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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In light of the recent damage and imminent destruction of the right of habeas corpus in the United States of America, it is with mixed feelings I point out the following observations by James Madison (or possibly Alexander Hamilton) in Federalist Paper 53.
The important distinction so well understood in America, between a Constitution established by the people and unalterable by the government, and a law established by the government and alterable by the government, seems to have been little understood and less observed in any other country. Wherever the supreme power of legislation has resided, has been supposed to reside also a full power to change the form of the government. Even in Great Britain, where the principles of political and civil liberty have been most discussed, and where we hear most of the rights of the Constitution, it is maintained that the authority of the Parliament is transcendent and uncontrollable, as well with regard to the Constitution, as the ordinary objects of legislative provision. They have accordingly, in several instances, actually changed, by legislative acts, some of the most fundamental articles of the government.
and…
Where no Constitution, paramount to the government, either existed or could be obtained, no constitutional security, similar to that established in the United States, was to be attempted.
and…
… and hence the doctrine [of annual elections] has been inculcated by a laudable zeal, to erect some barrier against the gradual innovations of an unlimited government, that the advance towards tyranny was to be calculated by the distance of departure from the fixed point of annual elections. But what necessity can there be of applying this expedient to a government limited, as the federal government will be, by the authority of a paramount Constitution? Or who will pretend that the liberties of the people of America will not be more secure under biennial elections, unalterably fixed by such a Constitution, than those of any other nation would be, where elections were annual, or even more frequent, but subject to alterations by the ordinary power of the government?
The row about whether Catholic adoption agencies should be allowed to refuse to give children up to gay couples has already caused a great deal of controversy, and there is a very, smart article on the issue at The Devil’s Kitchen blog which takes a pretty firm libertarian line on the matter. In my view, if a Catholic or any other religious organisation wishes to refuse to hand over children entrusted to it to certain sorts of people on grounds of religious doctrine, then one can certainly object to those views, but they should not be banned, in my view.
The problem, however, is that such adoption organisations receive money from the taxpayer: you and me. I am not a Catholic (although my wife is) and I am not happy that I may be financially enabling people to act on views I regard as wrong. This in my view demonstrates the great dangers of encouraging charities to receive tax moneys or indeed to get involved in state initiatives of any kind. By receiving such moneys, these bodies will slowly but surely lose their autonomy. The Catholic charities that are involved in areas like adoption may choose to sever any links with the state apparatus, and I strongly urge them to do so.
This government, remember, is one that regards autonomous institutions, be they businesses, charities, or any associations of people, as a threat to its power and designs. It wishes to bend these institutions to its corporatist, collectivist ends. In a sense, this is in fact a profoundly fascist government, in that it maintains the appearance of tolerating private property rights and institutions, but in fact seeks to regulate them so closely as to turn them into empty husks.
I hope this whole episode drives home in people’s minds the extent to which civil society, traditionally understood, has been weakened by this government. It was the late Tory MP, Nicholas Budgen I think, who once remarked that NuLabour would no longer seek to nationalise industries. Instead, it would nationalise people.
First off, a sincere apology for my notable lack of recent contributions. My absence has been caused by the more pressing and time-consuming task of keeping a humble roof over my head. I mean to address this dereliction of duty in future by cutting back on sleep.
Anyway, on to juicier matters. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, half so much worth doing as simply messing up political careers. Especially in this country and especially now. So, ladies and gentlemen, allow me to nominate my candidate for the day:
A Sussex MP who has campaigned against drink-driving has apologised after he failed a breath test.
Des Turner, the Labour member for Brighton Kemptown, was breathalysed after being involved in a minor crash in Streatham, south London, last month.
He said he had a glass of wine at lunch and had not realised he was “three percentage points” over the limit.
So is this menace to society now quivering in fear over the sum of money he will have to pay in fines? Is he polishing his sturdy walking shoes in expectation of an extended driving ban? Is he crippled with guilt and shame about the reckless way that he imperiled other road users and innocent pedestrians? Will he be forced to attend a driver re-education course? Um, no.
Mr Turner said the police view at the time was that the blood sample would be negative, and he was allowed to continue with his journey.
What a stroke of good fortune! Obviously the Praetorian Guards were in a generous mood that evening. Perhaps they even bade him on his way with a hearty slap on the back and a nerve-steadying snifter from a hastily produced hipflask. I am not entirely sure that the Guards would be quite so charitable to some lowly unelected serf whose similarly petty infractions are seldom tolerated or excused and are generally regarded as chicken feed for the state mincing machine.
But none of that need inconvenience or worry Mr. Turner who is free to resume his soaring career of anti-drink drive (and anti-God-knows-what-else) campaigning with an unimpeachable record and a disinterested fouth estate which is disinclined to risk embarrassing him.
But, maybe the blogosphere can play a role here. When Mr. Turner next thrusts his head over the parapet of public affairs (by early next week, I reckon) to press for more driving restrictions, seatbelts on toilets, no hamburgers after 7.00pm, regulations on toenail growth or some such desperately needed and worthwhile initiative, then perhaps a timely and polite e-mail could be sent to Mr. Turner (via his website) to ask if he may spare a thought for the less privileged little people.
