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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Labour is planning to attack David Cameron next week, accusing him of helping paedophiles escape British justice.
In what is billed as a campaign to portray the Tories as soft on crime, the home secretary, John Reid, is intending to hound the Tories over their refusal to vote for extradition laws that would allow fugitives to be forced to return to the UK. […]
Labour believes the Tories are wrong on potential crimes of the future, symbolised by the identity cards issue; wrong on terrorism by refusing to support 90-day detention and control orders; and wrong over the use of antisocial behaviour orders and extradition.
– Report in The Guardian this morning.
With this, from a review by Stephen Fidler in the FT Magazine of MIchael Burleigh’s Sacred Causes:
Burleigh understands that totalitarian states are founded not only on the will for power of ambitious, amoral men, but also on a popular desire for security.
Lie and cheat. It is empty bureaucracy, and the people asking the questions do not care either:
[A]lthough I was born in Rawalpindi, in Pakistan, I used to say my ethnicity was Irish because I resented the question.
– Rear-Admiral Amjad Hussain, Royal Navy logistics chief, quoted in The Guardian
Overconfident?
Governments are happily increasing their power everywhere by stoking fear of terrorists. Why risk undermining that by spilling over into loony implausibility?
Terrorism is the “biggest threat to all European nations,” Home Secretary John Reid has said as he discusses ways to boost security with five EU ministers.
– BBC
Utter tripe. Terrorism does kill, indubitably. That embarrasses governments that pretend to be perfect protectors.
Ignoring government self-image, it might be a serious enough threat to some people in some European states, to be worth some European governments spending a lot of treasure tackling it; and it might even be serious enough to merit changing the law to cope with it. I doubt both those prescriptions, and the latter more than the former, as regular readers will know. But they could conceivably be true.
However, let us review the facts against Mr Reid’s stronger assertion:
- Terrorism is NOT a threat to any European nation. No European nation state, and no identifiable national group in Europe is in danger of loss to terrorism endangering its identity or existence.
- Terrorism is NOT a threat to any Europen state. There are a handful of states in the world whose existence is from time to time endangered by terrorism. None of them is currently in Europe. The only very obvious example is Iraq. Colombia, Nepal, and others have come close recently, but no EU country has been in that position since the Greek civil war.
- To individual people and certain groups more than others, terrorism may present a threat, it is true. But that is not true of all European nations. The majority of EU countries have had no terrorist incidents whatsoever in at least a decade.
- Even in the few countries with significant terrorism in recent years (which really means France, Italy, Spain, Germany and the UK, if you extend ‘recent years’ to cover the last 20 or 30, which is a pretty generous estimate of the contemporary for a political phenomenon), actual casualties have been small. Hospital infection, food poisoning, non-political crime, bad driving… each presents a bigger risk to any of us. Terrorism is plainly not the biggest threat faced by people anywhere in Europe.
Witless hyperbole is the stock-in-trade of dictatorships propagandising their presumed-credulous servitors, in order to buff up their self-image. (Read any government-endorsed press story from an African or Mddle Eastern bullydom.) Dictatorships cannot bear to be embarrassed, and are embarrassed by terrorists, because they can never concede anything is outside their control. But in liberal states that sort of pretension to deity is supposed to be mocked from office. Which is Britain? Or is the question, which is Europe?
This anecdote from Ian Brown is just too much fun not to share: Killer wasp brings passport office to halt.
Any wasp-trainers out there? Your country needs you.
Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies, The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
– C.S. Lewis
A lot of people have been talking to me about the pubs of Yeovil this week. Not because of my unwise enthusiasm when young for rough cider. But because of this, first covered at the beginning of the year:
Revellers in the Somerset town of Yeovil, often seen as Britain’s answer to the Wild West on a Friday and Saturday night, were this weekend getting to grips with a unique scheme which is more science fiction than Wild West. Customers entering the town’s six main late-night drinking and dancing joints were being asked to register their personal details, have their photograph taken and submit to a biometric finger scan.
