My apologies for writing very little for a while. I have ideas but not much time. And I am a slow writer. By way of explanation if not excuse:
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March 18th, 2007 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
 A Conservative front bench spokesman has been sacked for racially insensitive remarks, leading one former Conservative cabinet minister (Michael Portillo) to note that while people complain about the professionalisation of politics, this is what happens when you bring in people with life-experience outside politics: they do things no professional would. A true professional can get away with more than dodgy anecdote. He can make a direct appeal to public xenophobia, and hang a major strand of government policy on it. And do it in such a way that no-one calls him out on it:
Of course he is a socialist, so he could not be a racist, could he? But make no mistake about it, this is a dog-whistle to the political base of the Labour Party among the white working class. It is not the legality of immigrants that makes their competition unwelcome. It is the fact of competition. Those who compete most effectively are legal migrants from the Commonwealth or Eastern Europe who have rights to the services as well as work ethic and education. Resentment does not check your papers: ‘illegal immigration’ is code for ‘immigrants’ tout court. Note John Reid’s language: “foreigners”. So when your landlord checks your ID and registers where you live for the authorities, in fear of a £20,000 fine; when Kylie and Madonna, Rupert Murdoch’s children, Sheikh Maktoum, Shilpa Shetty and all have to be fingerprinted for their ID cards* to make sure they are not “stealing our services” as well as adding to the colour of our national life; when you have to prove your residential status to see a doctor, who probably has to have an ID Card marked “Foreigner” if he is one of the tens of thousands of overseas doctors working in Britain (and threatening the minimum wage); when you.have to prove your own identity constantly for the official record even in private transactions and it would be so much easier to ‘volunteer’ to join the National Identity Register… then remember it is all the fault of filthy foreigners coming here, not in the least the exploitation of popular racist sentiment for political advantage. The Home Office has to watch you, just in case you might be a foreigner. * Or not, since I can not see them hanging around to put up with it. All the world’s interesting people, who live here for the combination of privacy and open society, might well go elsewhere. March 9th, 2007 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
And while we are on the subject of the Antichrist, is there not something very sign-of-the-apocalypse about this?
‘Leaked’, my balls! This is being floated in order to measure public reaction. A muted response and all the right boxes will be ticked. A mass cry of protest and the plans will be shuffled off to another in-tray to await re-floating later in the year or early next year (preferably under cover of some news-consuming natural disaster or terrorist attack). These people believe that time is on their side and maybe it is. Our masters are not only deeply and irredeemably malignant but they are also intoxicated with the heady fumes of power and verging on the insane. The question is, what do we do about it? March 4th, 2007 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
I read the headline of John Lloyd’s article in the FT Magazine this week, and I read it again, and again. Every time it seemed to make less sense than before:
Regardless of what it is or is not right for the government to do, state intrusion means something is no longer a matter of private morality, or morality at all. It is certainly not private, once the state is involved. And regulation displaces morality. The capacity for choice is required for morals to play a role. Reading the article was even more perplexing. To the extent Lloyd’s piece is about the Catholic/gay-adoption argument, it is as tedious as most of the vacuous discussion on the question. What engaged and enraged me were his premises. Mr Lloyd in this discussion treats the state as a kind of super person, possessed of its own opinions and moral sense, and that hectoring people who do not conform to those pseudo-desires is legitimate.
