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“Teenagers could lose bank accounts and driving licences for snubbing national service, Rishi Sunak says”
Despite everything, I will vote Conservative in this election, because my local MP is Kemi Badenoch, of whom I approve. But what a silly party the Tories have become.
I had my say about their proposal to reinstate conscription a month ago in this post: “A press gang there I chanced to meet”. I am honestly amazed that the proposal is still alive as anything other than a guaranteed laugh line for Radio Four comedians. It seems I was wrong: the prime minister still maintains this is something he will do after his surprise election victory. OK, let’s run with that. If he thinks that it would be a good thing for the state to compel British youth to spend a year in the army or “volunteering” (yes, they really do call it that) in the community, why does he evidently not trust the legal mechanisms of compulsion that the state evolved over centuries to enforce it?
Taking away people’s driving licence is an arbitrary punishment. For one young draft-dodger living in the country it might come as a disaster, for another convicted of the same crime but living in a major city with good public transport, it would be no more than a mild inconvenience. A young person who could not drive in the first place would laugh in the faces of the enforcers. Did we not once have some sort of legal system to iron out inconsistencies like that?
Another thing, I could have sworn we used to have this idea that a driving licence was issued when a person had demonstrated he or she could safely operate a motor vehicle on the public highway, and could be revoked only if that person drove dangerously. If it can be revoked for offences that have nothing to do with driving, trust in the whole system of licensing is damaged.
Colchester always looks prosperous when I go there. There are designer clothes at prices I cannot afford in its charity shops. I think of it as a place where the last serious incident of anti-social behaviour was in AD 61. Not so, according to the Telegraph:
How libraries changed from local sanctuaries to antisocial behaviour hotspots
All the crime in British libraries has traditionally been contained between the covers of our books – any rowdiness instantly quelled by the librarians’ famous “Shh!”
But in Colchester, Essex, that idyll increasingly resembles fiction. Over the past three months, the city’s local library has recorded a shocking 54 incidents of antisocial behaviour, forcing librarians to consider donning bodycams for their own protection.
Books have been snatched from the shelves, tossed about and destroyed. An irreplaceable collection of local 18th-century maps has been defaced with obscene sketches. A glass door has been shattered, fires have been lit on the carpet tiles of the quiet study area and staff have been subjected to appalling verbal abuse and – on one occasion – a physical assault.
Non-paywall version of the story here.
It continues,
Perhaps most worrying of all, however, is that the Essex librarians are far from alone, with similar learning sanctuaries across the country now battling a wave of criminality and disorderly behaviour.
In Kent, such institutions witnessed a 500 per cent increase in antisocial incidents affecting staff and library users between 2020 and 2023, while in Bristol, several libraries were forced to close or change their opening hours over the school holidays last year to deter unruly young visitors.
Note the timeframe. I suspect that this startling 500% increase in antisocial incidents in Kent public libraries between 2020 and 2023 was a ripple from the Black Lives Matter tsunami finally making landfall after crossing the Atlantic. However that is but the latest book in a multi-volume saga. The article speaks of any rowdiness being ‘instantly quelled by the librarians’ famous “Shh!”’ When did that last happen, 1975? Perhaps there really were Shh-ing librarians like that once. My imagination gives them beehive hair and cat-eye glasses. Never actually saw one though, and in the 1980s I spent vast amounts of time in the local public library. All my life, trendy young librarians lived in terror of being thought to be that sort of librarian, and the fear never went away while they gradually turned into old librarians who’ve still got their CND badges in a drawer somewhere.
No longer the silent book storage and study areas of old, libraries have evolved to become “community hubs” offering a wide range of free or affordable services to visitors of all ages. You can go to a library to access the internet and use printers and photocopiers. They host knitting clubs, manga drawing sessions and bereavement support meetings. Often they’ll loan out medical equipment such as blood pressure monitors, with many becoming Covid vaccination centres during the pandemic. A new Scottish scheme even offers up musical instruments for users.
