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]
|
My computer is evil, so this will be brief.
“Justice secretary wants jury trials scrapped except in most serious cases”, the BBC reports:
Justice Secretary David Lammy is proposing to massively restrict the ancient right to a jury trial by only guaranteeing it for defendants facing rape, murder, manslaughter or other cases passing a public interest test.
An internal government briefing, produced by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) for all other Whitehall departments, confirms plans to create a new tier of jury-less courts in England and Wales.
The new courts would deal with most crimes currently considered by juries in Crown Court.
But the MoJ said no final decision had been taken by the government.
The plans, obtained by BBC News, show that Lammy, who is also deputy prime minister, wants to ask Parliament to end jury trials for defendants who would be jailed for up to five years.
The proposals are an attempt to end unprecedented delays and backlogs in courts, and do not apply to Scotland or Northern Ireland.
Here is what David Lammy said about juries in 2020:
David Lammy
@DavidLammy
Jury trials are a fundamental part of our democratic settlement. Criminal trials without juries are a bad idea.
The Government need to pull their finger out and acquire empty public buildings across the country to make sure these can happen in a way that is safe.
12:20 pm · 20 Jun 2020
Kudos to the Guardian for not soft-pedalling this:
Chomsky had deeper ties with Epstein than previously known, documents reveal
The philosopher and the sex trafficker were in contact long after Epstein was convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor, documents reveal
The prominent linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky called it a “most valuable experience” to have maintained “regular contact” with Jeffrey Epstein, who by then had long been convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor, according to emails released earlier in November by US lawmakers.
Such comments from Chomsky, or attributed to him, suggest his association with Epstein – who officials concluded killed himself in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges – went deeper than the occasional political and academic discussions the former had previously claimed to have with the latter.
Chomsky, 96, had also reportedly acknowledged receiving about $270,000 from an account linked to Epstein while sorting the disbursement of common funds relating to the first of his two marriages, though the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor has insisted not “one penny” came directly from the infamous financier.
That is not much of a defence. Money is fungible.
Later, the article quotes from a letter written by Chomsky praising Epstein:
“The impact of Jeffrey’s limitless curiosity, extensive knowledge, penetrating insights and thoughtful appraisals is only heightened by his easy informality, without a trace of pretentiousness. He quickly became a highly valued friend and regular source of intellectual exchange and stimulation.”
In fairness, all that stuff about penetrating insights and thoughtful appraisals was probably true. Epstein would not have been able to rise as high – or sink as low – as he did without being able to read people. Epstein’s forte was befriending famous people, introducing them to each other, being at the centre of the networks of the global elite. My guess is that of the pleasures this position brought him, the status ranked higher in his mind than the money or the sex.
Added 23rd November: I am going to take the liberty of promoting a slightly edited version of something I wrote in the comments in reply to this excellent comment by Fraser Orr to the main post.
Fraser Orr writes, “FWIW, I find it a bit disturbing that mere association with this loathsome man (Epstein that is) that somehow convicts the associate”. I quite agree. Apart from the importance of the presumption of innocence in all circumstances, i.e. criminal or near-criminal wrongdoing needs to be proved, it should be obvious that a big part of the appeal of the sexual services that Epstein was offering was exclusivity. It wouldn’t have worked if everyone was invited. But I don’t think there’s any suggestion that Chomsky was involved in the sex stuff at all. My guess is what Epstein got out of associating with Chomsky was the feeling that he was an intellectual too, and one of the things Chomsky got out of associating with Epstein was a frisson of transgressiveness. He was above such bourgeois conventions as refusing to talk to someone who had been convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor. But it looks very much as if the other thing Noam Chomsky got from his association with Jeffrey Epstein was money. “Chomsky, 96, had also reportedly acknowledged receiving about $270,000 from an account linked to Epstein while sorting the disbursement of common funds relating to the first of his two marriages” This sounds evasive. What does the thing about “sorting the disbursement of common funds” even mean? It sounds like something to do with calculating how the money should be split between him and his first wife. I can see how working out how to divide joint earnings after a marriage ends might be complicated, but why did Noam Chomsky doing whatever he was doing regarding money from his first marriage require Jeffrey Epstein to send him more than quarter of a million dollars? For an intellectual to take money from a disreputable but very rich patron is not a crime, but all those who laud Chomsky as a fearless social justice advocate and opponent of abusive power might like to reconsider their tributes.
