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We all have a vision of Medieval justice as violent and barbaric. According to Cambridge historian Helen Mary Carrel, this was simply not true:
“The common view of the medieval justice system as cruel and based around torture and execution is often unfair and inaccurate,” said University of Cambridge historian Helen Mary Carrel. Most criminals received gentle sentences merely meant to shame them, Carrel said, with the punishments often carried out in the open so townspeople could bring them charity.
Her work covers only medieval English civil society: punishment traditions in other parts of Europe were perhaps nastier and more closely aligned with our Hollywood induced image of the era.
I’ve been re-reading the report of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee – Identity Cards Technologies: Scientific Advice, Risk and Evidence in preparation for an interview this evening. It is full of wonderful sarcasm couched in parliamentary politeness, and I recommend it to you, if you care to understand how Britain is governed and/or have a taste for black comedy. MPs are as much bemused spectators as the rest of us.
Nobody knows what the Home Office is up to, because it refuses to tell anyone – even select committees – any more than it can get away with. It does have 180-odd people now working on its Identity Cards programme. But I begin to wonder if they themselves know what they are about…
In case you think I am exaggerating, this is from section 30 of the report:
In written evidence, Microsoft said that “the current phase of public consultation by the Home Office has primarily focused on issues of procurement”. Jerry Fishenden [NTO for the UK] from Microsoft elaborated that “every time we came close to wanting to talk about the architecture, we were told it was not really up for discussion because there was an internal reference model that the Home Office team had developed themselves, and that they did not feel they wanted to discuss their views of the architecture”.
A woman who had (what I certainly think was) a humorous sign on her gate saying “Our dogs are fed on Jehovah’s Witnesses” was forced to take it down by British police because it is “distressing, offensive and inappropriate”. Yet seeing as Muslim extremists can walk down the street holding signs threatening to decapitate people, all with a police escort, it is clearly time to stop co-operating with the police and being so damn polite to them. Instead urge them not to allow themselves to be used to repress people’s right to express themselves and force them to fill out as much paperwork as possible. Got a lawyer? Call him. Just do not meekly co-operate.
We need to establish that there is no right not to be offended that trumps the reasonable right to self-expression. In fact I would argue that police escorted Muslims have already established that. If Muslims extremists can threaten people with death unless they express themselves in accordance with the restrictions Muslim activists want imposed on them, then we clearly do indeed have the right to make jokes about feeding Jehovah’s Witnesses to our dogs.
So stop making the job of the police easy when they try to impose such restrictions. If they want to stop you expressing themselves, do not threaten them but do not feel any great need to be unduly polite, make them arrest you and take the matter to court, every single time. I often go out wearing a tee-shirt saying “My Imam went to Mecca and all he got me was this lousy Tee-shirt”. Offensive? I do not think so but if anyone disagrees, I will not take it off and will force any policeman who takes issue with it to arrest me if he wants to stop me walking around wearing it.
The jury, at least, did not convict. A pity we shall never know (their deliberations being secret) whether this was that they found the evidence lacking, or the whole prosecution ludicrous. But it is perhaps some comfort, that if you are entrapped by a newspaper into discussing the purchase of an entirely fictional substance, and prosecuted with the Attorney General’s permision on inchoate Terrorism Act charges drafted to be hard to rebut, you can still escape gaol.
Whether this will be of much comfort for the three men just acquitted in the red mercury trial I doubt. They have been in custody as “terrorist suspects” since 2004, and had to find the funds to defend a trial that cost the prosecution £1,000,000 in taxpayers money. I only hope they have a million or so left to sue the News of the World and its “fake sheikh” agent provocateur, Mazer Mahmood.
Even if they were successful in that, of course the police, prosecutors, and their secret witness, B, are likely to go unpunished. It will be said they acted in good faith. It will be ignored that the waste of public resource and the injury to the defendents’ lives, was dealing with a ‘threat’ that could only ever have been fictional. It will be said that this is valuable and valid because it “sends a message” to all the real terrorists (200… 2,000… whatever the estimate is this week) that they were not investigating while they were wasting their time – and three families’ lives.
