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Section 19A in Part II of Schedule 2 to the Children Act 1989 – as inserted by the Children (Leaving Care) Act 2000 August 31st, 2006 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Pre-empting the failure of the national ID scheme to deliver total surveillance soon enough, HMG is opening the other portals to its totalitarian hell. When even former cheerleaders for centralised government by technology and datasharing get scared, you have to wonder can it be stopped after all? Michael Cross of The Guardian, now gets it, it seems:
This is straight reporting, there is none of the sneering at privacy advocates we are used to from Cross. But extended government data-sharing is already happening. This, for example, was unwelcome news to me. August 26th, 2006 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Decidedly. This is one of those sentences, from one of those articles, that you read again and again in the hope that it might bear some reasonable meaning on closer inspection. No-one could really think that, could they? Today’s prize for greatest misplaced faith in the state goes to The Guardian’s Hywel Williams:
For Mr Williams, the state is by definition good… but only when it is doing what he wants, promoting what he believes is social progress. The state is only the state for him when it is a mid-20th-century north European welfare auction. Otherwise it is a reversion to some more primitive social form, not a real state. If becomes an instrument for evil, then that is because it is not a proper state; someone must have interfered with it. Nasty states that express tribalism are not in the ‘Western tradition’, but they are caused by colonialism in the Middle East and Africa, while Putin’s Russia on the other hand looks “to its Slavic roots”, and while Bush’s America is (apparently) a tribalism of politicised evangelicalism. It is perplexing how ‘tribalism’ will stretch to cover everything Mr Willams does not like, but still he purports to think that local states for local people are a good thing (if permitting the English self-government is going too far, tantamount to endorsing apartheid). “Modern democratic states” are what he wants. But to be acceptable they should all be alike in this, in that, and in the other respect. His way of government is best. How is that different from imperial interference? August 24th, 2006 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
You may have thought that the recent search orgy at British airports was triggered by a genuine fear that passengers might bring something explosive on board. Apparently not, because the same regulations apply to air crew too. It is of no consequence to the official mind that a pilot can destroy an airliner without any technical assistance. (9/11 didn’t change quite everything – even where it might be thought to be relevant by us untrained civilians.) Here is an extract from the security briefing from the BALPA (pilots’ association) website:
How thoughtful they insist crew are not searched in front of passengers. One would not want them humiliated any more than is strictly necessary. Creating artificial privileges is in any case good psychology to keep the recipients of privilege loyal to the heirarchy. It also helps to avoid anyone getting the idea that the whole rigmarole is ludicrous. August 18th, 2006 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
I was struck by a comment from Professor Michael Clarke, writing in The Times yesterday: “Commercial aircraft represent globalism and high technology – they shrink the world and threaten cultural conservatism.” Symbols are important because they illustrate the cloudiness of motives and social dynamics. They show the world is not black and white, neatly predictable. Not divided into the elect and the rest. People’s motives are mixed, and they often hide them from themselves or express them to seem grander than they are. Which is why I do wish otherwise sensible people would stop taking Islamist loonies at their own evaluation. The same were not taken in by the 1970s liberationist terrorists’ claim to be the vanguard of The Revolution. We knew we had the Soviets in the background, quietly encouraging the mayhem for imperial reasons, but no one with a brain believed the workers and students actually were going to rise up and overthrow the bourgeois state. They are self-identified as Muslim holy warriors, fighting on behalf of the Umma, but actually they are a tiny unrepresentative group. There is no more physical threat from the average western Muslim than there was from the average 1970s trades unionist. They might in a large minority have beliefs which if taken literally would have scary results (Sharia v. state ownership of the means of production). Those need to be disputed and opposed, but Terrorists for an abstract cause fit a very, very specific profile: spoiled middle-class kids of more education than brain, and petty-criminals made good who find their psychopathy is accepted and admired by the former when applied to the cause. He is not an evil genius; he’s a very naughty boy. → Continue reading: A clash of symbols August 12th, 2006 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
I’ve remarked here before on how the paedo-craze leads to possession of ordinary images of children being deemed indecent, and hence their possession a serious crime, depending on who has them. Now comes an example where there were no children (nor, as the facts suggest, any young adults) involved at all, except in the imagination of the court speculating about the imagination of the defendant. The Times reported yesterday:-
For those who have not been keeping up with the intricacies of UK sexual offences legislation: Possession of, or (more seriously) making, indecent (not defined) photographs of children (defined as being or appearing to be under 16) became illegal a while ago. But it was extended to pseudo-photographs, i.e. digitally edited images, in 1994. And the age criterion was raised to 18 just a couple of years ago. And the courts have in their wisdom decided that copying an image to or within a computer counts as ‘making’ it. So photoshopping or downloading a picture (which also counts as ‘making’ it) that appears (to the court) to represent someone under 18 and is indecent (as it appears to the court after hearing the evidence of prosecution experts that may relate as much to the nature of the defendant and the context in which it was found as that of the picture itself) is a crime bearing a prison sentence and registration as a sex offender – even if the defendant made absolutely certain that no-one under 18 was in any way involved. You can screw your sixteen-year old girlfriend or boyfriend however you both like*, but snap them with their top off, or even leering suggestively, and use it as a screensaver, and you are a manufacturer of child pornography who could easily, given bad luck and a zealous prosecution, end up unemployable and/or be locked up to be tortured by career criminals. I don’t know how unlucky Mr Tudor-Miles was, but The Times also quotes Ray Savage, one of the professional experts involved in the case:
More worrying? Mr Savage worries me more than Mr Tudor-Miles. If our protectors wish to stamp out people having sexual fantasies about schoolgirls, then police raids and mass arrests here and here are clearly called for. Better still, lets deal with the problem at source and stop women going to school. It worked for the Taliban. I have it on good authority that you still can not buy a stripy tie or a navy-blue mini-skirt in Kabul. [* But not, under the new Sexual Offences Act, wherever you like.] August 11th, 2006 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
I remain puzzled by the Porter affair, and the venom with which it is still pursued by nearly all British papers.