The Telegraph reports,
The United States has threatened to cut off weapons and intelligence to Ukraine unless it signs Donald Trump’s peace deal by next Thursday.
Sources said Ukraine was under greater pressure from Washington to bow to the US president’s demands than in previous negotiation efforts.
“They want to stop the war and want Ukraine to pay the price,” one of the sources told Reuters.
Volodymyr Zelensky said on Thursday he would use the plan as the basis for negotiations with Russia but Kyiv has warned its red lines must not be crossed in any peace deal.
The Ukrainian leader spoke to his European allies on Friday, including Sir Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron, who “welcomed efforts of the US” but called for a “just and lasting peace” for Ukraine.
Mr Trump’s 28-point peace plan is largely favourable to Russia, giving Moscow more Ukrainian territory than it currently possesses and readmission to the G7.
On Friday, the Kremlin maintained that it had not received Mr Trump’s peace plan but warned Mr Zelensky must negotiate “now” or risk losing more territory.
The part I have put in bold type looks alarming. On the other hand, the British press, most definitely including the Telegraph, continually tries to make Trump look as bad as possible. In the first few months after Putin invaded, Ukraine’s resolute defence against the odds saved the country from annihilation – but as the war drags on its position seems to be gradually weakening. What do you think? Is this the best deal Ukraine is likely to get?
“Parents ‘vindicated’ after police admit unlawful arrest over WhatsApp row”, the Guardian reports. The subheading is “Hertfordshire police agree to pay £20,000 to Rosalind Levine and Maxie Allen, who were held for 11 hours after complaining about daughter’s school”.
I posted about this couple’s experience last April: Boiling frogs in Salem and Hertfordshire.
One aspect of the story that the Free Speech Union’s Frederick Attenborough highlighted at the time was that Hertfordshire Police didn’t just put the frighteners on Rosalind Levine and Maxie Allen, they also threatened – in writing – their local county councillor, Michelle Vince, that if she continued to advocate on their behalf she too might find herself “liable to being recorded as a suspect in a harassment investigation”. And they told Michelle Vince to pass on that warning to the local MP, Sir Oliver Dowden.
As Sir Oliver said in the Times, “Police risk ‘curtailing democracy’ by stopping MPs doing their job”.
Today’s Guardian article continues,
Allen claimed he and Levine were not abusive and were never told which communications were criminal, saying it was “completely Kafkaesque”.
A Hertfordshire police spokesperson said: “Whilst there are no issues of misconduct involving any officer in relation to this matter, Hertfordshire Constabulary has accepted liability solely on the basis that the legal test around necessity of arrest was not met in this instance.
“Therefore Mr Haddow-Allen and Ms Levine were wrongfully arrested and detained in January 2025. It would be inappropriate to make further comment at this stage.”
You wish. Further comment is both appropriate and necessary. There bloody well are issues of misconduct involving at least one officer in relation to this matter: whichever officer tried to frighten off both a local councillor and an MP from representing their constituents.
“Hurricane Melissa a ‘real-time case study’ of colonialism’s legacies”, writes Natricia Duncan for the Guardian. The subheading is “Destruction in Jamaica shows why climate justice cannot be separated from reparatory justice, campaigners say”.
The article starts with a sympathetic couple of paragraphs about the history of Gurney’s Mount Baptist Church, a church whose roof was ripped off by the hurricane.
The names of past members are still etched into its walls and the “freedom stone”, built into its structure to commemorate the end of slavery on 1 August 1838, is still there.
As church and faith groups play a significant role in Jamaica’s recovery, the loss of the building and parts of the adjacent school are a huge blow to the community, Rev O’Neil Bowen told the Guardian.
I find that sad, and I hope this community gets some help to rebuild after the hurricane. Though I have a low opinion of the long-term efficacy of taxpayer-funded foreign aid, and think it is actively harmful when it encourages a dependency economy, if we must have it, let the money be spent on helping victims of natural disasters like this one. I think a lot of people feel the same way.
But may God preserve Rev. Bowen from some of the people who want to help him.
