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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Various forms of coercion, such as designation of the application process for identity documents issued by UK Ministers (e.g passports), are an option to stimulate applications in a manageable way. Designation should be considered as part of a managed roll-out strategy, specifically in relation to UK documents. There are advantages to designation of documents associated with particular target groups e.g. young people who may be applying for their first Driving Licence.
– ‘National Identity Scheme, Options Analysis – Outcome’, the Home Office document from the end of 2007 that succinctly describes its approach to the imposition of the national identity scheme onto the population.
The new Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, says “Holding an identity card should be a personal choice for British citizens — just as it is now to obtain a passport.” This is no change. It always has been intended that it should become the same personal choice, that any application for a passport (or another official document that you need to live a normal life) should entail an application to be on the national register for the rest of your life. As voluntary as sleeping.
I feel sure that early man would not have embarked on the road to civilisation if he had thought that, one day, humankind would arrive at a point where one man has the right to determine how much beer another man may take into a field in the middle of the night.
– Jeremy Clarkson, on the over-policing of midsummer at Stonehenge.
If [UK Government] spending since 1997 had risen no faster than inflation, we would be spending a third less than we do now, and could abolish income tax, VAT, and council tax entirely.
– Eamonn Butler, writing in the Daily Telegraph on what I am relieved to discover the Adam Smith Institute has renamed Cost of Government Day.
The Times, assisted by Mr Justice Eady, who seems to preside over the whole mess that stands in the place of proper privacy law in England, has unmasked the police blogger NightJack. NightJack had just won the Orwell Prize for his blog. I am guessing that drew it to the attention of higher authority, and such articulate dissent must be punished.
It took just six weeks, including a court-case, to reveal his identity. The blog has now been deleted, and the DC formerly known as NightJack has been disciplined in some unspecified way. Apparently it is in the public interest to maintain a disciplinary code under which police officers are not permitted to express their opinions. That is what Sir David Eady implied, obiter, in giving his judgement.
But deleting from public knowledge what has once been on the web is difficult. Here is a celebrated sample, NightJack’s advice to the arrested, which Samizdata readers may find both useful and enlightening (there is a situational irony in the sideswipe at those who have learned how to use the forces of law and order to score points and extract revenge):
A Survival Guide for Decent Folk
Paul has posted a number of lengthy replies on the “Modest Proposal” thread. In these days of us increasingly having to deal with law abiding folk who have fallen foul of the “entitled poor” and those who have learned how to use us to score points and exact revenge, I thought it would be a good idea to give out a bit of general guidance for those law abiding types who find themselves under suspicion or under arrest. It works for the bad guys so make it work for you.
→ Continue reading: Public service
David Mitchell’s own opinions are a bit right-on for me (right-on generally being the opposite of right, in either sense). But unlike the ordinarily right-on, he is prepared to countenance being mistaken, and frequently an acute critic. This bit of his latest Observer column is lucid and perfectly to the point:
Gordon Brown is either so short of ideas or so despises the electorate that he thinks the best way to demonstrate that the government is coping with the biggest business crisis in a century is to make it the responsibility of a man whose day job is telling self-regarding mediocrities that they should take off their Mexican hats before trying to put on their jumpers. A man who has made himself rich, but whose career as a tycoon has gone sufficiently quiet that he’s got time to do TV.
Top-end billionaires are too busy for that – Rupert Murdoch and Richard Branson don’t have their own programmes, they have their own channels. Alan Sugar is no longer primarily a businessman – he portrays one on TV. Brown might as well have given the new tsardom to the bloke who played Boycie in Only Fools and Horses
What is even more depressing than Brown thinking that this might impress people is that the Tories, the only plausible alternative government, agree.
Sir Alan’s TV role is caricature capitalism. (Am I the only one who hears the the Fry & Laurie Dammit sketch, itself mocking business-set melodrama, when the apprentices talk?) It is alarming if the Tories think that the public might think that the appointment is any more than more window-dressing, and more alarming that they are engaging in manoeuvres to reinforce that impression. They should be mocking a Government that holds reality TV to be a model for reality.
But what if both Mitchell and I and all the other cynical commentators are wrong, and the Conservatives are wisely containing a real threat? What if the public is impressed?
