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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Mr Clarke: Concerns about police powers have been widely expressed, particularly in regard to stop and search. I want to make it clear that the Bill, and the introduction of identity cards, will make no difference to the general powers of the police to stop people for no reason and demand proof of identity. The Bill will make no difference to the powers that exist under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984. In fact, quicker, reliable access to confirmed identification would help to reduce the time a suspected person might spend in police custody. The effect of that would be to reduce the number of people wrongly held in police custody while their identity was being checked, which would be of benefit to the individual and to the police.
I also want to confirm that there is no requirement to carry an identity card at all times, as there have been many questions about that.
– Hansard, 28 June 2005
NEW anti-terrorism laws are to be pushed through before Tony Blair leaves office giving “wartime” powers to the police to stop and question people.
John Reid, the home secretary, who is also quitting next month, intends to extend Northern Ireland’s draconian police powers to interrogate individuals about who they are, where they have been and where they are going.
Under the new laws, police will not need to suspect that a crime has taken place and can use the power to gain information about “matters relevant” to terror investigations.
If suspects fail to stop or refuse to answer questions, they could be charged with a criminal offence and fined up to £5,000. Police already have the power to stop and search people but they have no right to ask for their identity and movements.
– The Sunday Times, 27 May 2007
BBC online’s heading on the latter matter was “Stop and quiz powers considered” which seems much less frightening.
“Good evening, Sir. What was the subject of the Pet Shop Boys’ 2006 single Integral?”
The Kaffirs believed that all kinds of misfortunes came upon them through wizards and witches, and every tribe had a “witch-finder,” whose duty it was to “smell out” these witches. When any misfortune came upon them, the tribe was called together. Then the witch doctor, fearfully painted and adorned with all kinds of terrible savage grandeur, rushed about among them. Trembling and anxious, the people stood waiting, each man knowing that his life was unsafe, until the witch doctor, pointing to one among them, accused him of being the cause of all the trouble. Then the poor wretch, who had no more to do with it than you or I, was seized, tortured, and killed without more ado.
– H.E. Marshall in Our Empire Story (1908)
Procedural aspects of trials for political offences (such as espionage, subversion, terrorist acts, and treason) leave even more to be desired. The court may try the case in camera, may refuse to call witnesses for the accused, may receive the testimony of witnesses not present in court, may use unpublished evidence in reaching its verdict, and may cut off argument for the accused or deny him counsel entirely. Explicit provision is made for trial without the participation of the accused” and with no right of appeal. Procedural norms in such cases are observed only in “demonstration trials” where the fate of the accused is decided beforehand and the trial is held exclusively for propaganda purposes.
– Robert M Weiss reviewing Soviet Millitary Law and Administration by HM Berner & M Kerner (1957)
So the fault is not with our services or, in this instance, with the Home Office. We have chosen as a society to put the civil liberties of the suspect, even if a foreign national, first.
I happen to believe this is misguided and wrong. If a foreign national comes here, and may be at risk in his own country, we should treat him well. But if he then abuses our hospitality and threatens us, I feel he should take his chance back in his own home country.
As for British nationals who pose a threat to us, we need to be able to monitor them carefully and limit their activities. It is true that the police and security services can engage in surveillance in any event. But this is incredibly time-consuming and expensive, and even with the huge investment we have made since 2001, they simply cannot do it for all suspects. Over the past five or six years, we have decided as a country that except in the most limited of ways, the threat to our public safety does not justify changing radically the legal basis on which we confront this extremism.
Their right to traditional civil liberties comes first. I believe this is a dangerous misjudgement. This extremism, operating the world over, is not like anything we have faced before. It needs to be confronted with every means at our disposal. Tougher laws in themselves help, but just as crucial is the signal they send out: that Britain is an inhospitable place to practise this extremism.
– Tony Blair, in The Sunday Times (2007)
The Prime Minister read jurisprudence at the University of Oxford. What do you mean, you can
not tell?
A told-you-so moment. Us Samizdatistas have been exercised by the new charities law in Britain for a little while. See me here, and Perry here, for example.
Tush, said critics, there is no clear intention:
No where does it suggest that the state wishes to ‘harness’ charities. Indeed, a central theme of the report is concern that charities accepting money from the state start to lose independence. This is, IMO, as much the fault of the charity as the state.