I have noted before that British justice (in a number of areas, not just terrorism) has started to take on the characteristics of a witch-hunt, with accusation the philosophers’ stone that transmutes ordinary objects and actions into evidence of guilt. But at least the persecutors of the witch-crazes purported to believe in witchcraft.
In whatever shape England emerges from the war […] The intellectuals who hope to see it Russianized or Germanized will be disappointed. The gentleness, the hypocrisy, the thoughtlessness, the reverence for law and the hatred of uniforms will remain, along with the suet puddings and the misty skies. It needs some very great disaster, such as prolonged subjugation by a foreign enemy, to destroy a national culture
– George Orwell in The Lion and the Unicorn
But we live further from Orwell than Orwell from Bismarck. The current rulers of England are keen on uniforms, inspectors, permits and controls. (In 48 hours: “Ports and airports to get to discipline young offenders: Home secretary considers community work uniform.” The replacement for the Child Support Agency [not authoritarian enough], “will wield extra powers to punish parents who fail to pay, including evening curfews to prevent fathers going out after work, and having their passports confiscated to stop them taking foreign holidays, and even the threat of prosecution and prison”.) Law is treated with contempt if it gets in the way of the state’s priorities. (Last week the Home Office revealed its ideas for Serious Crime Prevention Orders, to be used to control the activities – such as telephone, travel, banking or internet use – of “known criminals” without the evidence necessary for an actual criminal prosecution.) The prohibition of suet puddings has yet to be ‘put out to public consultation’ (which is how we would know the matter had been determined). But it can only be a matter of time.
I saw Terry Gilliam’s Brazil again last night. I had not for a long while. Seen just now, its aptness to New Britain is shocking. More surprising, I think than the utter submergence of Orwell’s gentle, un-Prussian England. We knew, in petto, we had lost that.
How long before we see official signs pronouncing “Suspicion breeds confidence” and “Help the Ministry of Information help you”? Eh?
A victory in the Netherlands for freedom of expression:
A political party formed by paedophiles cannot be banned because it has the same right to exist as any other party and is protected by democratic freedoms, a Dutch court has ruled. The Brotherly Love, Freedom and Diversity party (PNVD) was launched in May to campaign for a reduction in the age of consent from 16 to 12 and the legalisation of child pornography and sex with animals, provoking widespread outrage in the Netherlands.
The Solace group, which campaigns against paedophiles, sought a ban on the group, asserting that the party infringed the rights of children, and that its ideas were a threat to social norms and values in a democratic state. But a court in The Hague held otherwise.
– The Times (from the Reuters report)
Good for the court. Even easy-going Dutch society is prey to populism, it seems. Without constraint on ‘democracy’, then eventually non-majoritarian views will squeezed out; not defeated in argument, but denied even consideration.
Worth noting (1): Solace [can anyone find a web-site? I will link it if so], who would rather nobody hear the views of the PNVD, made their claim based on some putative ‘rights of children’. I would like to know quite how it enhances anyone’s rights to exclude from the political sphere discussion of policy on the age of consent, pornography, the treatment of animals, or the use of drugs – those questions that have aroused populist ire. Have any actual children complained? And if so, how have they been injured by ideas?
Worth noting (2): What is causing most frothing at the mouth both there and here is the idea of lowering the age of consent from 16 to 12. But that is the most plainly arbitrary, indeed vapid, of all the fringe policies on offer. While opponents can not bear the idea of even discussing a change, the precise age (unlike in Britain or the US) has not been agressively and rigidly policed in the Netherlands, and prosecutions of cases without actual rape or breach of trust are very rare. Those exceedingly law abiding teenagers who can not wait until they are 16 can hop on a subsidised train to France (15), Germany (14), or Spain (13) for a dirty weekend.