I am back and have been lurking for a bit. I did not intend to post for another week or two. In my initial post I said that occasionally something would cause me to “blow a gasket”: Habeas corpus is that something. Since King John at Runnymede was compelled to accept the Magna Carta, the right of an individual to demand access to judicial process has been the foundation stone of constitutional government.
Dicey wrote that the Habeas Corpus Acts “declare no principle and define no rights, but they are for practical purposes worth a hundred constitutional articles guaranteeing individual liberty”
While I have been away, I have apparently missed some fun jesting about ‘meta-context’. This is a serious example of it.
In its simplest and most fundamental way, this is about tribalism. This is about who ‘we’ are. Who we see our selves as. Are we defined by our geographical boundaries? Is ‘American’ a tribal bond? Or are we the citizens of our constitution? Have we charged our government with protecting its own sovereignty and security by exchanging it for that of its citizens? Or have we charged it with protecting all citizens from violation of their personal sovereignty by all powers. Are we, the citizens, not the fundamental reason for our government? If it will not abide by its contract with us, is it truly still our government? At what point does it become an occupying power?
It is babies and bathwater. More than that, it is meta-context. Underpinning assumptions about collectivism vs individualism. Did you happen to notice that Attorney General Gonzales singled out individuals and citizens:
I meant by that comment, the Constitution doesn’t say, “Every individual in the United States or every citizen is hereby granted or assured the right to habeas.” It doesn’t say that.
→ Continue reading: A bolt between the eyes of constitutional government
A press release from the Association of Chief Police Officers, not surprisingly, welcomes the latest police-state measures. But it seems they were taken by surprise, too:
Ref:21/07 January 17, 2007
ACPO COMMENT ON SERIOUS AND ORGANISATED CRIME BILL
ACPO spokesperson said:
�Tackling serious and organised crime is a serious issue to the police service. ACPO welcomes any measures that support us in our endeavours to combat this from of criminality�.
(Sic. Really – a direct cut-and-paste from here)
The unnamed (conceivably fictitious, since no-one is offered for interview) spokesmanperson – PC being the only correct thing about it – can only be referring to the Serious Crime Bill.
Can the Home Office not even get its news management right? A huge and complicated Bill is launched which will tear up important parts of common law, create major data-mining powers of an unprecedented nature, and create severe sanctions backed by imprisonment for people who have done nothing wrong at all if their conduct is deemed potentially helpful to criminals anywhere in the world. It was not drafted over the weekend.
It is a surprise the department failed to get a Chief Constable briefed and ready to stand up to say how wonderful it is in glorious detail, complete with scary illustrative anecdote – preferably involving paedophile terrorists. ACPO are left not knowing what the Bill is called. Or how to spell what they think it might be called. Still, they are so desperate to kiss the governmental arse that something supportive is rushed out, regardless that it is gibberish.
At some point current ACPO members will have sworn to uphold the law and keep the Queen’s peace. Is that not incompatible with being political lapdogs?
[Thanks to PJC Journal]
… on TV programmes he (quite sensibly) does not watch. Her Majesty’s Government was actually doing something about Big Brother. Granting him more arbitrary power. The Telegraph’s legal editor explains:
[The Serious Crime Bill] allows judges, sitting without juries, to make orders which, if breached, would put us in prison for five years.
Two conditions must be satisfied before the court can make a serious crime prevention order. First, the judge must be satisfied that someone has been “involved in serious crime” – anywhere in the world.
To be “involved”, you do not have to have committed a serious offence, or even helped someone else to have committed it. All you need to have done is to conduct yourself in a way that was likely to make it easier for someone to commit a serious offence, whether or not it was committed.
And what is a serious criminal offence? Drug trafficking and money laundering, of course. But also fishing for trout with a line left unattended in the water. Depositing controlled waste without a licence. And anything else that a court considers to be sufficiently serious.
Read the whole thing here. The Bill itself is here. Observers of government will notice that it is, unusually for important legislation, being introduced in the Lords. I would welcome any theories why.
I don’t do not know if the sainted editors will tolerate the colloquial English – the Samizdata style-guide proscribes contractions – but I couldn’t could not. So I won’t will not.*
A.C. Grayling pithly outlines the absolutism behind Tony Blair’s total information awareness scheme on The Guardian Unlimited. Do read it. I know a few of our readers refuse ever to move out of the safety of right-thinking reading, but they are missing comfort as well as understanding when they seek to avoid mental pollution from the liberal left.
* [editor’s note: does that answer your question, Guy?] 
If water were not so obviously essential, I wonder if it would now be even allowed:
If you drink too much water, eventually the kidneys will not be able to work fast enough to remove sufficient amounts from the body, so the blood becomes more dilute with low salt concentrations.