– commentator, J on “Stand and Deliver” {pdf}
And some people who should know better welcomed it, and wanted more. For example in this spectacularly badly timed article in the Independent on Friday, Baroness Helena Kennedy QC – who has a good record of skepticism of the state in her own field of criminal law – writes:
More recently this has led the newly formed Office of the Third Sector to actively promote an enhanced role for the voluntary sector, not just in service provision, but as the “voice” of a disenfranchised citizenry that needs to be empowered to talk directly to Government. But to flourish in this role we need a legislative framework and guidance that recognises the unique role that the sector is playing in articulating people’s views and promoting political debate.
“Guidance” forsooth!
Guidance is the poisoned fang of the state. And just today some teeth are bared in a political cause. Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, and a Labour deputy-leadership candidate, has given the Daily Telegraph an interview.
Mr Johnson said he wants private schools to take pupils on secondment from local state schools, open their science labs to comprehensives and offer many more bursaries to poor families.
“Private schools need to do more to earn their charitable status,” he says. “It’s not enough just to lend their playing fields, it’s about the science lab, it’s about teachers – there are excellent Maths teachers in private schools. Let them give a bit of their expertise to the state sector.”
An interesting operational definition of “give”. Was not the Government celebrating the abolition of the slave trade only a little earlier this year? Apparently the Department for Education and Skills is going to make suggestions, to the supposedly independent Charity Commission* that they impose such things on schools that are charities. If the commission, so decides, then it is not as if the schools have the option of foregoing the tax breaks. Their assets were effectively nationalised under the ultimate control of the commission in 2006.* And the board of the commission? Well it is appointed by ministers and members are deemed civil servants. Of the nine commissioners and non-executive directors – The Nine? – two have had careers in organisations beyond the shadow of the state. I wonder whether how amenable they will be to departmental suggestion?
Meanwhile anyone holding a position in any of Mr Johnson’s rivals, for the deputy leadership of a party that hates private education more than it loves tax-and-spend, may wish to sell.
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* It is little noticed that the 2006 Charities Act as well as changing the functions of the Charity Commissioners, actually abolished them, transferring the role to an entirely new para-statal body, the Charity Commission, which just happens to have a very similar name, and whose officers are referred to by the same name as the former commissioners.
OK, I am biassed. NO2ID gets a credit on this film. But having been to a contributors’ screening last night, I think you could do worse than drag any friends or relations who are complacent about Britain being ‘a free country’ along to Taking Liberties (since 1997) when it opens on June 8th. If you have a black sense of humour, you will laugh.
Not much in the film will come as news to Samizdata readers, and to get anything like a coherent story out of so much material it has had to simplify, rather. But I was very pleasantly surprised that in doing so it avoids falling into the usual human-rightist traps of equating liberty with leftism. Teeters on the edge occasionally, perhaps. The sequence on Guantanamo is a little too long, and I think unbalances the section on the Blair regime’s complicity in torture. But there are few tendentious statements, and in most ways it is a conservative polemic. If there are heroes on screen they are mild-mannered middle-class pacifists. The off-screen heroes are Winston Churchill and the common law courts.
The points are made gently and methodically, ticking off, one by one, the broad civil liberties supposedly assured by the Human Rights Act, but actually removed by the same government that made such a fanfare of its respect for “our way of life”. Boiling the story down from a vast mass of information they could have included makes it very solidly founded. This is polemic, but the antithesis of Michael-Moore-style, concocted illustration of an artificial thesis. I spotted only very few factual errors, and I am an awful nitpicking wonk, as you all know.
What will stay with me, however, is what I had not seen before. Footage of lots of officious political policing and show of official force. Those who think we are softies whining about nothing will no doubt say that actually this just illustrates we are in no danger, Britain is still a healthy democracy (whatever that means). But is it really better to be smothered with a feather pillow than publicly garotted?
PS – Like a lot of small films this starts out in a few screens and hopes for a rolling release, so it is desperately sensitive to opening receipts. If you do go to see it when it opens, you increase the chance that others will get a chance do so too.
I am traveling via AMTRAK to Boston today [Actually yesterday: I did not get a network connection until this morning]. Given the hassles of airline travel I have grown to prefer it. Additionally there is the accessibility of an AC outlet for my laptop and enough space in front of me to actually use it.
When I picked up my ticket though, I noticed a display running through a whole long list of new rules and regulations. It seems the powers that be are not satisfied with wrecking the flight travel experience: they want to ruin train travel as well.
The people who think up these rules are really more in tune with the needs of a totalitarian regime than a society of sovereign individuals. One has to ask what problem are they really solving? As I had a forty five minutes wait whilst waiting for my gate announcement to go up on the schedule board., I did some mental arithmetic
What if we took train security back to what it was when America was still a free country, perhaps back in the fifties before the do-gooders gained any real power? What would be the likely result?
