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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.
Articles like this help even an intolerant short tempered swine like me forgive the Ludwig von Mises Institute for some of its people’s a priori history and America-and-Britain-are-always-wrong view of war.
I put this up as a Samizdata quote of the day, before realising that there already was one. Sorry. But, it’s good and deserves plentiful copying and pasting, so here is that posting rehashed, with the quote in question as its starting point:
So, yet again, the courts are faced with a sample of the deeply confusing provisions of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, and the satellite Statutory Instruments to which it is giving stuttering birth. The most inviting course for this Court to follow, would be for its members, having shaken their heads in despair to hold up their hands and say: “the Holy Grail of rational interpretation is impossible to find”. But it is not for us to desert our judicial duty, however lamentably others have legislated. But, we find little comfort or assistance in the historic canons of construction for determining the will of Parliament which were fashioned in a more leisurely age and at a time when elegance and clarity of thought and language were to be found in legislation as a matter of course rather than exception.
That is the Court of Appeal struggling to make sense of the Criminal Justice Act 2003. Found here by him (who has recently resolved to blog approximately every day and whom I recommend) via a comment on this, which is about, among other foolishnesses, the recent fashion among Them for stopping us taking photos of Them.
My dad was a Big Cheese lawyer, and I can remember him telling me stuff like this several decades ago. I vaguely recall him saying that until about nineteen sixty something or thenabouts, there was this bloke who lived in a den in Whitehall and who spent his time rewriting laws so that (a) they didn’t contradict themselves, and (b) they didn’t contradict each other, but (c) so far as he could contrive it, they managed to maintain the original will of the legislators, insofar as he could divine it. If he could not divine it, he made it up, as intelligently as he could. But then, catastrophe. He retired. Ever since then, the laws have got more and more incoherent and incomprehensible. And of course now, you would need about a hundred of such non-existent paragons of legal non-incontinence just to keep up.
As Rob, the above mentioned blogger quotes another commenter saying:
We are told that ‘ignorance of the law is no excuse’ but how can it not be an excuse when even the courts are unsure of what the law is?
In practice, I think I notice that, recently (i.e. during the time since that old bloke my dad talked about retired), They have evolved a relatively sensible way of enforcing Their laws (senseless though the laws themselves frequently are), which is based on distinguishing between real laws and arbitrary laws. The real ones, against things like murder, assault, robbery and so on, still get you arrested at once, provided They catch you at it. But the vast mountain range of arbitrary laws and rules and regulations, often in the form of policy directives from On High about what various Acts of Parliament actually mean (given that as originally written they are quite often gibberish) according to On High, are enforced by you first being given a warning. You may not park on that purple line. You must have a permit to hand out leaflets here. You can’t wear that hat or that suntan lotion or eat that sticky bun or drink that drink in that sized glass or call that an artichoke. You are obliged to fill in this form. You must send it to us (i.e. Them) within one month. Etcetera, etcetera, et something angry cetera. Which means that, in practice, ignorance of the law has become the obviously reasonable defence that it obviously now is, with regard to almost all recently concocted laws. If They were to insist otherwise, They would get repeatedly involved in huge fights with people who don’t want to break the law, but who don’t know what it is. I.e. with everybody.
I now live my life certain that I am constantly breaking laws of this or that recently invented sort, and as far as I am concerned it is up to Them to tell me about which laws actually matter to Them. I will then, if I think that Their particular commands or demands make some sense, or if They are sufficiently menacing about them, obey them. Or, I will carry on breaking whatever idiot law it is or that They have just made up without troubling Parliament with the petty details, but a bit more carefully. I still take photos of policemen, for instance. I am just a bit more careful about letting them know I’m doing it, and am careful while doing it not to Look At Them In A Funny Way.
Decade after decade, to mention another example, I have failed to register to vote. Occasionally I read somewhere or see something telling me that this is illegal. Is it? I don’t know and I don’t care. Nobody menacing actually tells me that I must register and threatens me with actual trouble if I don’t. So from where I stand, the mere law of the matter can go jump into the Serpentine.
If They want me to be more respectful of “the law” (which is how They typically now describe Their laws), They should reduce the number of – and reduce the incoherence and arbitrariness of – Their laws, to the point where the laws that remain mostly make sense.
