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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.
“This is the zombie apocalypse”, tweeted Shoshanna Keats Jaskoll. “You need to watch this.”
You do need to watch it. The “zombie apocalypse” is jokey fiction. This is real and not funny. It happened in New York a few days ago.
Here is the same scene from a different angle. The tweet by Drew Pavlou says,
This is genuinely blood-curling.
Hamas murdered 364 Jewish civilians at the Nova music festival – one of the worst terrorist massacres in modern history. And people in New York City actually celebrate the bloodshed with zombie like call-and-response chants defending the massacre
The speaker leading the chants is not the woman with the long hair, as I thought at first, but the woman intermittently visible on the left wearing a Muslim hijab-and-keffiyeh combination over a combat shirt and black jeans. Judging from their clothing, the crowd is a mixture of Muslims and Leftists. Compiled from both video clips, here is my transcript what the leader and the crowd said,
Leader: “Fuck the Nova music festival”
Crowd: “Fuck the Nova music festival”
Leader: “AKA the place”
Crowd: “AKA the place”
Leader: “where Zionists decided to rave”
Crowd: “where Zionists decided to rave”
Leader: “next to a concentration camp”
Crowd: “next to a concentration camp”
Leader: “That’s exactly what this music festival was.”
Crowd: “That’s exactly what this music festival was.”
Leader: “It’s like having a rave”
Crowd: “It’s like having a rave”
Leader: “Right next to the gas chambers”
Crowd: “Right next to the gas chambers”
Leader: “during the holocaust”
Crowd: “during the holocaust”
Pro-Palestinian activists like this style of repeating chants. I think it is because they feel they need not take responsibility for their own words if they are just repeating what their leader said a second ago. Here is another recent example, posted by “KosherCockney”.
The video shows a bunch of supporters of the Palestinians, their faces hidden by keffiyehs or black ski masks, who have evidently just poured into a New York subway carriage. The ordinary travellers stand rigid or sit hunched with their eyes down, trying to avoid being selected.
The leader of the pro-Palestinians says, “Raise your hand if you’re a Zionist.”
Activists: “Raise your hand if you’re a Zionist.”
Leader: “This is your chance to get out.”
Activists: “This is your chance to get out.”
Understandably, none of the travellers raise their hands.
The progressive says with satisfaction, “OK, no Zionists. We’re good.”
I do not think it is an exaggeration to hear in that sentiment an echo of the Nazi term “Judenfrei”.
“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.
Not surprisingly, take-up of smart meters has been far slower than governments have hoped. Nobody wants a device in their home whose only function will be to enable an energy company to charge them five quid for a shower before work. Yet to avoid public pushback, ministers since Miliband have falsely claimed that smart meters will help households ‘reduce bills’ and put the onus on energy retailers to implement the rollout – if they don’t show sufficient effort in enforcement of the Government’s policy, they can then be fined. Thus, the public standing of energy companies has diminished over the duration, fuelling a growing antagonism between customers and retailers, as smart meters and other policies, such as the destruction of coal-fired power stations, have caused power prices to triple since the early 2000s. Energy companies take much of the blame for Westminster’s policy failures.
Don’t misunderstand the point. This is not a defence of energy companies. Of course, companies like National Grid have their greedy eyes on the opportunities created for them by green dirigisme. But only a fool would expect them not to. And one thing that there is no scarcity of is fools in SW1A. Energy companies have been relatively candid, if one cares to look, whereas Energy and Environment Ministers, from Gummer, Yeo, and Huhne, to more ideological zombies such as Miliband and Davey, have promised that climate targets can be hit with no downsides. But whereas the targets are binding in law, the upsides they promise are not. Anyway, rationing is good for you, donchaknow?
– Ben Pile
Once upon a time we had God. God was someone to emulate; someone whose rules one should attempt to live by. Nowadays, in our secular age, we have anti-God a.k.a. Hitler. Hitler is all bad and we should do the precise opposite of what he said and did.
But is that the case? How bad would things be if Hitler were in charge?
It would not be great for freedom of speech. But then right now is not great for freedom of speech. It would not be great for Jews. But then right now is not great for Jews. And they do, at least, have somewhere to go nowadays.
He might want to start a world war. But he would be frustrated because we are already in a world war. But I think we can be pretty sure he would prosecute that war with rather more vigour than our current masters can muster.