In Colchester’s library, parents and grandparents are supervising toddlers clambering around a small soft play area situated on the two-storey building’s ground floor.
There is nothing wrong with the manga drawing or the soft play areas in themselves. Nor do I have any automatic objection to a library, in the sense of a place whose primary purpose is to make books available to the public, also hosting activities such as Drag Queen Story Hour, as Colchester library has done. Although I do think the famous Rainbow Dildo Butt Monkey whom Redbridge council commissioned to do the rounds of its children’s libraries in 2021 might have been a little off-putting to certain demographics.
If public, government-run libraries were private, commercially-run libraries as once existed in the UK – Boots the Chemist used to run a mass-market circulating library – we could have lively competition between the “We’re not your grandma’s library” libraries and the “We are your grandma’s library” libraries. I am sure there is room for both.
But that is a dream. In the real world, low as its fees were, “Boots Book-Lovers’ Library” could not compete with the government-subsidised version which proudly boasted it was free to all. And the generations of public librarians since then thought they were being non-authoritarian by taking that “to all” literally. “The library isn’t just about books”, they said. The banks of computers pushed the books into a corner. “The library isn’t just for swots”, they said. “We won’t make you stay quiet”, they said. It stopped being a quiet haven for swots. “We are inclusive”, they said. “The library is for all sorts of people.” And, lo, no one was excluded and all sorts of people came.
The Telegraph is playing with us…
Donald Trump jury reaches verdict in historic hush money trial Updated 2 minutes ago
No, they don’t say what the verdict is.
Update: Guilty.
What effect will this have? Personally, I suspect the Democrats have caught a tiger by the tail. They saw some polling in 2020 that said X per cent of voters would be less likely to vote for someone if they had been convicted of a crime and thought, “Aha, this is how we do it”. But it all looks very different when the election is 159 days away. They should have watched more Yes, Minister.
Bernard: “And as you know the letters JB are the highest honour in the Commonwealth.”
Hacker: “JB?”
Sir Humphrey: “Jailed by the British. Gandhi, Nkrumah, Makarios, Ben Gurion, Kenyatta, Nehru, Mugabe, the list of world leaders is endless, and contains several of our students.
(From Season 2,Episode 2 “Doing the Honours”.)
A spell in the clink is not quite so certain a predictor of future high office when the jailers are your own countrymen, but the principle still holds. If the Democrats are really as afraid as they claim to be that Trump will make himself into a second Hitler, they should have considered where the first one got time to write his bestseller.
By the way, there is much of current interest in that 43-year-old episode, including discussion of British universities being dependent on overseas students and what Sir Humphrey calls the “catastrophic” possibility of a pro-Israeli Foreign Office.
“Conservatives want to bring back mandatory national service”, reports the BBC:
Twelve months of mandatory national service would be reintroduced by the Conservatives if they win the general election.
Eighteen-year-olds would be able to apply for one of 30,000 full-time military placements or volunteering one weekend a month carrying out a community service.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said he believed bringing back compulsory service across the UK would help foster the “national spirit” that emerged during the pandemic.
Back to the good old days:
As I walked out on London street
A press gang there I chanced to meet
They asked me if I would join the fleet
On board of a man-o-war, boys
They said that a sailor’s life was fine
Good comrades and good pay I’d find
They promised me a bloody good time,
On board of a man-o-war, boys
– Traditional sea shanty
The press-ganged sailors of the Napoleonic wars often did fight well. That might have been due to their national spirit. Or it might have been due to the disciplinary methods detailed in the next two verses of the song:
But when I went, to my surprise
All they’d told me was shocking lies
There was a row and bloody old row
On board of a man-o-war, boys
The first thing they did, they took me in hand
And they flogged me with a tarry strand.
