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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It is revealing in the coverage of the conviction of two racists for expressing their views, that there is a near complete lack of any debate over the profound civil liberties issues involved. It is being flatly reported, but not debated.
The mainstream media are always telling us how ‘essential’ they are for ‘our democracy’. But I have yet to see anyone raise the point that just because the people stating their opinions are crackpots, maybe crackpots should also be allowed to say what they think? I was waiting for the papers to surprise me today…
But no. This is ‘ground breaking‘ we are told, and indeed it is, but that is as far as the reports go. Does the Guardian or Telegraph not have anything to say about the broader implications?
State commissars like Adil Khan in Humberside, who is in charge of making us diverse but cohesive (or face prison if we demur) tells us:
“This case is groundbreaking. The fact is now that we’ve been able to demonstrate that you’ve got nowhere to hide; people have been hiding on [sic] the fact that this server was in the US. Inciting racial hatred is a crime and one which seems to occur too regularly. This kind of material will not be tolerated as this lengthy investigation shows.”
Which is actually quite a misleading statement. The state only regards people stating their extreme opinions as “incitement” if they belong to ritually abominated groups like white racists, whose extreme views must be punished because there is no political cost to doing so. For groups who actually throw bricks when the cops come calling, well, stating their extreme views is treated rather differently.
This is hardly new of course. Incite violence with words, but be unlikely to actually do anything, well you might well go to jail… actually kill people over many years, ah, that eventually gets you invited to help govern. No? I have two words for you: Sinn Fein.
Last time I called Britain a police state, I was dismissed as overheated because, after all, I can run this blog and state my contrary opinions, so this is hardly a police state.
Yet were Simon Sheppard and Stephen Whittle not just jailed for running a website on a US server (just as Samizdata is on a US server)? If you cast your eyes back through our archives, you will find we have on many occasions called for this or that group to have fairly violent things done to them (Ba’athists for example… and certain Wahhabi folk on occasion too… and certain Serbian nationalists)… and I suspect trawling through the archives of the Daily Telegraph would turn up articles ‘inciting’ not just ‘violence’ but calling for full blown wars.
Well it is now clear that we can say what we think, not by right as ‘freeborn Englishmen’ (hah!) but rather at the sufferance of the likes of Adil Khan and the whole apparatus of thought control that people like him represent. They do not feel the urge to come after us because we are not unpopular enough, although I doubt they like folks like us suggesting they prose a vastly greater threat to liberty and, gasp, “social cohesion” than a couple comically wacko racists.
Have you seen this being hotly debated in the media? Even a little? Pah. So much for the fearless and ‘essential’ media guardians of our liberal western order.
The sooner the old media are driven out of business by the internet, the better… ten years tops… except they will of course just rent seek tax money to keep themselves alive (or more accurately undead as no one will actually read them/watch them any more) due to their ‘essential role’ and the ‘public interest’ of having newspapers and TV channels no one really needs and do who not actually do anything essential or even particularly useful.
Two men have been convicted of thought crimes by the state for daring to express what they think. I very much doubt the Human Right Industry will rally to the defence of Simon Sheppard and Stephen Whittle because the two men in question are a couple deeply unappealing white racist scumbags.
Had they merely been scumbag imams preaching in a mosque rather than scumbag white males handing out leaflets and publishing a website, I wonder if the ‘head of diversity and community cohesion’ in Humberside would be crowing about the latest demonstration of the British police state’s ability to tell people what they can and cannot say? Just askin’.
… Aussie style, from ‘GetUp!’.
It is a pity that ‘GetUp!’ are a profoundly statist bunch who just love state coercion just as long as it is democratically popular and ‘progressive’… but one has to make short term tactical alliances where one finds them (such as on the issue of censorship). The enemy of my enemy is my friend, at least for a (very short) while.
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.
There is a certain grim satisfaction in reading this story, on how one UK government minister – seen as a potential future Labour leader – has announced, without telling Gordon Brown, that the case for compulsory ID cards has been scrapped.
Of course, the real issue remains that even without compulsory ID cards, we have a state database on every person in this country; and the aggregation of data about us gets more intensive, and is unlikely to be reversed regardless of the outcome of the next election. Too much money has been spent, too many corporate interests have been bought, for that to stop.
…says the person calling himself the Right Honourable Alan Johnson MP.
Amusing comments.
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.
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
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.
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* Well, last week, actually.
Whatever else he can be called, I do not think that Mr Obama can be called a liberal. I was having a good chat with fellow blogger Paul Marks last night and he made this point. And as if by coincidence, via Instapundit, comes this story:
“The US Department of Homeland Security is set to kickstart a controversial new pilot to scan the fingerprints of travellers departing the United States. From June, US Customs and Border Patrol will take a fingerprint scan of travellers exiting the United States from Detroit, while the US Transport Security Administration will take fingerprint scans of international travellers exiting the United States from Atlanta. The controversial plan to scan outgoing passengers — including US citizens — was allegedly hatched under the Bush Administration. An official has said it will be used in part to crack down on the US population of illegal immigrants.”
Brilliant idea (sarcasm alert). How will fingerprinting people make illegal immigration more difficult? Surely, if supposedly unwanted folk are leaving a country, they are doing that country a favour, so why make it more irksome for them to move away by fingerprinting them or by insisting on other evidence, details or whatnot? I guess greater minds than mine have an answer.
As Thaddus Tremayne noted on this blog not so long ago, our own marvellously-run administration is pondering the idea of getting all travellers from the UK to divulge their travel and accomodation plans, reasons for trips, etc. (So I guess eloping couples will have a lot of explaining to do). As he also noted, the day may not be far off when exit visas, of the sort that used to be applied in the Communist East, make a comeback. So if you want to get the hell out of the UK before it crashes into bankruptcy, rising inflation and tax, then it is probably smart to do so in the next few years, regardless of the outcome of the next General Election. Paranoid? Well, who would have thought that the very notion of detailed information requests from travellers would have been mooted a few years ago. The ratchet effect keeps going.
And by the way, for those who sneered at Dale Amon’s enthusiasm for spacefaring the other day, it is stories like this that explain why “exit” strategies such as spacefaring and sea-steading are gaining some interest from libertarians. It may sound utopian, but the general idea of “getting out” has never been more popular. And that is why I keep banging on about the attempted assaults on so-called tax havens. They are an attack on the very notion that places of refuge from governments should exist, for rich or poor alike.
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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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