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]
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Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
– Karl Marx
It must be plain to the historicist that Tinky Winky is such a personage. First, as supporting character in the American tragedy of Jerry Fallwell; now as a causus belli in the farcical end of Polish ultra-Catholicism. The trouble is, Marx – or at least that Marx) had it wrong, as usual. It is always farce and tragedy at the same time.
This is not me. Save as a result of incompetent shaving, or depressed non-shaving, I have never had a beard. And not more than a couple of millimetres long, in any case. My verse output is formal exercises and satyrical squibs. One directory thinks there are eight Guy Herberts in Britain. More than one of those are, or were, me. I do not know whether any are him.
Mr Clarke: Concerns about police powers have been widely expressed, particularly in regard to stop and search. I want to make it clear that the Bill, and the introduction of identity cards, will make no difference to the general powers of the police to stop people for no reason and demand proof of identity. The Bill will make no difference to the powers that exist under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984. In fact, quicker, reliable access to confirmed identification would help to reduce the time a suspected person might spend in police custody. The effect of that would be to reduce the number of people wrongly held in police custody while their identity was being checked, which would be of benefit to the individual and to the police.
I also want to confirm that there is no requirement to carry an identity card at all times, as there have been many questions about that.
– Hansard, 28 June 2005
NEW anti-terrorism laws are to be pushed through before Tony Blair leaves office giving “wartime” powers to the police to stop and question people.
John Reid, the home secretary, who is also quitting next month, intends to extend Northern Ireland’s draconian police powers to interrogate individuals about who they are, where they have been and where they are going.
Under the new laws, police will not need to suspect that a crime has taken place and can use the power to gain information about “matters relevant” to terror investigations.
If suspects fail to stop or refuse to answer questions, they could be charged with a criminal offence and fined up to £5,000. Police already have the power to stop and search people but they have no right to ask for their identity and movements.
– The Sunday Times, 27 May 2007
BBC online’s heading on the latter matter was “Stop and quiz powers considered” which seems much less frightening.
“Good evening, Sir. What was the subject of the Pet Shop Boys’ 2006 single Integral?”
The Kaffirs believed that all kinds of misfortunes came upon them through wizards and witches, and every tribe had a “witch-finder,” whose duty it was to “smell out” these witches. When any misfortune came upon them, the tribe was called together. Then the witch doctor, fearfully painted and adorned with all kinds of terrible savage grandeur, rushed about among them. Trembling and anxious, the people stood waiting, each man knowing that his life was unsafe, until the witch doctor, pointing to one among them, accused him of being the cause of all the trouble. Then the poor wretch, who had no more to do with it than you or I, was seized, tortured, and killed without more ado.
– H.E. Marshall in Our Empire Story (1908)
Procedural aspects of trials for political offences (such as espionage, subversion, terrorist acts, and treason) leave even more to be desired. The court may try the case in camera, may refuse to call witnesses for the accused, may receive the testimony of witnesses not present in court, may use unpublished evidence in reaching its verdict, and may cut off argument for the accused or deny him counsel entirely. Explicit provision is made for trial without the participation of the accused” and with no right of appeal. Procedural norms in such cases are observed only in “demonstration trials” where the fate of the accused is decided beforehand and the trial is held exclusively for propaganda purposes.
– Robert M Weiss reviewing Soviet Millitary Law and Administration by HM Berner & M Kerner (1957)
So the fault is not with our services or, in this instance, with the Home Office. We have chosen as a society to put the civil liberties of the suspect, even if a foreign national, first.
I happen to believe this is misguided and wrong. If a foreign national comes here, and may be at risk in his own country, we should treat him well. But if he then abuses our hospitality and threatens us, I feel he should take his chance back in his own home country.
As for British nationals who pose a threat to us, we need to be able to monitor them carefully and limit their activities. It is true that the police and security services can engage in surveillance in any event. But this is incredibly time-consuming and expensive, and even with the huge investment we have made since 2001, they simply cannot do it for all suspects. Over the past five or six years, we have decided as a country that except in the most limited of ways, the threat to our public safety does not justify changing radically the legal basis on which we confront this extremism.