At the ongoing UN Cop30 climate change conference in Brazil, campaigners say that devastated regions such as Hanover as well as others across Jamaica, Cuba and Haiti, are stark examples of how African descendants are disproportionately affected by centuries of environmental degradation.
Speaking from Cop30, Jamaican economist Mariama Williams said historical injustices must be confronted and addressed.
“The research shows that wherever Afro descendants are located, they are most vulnerable to climate and environmental impact and have been suffering from historical environmental injustice and climate injustice,” she said. “Climate justice cannot be separated from reparatory justice. The same systems that enriched the north created today’s vulnerabilities.”
The Global Afrodescendant Climate Justice Collaborative, where Williams is a senior adviser, is among hundreds of human rights groups and environmentalists that urged Cop30 to put reparations on the agenda.
In their open letter they argue that “global warming began with the Industrial Revolutions that were made possible by the resources provided by imperialism, colonialism and enslavement, [and] that colonialism and enslavement skewed the global economy in favour of the material and financial interests in the global north”.
You know what will happen? The people from governmental, inter-governmental and so-called Third Sector aid organisations that victims of natural disasters in the Caribbean deal with most often talk like Mariama Williams and her white counterparts. They, the victims, will pick up the impression from the Climate Justice people that the way to get financial aid these days is to talk like this:
“We’re not begging these countries. This is a debt that is owed. And I think this needs to be made clear. And this is why there is very deep connection between calls for climate reparations and reparations for slavery, because they’re both connected through these longer histories, these colonial legacies,” he [Arley Gill, a member of the Caribbean Community (Caricom) Reparations Commission] said.
In 2020, two thirds of Britons supported cutting the foreign aid budget. I doubt the British people have warmed to it since then. But if giving taxpayer-funded aid to poor countries is unpopular now, wait till you see how unpopular it will be if it is packaged as punishing ordinary British people for a small fraction of their distant ancestors having owned slaves. I predict that even private donations will become more scarce the more often reparations are mentioned. Oh, and they’ll never get the reparations.
This tweet from “GnasherJew” includes a video clip from a lecture on “The Birth of Zionism” given by Dr Samar Maqusi for the group “UCL Students for Justice in Palestine” on 11th November 2025. Dr Marqusi is currently Research Associate at University College London’s Person-Environment-Activity Research Laboratory (PEARL). (“Her work looks into the politics of space-making inside the Palestine refugee camps. More recently, she has been investigating modes of sociality and vitality in refugee camps inside a burdened Lebanon. Previously, Samar worked with UNRWA (UN Agency for Palestine refugees) as an Architect/Physical Planner, focusing on programmes of shelter rehabilitation and camp improvement.”)
Update: It looks like I pressed “publish” too soon. Never mind, you can enjoy seeing this post made in real time. Watch the video clip. It shows an academic in University College, London (UCL) spreading the blood libel. For anyone new to the term, a blood libel is a specific sort of anti-Jewish propaganda in which Jews are said to have murdered Christians for ritual purposes, often including baking their blood into bread. The genre goes back to the thirteenth century cult of Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln. The spreading of such tales is usually the precursor to a pogrom, as it was in Lincoln in 1255.
Dr Samar Maqusi said this to her students the day before yesterday:
Now 40 years later, in about 1838, there was something called the “Damascus Affair”. Uh, what happened is, there is, um, a priest, a Christian priest called Thomas. He disappears, um, in Damascus during what is called the feast of Tabernacles. So, this is a Jewish feast, and the story goes – and, you know, again, these are things that you read again and again. As I said, do investigate, draw your own narrative. But the story is that during this feast they make this, um, special pancakes, or, um, bread. And part of the holy ceremony is that drops of blood from someone who’s not Jewish, which the term is “gentile”, has to be mixed in that bread. So, the story is that, um, a certain investigation was undergoing to try and find where Father Thomas is. He was found murdered and a group of, of Jews who lived in Syria said that, you know, admitted to kidnapping and murdering him to get the drops of blood for making, uh, the holy bread.