They flogged me till I couldn’t stand,
On board of a man-o-war, boys
The Home Secretary is already rowing back:
James Cleverly has insisted that “no one is going to jail” if they refuse to take part in National Service, but that the Tories would “compel” young people to participate.
Rishi Sunak last night vowed to create a mandatory scheme where school leavers will either have to enrol on a 12-month military placement or spend one weekend each month volunteering in their community.
But Mr Cleverly said that young people would not face any criminal sanctions if they did not take part.
Asked what would happen if someone said they didn’t want to engage, the Home Secretary told Trevor Phillips on Sky News: “There’s going to be no criminal sanction for this. No one’s going to jail over this…
“We want to make this compelling, we are going to compel people to do it, but also we want to make sure that it fits with different people’s aptitudes and aspirations.”
He added that “we force people to do things all the time” when pressed by the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg about whether he was comfortable as a Conservative forcing teenagers to do something.
He told the BBC: “We force 16-year-olds who, as a society, for example, we recognise are not fully formed, and they still require education. So the decision was made that they remain in education or training.
“So we force teenagers to be educated. No one argues with that.
I argue with it.
“Scottish government to declare national housing emergency”, reports the BBC.
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, sorry Humza Yousaf, sorry John Swinney wanted a turn at the podium.
Declaring an emergency is a signal to government that the current situation is not working and there needs to be intervention.
The councils cited issues ranging from pressure on homelessness services, rising property prices and high levels of temporary accommodation.
By declaring an emergency, the Scottish government is formally recognising the housing problem and calling for cuts to its capital budget to be reversed.
However, there are no practical effects that automatically happen due to a declaration being made.
The one declaration they will not make is the one that would have an effect; the one reversing the stupid thing they did that brought about this “emergency” in the first place.
As Kevin Davidson-Hall says in this article, “The Past and Present of Scottish Rent Controls”,
I have some news for the Scottish Government. “Bah! Humbug!” Rent controls simply do not work.
UK data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) released on 17 April 2024 reveals the largest increase in average rents since 2015, was in Scotland. Rents which have had a cap since September 2022, have increased more than in any other country in the United Kingdom.
ONS figures show that during the year to March 2024, average monthly rents in Scotland went up by more than in England, which went up by 9.1%, while Scottish rents rose by 10.5% to £947pcm. This is proof enough for me that rent control in Scotland has had the opposite effect from what the Scottish Government said was intended.
“Labour council to let staff ignore people they find annoying”, reports the Telegraph. To be fair to Oxford city council, the Telegraph headline and the first line are clickbait designed to (pleasurably) annoy its readers:
A council that drew a backlash for banning meat and dairy products
Misleadingly phrased and irrelevant. The “ban” only applies to meat and dairy products being served at council events.
will allow its staff to refuse contact with people they find irritating.
Relevant, but still misleadingly phrased. Most of the behaviours that the council says might cause its staff to refuse contact with a citizen are worse than “irritating”:
Oxford city council has introduced a policy to manage citizens it describes as “abusive, persistent and/or vexatious”.
The “vexatious behaviour policy” outlines how staff and councillors should deal with people who make complaints or inquiries in a way that is “manifestly unjustified”, “inappropriate” or “intimidating”.
Guidelines include limiting how often they can contact the council or meeting them face to face with a witness.
The council has more of a point than I first thought. It does have the responsibility to protect its staff from an intolerable working environment or actual violence. No organisation can give infinite time to complainers, even when the complaints are reasonable and the complainers polite. The courts have the concept of the “vexatious litigant” for this reason. I note from the mention of witnesses that the council does not seem to intend to cut people off entirely. It could also hold meetings with citizens it deems threatening by video. Perhaps it does say it will do that and the Telegraph did not report it because it sounded too reasonable.