Their right to traditional civil liberties comes first. I believe this is a dangerous misjudgement. This extremism, operating the world over, is not like anything we have faced before. It needs to be confronted with every means at our disposal. Tougher laws in themselves help, but just as crucial is the signal they send out: that Britain is an inhospitable place to practise this extremism.
– Tony Blair, in The Sunday Times (2007)
The Prime Minister read jurisprudence at the University of Oxford. What do you mean, you can
not tell?
A told-you-so moment. Us Samizdatistas have been exercised by the new charities law in Britain for a little while. See me here, and Perry here, for example.
Tush, said critics, there is no clear intention:
No where does it suggest that the state wishes to ‘harness’ charities. Indeed, a central theme of the report is concern that charities accepting money from the state start to lose independence. This is, IMO, as much the fault of the charity as the state.
– commentator, J on “Stand and Deliver” {pdf}
And some people who should know better welcomed it, and wanted more. For example in this spectacularly badly timed article in the Independent on Friday, Baroness Helena Kennedy QC – who has a good record of skepticism of the state in her own field of criminal law – writes:
More recently this has led the newly formed Office of the Third Sector to actively promote an enhanced role for the voluntary sector, not just in service provision, but as the “voice” of a disenfranchised citizenry that needs to be empowered to talk directly to Government. But to flourish in this role we need a legislative framework and guidance that recognises the unique role that the sector is playing in articulating people’s views and promoting political debate.
“Guidance” forsooth!
Guidance is the poisoned fang of the state. And just today some teeth are bared in a political cause. Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, and a Labour deputy-leadership candidate, has given the Daily Telegraph an interview.
Mr Johnson said he wants private schools to take pupils on secondment from local state schools, open their science labs to comprehensives and offer many more bursaries to poor families.
“Private schools need to do more to earn their charitable status,” he says. “It’s not enough just to lend their playing fields, it’s about the science lab, it’s about teachers – there are excellent Maths teachers in private schools. Let them give a bit of their expertise to the state sector.”
An interesting operational definition of “give”. Was not the Government celebrating the abolition of the slave trade only a little earlier this year? Apparently the Department for Education and Skills is going to make suggestions, to the supposedly independent Charity Commission* that they impose such things on schools that are charities. If the commission, so decides, then it is not as if the schools have the option of foregoing the tax breaks. Their assets were effectively nationalised under the ultimate control of the commission in 2006.* And the board of the commission? Well it is appointed by ministers and members are deemed civil servants. Of the nine commissioners and non-executive directors – The Nine? – two have had careers in organisations beyond the shadow of the state. I wonder whether how amenable they will be to departmental suggestion?
Meanwhile anyone holding a position in any of Mr Johnson’s rivals, for the deputy leadership of a party that hates private education more than it loves tax-and-spend, may wish to sell.
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* It is little noticed that the 2006 Charities Act as well as changing the functions of the Charity Commissioners, actually abolished them, transferring the role to an entirely new para-statal body, the Charity Commission, which just happens to have a very similar name, and whose officers are referred to by the same name as the former commissioners.
I like to feel that programs get on to my computer at my invitation, rather than barging past me into the living room and demanding to know where the drinks are.
– Charles Arthur on the Word 2007 converter. Which goes for all sorts of institutions and people. If someone is prepared to explain themselves, gives us an alternative, recognises our autonomy, then we incline to trust them simply because they have shown they understand that there is trust involved.
OK, I am biassed. NO2ID gets a credit on this film. But having been to a contributors’ screening last night, I think you could do worse than drag any friends or relations who are complacent about Britain being ‘a free country’ along to Taking Liberties (since 1997) when it opens on June 8th. If you have a black sense of humour, you will laugh.
Not much in the film will come as news to Samizdata readers, and to get anything like a coherent story out of so much material it has had to simplify, rather. But I was very pleasantly surprised that in doing so it avoids falling into the usual human-rightist traps of equating liberty with leftism. Teeters on the edge occasionally, perhaps. The sequence on Guantanamo is a little too long, and I think unbalances the section on the Blair regime’s complicity in torture. But there are few tendentious statements, and in most ways it is a conservative polemic. If there are heroes on screen they are mild-mannered middle-class pacifists. The off-screen heroes are Winston Churchill and the common law courts.