“If you drink too much water it lowers the concentration of salt in your blood so that it is lower than the concentration of salt in cells,” says Professor Robert Forrest, a consultant in clinical chemistry and forensic toxicology at the Royal Hallamshire Hospital in Sheffield.
Professor Forrest continues:
“When the brain swells, it is inside a bony box so has nowhere to go,” he says. “The pressure increases in the skull and you may get a headache. As the brain is squeezed it compresses vital regions regulating functions such as breathing.”
Eventually these functions will be impaired and you are likely to stop breathing and die. Warning signs included confusion and headaches.
No sniggering. This is exactly what happened to a Californian lady after she had taken part in a water drinking contest (a sport which should obviously be banned forthwith).
A government task force is clearly needed to keep a constant eye on the water threat. Once that happens, health warnings on water bottles are only a matter of time. “Water can seriously damage your kidneys”, and so on. “Big Water” will be accused of peddling scaremongering stories about the alleged need for water, and the alleged benefits of water, and even nonsense about how, if you don’t regularly wash with it, that might be a danger to your health.
Some time ago, I recall someone translating “water” into “hydrogen oxide” or “oxygen di-hydride” or some such thing, and listing all the dangers of this profoundly dangerous fluid, such as the definite danger of contracting cancer if you drank, say, forty gallons of the stuff at one sitting, and quite a few safety nazis fell for it. Well, now such anti-water campaigners have some hard evidence to work with.
Am I still going to be regarded as a wild-eyed loony by quite so many members of the general public after this?
Probably. Note the delicate way in which one big file on everything in your life – a British Dang An – is justified by a lacrymose anecdote about a family having to have dozens of contacts with government agencies after someone died. Who makes them do that in the first place?
The Executive Committee of the Exeter University Evangelical Christian Union has today (5JAN) issued proceedings in the High Court seeking a Judicial Review of the decision to suspend the Christian Union from the Guild of Students; such acts by the Guild violating the rights of association of religious bodies and representing religious animus. The Court will be asked to quash the decision to suspend. The committee has also instructed Paul Diamond, a leading Civil Rights Barrister to represent them.
The action was taken after the students advised both the Guild and the university authorities that it had failed to support their right as Christians to the freedoms of speech, belief and association.
The 50-year-old Christian Union (CU) at Exeter University is currently suspended from the official list of student societies on campus, has had its Student Union bank account frozen, and has been banned from free use of Student Guild premises, or advertising events within Guild facilities, because the Student Guild claims the CU constitution and activities do not conform to its Equal Opportunties Policies, which have only recently been introduced.
That’s the Christian Union point of view. Here is the Exeter Students’ Guild point of view. It appears what’s wrong with the Christian Union (though there seems to be a side dispute about what it is called) is it expects members to be Christians – and this is written down somewhere.
I find it very difficult to believe that the Student Friends of Palestine welcomes applications from hardcore Zionists, or that the change-ringing group offers opportunities for extended bongo solos, or that their Amnesty branch is really open to those who think the Uzbek government is a bit wishy-washy and needs positive reinforcement in the form of fedexed floral tributesfrom the society to its president in order to hold the line on law-and-order. It is just those bodies have not recorded such obvious facts in their constitutions.
Clubs don’t and shouldn’t appeal to everyone. That’s the whole point of them. They provide social opportunities through giving scope for people to get together with people with whom they know they’ll have something in common. That’s why traditionally they were so much a part of student life, as escape from the non-discriminatory potluck of faculty and accomodation. If Exeter Students’ Guild doesn’t get that, then why is it offering subsidy to societies at all?
Update: A notice that is rather strangely hidden away, but dated the same as the threat of action above, says that privileges have now been ‘restored’. Though nobody seems to have changed their mind about anything, there is to be a “consultation process” instead. Does this mean the Christians are expected to be persuaded not to be Christians? [Is this consultation going to involve lions?] Or is the question being postponed in the hope that it might go away, or that a new set of officers might have a better idea? All very odd.
Well, fancy giving money to the Government!
Might as well have put it down the drain.
Fancy giving money to the Government!
Nobody will see the stuff again.
Well, they’ve no idea what money’s for –
Ten to one they’ll start another war
I’ve heard a lot of silly things, but, Lor’!
Fancy giving money to the Government!
– A.P. Herbert (no relation)
Thanks to Brian Walden for reminding me of this, in a brilliant but very depressing radio essay: Lessons from Herbert.
Rob Fisher has an interesting posting up about police harassment, as displayed in a reality TV show. Basically, the police took it upon themselves to mess with some apparently quite innocent citizens, fishing for crimes that they might have committed. And it turned out one of them had apparently done something evil. He had, apparently, committed the crime of failing to be on the police driver database. Said the policeman: “You don’t exist” …It turned out that the database did contain him, but spelt slightly differently.
Rob Fisher is depressed about all this. But what I think this episode – by which I mean not just the police harassing people, but it being on television, and Rob Fisher copying out what they said and blogging about it – is that one of the benefits of total surveillance (see my immediately previous post) might be that the authorities might find themselves having to behave rather better.
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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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