Economically speaking, he would be a disaster. He is, after all, a socialist. He would do nothing about the debt, he would reduce trade and be constantly trying to pick winners. So not much change there. A lot would depend on how enthusiastically he embraced Net Zero. Nazis were appalling environmentalists. I suspect, however, that so long as there was a war to fight that would take priority.
I think we can be pretty sure that the small boats crisis would come to an end. The Volksmarine machine-gunning anyone in a small boat would be likely to put a damper on the people-smugglng trade. Similarly, I don’t think he’d have much time for illegal migration. Or legal migration for that matter. Quite the opposite. Fewer people around would mean lower house prices. So, that’s a Hitler win. Unfortunately, Hitler’s socialist economics would mean shortages of all sorts of things. So, you’d have a house but it wouldn’t have any windows.
He might initially have some trouble with activist judges. But given that he will have a majority in Parliament – Nazis are quite good at arranging that sort of thing – and given that via the Bill of Attainder, Parliament can execute anyone they don’t like without giving reasons, I don’t think the judges would prove much of an obstacle.
I don’t think he would have much time for DEI (or DIE as think we ought to start calling it) or the whole equality agenda. At very least that’s good news for the Garrick Club, if it can retain any degree of independence. OK, so the members would have to sing the Horst Wessel Lied every evening but who doesn’t like a good sing song every now and then? Especially, if it’s being led by prominent celebrities.
On that point, it would certainly be amusing to watch as the gobshites at the BBC and elsewhere in the establishment, heaped praise on the new government, claiming that it was their idea all along in their vain attempts to secure a party membership.
Communist indoctrination in universities would come to an end. To be sure it would be replaced by a different form of indoctrination but at least white men would not be being taught to hate themselves.
I don’t think he’d have a lot of time for Islamic terrorism or Islam in general. I think he’d put likely trouble-makers in concentration camps. Most would fall foul of his racial policies.
Art and aesthetics generally would be better. Who wouldn’t enjoy the sight of the Angel of the North being melted down to make 155mm shells? The remake of Love Thy Neighbour would be compulsory viewing. Literally.
The key thing is that by shifting the Overton Window, Hitler would be able to cut the Gordian Knot that makes doing anything at the moment almost impossible. It is amazing what you can achieve when you are prepared to lock up your opponents.
At this point, I should point out that a Hitler government may well turn out to be sub-optimal. But given the path towards an Islamo-communist tyranny we are currently on one would have to say it could be worse.
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
For some reason, this story about Iran and its intention to execute a rap artist has gone “under the radar” of a lot of the news channels, and I only came across it when listening to a podcast from Yaron Brook.
Reuters: Iran’s judiciary confirmed the death sentence of well-known Iranian rapper Toomaj Salehi but added that he is entitled to a sentence reduction, state media reported on Thursday. Salehi’s lawyer Amir Raisian told Sharq newspaper on Wednesday that an Iranian Revolutionary Court had sentenced his client to death for charges linked to Iran’s 2022-2023 unrest. Salehi was arrested in October 2022 after making public statements in support of the nationwide protests, sparked by the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman arrested over wearing an “improper” hijab.
None of the shitheads behaving so badly on the campuses of US universities, or in the streets of other Western capitals, have, I suspect, any regard to the plight of this young person. I haven’t picked up on a lot of condemnation from major Western governments, either. Maybe what we are seeing here is the “soft bigotry of low expectations”: we expect Israel to strictly observe certain “laws of war” in self defence, for example, but the supposition seems to be that Iran, a theocratic hellhole, cannot be expected to behave with regard to respect for individual rights, so being angry is a waste of time.
This is not a quote about life under a Communist or Fascist regime. It is about life in Exeter University in 2018.
I heard about this story from an article by Sanchez Manning in the Mail on Sunday:
A philosophy student overheard through the wall of his room saying ‘veganism is wrong’ and ‘gender fluidity is stupid’ was threatened with expulsion by his university, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
Robert Ivinson said he was disciplined after a student next door in halls of residence at Exeter University heard the comments then complained he had been offensive and ‘transphobic’.
Mr Ivinson, who expressed the views in a phone call to a friend, was hauled before university officials and put on a ‘behavioural contract’ for the rest of his studies.
This video made by the Committee for Academic Freedom shows Robert Ivinson giving his own account of what happened.
Mr Ivinson acknowledges that a legitimate part of the complaint against him was that he was speaking too loudly in the phone call in question so that noise was coming through the wall. However he says that the university hearing refused to separate the issues of him making too much noise and what he said in a private conversation being deemed offensive.