That’s from a report in The Guardian in May, which went on to explain:
The clubs and Avon and Somerset police, who are supporting the scheme, argue that it is not compulsory. Nobody can be forced to give a finger scan, which works by analysing a fingertip’s ridges and furrows. However, the clubs admit they will not allow people in if they refuse to take part in the scheme.
But things have moved on. “Don’t like it? You can drink elsewhere. Let the market sort it out… let these awful surveillance clubs go out of business and free-wheeling ones thrive,” was my immediate reaction. It appears that was naive. While it may be “voluntary” for drinkers, it appears that it is not voluntary for pubs and clubs. Not any longer. The Register explains,
“The Home Office have looked at our system and are looking at trials in other towns including Coventry, Hull & Sheffield,” said Julia Bradburn, principal licensing manager at South Somerset District Council.
Gwent and Nottingham police have also shown an interest, while Taunton, a town neighbouring Yeovil, is discussing the installation of fingerprint systems in 10 pubs and clubs with the systems supplier CreativeCode. […]
The council had assumed it was its duty under the Crime and Disorder Act (1998) to reduce drunken disorder by fingerprinting drinkers in the town centre.
Some licensees were not happy to have their punters fingerprinted, but are all now apparently behind the idea. Not only does the council let them open later if they join the scheme, but the system costs them only £1.50 a day to run.
Oh, and they are also coerced into taking the fingerprint system. New licences stipulate that a landlord who doesn’t install fingerprint security and fails to show a “considerable” reduction in alcohol-related violence, will be put on report by the police and have their licences revoked.
The fingerprinting is epiphenomenon. What’s deeply disturbing here is the construction of new regimes of official control out of powers granted nominally in the spirit of “liberalisation”. The Licensing Act 2003 passed licensing the sale of alcohol and permits for music and dancing – yes, you need a permit to let your customers dance in England and Wales – from magistrates to local authorities. And it provided for local authorities to set conditions on licenses as they saw fit.
Though local authorities are notionally elected bodies, and magistrates appointees, this looked like democratic reform. But all the powers of local authorities are actually exercised by permanent officials – who also tell elected councillors what their duties are. And there are an awful lot of them.
Magistrates used to hear licensing applications quickly. They had other things to do. And they exercised their power judicially: deciding, but not seeking to control. Ms Bradburn and her staff have time to work with the police and the Home Office on innovative schemes. I’ve noted before how simple-sounding powers can be pooled by otherwise separate agencies to common purpose, gaining leverage over the citizen. I call it The Power Wedge.
They are entirely dedicated to making us safer. How terrifying. “A Republic?” said the Seagreen, with one of his dry husky unsportful laughs, “What is that?”
GIve me the foul air of corruption, if that is the only way I may be permitted to breath at all.
… is they are all racists, apparently. The paradox inherent in such a declaration might not be lost on Trevor Phillips, were he not now one of the official arbiters of what is and is not forbidden thought and speech in Britain.
How extraordinarily coincidental that this line should emerge from a New Labour appointee just before the Home Secretary is due to announce that settlement of Bulgarians and Romanians here will still be controlled after they become EU citizens.
Having given up trying to stay PM and handed over the kulturcampf to Mr Brown, St Anthony now wishes to save the world:
In his strongest warning yet on the environment, the prime minister will tell fellow EU leaders that the world faces “conflict and insecurity” unless it acts now. “We have a window of only 10-15 years to take the steps we need to avoid crossing catastrophic tipping points,” Mr Blair says, in a joint letter with his Dutch counterpart, Jan Peter Balkenende.
I am not interested for this purpose in whether he is right about ‘catastrophic tipping points’. It is entirely possible he is. It is interesting that this is certainly not from his own knowledge. And since actually no one knows enough about climate to say under what conditions, never mind when, a catastrophe, bifurcation, flip, transition… whatever you would like to call it… might occur, then the fact the firm limit of years is reported as as little as 7 in some places, and up to 25 elsewhere, should not worry us.