This one is known as “the Damascus Affair” or “the Damascus Blood Libel”. It’s famous enough to appear in lists of historical blood libels. I wasn’t expecting to see it related as fact in 2025 in one of the top ten universities in the world. Like every conspiracy theorist ever born, Dr Maqusi peppers her speech with literal and metaphorical “uptalk”, little get-out clauses such as “the story goes” and “draw your own narrative”, so that if challenged she can claim to be “just asking questions”. But she felt safe enough to speak as she did, and, with the delayed exception of whoever recorded her, her student audience did not challenge her.
As ever, I do not seek to use the law to silence Dr Maqusi. I want it made clear to all how common and accepted her views are among the pro-Palestinian movement, and among Palestinians. I do think that unless UCL takes action their Equality, Diversity and Inclusion policy will be revealed as an empty sham, but if that is the case I would rather know about it.
Update: Dan Souter points out in the comments that UCL has apologised and Dr Maqusi’s profile has been removed from the UCL website. The link is to an article by David Rose in Unherd. I commend the Provost’s decisive action to protect his university’s reputation, but I do find it disquieting that in just five years universities across the English-speaking world went from beating their breasts in penitence for the most minuscule and indirect manifestations of racism – here is UCL’s 2020 statement on Black Lives Matter and here is an account from its website of how it “denamed” buildings named after a couple of Victorian eugenicists because seeing the old names has “a profound impact on the sense of belonging that we want all of our staff and students to have” – to this.
The day before yesterday I wrote, “Remember the names of those public figures, especially journalists, who say that this was acceptable behaviour by the BBC because it was done to Trump. These people think lying is acceptable. Assume they are lying to you; assume they would lie about you.”
One example is Adam Boulton. He is the former political editor of Sky News, among many other prestigious roles, and currently presents on Times Radio. Regular readers may recall that in 2023 he told BBC Newsnight that GB News should be shut down in order to protect the UK’s “delicate and important broadcast ecology”. Boulton’s response to the crisis at the BBC was this tweet:
Adam Boulton
@adamboultonTABB
For the record No words were put into Trump’s mouth. The quotes were him saying what he said.
9:36 AM · Nov 9, 2025
(Hat tip to the science fiction author Neal Asher.)
People in the replies to Boulton’s tweet have a lot of fun snipping out parts of what he said in order to reverse its meaning. But it is not really that funny. Leading journalist Adam Boulton thinks deliberate, carefully engineered selective quotation is an acceptable journalistic practice. Leading journalist Adam Boulton thinks lying is acceptable. Assume Adam Boulton is lying to you; assume Adam Boulton would lie about you.
Another journalist whose own words demonstrate that he thinks it is fine to use selective quotation to lie to his readers is Mikey Smith, Deputy Political Editor of the Mirror. Back in the days when he was Michael Smith, Mikey worked for Sky News and the BBC. On November 9th, he tweeted this:
Mikey Smith
@mikeysmith
It’s not an assault on the BBC. It’s an assault on facts.
The edit was only remotely a problem if your position is that Trump played no part whatsoever in encouraging January 6th. Which he plainly and obviously did.
7:37 PM · Nov 9, 2025
Leading journalist Mikey Smith thinks deliberate, carefully engineered selective quotation is an acceptable journalistic practice. Leading journalist Mikey Smith thinks lying is acceptable. Assume Mikey Smith is lying to you; assume Mikey Smith would lie about you.
Still, perhaps I was a little harsh about journalists in general in my earlier post. Sure, there are plenty of outright liars in the media, and plenty of people who upvote their lies and beg to be lied to some more. But perhaps a larger group is made up of caring, intelligent people who you’d probably really like if you met socially, in the unlikely event that you were invited to one of their social gatherings.
People like Jane Martinson. She is a Guardian columnist, a professor of financial journalism at City St George’s and a member of the board of the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian Media Group. On November 9th she wrote this piece for the Guardian: “The BBC is facing a coordinated, politically motivated attack. With these resignations, it has given in”
Now the resignations of both Davie and the CEO of BBC News, Deborah Turness, have shown that baying for blood gets results.
The biggest shock is that this saga began just a week ago with the leak of a 19-page “devastating memo” from Michael Prescott, a former political journalist who spent three years as an external adviser to the broadcaster, published in the Telegraph. The dossier alleges BBC Panorama doctored a speech by Trump, making him appear to support the January 6 rioters, that its Arabic coverage privileged pro-Hamas views, and that a group of LGBTQ employees had excessive influence on coverage of sex and gender.