That said, the quip that instantly came to my mind and yours is no mere joke: Oxford city council does not permit the citizens of Oxford to ignore it. It takes their money by force and frequently fails to properly provide those services that are meant be its side of the coerced bargain. It vexes them with its little obsessions about food and rainbows. Until they allowed to say, “Your demands annoy me, Oxford city council, and I will henceforth ignore you”, Oxford city council is obliged to continue to respond in some way to the complaints of everyone over whom it claims authority.
Particularly troubling are the provisions that commit WHO member states to developing behavioural-science measures (a euphemism for ‘nudge’ tactics and propaganda) and countering ‘misinformation and disinformation’ (meaning increased censorship). Given the extent of state-led propaganda and censorship during the last pandemic, would it not be more appropriate to strengthen protections for scientific debate and free speech instead?
– Molly Kingsley
Some good stuff in the Telegraph today. “The electric car carnage has only just begun”, writes Matthew Lynn.
As with so much of the legislation passed during the last five years, setting a quota for the percentage of EVs companies had to sell probably seemed like a good idea at the time. Manufacturers now have to ensure that 22pc of the cars they shift off the forecourt are battery powered, rising steadily to 80pc by the end of this decade, and 100pc by 2035. If they don’t hit their quota, the senior executives will get ten years hard labour in Siberia (well, actually it is a fine of up to £15,000 per vehicle, but it nonetheless feels extremely draconian). Like Soviet planners in the 1950s, the architects of this legislation presumably assumed that all you had to do was set a target and everything would fall into place.
The trouble is, quotas don’t work any better in Britain than they did in communist Russia. EVs have some serious problems: the range is not good enough, we have not built enough charging points to power them, the repair bills are expensive, the insurance ruinous, and second hand prices are plummeting. Once all raw materials and transport costs are factored in, they may not be much better for the environment.
Yet the masterminds foisting this legislation on businesses don’t appear to have given much thought to what will happen if the quota isn’t met. Now Ford, one of the biggest auto giants in the world, and still a major manufacturer in Europe, has provided an answer. “We can’t push EVs into the market against demand,” said Martin Sander, the General Manager of Ford Model eEurope, at a conference this week. “We’re not going to pay penalties… The only alternative is to take our shipments of [engine] vehicles to the UK down and sell these vehicles somewhere else.”
In effect, Ford will limit its sales of cars in the UK. If you had your eye on a new model, forget it. You will have to put your name on a waiting list, just as East Germans had to wait years for a Trabant. Heck, we may even see a black market in off-the-books Transit vans. Ford is the first to spell it out in public, but we can be confident all the other manufacturers are thinking the same thing. They can’t absorb huge fines. The only alternative is to limit the sales of petrol cars.
“Trump’s trial is a stupendous legal catastrophe”, writes Alan Dershowitz in the Telegraph.
I have been teaching, practising and writing about criminal law for 60 years. In all those years, I have never seen or heard of a case in which the defendant has been criminally prosecuted for failing to disclose the payment of what prosecutors call “hush money”. Alexander Hamilton paid hush money to cover up an affair with a married woman. Many others have paid hush money since. If the legislature wanted to criminalise such conduct they could easily enact the statute prohibiting the payment of hush money or requiring its disclosure. They have declined to do so.
Prosecutors cannot simply make up new crimes by jerry-rigging a concoction of existing crimes, some of which are barred by the statute of limitations others of which are beyond the jurisdiction of state prosecutors.
and
If the defendant were not Donald Trump and the venue were not Manhattan, this ought to be a slam dunk win for the defendant. Indeed, this extraordinarily weak case would never have been bought.
I am not a Trump political supporter. I voted for Joe Biden in the last election and I have an open mind about the coming election. But I want it to be fair. Whoever loses the election should not be able to complain about election interference by the weaponisation of the criminal justice system for partisan advantage.
All Americans, regardless of political affiliation, should be appalled at this selective prosecution.