Though Mr Ivinson appears perfectly reasonable, indeed likeable, in his video, I would like to believe that there is something missing from his account – because I do not want to believe that a British university can have fallen so far from what a university is meant to be. The Mail on Sunday article says “Exeter University was approached for comment but did not respond.” I shall be most interested to see what the University’s response turns out to be.
Somehow we have arrived at a place that the West never expected to inhabit. A generation after the collapse of the most powerful totalitarian regime in modern history, the “free world” has apparently lost its grip on the relationship between moral values and political decisions which was once its greatest strength.
The idea had seemed to win out against all the odds: that a government could uphold fundamental first principles of justice, liberty and the authority of the law while still responding realistically to changes in popular opinion and social conditions. This was a truly miraculous understanding of the relationship between morality and politics and, difficult as it might have been to manage, it seemed to deliver the life most people wanted.
It’s hard to believe but we might be witnessing the end of it.
– Janet Daly (£)
Adam Smith, the Scottish intellectual figure most famous for his Wealth of Nations (1776) book, would, I like to think, have been deeply unamused by the abominations coming from the Scottish Parliament in recent times. The Adam Smith Institute, the UK think tank bearing the great doctor’s name, writes the following article. I pray the indulgence of the reader, and ASI, in quoting the article in full. I hope that this appalling Scottish piece of legislation fails, that those who seek to enforce it are humiliated and mocked.
Three and a half years ago, the ASI published a position paper and draft law proposing a “UK Free Speech Act” which would, if enacted, forever remove the regulation of nonviolent political discussion from the remit of law enforcement in the United Kingdom.
The censorship provisions of the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 (the “Hate Crime Act”), entering into force this week, are deeply offensive to freedom of expression, and the only way to stop them is to implicitly repeal these new rules with UK-wide protection for freedom of speech.
The Hate Crime Act contains three provisions in particular – “aggravation of offences by prejudice,” “racially aggravated harassment” and “stirring up hatred” – which are, at least as-described, descriptions of the sort of speech that most members of polite society would rightly oppose as a personal, moral matter.
However, if we look at the substance of the language employed by the new laws and its derivation from similar, viewpoint-neutral English rules – in the case of the stirring-up offence and the “racially aggravated harassment” offences, the “alarm or distress” language from the English Public Order Act 1986, and in the case of the stirring-up offence only, the historic “threatening, abusive, or insulting” language from that same law – we know that these rules have proven capable of extremely overbroad application in England, and these new rules will prove just as terrible, if not more so, if allowed to stand in Scotland.
The position, outlined in a 2020 paper for the ASI, and the applicable English legal rules, remains entirely unchanged. It suffices for present purposes to note that existing English laws, which are nowhere near as intrusive as the new Scottish ones, have already been used in England to, variously:
· threaten a schoolboy with prosecution for nonviolently holding up a sign calling the Church of Scientology a dangerous cult;
· arrest republican protestors in the vicinity of King Charles’ coronation for nonviolent picketing;
· convict a protestor for nonviolently saying David Cameron had “blood on his hands” for cutting disability benefit at an event where the then-PM was speaking;
· convict protestors against the war in Iraq for nonviolently expressing their points of view in front of soldiers of the British Army returning home from that war;
· arrest students for nonviolently saying “woof” to a dog;
· arrest a woman for nonviolently praying silently; and
· arrest a preacher for nonviolently reading from the Bible, in public, verbatim.
The existing rules should have been repealed years ago, but few UK lawyers, being unaccustomed to an American perspective on free speech jurisprudence and thus unable to see that the frog was starting to boil, seemed to notice very much as the English judiciary lost its way after issuing its landmark, pro-free speech decision of Redmond-Bate [1999] EWHC Admin 733. In a few short years, the English courts went from protecting controversial speech to routinely acquiescing to the criminalization of what, pre-1999 at least, would have been entirely lawful, if somewhat controversial, expression (see: Norwood v DPP [2003] EWHC 1564, Manchester Crown Court ex parte McCann [2002] UKHL 39 and Abdul v. DPP [2011] EWHC 247).
The provisions of Article 10 of the European Convention concerning freedom of expression, enshrined in domestic law by the UK Human Rights Act, are little better than window-dressing. They have been of no assistance whatsoever in protecting English speakers of controversial ideas since that law’s enactment; indeed, the Human Rights Act may have harmed the cause of free speech in the country by formalising the broad derogations from that right permitted under Article 10(2) which have been abused, time and again, to stifle discourse.