I admire in a technical sense the way that Professor Martinson uses the word “alleges”. The claims that the BBC’s Arabic coverage privileged pro-Hamas views and that a group of LGBTQ employees had excessive influence on coverage of sex and gender can be fairly called allegations. Even if one thinks these two allegations are probably true, as I do, whether the behaviour of groups of journalists over a period of years was fair or unfair is not a matter that can be assessed quickly at a distance. Two of the three items in Professor Hutchinson’s list of things that she says the dossier “alleges” truly are allegations, i.e. claims that remain to be proved. The first one is the cuckoo in the nest. Professor Martinson also categorises it as an “allegation” that Panorama misleadingly edited Trump’s speech. If she had wanted to, she could have verified the allegation as fact by watching a twenty-three second video. That particular clip was from news.com.au, but it is widely available. (I suppose we could enter a spiral of distrust and say that maybe that video was faked like the Panorama one, but that would involve admitting the Panorama one was faked, so this option is not available to Professor Martinson.)
Now, Prof. Martinson might complain that it is unfair to focus on that little evasion when later in the article she did go on to say,
None of this is to say that the BBC has not made mistakes. At the very least, the Panorama documentary appears to have included a bad and misleading edit of an hour-long Trump speech, which is unacceptable even if that speech was subsequently found to have encouraged insurrection.
But if she did so complain about relevant material being downplayed, I wouldn’t have to go to ChatGPT to find a smoothly written defence of the practice. Notice how even in the act of admitting that the Panorama edit was “bad and misleading”, she still puts in a little doubt that it actually happened. She writes, “the Panorama documentary appears to have included a bad and misleading edit“. “Appears to” – can we get BBC Verify onto that? It might be that Jane Hutchinson wrote “appears to” here and “alleges” earlier as part of a subtle attempt to cast doubt on politically inconvenient facts that she knew were true but would prefer her readers to doubt. However I think it more likely that it was a mere reflex; an involuntary flinching of the eyes and mind away from the thought that a situation could exist where Trump – Trump! – was the one being lied about and people like her were the liars, and, more embarrassing yet, that she and people like her might be the ones being lied to. And that this might have been going on for years, and she, a Professor of Financial Journalism, had not noticed.
Let us finish this discussion with a short prayer for Guardian journalists and those who love them:
“Protect me from knowing what I don’t need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don’t know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen.”
– Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
“BBC director general Tim Davie and News CEO Deborah Turness resign over Trump documentary edit”, reports the BBC about itself:
BBC director general Tim Davie and CEO of News Deborah Turness resign over Trump documentary edit
It comes after the Telegraph published details of a leaked internal BBC memo suggesting Panorama edited two parts of Trump’s speech together so he appeared to explicitly encourage the Capitol Hill riots of January 2021
In a statement, Davie says “there have been some mistakes made and as director general I have to take ultimate responsibility”
I used the tag “Deleted by the Woke Media” because fifty-four minutes of Trump’s speech on January 6th 2021 were deleted by the Woke BBC, and the trailing ends of the tape spliced together to make it appear as if he had said an inflammatory sentence he never said.
Remember the names of those public figures, especially journalists, who say that this was acceptable behaviour by the BBC because it was done to Trump. These people think lying is acceptable. Assume they are lying to you; assume they would lie about you.
Magatte Wade is an African anti-poverty activist. No, not like you’re thinking – she’s an actual anti-poverty activist. In fact her chosen term to describe what she does is “prosperity activist”.
In a tweet made yesterday, she wrote,
https://x.com/magattew/status/1986537994984058913
The best way to keep people poor:
Convince them their poverty is someone else’s fault and only the government can save them.
I think that is true.
The Telegraph has a story – with accompanying videos – that ought to finish several careers at the BBC: “Exclusive: BBC ‘doctored’ Trump speech, internal report reveals”.
What Trump actually said:
“We’re gonna walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re gonna walk down, we’re gonna walk down any one you want but I think right here, we’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and we’re gonna cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you’ll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength and you have to be strong…I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
And 54 minutes later:
“Most people would stand there at 9 o’clock in the evening and say I wanna thank you very much, and they go off to some other life but I said something’s wrong here, something’s really wrong, can’t have happened, and we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country any more.”