I am curious as to whether Professor Dershowitz’s article will be appearing in any of the American papers as well as in the Telegraph. It is very common for British papers to reprint articles about American affairs, but a quick Google showed no sign of this one other than in the Telegraph itself. One would think an emeritus professor at Harvard Law School would have American newspapers queuing up to publish his views on one of the top U.S. legal stories of the day. Maybe the layers of editors and fact-checkers for which the American media are famed are just taking their time on this one.
Scruton gave a lecture on Wittgenstein to a private circle of intellectuals. He was quick to notice, however, that “they were far more interested in the fact that I was visiting at all”, rather than deliberations on the rather impenetrable Austrian thinker. The sense of togetherness was, according to the recollection of a Czech dissident, “the most important morale booster for us”.
It wasn’t just intellectuals who were in peril. The country, Scruton discovered, contained a sophisticated network of secret agents and snitches. Denunciation was prolific and social scrutiny omnipresent. No one, including the most inconsequential citizens, could feel safe from the Big Brother of the state and social pressure of their peers. The Czech author and playwright Václav Havel made this atmosphere famous when describing the deliberations of a greengrocer, who had to place a pro-regime slogan on display in his shop to avoid being denounced or judged unfavourably by his neighbours.
It is 2024, and in many ways the positions of Britain and Czechoslovakia (now Czechia) have reversed. It is now in Prague where freedom of speech and thought is tolerated, and it is in Britain where it is under assault – sometimes on the social level, but increasingly on the legal level as the recent legislation in Scotland shows. True, people seldom go to prison for expressing their opinions – like Havel did in Czechoslovakia – but lives have been destroyed nonetheless. Sackings, cancellations and character assassinations have proliferated in the country that was once hailed as the cradle of liberalism.
– Štěpán Hobza
“Little by little, the Government is seizing control of our great universities”, writes James Tooley in the Telegraph.
Fifty years ago this week, Lord Hailsham laid the foundation stone for the University of Buckingham. Even back in the 1970s, eminent scholars feared the increasing encroachment of the state on higher education, with deleterious consequences for academic freedom if it was allowed to continue. If a university could be created that did not receive government funding, they argued, then it could escape the need for state regulations. Buckingham was born as a beacon for independence, a bastion of free speech and freedom of thought.
Fast forward 50 years. Our founders would be shocked to see the all-encompassing regulations emerging from the Office for Students (OfS), the higher education regulator in England which took over university regulation in 2018. There are 25 sets of regulations covering an enormous range of topics, including its current major foci, equality of opportunity and quality.
Thank goodness that the University of Buckingham is exempt from this interference! Wait a minute, it’s not:
A private university like Buckingham, which doesn’t receive any direct government funding, has to satisfy all but three of these 25 sets of regulations – known as “Conditions of Registration” – even though ostensibly the regulations are to ensure taxpayer value for money. If a university is found to be in breach of any of these conditions, then the OfS has a variety of sanctions at its disposal, including removal of a university’s title and status, even if these were awarded through a venerable Royal Charter.
Wokeism. Climate extremism. Kindly authoritarianism. This is now the operating system of Western, ‘centrist’ politics. Take Joe Biden, America’s somnambulant president. At the 2020 election, even anti-woke liberals insisted this scion of the old Democratic establishment – a man so old he can’t even be slurred as a Boomer (he’s actually Silent Generation) – was the man to return America to normality, before the BLM riots and MAGA mania. ‘If you hate wokeness, you should vote for Joe Biden’, declared a piece in the Atlantic, arguing that Trump is to the culture war what kerosene is to a dumpster fire, fueling the woke extremes. That take has aged like milk. On his first day in office, Biden signed sweeping Executive Orders on ‘racial equity’ and gender ideology. He later tried to apportion Covid relief on the basis of race. He’s a Net Zero zealot. He has allowed the justice system to be weaponised against his opponents. He invited Dylan Mulvaney to the White House, FFS. Biden’s return to ‘normalcy’ has been so successful millions of Americans are starting to wonder if Donald Trump might actually be the saner choice.
– Tom Slater
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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.
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