Summarises The Times, not completely accurately. The policy was based on a reasonable assumption by the councillors involved that owner-occupiers would be more likely to vote Tory. They did not hand-pick the beneficiaries. I have two questions for which no satisfactory answers have been provided. Indeed, I have not seen the questions asked in the mainstream media. 1. If Porter and her colleagues could be surcharged by an official for selling off some dozens of council flats for indirect political advantage, where are the surcharges for the Labour, Liberal, and Tory politicians who built and subsidised the occupation of London’s three to four million council flats? 2. Why the hatred directed at Shirley Porter in particular? She is not a particularly endearing character, but then neither were most of the other Tory politicians caught up in the sleaze craze of the ’90s, and most of them have been rehabilitated in the public eye and are writing books or presenting TV shows. Is it because she is so rich? Or is it because she is Jewish? August 10th, 2006 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
Apparently the terrorism threat level in the UK has just been raised to ‘critical’. Which we are told means, “an attack is expected imminently”. Pardon me for being critical, but that is entirely meaningless. It has been raised from ‘severe – an attack is highly likely’ which is also meaningless. When I write “meaningless,” I suppose that is because I want to know what is meant by ‘an attack’, and what probabilities are adduced to distinguish between ‘unlikley’, ‘possible but not likely’ [are not those the same? – no, apparently], ‘a strong possibility’, ‘highly likely’, and ‘imminent’? The announcement is full of meaning, but it is a purely political meaning. This morning the police announce they have “disrupted a major plot” and arrested 18 people overnight, “as part of a long-running operation”. Unless there is actually someone known to the police to be loose with a bomb as a result of the raids, then disrupting a plot would reduce the actual level of danger, wouldn’t it? Maybe the danger was ‘critical’ (whatever that means) before last night, and they did not know it, so now a misleadingly low level of threat is being corrected. What is entirely evident is that in the threat levels do nothing to inform the public. They contain no information. Actual threats (those that might succeed) are by definition unknown unknowns, because the security services can (we hope) cope with what they know. What threat levels do do is provide justification for actions the authorities might otherwise have to explain in detail. One cannot help notice the timing, immediately after a vague but minatory speech by John Reid:
I do not think the plot is invented to support the Home Office’s war on liberty but I do think it is so interpreted. I do think that Reid, with knowledge of what would happen in the next few hours, was well situated to take advantage. And the timing could not be better to monopolise the news. **** An acquaintance of the left-liberal establishment, whom I will not embarrass by mentioning his name on this blog, remarked on Reid’s speech that it marked another step in the perversion of language: “None of us should be anything other than vigilant and that vigilance is the price of securing our freedom,” the Home Secretary said, inverting the meaning of a well-known phrase. “The price of liberty is eternal vigilence” once meant we should take care of our liberty at all times lest we lose it to surreptitious encroachment. Now the official meaning is to be that we may only repurchase our freedom (at some indefinite time in the future) by indentured labour for state security, exchanging it just for now (and future nows to be determined) with vigilence – that we should subordinate our lives to watching for the Bad Wolf. And Big Brother is a TV programme. August 10th, 2006 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
One doesn’t expect much good news from Africa, and Kenya may be notorious as among the most corruptly governed countries in the world, but this is what I call a public service. A strange note in the commentary which I take to be a sign of a global, not just an African, problem:
I have heard similar things in Britain, from both the non-readers and academic acquaintances responsible for teaching non-readers. In a world dominated by bureaucracy, qualifications no longer have any necessary relationship to knowledge, and reading is an act of compliance. But being an outdoor librarian seems like a good job to me. August 8th, 2006 | Comments are closed
This I wrote elsewhere in a discussion about politics and public opinion:
And I think I was correct. Blair’s destruction will follow, as he is already starting to broaden the principle to include the rest of his party and the public. “I don’t care what you think.” is not a sustainable position for a politician. It does surprise me that no mainstream commentator appears to have spotted that this is what Brown is doing over Trident, positioning himself as trustworthy to the general public by prompting a group hate from the sandal-wearing left (whom the public definitely do not trust) while reserving his position on the more important matters of domestic policy that he might wish to change. August 7th, 2006 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
I’ve been re-reading the report of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee – Identity Cards Technologies: Scientific Advice, Risk and Evidence in preparation for an interview this evening. It is full of wonderful sarcasm couched in parliamentary politeness, and I recommend it to you, if you care to understand how Britain is governed and/or have a taste for black comedy. MPs are as much bemused spectators as the rest of us. Nobody knows what the Home Office is up to, because it refuses to tell anyone – even select committees – any more than it can get away with. It does have 180-odd people now working on its Identity Cards programme. But I begin to wonder if they themselves know what they are about… In case you think I am exaggerating, this is from section 30 of the report:
August 5th, 2006 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Perry in particular will be delighted to know of the existence of Moonbat Media – it is new to me anyway. Though they do not seem to be taking the definition very literally. August 4th, 2006 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
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