The points are made gently and methodically, ticking off, one by one, the broad civil liberties supposedly assured by the Human Rights Act, but actually removed by the same government that made such a fanfare of its respect for “our way of life”. Boiling the story down from a vast mass of information they could have included makes it very solidly founded. This is polemic, but the antithesis of Michael-Moore-style, concocted illustration of an artificial thesis. I spotted only very few factual errors, and I am an awful nitpicking wonk, as you all know.
What will stay with me, however, is what I had not seen before. Footage of lots of officious political policing and show of official force. Those who think we are softies whining about nothing will no doubt say that actually this just illustrates we are in no danger, Britain is still a healthy democracy (whatever that means). But is it really better to be smothered with a feather pillow than publicly garotted?
PS – Like a lot of small films this starts out in a few screens and hopes for a rolling release, so it is desperately sensitive to opening receipts. If you do go to see it when it opens, you increase the chance that others will get a chance do so too.
Myself I do not think the state should be in the business of subsidising housing. But if it is in that business then I do not think it is tolerable for the state to pick and choose whom to subsidise on the basis of other than individual circumstance – not group belonging.
New Labour minister Margaret Hodge begs to differ. She writes in The Observer today:
We should look at policies where the legitimate sense of entitlement felt by the indigenous family overrides the legitimate need demonstrated by the new migrants. We must debate these difficult questions.
If you have an ounce of conscience or historical background the questions [sic] are not difficult at all. Someone’s sense of entitlement does not trump someone else’s need – by which she necessarily implies it should curtail the second person’s legal rights – because the first person is ‘indigenous’. We know where that leads.
I have often suggested that the New Labour programme is a ‘soft’ form of fascism. I wonder now whether I was rude enough.
On the same day that the news widely features the very boring (if believable and justified) complaint from British shopkeepers that fixed-penalty notices are not sufficient to deter common shoplifting, comes this illustration that stealing from shops need not be mundane, but that it does not pay to be different:
A lab technician who dressed as a female elf to steal lingerie at knifepoint was jailed for two years today.
Robert Boyd, 45, donned a blonde Harpo Marx wig, glasses and a beanie hat to hold up a female staff member at a lingerie store in Belfast.
He claimed to have been involved in a futuristic fantasy role-playing game at the time of the robbery in December 2005.
Two little bits of green craziness from yesterday’s Ethical Living section of the Guardian. Interesting that it is no longer Environment Guardian, which I think is a hint that greenery is more a system of morals than a mode of scientific policy formation.
First, can’t add. Bibi van der Zee addresses a reader’s ethical dilemma:
Well, yes, cotton hankies, obviously. It’s not like disposable nappies versus reusables, where the disposable bunch can defend themselves on the grounds of the powere used to launder reusables. Because, really, how much electricity does it take to wash a handkerchief?
If Ms van der Zee could take some time off from expostulation – really – to think, she might spot that if you use a machine rather than bashing it on rocks at the riverside, laundering a piece of cloth takes pretty much the same amount of energy until it is too big to get in the machine, and the likelihood is greater that a handkerchief gets more energy (water, detergent…) used on it than strictly necessary than for any other item you might launder, precisely because it is smaller.
Second, won’t add. Caroline Lucas MEP answers the question, “Do you know your carbon footprint?”
Yes. It’s about seven tonnes of carbon a year, at least three times the global average but a little below the UK mean. That doesn’t include the essential travel in my work as an MEP – or the other carbon costs associated with running busy offices in Brussels and London. Measuring one’s carbon footprint is difficult, because differing systems calculate it differently. Mine includes an estimate for the carbon dioxide embedded in the clothes I wear, the food I eat and the goods I buy, for which I am responsible. So policy on reducing emissions can be based on actual or worst case figures, rather than the wishful thinking engendered by those who consider only travel and household fuel.
… but cosily ignoring the wishful thinking involved in excluding from consideration that MEPs spend more time on jets than many people who own one.
Oh Caroline! (She was a friend of mine, though I have not seen her for years.) What was wrong with saying the European government is insanely wasteful and you are trying to reduce that at the same time as contributing? Frightened of losing the moral high ground? Or such a believer in the value of more “essential” government that you exempt it from a calculation that purports to weigh every other human activity?
