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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I look forward to Blair apologists spinning this unsurprising revelation.
Town hall bureaucrats are to be given sweeping new powers to investigate homes for identity card evasion and to impose heavy fines on occupants found without one. The revelation, in an obscure Whitehall consultation paper, calls into serious doubt the Government’s repeated promises that planned ID cards, already hugely controversial, will be voluntary and that no one will be forced to carry one.
But we should trust the government because… well, just because.
At least the Telegraph is putting out bloggy articles like this one in opposition. I wonder, is the rest of the Fourth Estate going to sleep through this?
As the report stage of the Identity Cards Bill approaches in the Lords, a reminder of one highlight from the first day of the committee stage Hansard, 15 Nov 2005, Col.1012:
Lord Gould of Brookwood: Both the previous speakers—the latter with great emotion—were arguing for freedom. We have to ask what greater freedom is there than the freedom to place a vote for a political party in a ballot box upon the basis of a mandate and a manifesto. That is the crux of it: the people have supported this measure. That is what the noble Earl’s father fought for. But that is too trivial an answer. I know that. The fundamental argument is that the truth is that people believe that these identity cards will affirm their identity. The noble Lord opposite said that he likes to be in this House and how he is recognised in this House because it is a community that recognises him. That is how the people of this nation feel. They feel that they are part of communities, and they want recognition. For them, recognition comes in the form of this identity card. Noble Lords may think that that is strange, but it is what they feel. This is their kind of freedom. They want their good, hard work and determination to be recognised, rewarded and respected. That is what this does.
Of course it is right and honourable for noble Lords to have their views, but I say there is another view, and it is the view of the majority of this country. They want to have the respect, recognition and freedom that this card will give them. Times have changed. Politics have changed. What would not work 50 years ago, works now. It is not just me. I have the words of the leader of your party:
“I have listened to the police and security service chiefs. They have told me that ID cards can and will help their efforts to protect the lives of British citizens against terrorist acts. How can I disregard that?”.
This is not some silly idea of the phoney left. It is a mainstream idea of modern times. It is a new kind of identity and a new kind of freedom. I respect the noble Lords’ views, but it would help if they respected the fact that the Bill and the identity cards represent the future: a new kind of freedom and a new kind of identity.
This is the sort of rhetoric that makes my blood run cold. Here’s a prefiguring example:
In our state the individual is not deprived of freedom. In fact, he has greater liberty than an isolated man, because the state protects him and he is part of the State. Isolated man is without defence
– Benito Mussolini
Terry Eagleton (from a review of Paxton’s Anatomy of Fascism in the New Statesman) elucidates the connection:
Conservatives disdain the popular masses, while fascists mobilise and manipulate them. Some conservatives believe in ideas, but fascists have a marked preference for myths. If they think at all, they think through their blood, not their brain. Fascists regard themselves as a youthful, revolutionary avant-garde out to erase the botched past and create an unimaginably new future.
All supporters of the old-fashioned conception of individual liberty, whether they think of themselves as left or right, conservative or progressive, must do what can be done. Resist. We should not expect any quarter for outdated ideas under a new kind of freedom.
[cross-posted from White Rose]
A letter to The Independent:
Sir: In the article “Terror suspects describe alleged torture ‘in front of MI6 agents’ ” (4 January) Elinda Labropoulou claimed “The British Government has issued a gagging order to prevent the publication of the alleged British agent’s name”. It has not.
The advice given to editors on this issue was not offered by the Government, but by me on behalf of the Defence Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee. The five standing Defence Advisory Notices on the publication and broadcasting of national security information agreed by this independent Committee (see www.dnotice.org.uk) constitute a purely voluntary code, one without any form of legal sanction. Any suggestion that the media has been “gagged” on this issue is plain wrong.
ANDREW VALLANCE
AIR VICE-MARSHAL, SECRETARY, DEFENCE PRESS AND BROADCASTING ADVISORY COMMITTEE, LONDON SW1
Which rather begs some questions. If the D-notice DPBAC has no legal sanction, what extra-legal sanctions are available to it? Is there an implicit distinction here between “the Government” and government? I’m sure you can think of others.
I have been a bit more tolerant than my Samizdatista comrades about the populist postures adopted by nice Mr Cameron. And being a Conservative Party member, it is me that has to be tolerant, after all. A certain sainted editor has been consistent in urging people not to vote for a long, long time, so a Tory leader really need not care what Perry thinks…
But this has brought me up short. OK, it is speculative bluster about what might be considered by a working party. But how are the ‘liberal values’, that Cameron has made so much of, served by forced labour?
Do not count on it but there is a much belated push on in Westminster to undermine the ID cards legislation that, if successful, would in effect make them voluntary. The Tories and LibDems peers (the later of which have at least been consistent in their opposition to ID cards) are at least going through the motion of blocking this monstrous intrusion by the state but I will believe it when I see it.