Assume we get a few Jihadi’s loose in the US and they manage to blow up three trains a year. Given the numbers from the UK and other places in Europe, these sorts of things usually kill 100 or fewer people. That translates to a 300 in 300,000,000 chance per US citizen per year: a 1 in a million chance. Given modern medicine and a bit of rounding up to 100 years lifespan, that would be 1 in ten thousand per person total or .01% chance of that being the mode of your death, rather than cancer or heart disease.
One has to ask whether this kind of risk level is worth what we are giving up for it. What do we get in return? We get treated like criminals, assumed guilty, herded through transport facilities like cattle into pens, with our civil liberties violated right and left. I would much rather they took all the security folk from here and shipped them over *THERE*.
As a thought experiment, imagine an insanely aggressive strain of Africanized bees shows up in your town. How will you deal with it? Will you run all over the town killing bees in ones and two’s? Will you try to make every place in town bee-proof and pass regulations requiring people seal their homes and businesses?
I know what I would do. I would track down the nest and wipe them out at source.
I would like to suggest that Jonathan’s “Missing the point over grammar schools” below, itself misses the point. I am as in favour of grammar schools as anyone. But I do not think Cameron’s decision is any more than another piece of political pragmatism (read my comment on Jonathan’s piece for the rationale.)
I agree the new Tory policy does nothing significant for education. But I suspect Jonathan’s policy prescription – compromise vis-a-vis properly voluntary schooling it may be, is doomed. Introducing vouchers now would be worthless and the Tories are sensible, therefore, not to tie themselves to that. Not least they would risk discrediting vouchers: vouchers could be a move in the right direction, but not yet.
This is why. Here is a sensible lefty, Jenni Russell, reporting in the Guardian’s bloggish Comment is Free:
[A] father with an 18 year-old daughter at one of London’s famous public schools is shocked by her fear of anything beyond her narrow syllabus. She pleads with him not to tell her anything he knows about history or classics or literature, because she understands by now that knowing anything beyond the points on the examiners’ mark schemes will jeopardise her chances of getting top grades. She has learned that education is not about discovery, but the dutiful repetition of precisely what you have been told.
However good the school, however motivated the pupil, there is no choice to be had. There is a chemin-de-fer, directions predetermined, signals to be passed at the prescribed speed. No entry to university at 16, Mr Brown. No ignoring unutterably tedious and repetitious schoolwork and passing the exams at the end on the basis of your own reading. Step off the lockstep elevator once, and you are out for ever. (Mr Fry, the University regrets that we require a clean Criminal Records Bureau certificate.)
All Britain’s education is under the supervision of a suffocating bureaucracy, that serves itself and its conception of proper development. There is small choice in rotten apples; the sadly pocked sharecrop goes to uniform damp barrells.
Who is to blame? The conservative defenders of both grammar schools and ‘family values’, that is who; and the utilitarian industrialists who now complain workers can’t read or count. It was they who sought to save the population from indoctrination by radical Local Education Authorities, so delivered the entire population into the hands of pseudo-progressive educationalists by creating the National Curriculum; they who worried that universities could not be trusted to set sufficiently ‘practical’ exams, and did the same with syllabuses.
My modest proposal for English education:
Scrap the National Curriculum. Do not replace it. Scrap league tables and DoE “Key stage” testing. Do not replace them. Scrap rules on school admissions and allow schools to exclude or expel pupils as they choose. Scrap the QCA. Do not replace it. Scrap the Teacher Registration Regulations. Do not replace them. Scrap the office of the Access Regulator. Do not replace him. Wait five years, continuing to run and fund schools otherwise the same, which means a mix of Local Authority, central government, voluntary aided, and private schools. Only then, when people have got used to making their own decisions again, consider vouchers.
They are at it again. Medical experts are advising the state that they should mass medicate the population of Britain against a non-infectious disorder.
Perhaps a ‘totalitarianism’ of experts might be more accurate as Food Standards Agency seem to think it is the super-owner of the bodies of everyone in the country.
The problem is, they will outlaw almost everything while enforcing very little. Imprisonment by stealth. People will not know they are encircled until it is too late – like putting in all these very deep, robust fence-posts with no fence panels. All seems open. One day you will wake up and the panels are in, you are trapped and they can decide what law they wish to impose to nail whomsoever they desire.
– Regular commenter TimC in this thread.
Sean Gabb has written a fine piece called Defending the right to deny the Holocaust, stating why censorship undermines our ability to decide what is and is not true.