One of my hobbies in recent years has been photoing tourists in London as they indulge in photography. And, given the harassment I am starting to get from uniformed persons as I wander about London snapping whatever I feel like snapping, I have for quite a while now been wondering how long it would be before I ran into a news story about the police harassing foreign tourists for taking photos and hence undermining London’s reputation as a nice place to visit.
The wait is over:
In a telephone interview from his home in Vienna, Matka said: “I’ve never had these experiences anywhere, never in the world, not even in Communist countries.”
He described his horror as he and his 15-year-old son were forced to delete all transport-related pictures on their cameras, including images of Vauxhall underground station.
“Google Street View is allowed to show any details of our cities on the world wide web,” he said. “But a father and his son are not allowed to take pictures of famous London landmarks.”
He said he would not return to London again after the incident, …
You know how really shitty governments don’t care what their own citizens say about them, but can sometimes be slightly shamed by what the foreigners say? Well, I tried googling “Klaus Matka”, and got to a number of foreign versions of the same story, so this harassment is already being somewhat noticed elsewhere. The forbidding of photos of London’s famed double decker buses (“bus rossi a due piani”) is being particularly talked about. I hope this story goes right round the world, carrying with it the message of just what ghastly people now rule us.
I wonder what London Mayor Boris Johnson thinks about this.
Mr Obama’s administration has released documents about details of “harsh interrogation techniques” that were used, or considered acceptable to be used, to deal with suspected terrorists. What is interesting is that Mr Obama does not intend to prosecute those responsible. I guess the difficulty here is that Mr Obama does not want to be drawn into moves to prosecute and go after senior officials in the previous Bush administration. But if there are to be no legal consequences – assuming that the use of such powers is clearly illegal as well as wicked – then it is hard to see what can be gained by all this non-action by Mr Obama. If there is insufficient evidence to launch a prosecution of those who sanctioned its use, then they are entitled to have that fact known, since a stain will attach to their name otherwise. On the other hand, if there was authorisation of torture, then the fact of there being no prosecutions will send out a message that such behaviour will not be punished and can happen again. Is that what “hope and change” meant?
(Update: or maybe Mr Obama and some of his supporters fear that punishment of torturers could be used against Democrats in the future if officials in Democrat-led administrations ever sanction such techniques, or are suspected of so doing. Mr Obama and his party are not consistent civil libertarians.)
Torture, and its use, is one of those “canary in the mineshaft” issues for me; it shows a government has no respect for law. Any attempts to try and domesticate it and limit it under strict guidelines are likely to fail. As we are finding here at home in the UK, if you give governments powers, then they will use them, sooner or later, against innocent people.
As a side-note, I would add that while some of the venom directed at the Bush administration was partisan grandstanding, there is no doubt that part of it was driven by a real worry about where the US and other Western governments were headed. It is not remotely comforting that Mr Obama has taken the course he has. We cannot be confident that torture is off-limits under his administration, and nor should we be. It is not as if he has, for instance, abolished indefinite detention of terror suspects, despite the much-touted plan to shut down Gitmo.
Some earlier thoughts by me on this issue.
A comment on this posting made me think that our US/non-UK readers value this blog’s coverage of the whole business of the scandals now hammering the UK government on a daily basis. As Iain Dale, the political blogger, said the other day, we are entering a period not unlike the fag-end of Richard Nixon’s time in power, with Gordon Brown playing the Nixon role, and his various acolytes, toadies and henchmen in the various roles of shit-stirrers and frighteners.
Another day, another twist. A few months ago, a Conservative MP, Damian Green, was arrested by anti-terrorism officers after he had received material, concerning illegal immigration, that was leaked to him by a civil servant. Some of the material claims that illegal immigrants have managed to get jobs that bring them close to the very heart of government. Whatever you think about immigration – I am a defender of free migration BTW – this is a legitimate issue for a politician to make a fuss over.
Yesterday, a committee of MPs concluded that the use of such anti-terrorism powers was grossly excessive. You don’t say. Of course, not all aspects of Mr Green’s behaviour, or indeed that of the civil servant, are above reproach. But given that journalists, MPs and other potential “whistle-blowers” on public problems cannot do their job unless leaks occur, it does seem rather rich for a Labour-led government to operate in this way. But they just love their anti-terrorism powers, do they not? Just ask the government of Iceland.
I must admit that in recent days I have tried to post stories that take one out of the Westminster Village, not simply because I wonder whether this is a bore, but because reading constantly about the doings of Gordon Brown and his circle makes me want to take a shower to feel clean and human again.