What the spliced-together BBC version made it look like Trump said:
“We’re gonna walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re gonna walk down, we’re gonna walk down any one you want but I think right here, we’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and we’re gonna cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you’ll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength and you have to be strong…I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
And immediately afterwards:
“Most people would stand there at 9 o’clock in the evening and say I wanna thank you very much, and they go off to some other life but I said something’s wrong here, something’s really wrong, can’t have happened, and we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country any more.”
In case your screen is not showing all the lines through most of the second version, the falsely edited BBC version made it look like Trump said,
“We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you and we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country anymore.”
It seems like only yesterday that I posted this in 2021 :“The background and motive of yesterday’s attacks were unclear”.
And here we are again. It has been hours since the mass stabbing on a train travelling from Doncaster to Kings Cross. There were many witnesses. Two men have been arrested. No other suspects are sought. I find it hard to believe that the background and motive of yesterday’s attacks really do remain unclear to the police, the government, or the press. But they certainly have not been made clear to the public.
The Home Secretary has urged the public to “avoid comment and speculation at this early stage”. There are times when this is good advice. This is not one of them. “Nature abhors a vacuum” is never more true when the vacuum is one of information about a crime that makes millions think, “That could be me”. Did you learn nothing from Southport? The only thing that will dissipate the hurricane of speculation is to replace it with facts. It is not as if your strategy of politically correct evasiveness is working. It hasn’t worked for years.
Update: one of the arrested men was innocent and has been released. The only suspect for this crime has now been named as Anthony Williams, aged 32. This development makes the slowness of the police to release any details worse, not better. Williams is black. Those who were inclined to believe that the authorities were trying to avoid saying that the two suspects were Muslim are not going to say, “Oh, how foolish I was” when it turns out the only suspect is black. Furthermore official tardiness meant that an innocent man was under a cloud for long after it should have been clear that he was innocent. What were they playing at?
“Victims petrify politicians”, writes “Bagehot” in the Economist. (Alternative link here.) “They are apex stakeholders. Normal rules for decisions—risk, cost, proportionality—are thrown away when they are involved. What if a headline suggests ministers snubbed victims? Write the cheque. Civil servants, always cautious, become cowards. Campaigners know this. The unedifying spectacle of a grieving parent wheeled in front of cameras to push a particular policy, whether limits on smartphones or ninja swords, has become a political trump card.”
“Has become”? One of my few criticisms of this admirably unaccommodating article is that it talks as if this development were new. That voters and hence governments cannot bear to disagree with a victim was already old news in the days when the cheques being written really were cheques. It was an established political pattern in 2001 when I wrote a piece for the Libertarian Alliance about the reaction to the gun massacre at Dunblane.
. . . nowadays we give the bereaved parents at Dunblane, the survivors of rail crashes, and similar groups both the license to say anything due to the distraught and the intellectual consideration due to experts. They can’t have both. Not because I’m too mean to give it to them, but because the two are logically incompatible. The press and public have handed power to those least able to exercise it well.
(Alternative link here.)
Bagehot continues:
Trade-offs are ignored when victims campaign. Martyn’s law, named after a victim of a suicide-bombing at a concert in Manchester in 2017, requires any venue that can hold more than 200 people to have an anti-terror plan, even if it is a village hall. It is likely to cost businesses about £170m ($225m) a year to comply and bring about £2m of benefits, mainly from lower crime. A careful balancing of interests is close to impossible if a victim’s mother is involved. “This would not have happened without your campaigning,” said Sir Keir at a meeting with Martyn’s mother, rightly.
The word “rightly” is not here a term of praise. “Martyn’s Law”, like nearly every law named after a victim, is a bad law that should never have been passed. But the blame for it should not fall on Martyn’s mother. God knows she never wanted to be labelled “Victim’s Mother” on the chyron. She never wanted to be in a position such that her opinions on measures to take against terrorism were of interest to anyone. She never sought to be a lawmaker; never claimed she would be any good at it. The man who should be blamed did.
|
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.
|