From: *.*@westminsterforumprojects.co.uk]
Sent: 12 June 2009 09:50
To: enquiries@no2id.net
Subject: The future role of the third sector in the UK: Don’t Miss the Westminster Legal Policy Forum Keynote Seminar: The Future of the UK Third Sector – proving ‘public benefit’, Morning, 18th June 2009
Westminster Legal Policy Forum Keynote Seminar:
The Future of the UK Third Sector – proving ‘public benefit’
with
Helen Stephenson
Deputy Director, Third Sector Support Team
Office of the Third Sector, Cabinet Office
and
Claire Cooper
Deputy Director, Communities Group
Department for Communities and Local Government
and
Peter Wanless
Chief Executive, Big Lottery Fund
and
Simon Blake
Chair, Compact Voice
Morning, Thursday, 18th June 2009
Princess Alexandra Hall, Over-Seas House, Park Place, St James’s Street, London SW1A 1LR
[…]
For the attention of the Director
I hope you won’t mind this final reminder about the above seminar, taking place in Westminster next Thursday, but you don’t currently appear to be represented, and I do believe the issues being discussed will be of interest.
This email is being sent to a general email address because I wanted to pass along information that I thought may be of interest but was unable to secure specific contact details. Please forward this to the appropriate person, and we would be grateful to receive precise contact details if this is possible.
Whereas I thought readers of this blog would be interested, given we have previously discussed the creeping nationalisation of charities and other voluntary organisations by Britain’s Borg-state. For foreign readers I hope it throws light on an icy subtle totalitarianism.
What makes this doubly creepy is that it is a legal policy seminar. That hints at further powers perhaps to coerce the ‘third sector’, as well as to co-opt and to corrupt it. Though the new Companies Act 2006 constrains the independence of action of commercial firms and non-profits in unclear ways, it is yet a shadow in the corner. So if you are a voluntary organisation but not a charity, don’t spend money on party politics, and don’t accept government or local authority or quango or bound-charity money, then you are currently still beyond state control and not obliged to provide a ‘public benefit’.
Please note there is a charge for most delegates, but no one is excluded on the basis of ability to pay (see below).
Seminar
The third sector – charities, social enterprises, credit unions – have an increasingly prominent role in the delivery of services and economic development in the UK.
But now the ‘rules of the game’ are changing as the Charity Commission imposes new duties on charities to justify ‘public benefit’ and the recession threatens to squeeze much-needed donations.
This seminar takes an in depth look at the effects on charities themselves and those who support or benefit from them, at what the third sector will look like in the future, how significant a role it is set to play after the recession and at implications for UK society as a whole.
→ Continue reading: Anaconda
To quote David Davis MP, three months ago, “How will we know we are living in a police state?”
Is it when the police conduct a systematic campaign of false arrests in order to gather information on people who might commit a crime? Is it when they do that, and public reaction is no more than a shrug? A couple of days ago, The Daily Telegraph reported discoveries made by my local Liberal Democrat PPC, excellently living up to the first bit of her party’s vaguely oxymoronic name:
Officers are targeting children as young as 10 with the aim of placing their DNA profiles on the national database to improve their chances of solving crimes, it is claimed.
The alleged practice is also described as part of a “long-term crime prevention strategy” to dissuade youths from committing offences in the future. […]
A Metropolitan Police officer made the claims after figures were released showing that 386 under-18s had their DNA taken and stored by police last year in Camden, north London.
The officer said: “Have we got targets for young people who have not been arrested yet? The answer is yes. But we are not just waiting outside schools to pick them up, we are acting on intelligence.*
“It is part of a long-term crime prevention strategy. If you know you have had your DNA taken and it is on a database then you will think twice about committing burglary for a living.
“We are often told that we have just one chance to get that DNA sample and if we miss it then that might mean a rape or a murder goes unsolved in the future.”
Acting “on intelligence”, that is, hearsay, unsubstantiated allegations, and prejudice, when they know they have no evidence let alone reasonable suspicion of any actual crime — for intelligence is not evidence, it is a substitute for evidence in its absence — the Metropolitan Police are making unlawful arrests, in order to take samples (fingerprints and DNA), that it is deemed by the human rights court to be improper for them to hold in any case. And that fact has not caused public outrage. It has yet to reach any broadcast news service, as far as I am aware.
A quiescent, compliant public and a quiescent, compliant media, are the handmaidens of a police state.