What should, is the contradiction between the millenarian rhetoric and the irrelevance in its own terms of the hair-shirt policy that we are being exhorted to adopt. If the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere will cause catastrophe at some threshold level, then capping emissions from human activity merely postpones reaching the threshold. By not very much.
If things are that bad either: (1) We should find ways yet unknown to make global human greenhouse-gas emissions close to zero or net negative. (Sorry, no cooked food – except sun-baked and geyser-boiled – until we do.) Or (2) we should enjoy the party at the end of the world. But it seems those in charge do not know the difference between quantity and rate.
Now that is really scary. Reality I can cope with. I am aware I’m going to die, and probably suffer disease and loss first. That the course of my life will be determined not by biology, physics and economics, but by messianic imbeciles with no grasp of any of them, is harder to bear.
For me; the non-exclusive or: technofix plus fun.
For the Head Boy; “Repent, o ye sinners or burn in hell on earth! Go, and sin no more. (Than you did in 1990).”
I cannot have a situation where businesses close haphazardly.
– Rt Hon Alistair Darling MP, speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme about the Sub-Post Office network, and neatly demonstrating the dirigiste mentality of the Scottish Raj
The threats to liberty in Britain are too numerous to keep track of. Thanks to Josie Appleton on Spiked! for this, which I had entirely missed before now:
The Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Bill, due to return to the House of Commons next week, will mean that 9.5million adults – one third of the adult working population – will be subject to ongoing criminal checks.
It is a House of Lords Bill, but has Government backing.
The Bill would create an Independent Barring Board (IBB), which would maintain “barred lists” preventing listed individuals from engaging in “regulated activities”. “In respect of an individual who is included in a barred list, IBB must keep other information of such description as is prescribed.” [cl.2(5)]
As the Bill was originally presented, you would have no right to damages if you were mistakenly or maliciously included in a barred list, and nor would anyone else. And the IBB would have been an absolute finder of fact, with appeal allowed only on a point of law. So among the things the IBB would have been independent of is responsibility for its actions.
Now things are slightly better, but there’s a cunning pseudo-compromise. You can sue. And you can now appeal the facts. But the criteria applied in the application of policy to an individual case – the core of what the IBB would do – is expressly (with a shade of Guantanamo) deemed not to be a matter of law or fact, and are therefore not to be subject to examination by the courts [cl.4(3)].
The schedule of “regulated activity” is 5 pages long in the printed copy. So you’ll have to look it up yourselves if you are interested.
The practical effect? Well, as an example, as I understand it, if the Bill were currently law, I would be committing a criminal offence in paying someone I trust to look after my elderly mother, who is currently convalescing from an operation, without both of us being made subject to official monitoring first.
Once it is in force, if you wish to be self sufficient – even if you don’t value your privacy, and are confident that theree’s nothing about you to which an official could possibly have objected in the past, and that you might not be confused with anyone else – you’ll need to know if a family member is going to be ill in sufficient time to fill in all the forms and wait for them to be processed. Better leave it to the state – which is of course always perfect.
From The Guardian yesterday:
The Department for Education has drawn up a series of proposals which are to be sent to universities and other centres of higher education before the end of the year. The 18-page document acknowledges that universities will be anxious about passing information to special branch, for fear it amounts to “collaborating with the ‘secret police'”. It says there will be “concerns about police targeting certain sections of the student population (eg Muslims)”.
There are two things I find fascinating about this. Not that it explicitly suggests staff may want to report students to the authorities for “using a computer while Asian” – something which if followed would bankrupt every scientific, economic and medical faculty in the country, from the postage and staff time used in denouncements – but the institutional presumptions involved, and the political context. → Continue reading: Love report thy neighbour
You can guess the context.
10 October 2006
Dear Sir or Madam,
YOUR ADVERTISING
We investigate complaints to ensure that non-broadcast marketing communications comply with the British Code of Advertising, Sales Promotion and Direct Marketing (the CAP Code), prepared by the Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP). We also investigate complaints to ensure that television and radio advertising complies with the CAP (broadcast) Codes.