Those greens who favour carbon allowances tracked and enforced by government – very many of them – usually fall into the won’t add category. I have yet to see any of them attempt to quantify, or even acknowledge the existence of, the “carbon footprint” of the fabs and server farms, the bureaucrats and analysts, the data infrastructure and policing, needed to monitor and control everyone else’s lifestyle. Your personal carbon is a sooty sin consumed of private desire. That expended by the good state managing you is essential, virtuous, too cheap to meter. The divine Ms Lucas has internalised that distinction, it seems.
I would like to suggest that Jonathan’s “Missing the point over grammar schools” below, itself misses the point. I am as in favour of grammar schools as anyone. But I do not think Cameron’s decision is any more than another piece of political pragmatism (read my comment on Jonathan’s piece for the rationale.)
I agree the new Tory policy does nothing significant for education. But I suspect Jonathan’s policy prescription – compromise vis-a-vis properly voluntary schooling it may be, is doomed. Introducing vouchers now would be worthless and the Tories are sensible, therefore, not to tie themselves to that. Not least they would risk discrediting vouchers: vouchers could be a move in the right direction, but not yet.
This is why. Here is a sensible lefty, Jenni Russell, reporting in the Guardian’s bloggish Comment is Free:
[A] father with an 18 year-old daughter at one of London’s famous public schools is shocked by her fear of anything beyond her narrow syllabus. She pleads with him not to tell her anything he knows about history or classics or literature, because she understands by now that knowing anything beyond the points on the examiners’ mark schemes will jeopardise her chances of getting top grades. She has learned that education is not about discovery, but the dutiful repetition of precisely what you have been told.
However good the school, however motivated the pupil, there is no choice to be had. There is a chemin-de-fer, directions predetermined, signals to be passed at the prescribed speed. No entry to university at 16, Mr Brown. No ignoring unutterably tedious and repetitious schoolwork and passing the exams at the end on the basis of your own reading. Step off the lockstep elevator once, and you are out for ever. (Mr Fry, the University regrets that we require a clean Criminal Records Bureau certificate.)
All Britain’s education is under the supervision of a suffocating bureaucracy, that serves itself and its conception of proper development. There is small choice in rotten apples; the sadly pocked sharecrop goes to uniform damp barrells.
Who is to blame? The conservative defenders of both grammar schools and ‘family values’, that is who; and the utilitarian industrialists who now complain workers can’t read or count. It was they who sought to save the population from indoctrination by radical Local Education Authorities, so delivered the entire population into the hands of pseudo-progressive educationalists by creating the National Curriculum; they who worried that universities could not be trusted to set sufficiently ‘practical’ exams, and did the same with syllabuses.
My modest proposal for English education:
Scrap the National Curriculum. Do not replace it. Scrap league tables and DoE “Key stage” testing. Do not replace them. Scrap rules on school admissions and allow schools to exclude or expel pupils as they choose. Scrap the QCA. Do not replace it. Scrap the Teacher Registration Regulations. Do not replace them. Scrap the office of the Access Regulator. Do not replace him. Wait five years, continuing to run and fund schools otherwise the same, which means a mix of Local Authority, central government, voluntary aided, and private schools. Only then, when people have got used to making their own decisions again, consider vouchers.
By some strange para-constitutional principle, it is now assumed that the deputy leader of the Labour Party will be Deputy Prime Minister. That itself is not a huge prize, being a post with no constitutional status in the UK, and thus worth even less than the Vice Presidency of the US: The DPM’s power is entirely in the gift of the PM. It has mostly been a perch for a flightless bird.
Why then is the competition for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party apparently so well funded? You could see why the candidates might want the job. But what do backers get for their money if their man or woman wins?
The New Statesman is frequently frightening to read. But this week’s contained a scary extra: a full colour insert for the Peter Hain campaign. Running a national campaigning organisation on an issue that affects everyone in the country, I can’t afford to do that. Mr Hain may be an exotic shade of orange but is not in other respects politically colourful. His rivals have marginally different emphases in policy and are some more, some less personally likeable than he is… and that’s it. None can offer to change the country; and none is even offering to keep peace in the Labour Party. So who cares? Where does the money come from? Do they all – there are six contenders – have rich and indulgent mothers?
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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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