Put another way, our experience with the English rules, in particular the Public Order Act 1986 but also the Malicious Communications Act 1988, and Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, is that their application, especially in the last 25 years, has been subjective, unpredictable, inconsistent, politically-motivated, sometimes capricious, and thoroughly chilling to speech.
The Scottish law turbocharges all of these problems by abandoning viewpoint-neutrality and expressly targeting “culture war” issues around questions of identity within the four corners of the statute. This is particularly the case when we look at the “aggravation of offences by prejudice” law, which states that age, disability, national or ethnic origin, sexual orientation, and transgender identity are all to be considered when sentencing people in Scotland for criminal offences.
The problem with this, of course, is that merely talking about these issues and causing offence is already capable of constituting a crime under the Public Order Act 1986, both in England and in Scotland, and the Public Order Act was being abused in both England and Scotland to suppress speech even before the Hate Crime Act entered into force.
Only last month transgender activists sought to have J.K. Rowling arrested there after English prosecutors declined to prosecute her for prior “gender critical” remarks. The Hate Crime Act now requires Scottish judges to take into account Rowling’s motivations when judging her speech, which we think would be fairly described as emanating from the identitarian, and therefore definitionally “prejudicial,” ideology known as second-wave feminism, and would require, in a Public Order Act 1986 prosecution for those feminist remarks, for a Scottish judge to consider a sentencing enhancement.
It makes no sense to criminalise these conversations. Indeed it makes sense to expressly legalise them, given that national politics seems, increasingly, to cluster around identity issues and, in a democratic society, require their open discussion in order for these disputes around the proper ordering of society to be satisfactorily resolved.
On the gender theory question, in particular, the debate seems to be between, on one side, critical theory-informed intersectional activists who seek to view all power relationships through the lens of what they call immutable characteristics, and on the other, we see a coalition of classical liberals and religiously-minded traditionalists from the usual suspects like the Catholic Church but also newly aggrieved groups such as traditionalist Muslim parents of schoolchildren. As the fact that the Prime Minister himself felt the need to chime in on these matters this week plainly evidences, identity issues, whether we like it or not, now sit squarely at the centre of contemporary UK political discourse.
We take no view on the merits of either “side” here, because taking a viewpoint does not matter and, in any case, is inadvisable, to the extent anyone here at the Institute plans on ever setting foot in Scotland again. This is because it is now quite unsafe, legally speaking, to take a vigorously-defended public position on these questions in Scotland from any perspective, as long as there is a hearer who is offended enough to file a police report against the hearer’s perceived political enemies, or calculating enough to pretend to be so offended.
To see how the Hate Crime Act potentially cuts in all directions, we need look no further than criminal complaints which have already been made under the new law. See, for example, the fact that Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf, the law’s primary advocate and promoter, was immediately reported by the Indian Council of Scotland to the police for thoughtcrime contained in a speech he himself delivered in Scottish Parliament in 2023 as soon as the Hate Crime Act entered into force. Under the new regime, even the First Minister will need to take care not to express those same thoughts in the same manner again.
There are not many reasonable people who wish to live in a country where the first response to any political disagreement is to call for a speaker’s arrest. Nonviolent speech should never warrant a violent response. Yet, as was proven on day 1 of this new law, we already see that the Scottish law will be used, and is being used, to call down state-sanctioned violence, namely arrests and imprisonment, to suppress broad swathes of viewpoints from all political quarters.
To the few back-benchers who are engaged by this pertinent issue: This is the hill to die on. Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, has said he opposes the Scottish law.
Push the Prime Minister to back up that opposition with decisive action. Permanently abolish political censorship enforced at gunpoint. Enact the UK Free Speech Act.
So there you have it from the ASI. I endorse every word.
So too there is nothing in the New Testament that makes behaviour worse if it is directed against black people or gay people. Rather what is radically new about Christianity is that it treats all people as being essentially the same.
I can find nothing in Plato or Aristotle that says that a deed is worse if it is done against this type of person or that type of person, nor do I find this sort of idea in Augustine, Aquinas, Kant or Mill.
Ever single system of religious, moral or legal thinking that I can think of treats humanity as being morally equal. From this we get “all men are created equal” in the United States Declaration of Independence, which is one of the cornerstones of western thought.
So not only has the Scottish government destroyed the objectivity of the law, so too it has destroyed the idea that we are all equal before the law.
– Effie Deans
… here it is on BitChute, just in case they take the final step and delete it 😉
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