(His Most Catholic Majesty’s Kingdom of Spain is not generally pointed out by moralitarians as on the brink of social collapse – but then 13 is a rise from the Franco era, so perhaps it is more democratic…)
Back in 2004 I put a clothespin on my nose and endorsed the Republicans over the Democrats. This was primarily because with a hot phase of a war against our sworn enemies in progress, the thought of Kerry in the White House just scared the hell out of me.
Several years on, as the Republicans continue to erode civil liberties and dig their snouts into the porker trough as deeply as any of the Democrats ever did, I am beginning to pray for enough of a Democratic success this fall to at the very least deadlock the government. The following, which I have just received from Downsize DC was the last straw:
The politicians want YOU to be a snitch
HR 1528 has already passed through one committee and appears likely to pass through another. This bill, if passed, will force you to inform on your neighbors if you have any knowledge of drug related activity. We’re not making this up. First it was illegal to deal drugs, then use them, and then to be caught with them. Now, Congressman James Sensenbrenner wants to send you to prison if you don’t inform on your neighbors! “Informing on neighbors” has always been a key feature of past totalitarian regimes. Is this really what we want for America? Click here to send your message to Congress opposing this law.
It is time to throw the bums out. The problem is, we already know their replacements are bums who are just as bad. The best we can say is a new bum is less experienced than an old bum and less capable of causing trouble for a few years.
I really wish we could get a few more libertarians into the asylum to jam a spanner into the works of government.
We (classical) liberals have spent a lot of our lives worrying about how to keep the state small and stabilise free institutions against collectivist urges. It seems we missed the point. The gradual socialist slide we were resisting popped. Meanwhile the revolution happened and we missed it. In fact most people seem to have missed it, including the old leftists that we feared and who are now equally perplexed. We were all looking the wrong way: Blair’s Britain is no more like Scandinavia than it is like Soviet Russia.
Matthew Parris might be right to detect something of the Third World in the way that government pronouncements no longer have a relation to reality, but I submit the polity itself is something new. It is nothing so human as kleptocracy. At some point Britain became a totalitarian bureaucratic state in spirit, while retaining plentiful food and clean water, and the forms of the rule of law – where that doesn’t get in the way of official power. Week on week measures are brought forward that present ministers would have organised protests against (and in some cases actually did) had they happened in 20th century South Africa, Eastern Europe or Latin America… Had anyone been doing them but the benign guardians of civic republicanism (themselves), in fact.
Last week: Local authories get powers to seize empty housing.
Next week: Some more exciting ways for the Home Office to build a safe just and tolerant society.
1. Seize the profits of companies that employ people who are not permitted to work by the state, or subcontract to companies that do. And remove their directors and ban them from acting as directors.
2. The Serious Organised Crime Agency to have powers to seek ‘control orders’ on those it suspects of involvement in serious crime but does not have evidence sufficient to prosecute. These control orders would be like those on suspected terrorists and control potentially any aspect of a person’s life and their contact with others.
We will have to wait for the announcement to discover whether, “for operational reasons” they will, like the terrorist versions, have to be imposed in secret at secret hearings with the suspect unable to hear or challenge the evidence against them. What’s the betting?
[Note: The current default definition of ‘serious crime’, by the way, is that in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, s81. It is extraterritorial. Activity is serious crime if it would be a crime anywhere in the UK, involves the use of violence, or “substantial financial gain” or is conduct by a “large number” of persons in pursuit of a common purpose… The former NCIS (now part of SOCA) defined “organised” crime as that committed by three persons or more, so a “large number” may not be all that large. Mind how you go.]
Paul Routledge in the Mirror (not a permalink, sorry) offers a follow up to the “Bollocks to Blair” story covered here by Brian the other day:
“Getting fined worked,” he says. “I had only sold two before the police came. Once word got round, people took pity on me and everyone wanted one. I ended up selling 375.”
But more scarily…
The cops asked for the shirt seller’s eye colour, shoe size and National Insurance number to keep track of him “in case he reoffended”.
Once you know that, you know what the fuzz are up to – building a national database of people they don’t like.