False dichotomy and all, this is the authentic voice of the New Labour branch of civic republicanism: ‘citizenship’, which is to say personhood, defined by duty to the state-collective. He notes entirely accurately that:
The square brackets there stand for the omission of two and three-quarter paragraphs, so apologists for the New Labour point of view may object that the last clause refers only to removing some disadvantages from homosexuals. But I am not being unfair. Ensuring that society as a whole observes the new order is the key to the project. Despite there being other theories of the welfare state that I and other Samizdatistas might reject but that are less repugnant to human autonomy, we are now offered a Hobson’s choice: be treated as drone in the sense of a worthless idler – or become a drone in the Borg sense, actually not a fertilising drone but a sterile ergate, emptied of all capacity for moral choice. What is the eGovernmental equivalent of soft hands, marking the unproductive drones out for hounding to destruction of their dronish identity? Inadequate contribution. Failure to comply with whatever compliance is required. You will not will incorrectly. You will comply. February 11th, 2007 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Register reports:
I had to read that story several times to acclimatise myself to the culture shock. If you do not live in Britain compare another Register story:
Now (if you do not live in Britain) count your blessings. January 18th, 2007 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
I 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?] January 16th, 2007 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
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? January 14th, 2007 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Labour has contrived to do something very difficult indeed… they have made the ‘Conservative’ party look good. By announcing that failure to produce your ID card will make a person liable for a £1000 (about $1,850) fine if, for example, they cannot find and return the ID card of a recently dead relative, they have allowed David Davies, the Tory shadow home secretary to very reasonably point out that the ID card scheme…
…which puts me in agreement with the ‘Conservative’ party and that does not happen very often. December 24th, 2006 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
This is a weird story. From The Mail on Sunday, 2nd December 2006: Estate agents secretly selling home details to tax inspectors Snooping: tax officers can now find out exactly what your home is worth. Government officials have been given access to a vast database of properties, revealing their sale prices and detailed floorplans, under a deal with the website Rightmove.co.uk. The site, run by four of Britain’s biggest estate agents, contains information on 800,000 properties – and the contract, which runs until 2008, also gives inspectors access to old records. The Valuation Office Agency – the department of HM Revenue & Customs that allocates a council tax band to every home in England and Wales – will be able to use the data to find out about improvements such as double-glazing and conservatories that may increase tax bills. What’s weird is this: Property sales in Britain now involve a direct return to the Revenue as part of the new Stamp Duty Land Tax regime. And the Lands Registry has a definitive record of all such transactions, now online, which ought to be accessible to the Revenue. Unless the transaction is registered, you haven’t bought the property. And a house’s recent, actual, sale price is going to be pretty conclusive evidence of its valuation. So why pay a website whose coverage can be at best partial? Either HMRC is wholly incompetent (possible). Or they think transactions are being under-declared in the hot market (difficult in most cases, when two sets of solicitors and bankers are involved). Or the Mail on Sunday is missing the point and HMRC is not targeting sellers but renters and landlords. Or this is a publicity exercise, and HMRC is engaging in its favourite hobby: public intimidation of the public. December 6th, 2006 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is a reflexive tic among libertarian types to describe Britain’s NHS as ‘Stalinist’, in reference to its vast monolithic structure and institutional preference for central state planning. Now some indications that the parallels run a little deeper. The Department of Health’s first reaction to the campaign for people to opt out of the “Spine” medical records database, that I mentioned a couple of days ago, is not to attack it as ‘irresponsible’ as I was expecting. It is to demand that doctors report any patients who try to the authorities. “Let us deal with them,” it appears to be saying. The Guardian reported yesterday:
You will recall that such suggested letters were personal communications with doctors, asking them personally to do something: to code patients records so that they would not be uploaded to the Spine. That’s something that can only (as I understand it) be done locally. “Consideration” by the Secretary of State defeats it. It also seems to me that it would be a fundamental breach of confidentiality, and if the letter were posted, possibly a criminal offence contrary to the Postal Services Act 2000, for the letter to be forwarded to the Secretary of State without patient consent. But neither law nor morals may stand in the way of the great plan. … BBC Radio 4 had another example this evening. Its File on 4 programme considered endemic MRSA and other antibiotic resistant bacteria in NHS hospitals. It interviewed a couple of epidemiological specialists who said with the current control regime slow progress was to be expected and the government target of 50% reduction in MRSA infections by 2008 is unrealistic. Andy Burnham MP, usually characterised as one of the brightest and best of the Primrose Hill group of New Labour heirs presumptive, was asked to comment. He said the complacency and defeatism of the clinical scientists was unacceptable: there was a target and the Health Service would meet it. December 3rd, 2006 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
… Gave a very good account of themselves at NO2ID’s public meeting on “The Database State” at Imperial College on Wednesday night. Sir Malcolm Rifkind, Professor Ross Anderson, and Henry Porter tore pieces out of, respectively, the ID card scheme, Connecting for Health, and generalised surveillance in the UK. People keep telling me how good the chairman was as well [blush]. Meanwhile, continuing one of the main themes of the meeting, another wise man, Phil Booth (formerly of the infinite ideas machine, but now too busy being my boss at NO2ID to post, sends an email that I thought I’d share with you all.
You would all be on my Christmas card list, dear readers, if I had any idea who you are (and did not have to sign 2,000 already in my various capacities). You know what to do. December 1st, 2006 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
I found it via engadget and The Raw Feed, but I might have found it in the Guardian. The Raw Feed reported it this way:
I do not see this as a problem. But what if the day ever comes when only government employees may use such gadgets? If present trends continue that may become the rule, especially when you consider that in a few short years time, we will be talking about devices that are pretty much invisible. Next step, having to have a license. November 22nd, 2006 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
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