Update: Damian Green will not be prosecuted. It should never have come to this. The position of the Speaker of the House of Commons, a product of the Labour thugocracy from Scotland, is untenable.
Further thoughts on the vileness of the government from Fraser Nelson in The Spectator, which also has a picture of Guido Fawkes on the front cover. Question to Paul Staines: when do we get the movie?
Is this just a bad video at Fox News or do any of you have problems with it as well? About 4 or 5 seconds into it after the commercial it freezes on me. I have been seeing this fairly often lately and usually on things I most want to see!
It looks like it might be interesting if I could only watch it here in the UK.
It is has surprised me that David Cameron’s Conservative Party, even though it has been pretty hopeless at resisting or promising to overturn whole assaults on UK civil liberties, has not embraced the idea of a mass repeal of such odious laws more enthusiastically. A commenter called KevinB has raised this point just now.
Consider the benefits: it would appeal to liberal-leaning folk who might otherwise not give the Tories a second glance and weaken the challenge from the LibDems; it would go down well with younger people normally less inclined to vote; it would be the right thing to do anyway. So why do they not make a manifesto commitment saying that in the first session of the next Parliament, a Great Repeal Act will be enacted that sweeps away hundreds of encroachments on UK civil liberties, such as the Civil Contingencies Act and the National ID database?
Of course, some of this might require the government to pull out of certain EU laws, but remember that the vast bulk of the laws imposed by New Labour have been domestically generated and cannot be blamed on the EU, important though that dimension is.
Now at this blog we are not exactly very nice to the Tories, to say the least. But it strikes me that a Great Repeal Act, or Restoration of Liberties Act, would be a nice, catchy idea that even the most authortarian cynic in the Tory ranks might feel would be worthwhile.
Following from Philip Chaston’s post immediately below, is the point that needs to be repeated as to how bad it is that the authorities are now trying – in vain, hopefully – to ban people from photographing the police. Had such photographing been prevented, then this incident, which threatens to engulf the police in further turmoil, would not have been recorded.
I cannot believe I am now writing stuff like this. This is Britain, right?
Let it not be said that the politicians gathering to celebrate an orgy (er, steady on, Ed) of Keynesian delinqency and transnational socialism are letting this current financial crisis go to waste. The G20 countries have agreed to a crackdown on those pestilential things, tax havens. I have defended them before and will do so again. What we are seeing is a determined effort to create a global tax cartel. Cartels, unless backed by brute force, tend to break down eventually. The G20 are making lots of blood-curdling threats about sanctions and so forth. What is Germany or Italy going to do – invade Switzerland? Good luck with that, gentlemen.
At the root of the hatred of tax havens is a hatred of freedom, pure and simple. If you believe a democratically elected government, say, can seize the wealth of a portion of its citizens, then you will believe that that minority can be more or less robbed, held hostage and prevented from going abroad. Socialists such as Richard Murphy believe that if 51 per cent of my fellow citizens want to help themselves to the contents of my bank account, then I am being “undemocratic” and a bad citizen if I choose to park my cash in the Caymans or wherever. Well, why not go the whole distance and require anyone who has an offshore bank account either to close it or be forced to get an exit visa if they wish to do so? We may be already reaching that point. If, on the other hand, you believe people are entitled to their property regardless of what their fellow electors think, then tax havens – “haven” is a place of safety, remember- are an important escape route and bulwark against looters. When politicians want to shut down places of safety in a time of crisis, it is well to be cynical about the motives of those involved. Especially if they happen to be such characters as Gordon Brown or Barack Obama.
The sheer cynicsm of it all is breathtaking. Whatever the cause of the current financial crisis, I think it is pretty fair to say that it did not originate in tax havens. Switzerland, in fact, has been hammered by the crisis; its biggest wealth manager, UBS, has lost an estimated $49 billion in write-downs connected to the US sub-prime disaster. The $50 billion Ponzi scheme fraud of Bernard Madoff happened onshore, right under the noses of the SEC, rather than in some far-flung island in the South Pacific. The huge losses incurred by banks have been nothing whatever to do with so-called “tax leakage”. And in the US, there is already a tax haven, known as the state of Delaware. And the UK has been – well until recently – a tax haven on certain definitions. Ditto places such as Ireland or even Belgium.
Rant over. Thanks for your patience.
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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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