Well that we knew. In fact the government is building a database of everybody just in case it might not like them – or might have some reason to ‘assist’ them personally (as a matter of ‘enabling’ a more ‘active citizenship,’ you understand) by telling them what to do – at any time in the future.
For myself I’m only surprised the cops did not take careful note of the brand of footware, and take his footprints for the national footprint database, which they have recently acquired the power to do – I kid you not. Or perhaps they did…
This is daft:
POLICE issued two stallholders at a farming show with £80 fines for displaying T-shirts bearing the slogan “Bollocks to Blair”. Officers questioned staff on two stands at the Royal Norfolk Show after receiving a complaint, subsequently issuing two fixed-penalty notices of £80 for the offending garments.
But, it is entirely legal, given the state of the law these days. Someone says something is offensive, and if they say it is offensive it is offensive, because offensive is whatever offends anybody. Then, once the complaint is made, the police are legally obliged to inflict over-the-top and ridiculous summary justice.
Last night Norfolk police defended the action. A spokesman said: “Officers from Norfolk Constabulary issued two fixed penalty notices, each with a value of £80, at the Royal Norfolk Show in relation to two trade stands displaying T-shirts emblazoned with offensive language. The notices were issued under Section 5 of the Public Order Act as the language was deemed to cause harassment, distress or alarm at an event, where a cross section of people were present including families and young children who may have found the displays offensive. Police did receive a complaint from a member of the public.
Quite so.
I reckon that a creative application of this law could render illegal just about any damn thing anybody took against, definitely including the Police, Tony Blair, etc. Has Tony Blair never used language that was “deemed to cause harassment, distress or alarm at an event”? Selling the Koran would definitely be illegal, provided only that the Police received the complaint about it through the proper channels.
My guess is that Police morale is now so low that a lot of them are now in Good Soldier Schweik mode, i.e. doing every stupid thing that the law says they must, just to show everyone how ridiculous the law now often is.
My late father, who was a rather distinguished lawyer, used to tell us about a bloke who sat in Whitehall somewhere looking at all new laws that they were threatening to pass, pointing out inconsistencies and collisions with other laws, and unintended but possible consequences, and then deftly rewriting all the laws so that they achieved only what they were intended to achieve, and stopped only what they were supposed to stop. (He himself, apparently, had no firm opinions about what the law should do, other than what the people passing it said they wanted it to do.) Then he died, and they were never able to replace him. That must have been, if I remember it rightly, round about forty or fifty years ago. And that, my dad reckoned, was when, legally speaking, the rot set in.
This story about a drugs bust at a drive-thru restaurant may get some folk chuckling but I am not getting the joke. One of thousands of examples, in fact, of how the war on drugs is a waste of time, energy and law-enforcement talent. At a time when we live with the threat of terrorism, one would like to think that priorities were a touch different on both sides of the Atlantic.
Such is the changing nature of that world and the ferocity of those forces, we need to adjust, to reclaim the system and thereby the street for the law-abiding majority.
That means not disrespecting civil liberties but re-assessing what respect for them means today and placing a far higher priority, in what is a conflict of rights, on the rights of those who keep the law rather than break it.
This is not the argument of the lynch mob or of people who are indifferent to convicting the innocent, it is simply a reasonable and rational response to a problem that is as much one of modernity as of liberty. But such a solution will not happen without a radical change in political and legal culture and that is the case I make today.
– Tony Blair MP, June 23 2006
As ever, the pretext is “modernity”… odd how that trope of Marxian theory crops up all the time. Things have changed, we are told. Rebalancing is imposed upon us by the sudden new wickedness of the world.
But read this in the context of other recent statements by Blair and his coterie and you can see that the PM is propounding a double fallacy in order to persuade us make a great leap backward. Ossa is the false dilemma between victim’s rights and suspects’ liberties; Pelion is the great mandarin standby, seeking ‘a balance’ – conceptualised as some mid-point between where we are now and the far extreme in the direction of the proposed policy. The Olympus the New Labour titans would storm is the fundamental western concept of trial. → Continue reading: Forward into the 14th century!
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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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