With regard to the holocaust, I have – broadly speaking – two options. I can believe that it did happen roughly as claimed. Or I can believe that it is a gigantic conspiracy of lies maintained since the 1940s in the face of all evidence. Since debate remains free in the English-speaking world, it should be obvious what I am to believe. I believe in the central fact of the holocaust. On the secondary issues mentioned above, where my authorities do not agree, I suspend judgement.
Take away the freedom to argue with or against these authorities, though, and my assurance that they are right must be weakened.
Read the whole thing.
As I prepare my itinerary for my next long chain of consultancy visits, my best customer (the one I do webcast editing for) has just purchased my ticket for the transatlantic leg. Now I suspect someone at Continental Airlines has a bit of a Libertarian or small government or at the very least a ‘do not blame us’ bent because the statement actually breaks out how each ‘involved government’ is stealing my money:
Equivalent Airfare:……………………….565.00
U.K. Air Passenger Duty: ……………….79.60
U.K . Passenger Service Charge:……..25.90
U.S. Customs User Fee:…………………..5.50
U.S. Immigration User Fee:………………7.00
U.S. APHIS User Fee:………………………5.00
U.S. Passenger Facility Charge:…………4.50
U.S. Federal Transportation Tax:……..30.20
U.S. Security Service Fee: ……………….2.50
Per Person Total: ……………………….725.20
I must admit it is much worse than I had thought. At times like these I remember the words of a southern gent I once worked with on a project at CSC: “Back where I come from, servicing was what a bull did to a cow.”
After reading the above, I am feeling very well ‘serviced’ by the UK and US governments.
Yesterday morning I caught myself committing two crimes simultaneously in a public place.
I emerged from Westminster underground station beside the Houses of Parliament wearing a NO2ID button, which almost certainly constituted an unauthorised demonstration contrary to the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2006. And, before proceeding southwards across the bridge to continue the same criminal conduct in Southwark and Lambeth on the way to where I was going, I took a leaflet from a young woman advertising a hairdresser, smiling and thanking her. If that is not ‘counselling and procuring an offence’ against the Environmental Protection Act 1990 (as amended by the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act 2005), given that Westminster City Council has taken the powers granted by the new Schedule 3A to prohibit the distribution of free literature, then I do not know what is.
I am minded to get a haircut. Presumably that would make my payment the proceeds of crime, and the hairdressing business subject to sequestration under the 2002 Act.
If things like this can happen on a sunny spring day under the eyes of the armed police and surveillance cameras protecting our diligent legislators, then no wonder the government is ‘cracking down on crime’ for the several-dozenth time in its Serious Crime Bill. If people can communicate and have social intercourse just as they like , without a license or the fear of prosecution, then there could be chaos.
The PM is quite right, plainly. Society is being menaced by the liberal, laissez-faire, values of the ’60s. People showed respect for authority in the 1550s, before we went soft on witchcraft and heresy.
I seldom encounter much in the way of verbal discussion attached to Flickr photos, because the kind of Flickr photos I usually look at are things like pictures of footbridges, concerning which there is really not a lot to be said, given how many such snaps abound on Flickr. But this snap (catchily entitled “DSC07222.JPG”) is different because it is a photo of a rather violent political demo in France. This was taken by an accredited photographer, who had his card examined by the Police but who was then permitted to keep his snap. But, says one of the commenters:
i got all the photos and videos i took yesterday on my camphone deleted by a policeman who told me he would arrest if he ever saw me doing again. I don’t know if he had the right to erase the photos, i should see about that.
Presumably not. My thanks and congratulations to Norwegian media blogger Kristine Lowe for the link to that, and for spotting the above comment. Kristine blogged earlier about the new French law.
If all French bloggers, podcasters, vodcasters, and even those snapping a picture with their mobile phone camera and sending it to a relative, could be put on trial or fined for publishing footage from the frontlines. How bizarre, troubling, surreal. …
Indeed. This is a huge issue. I was in Parliament Square not long ago and observed some hairy anti-war person being shoved into a Police van. The entire scene was surrounded by other demonstrators holding video cameras. They were subjecting to the Police themselves to surveillance, guarding the guardians you might say. I do not ever want that to be illegal in Britain, but in France, it would appear that it already is.
Expect a thriving market in fake “accredited photographer” cards. And expect things in France to get even more interesting, when, as they soon will, digital cameras become so small that it will be impossible for the Police or anybody else to spot them being used. In fact, expect things everywhere to get more interesting.
Meanwhile, I have been chronicling that brief moment when digital cameras are (were) quite small, but still visible in action.
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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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