We have received the attached complaint about your national press ad (copy enclosed) and we welcome your help to resolve it. If the copy is incomplete, please send us a complete version. If the copy is difficult to read, please send us a better copy.
Please also check your company name and address details at the top of the complaint notification. If they are incorrect, please let us know.
We shall consider the complaint in particular under Clause 5.1 of the Code (copy enclosed). You should be aware that marketing communications must comply with all other relevant clauses, among which are the attached underlying principles. A copy of the 11th edition of the Code may be obtained from the CAP website, www.cap.org.uk or the ASA website, www.asa.org.uk.
The Code requires marketers to hold documentary evidence for their claims before submitting an ad for publication. Please give us all the substantiation and information you would like us to have. Although it is for you to decide what to submit, you will need to comment on the complainants’ specific objection as outlined in the attached complaint notification. We shall be happy to receive anything else you think is relevant.
Please let us know whether the material to which this complaint relates was prepared/handled by you or by another company on your behalf and, if so, which company. If you have used an agency, please tell us its name. Please let us know what plans you have for future use of your ad. Can you provide us with a media schedule?
If the ASA Council upholds the complaints, its ruling might affect the acceptability of the same or similar claims/advertisements appearing in other media, including broadcast. We are telling you this now so you are aware of the potential ramifications of this investigation. Please let us know whether the same or similar claims are made or are to be made in advertisements in other media, including broadcast.
Our Complaints Procedure leaflet is enclosed.
The ASA’s effectiveness depends on resolving complaints fairly and swiftly. An unreasonable delay in responding to our enquiries may be considered a breach of the Code. So that we can conclude this matter as soon as possible, please respond in writing, preferably by e-mail to […..], within five working days. If you need more time please let us know. If you are not the right person to deal with this letter please tell us and pass the letter on to someone who is. If we do not receive a reply within five working days from the date of this letter, we shall submit to the ASA Council a draft recommendation upholding the complaint. [My emphasis]
Thank you for your co-operation. We look forward to hearing from you by 17 October.
Yours sincerely
[…………]
Investigations Executive
cc: [Newspaper]
bcc: NPA [=Newspaper Publishers Association]
Yes; they did disclose the “bcc”. The accompanying leaflet sets out the complaints procedure. It ends, inevitably, on a minatory note:
Most advertising parties act quickly to amend or withdraw their ad if we find it breaks the codes. The ASA acts against the few who do not. Broadcasters’ licenses require them to stop transmitting ads that break the codes and we can ask publishers not to print ads that dont meet the rukes. Other sanctions exist to prevent direct mail that breaches the code from being distributed and to reduce the likelihood of posters appearing that breach the codes on taste and decency and social responsibility grounds.
Ultimately, we can refer non-broadcast advertisers who persistently break the CAP Code to the Office of Fair Trading for legal action under the Control of Misleading Advertisement Regulations. Broadcasters who continually air ads that break the codes can be referred to Ofcom, which has the power to fine them or even revoke their licence.
Terrorism has always been cheap and easy, to be sure. The reason we do not have more has more to do with the tiny numbers of people it appeals to, and the sort of people it appeals to not generally being much good at practical organisation, than the competence of security forces. But modern governments and modern media appear to make terrorising the general population costless, workless and safe. Just hold a few meetings, send a few emails, and confess to plotting some extravagant crimes, and you are guaranteed to occupy the media for days.
Dhiren Barot, of north London, planned to use a radioactive “dirty bomb” in one of a series of attacks in the UK, Woolwich Crown Court heard.
Leave aside that ‘dirty bombs’ are not significantly more dangerous than ordinary bombs, but rely on superstitions about radioactive contamination – read further down the story:
The Crown could not dispute claims from the defence that no funding had been received for the projects, nor any vehicles or bomb-making materials acquired, [prosecuting counsel] said.
Barot had also faced 12 other charges: one of conspiracy to commit public nuisance, seven of making a record of information for terrorist purposes and four of possessing a record of information for terrorist purposes.
The judge ordered all these charges to lie on file following his guilty plea to conspiracy to murder.
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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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