So… will David Cameron make the immediate scrapping of ID cards and abolition of the national register a manifesto pledge? If not then clearly it is still very much the party of Michael ‘a touch of the night’ Howard. Even if the move to prevent back-door compulsion succeeds, as long as the infrastructure of surveillance and branding us like cattle remains in place, Britain will remain nothing more than a Police State being held in abeyance.
I have written a couple of times before about the very useful cultural confrontation with intolerant Muslims that occurred when Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten published some less than flattering cartoons featuring the Prophet Mohammed.
Well in case you are curious what those cartoons actually looked like, here they are (sorry, but I do not have a larger version and the original link no longer works):
If Salman Rushdie wrote the ‘Satanic Verses’ and incurred the ire of the moonbat faction of Islam, I guess the Jyllands Posten publication must be the ‘Satanic Cartoons’.
Here is a link that shows the cartoons more clearly so you can see what all the fuss is about.
Britain’s Law Lords, the nearest thing this nation has to the U.S. Supreme Court, has ruled that evidence obtained by torture is inadmissable in a criminal court. I’ll state right off that this surely has to be the right decision for cases including those of terrorism. Torture is a sort of “canary in the mineshaft” issue in a civilisation. The willingness to admit evidence obtained by torture is a no-go zone for me. Even on practical, consequentialist grounds, the use of torture cannot be expected necessarily to give valuable, credible evidence for those trying to prevent terrorist attacks.
The broader point for me is that there is not much point trying to defend civilisation if we use barbaric methods.
The rule of law has had a good day today.
Update: so far 117 responses! By my rough calculation, about 70 percent think torture is a legitimate practice in certain cases. I honestly don’t know whether the comments are representative of Samizdata readers overall. What I do find odd is that so many of you fellows, normally so hostile to abuse of state power and suspicious of things like ID cards, are prepared to let state agents use torture. That cannot be right.
This is not some silly idea of the phoney left. It is a mainstream idea of modern times. It is a new kind of identity and a new kind of freedom. I respect the noble Lords’ views, but it would help if they respected the fact that the Bill and the identity cards represent the future: a new kind of freedom and a new kind of identity.
– Lord Gould of Brookwood (most decidedly New Labour) speaking at yesterday’s Committee of the Whole House on the Identity Cards Bill.
Chilling, eh?
I file this under “Self ownership” because the Bill (do read it) seeks to end all that sort of thing. No more of the messy business of people deciding for themselves who they are and how much to involve the government in their lives.
Samizdatistas David Carr was on the Jeremy Vine Show (BBC Radio Two) this morning, arguing with some Labour member of Parliament who believes that firemen and ambulance drivers should enjoy higher levels of legal protection than the ordinary people in the street.
David puts his views forcefully and you can download and listen to it here (mp3 file).
The leader in this week’s Spectator kicks off with this zinger of a paragraph:
When history comes to make a final judgment on the Blair government — and we can be forgiven for hoping that moment is not too much longer delayed — there is one key statistic by which to assess the Prime Minister’s performance. Since 1997 the Labour government has created no fewer than 700 new criminal offences. This is supposed to be an age of increasing peace and prosperity. Yet the Labour party has been in such a continuous panic about the behaviour and potential behaviour of the British people that it has found 700 new ways in which to proscribe courses of conduct. In case you are wondering how that compares with any previous administration, Labour is creating criminal offences at a rate ten times greater than that of any other government.
No further comment required, surely.
Earlier this year the British government overturned the old “double jeopardy” rule, that previously meant that a person could not be tried twice for the same offence. Today, Reuters reports that the first case of a man to face jurors for a second time for the same alleged crime is to go ahead.
This is another step down a slippery slope, precisely because the argument for ending the rule is so seductive at first glance. It is possible to sympathise with victims or relative of crime victims who see a person whom they think has gotten away with it. Many years ago in the course of my then job, I watched several court cases in my native East Anglia and saw people get away with crimes on technicalities. It was maddening.
But – the double jeopardy rule existed for a reason. If people can be repeatedly tried for the same crime, it creates a potential very bad and unintended consequence: police and the Crown Prosecution Service will become lazy in the preparation of cases. Why bother to get a case presented as powerfully as possible and with as much care if you think that if X gets acquitted, one can always have another go, and another, and another….?
The potential for abuse of power from double jeopardy is at the core of why the rule exists. The law in the United States was based on the English model. Hard cases, however appealing, make bad laws, as they say. This is a bad day for justice in Britain. There have been a lot of them lately.
Want to see a splendid example of verbosity when the simple word arse (or even ass) would have sufficed?
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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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