The left should be sensitive to inequality, the left should never accept liberty on a playing field that is unequal.
– Conor Gearty. Quoted in this account of a debate on liberty at the Hay Festival by Afua Hirsch (do I detect an elegant lefty lawyer’s eyebrow raised in, “There was no competition for this position…”?).
Every time I hear Prof Gearty or another human rightist of his water argue for a policy with which I agree (banning torture, say, or permitting freedom of expression), I have to remind myself that they are proceeding from an entirely different foundation. The position is coherent, but coherently alien.
—-
* Well, last week, actually.
I am not a very musical person, but the following juxtaposition in the tv schedules last night struck me as remarkable:
9:30 ITV1 Britain’s Got Talent (results show). Amateur variety acts are ranked by the viewers. Predicted audience 14 million. An industry in itself.
9:00 BBC4 Standing in the Shadows of Motown. Documentary on the Funk Brothers, the Motown Records house band, who played on everything even the amusical like me have heard of, and incorporating live sets with the surviving old guys backing top modern soul artists. Predicted audience, way under half a million.
Hereford T-bone has none of the attractions of udderburger. And sometime in the next year they will let those 14 million vote for a government, too.
As I was saying before, the real poison of the MPs allowances system is not that they get ‘free money’. It is that it insulates them personally from the bulllying of officialdom that they would have the power, had they the motivation, to curtail. The Guardian reports:
A Labour source said: “The fees office green book which sets out the rules and advice on behalf of the parliamentary authorities states specifically that professional advice, for example from accountants or solicitors, is an allowable expense.
“In order that MPs comply fully with all the relevant requirements relating to tax, and to ensure they are properly meeting all their tax liabilities, many rightly seek professional assistance and advice where this relates specifically to their role as members of parliament.”
But,
Under tax rules, most workers are not allowed to claim the cost of paying an accountant to help them to fill in a tax return as a legitimate business expense.
HMRC is deliberately discouraging ordinary people from getting professional help with a complicated and secretive tax system by disallowing personal accountancy as an expense.* That is calculated to keep a naive segment of the taxpaying public on the margin in subjection and overpaying. In my experience an accountant is not expensive. The psychological pain he protects you from is at least as important as the financial benefit of getting it right.
The sums they claim for it are trivial, but that MPs are encouraged to get that analgesia (100% free to them), whereas the ordinary voter is discouraged from it (paying out of their own pocket, with at best 40% counting against the tax they pay, if they fall into the category where accountancy is allowed as an expense, which they won’t find out unless they employ an accountant in the first place), is another corrupting influence.
…..
* My idea of ‘tax justice’, unlike that of the various organisations that campaign for people to pay as much tax as possible and for more arbitrary power for the authorities, is one in which the system is transparent, there aren’t different sets of rules for different people, and the rules themselves are fair and set out in law.
…..
BTW, on the subject of tax, readers might enjoy this letter in The Times.
Time Rice has said that to write a great pop lyric you need to “fall in love with cliché”. Shahid Malik MP, who is one of the smartest and most personable of the younger New Labour generation (full disclosure: I know his brother, who is a brilliant computer scientist and an IT entrepreneur), has had a go at repudiating accusations about his parlimentary expenses. He says his allowance claims were “a million percent within the rules”.
If that is a deliberate attempt to package in a soundbite the suggestion (1) that he is intensely distressed to have been traduced, with the hidden message (2) that he is insufficiently numerate to have been conscious that the figures might look a bit odd, then it is an impressive subordination of cliché to the political purpose of asserting his honesty. It comes across as demotic and with the right tone of shock at being singled out. As long as Mr Malik is not subsequently proved to have done anything seriously wrong, he will be one of the winners out of this political crisis.
It is a weird world. A political career can be built on or destroyed by a few words. And the words need not be obviously rhetorical. It is all the smarter if they are not.
Update: [& typo corrected above.] He’s “stepped down” as a minister while suggestions that he has broken the ministerial code are investigated. That too strikes me as a smart damage-limitation move. Some commentators seem to assume I am defending him. I am not. I don’t have any opinion on the allegations. I’m admiring his chutzpah and musing on how subtle the game of media democracy is.
The first 10% off public spending could be painless for the public and popular.
– John Redwood
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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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