for ‘The Spectator’.* As true today as it was 40 years ago, sad to say. He goes on: There is no evidence for putting Mr Powell in this latter category. But his economic liberalism is allied uneasily with an attachment to the nation state as the absolute political value. Most economic liberals, on the other hand, while conceding that Englishmen would naturally have a greater feeling for other Englishmen than Peruvians, regard the national interest as a function of the interests of the individuals who compose it, and are highly suspicious of supposedly superior collective entities. Indeed, once the supremacy of overriding national goals is admitted it is difficult to see what arguments there are against Mr Wilson, having been elected by a national majority, decreeing that an excessive consumption of candyfloss is against his conception of the British idea. The latter was merely a philosophical fancy in 1969. Mr Wilson went out of his way to be photographed smoking. O tempora! O mores! ![Let us revive the permissive society! [pic: Allan Warren]](http://www.samizdata.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/766px-Lord_Harold_Wilson_2_Allan_Warren-350x274.jpg) Let us revive the permissive society! [pic: Allan Warren] * [Reprinted in his 1973 book ‘Capitalism and the Permissive Society’ whose 40th anniversary calls for a series of quotations. Let us revive the permissive society!] January 6th, 2013 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
A Guardian blog commentator attacks the free-market right thus:
It won’t fit on a T-shirt, but maybe “verminous, parasitic , parvenu, lickspittle, non empathetic sociopathic trash” would. November 9th, 2012 | 42 comments - (Comments are closed)
Big state cronyism is a bad thing, economically, socially and ethically but it is not Soviet Communism. Get a grip, people. Nor is it possible for a big, strong and basically rich country to be destroyed and annihilated by one bad Administration though it is very bad. No country gets annihilated just like that. Heck, even Belgium cannot destroy itself. – Helen Szamuely Nor is it the case that the American people, as this bizarre Economist blog claims, “endorsed macroeconomics”. They just voted very marginally for known dull over unknown boring, neither of whom would have enough power to implement a root-and-branch plan of reform. That is presumably why neither man had much of a plan to do so. Drift continues, roughly in the same direction. November 8th, 2012 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
[A]ll law-enforcement agencies really believe they need more powers. But, when they say that, they should be completely ignored. Not criticised, not accommodated, just disregarded. The sincerity is beguiling but it’s meaningless. “Help us to do our jobs better,” the police implore. “We can see the good we could do if you let us.” They almost certainly can. But they can’t see what it would cost society in lost freedoms. – David Mitchell, in an article that is so sharp it is quite hard to pick out the best quote. Read the whole thing. October 21st, 2012 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have frequently noted here the obsessive fortification of the state during the last decade: how all public buildings in Britain have steadily become the opposite – closed-off, accessible only through guardrooms, by special permission. A fascinating and frightening piece by Anna Minton in the FT Locked in the security cycle describes something I did not know. Though I had noticed a more general neurotic security obsession in new developments, I thought this was merely a matter of insurance and corporate cowardice. Some of it may be. But some of it is official coercion. Minton explains:
Beware the security-industrial complex! Note this is enforced by state power: since the all-nationalising Attlee government of 1945-51 planning permission controls all building in Britain. It is a panopticon of the built environment, covering all significant building or alteration of building: nothing is legally done privately; nothing is legally done without prior official approval. So “a prerequisite of planning permission”, means developers comply or they don’t build. But the standards to be applied by planning officers are controlled by a ACPO – a closed professional body for senior police and civilian policing officials – and far from correcting the producer interest, as choice might, deliberately incorporate it as a driving factor. What will we get – what are we getting – all around us? An architecture calculated to reproduce the assumptions of those in security positions and industries of what’s a good place for people to live, trade or work, for children to play or be educated. Those are assumptions about order, ‘appropriate’ persons and behaviour, the need for oversight, the nature of – and constant presence of – threat. Hence the suspicious building syndrome: you will be increasingly screened to permit entry, and watched, controlled inside the perimeter. Hard, plan-defined boundaries, rather than freely negotiated common use of space. But look! Lots of jobs for guards and electrical maintenance crews. Compliance by large builders will make their lives easier and competition more difficult. ACPO members will find valuable consulting work. Politicians can say we live in a society with “world class” security. The execution of policy will be deemed its success. Everybody (who matters) wins. Positive feedback. But not the only feedback loop. The authorities are not interested in contrary evidence. Public bodies and quangos are skjlled at commissioning proleptic studies, and the institution of ‘public consultation’ is highly developed as an art of obtaining affirmation for policy, but even so, there are clear signs that that official security obsession creates psychological insecurity in the populace. Minton again:
[my emphasis] I would add: they also remind us of something else. The pressure for all this comes from regulatory culture. As with the fortification of the state, it reveals and propagates the intense fearfulness in authority itself. Authority is frightened of the unsupervised individual, and thinks we should be too. To recycle a phrase, they hate our freedom. The possibility that life may be lived harmlessly in divers ways is just as much anathema to a secular bureaucrat as a religious totalitarian. If rules and fear are not everywhere, we might not accept that the people who make up rules always know best. October 14th, 2012 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Presumably Matthew Woods learned a powerful lesson about the potential consequences of tasteless humour when a 50-strong mob turned up at his house and the police had to arrest him for his own safety. Jailing him on top of that is insane. Sick jokes can upset and offend. Hurriedly formed vigilante mobs can kill. If the state earnestly believes that the former pose a greater threat to social order than the latter, the state is nuts. – Charlie Brooker, quoted here, on the latest person in Britain (last time I checked) to be sent to prison for a Facebook posting. Sometimes we end up on the same side of the barricade as the Guardian in-crowd. October 12th, 2012 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
This whole idea of ‘respect’ – which is a code-word for ‘fear’ – is something we have to get away from. – Salman Rushdie (interviewed on BBC Radio 4). Indeed. And not just in where the bullying religiose are concerned. Tolerance should not mean pretending to agree. September 15th, 2012 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
If you think £2m for a project without any policy implications is expensive, just imagine how expensive it would have been with policy implications. – The IEA’s Kristian Niemitz on the Office for National Statistic’s venture in ‘happiness research’. August 8th, 2012 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
[I]t’s simply no longer the case that killing a few people on board a plane could lead to a hijacking. Never again will a terrorist be able to breach the cockpit simply with a box cutter or a knife. The cockpit doors have been reinforced, and passengers, flight crews and air marshals would intervene. – Kip Hawley Oh, well done! That only took 10 years. A retired securocrat would like us to understand a fact that was plainly apparent by noon on September 11th, 2001. A fact that the isolated and terrified passengers of Flight 93 worked out and demonstrated for themselves. In the meantime countless millions of people have been inconvenienced and humiliated in the name of security. And since countless billions have been spent on the pointless bullying, there is now a public superstition and pointless bullying lobby that makes it certain the article will make no difference. If you want a vision of the future, imagine a queue to be groped by a truculent imbecile, to no purpose but your subordination – forever. April 14th, 2012 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
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