The Last Ditch

There is nothing Conservative about this Government

Anthony Peto QC: A very un-British Bill – my response to Robert Buckland MP.

Conservatives are supposed to defend ancient rights. In their hands the great principles of English Law such as "innocent until proven guilty" and the rules of Natural Justice should be much safer than with progressives who openly seek to sweep away ancient rights to build a new order.

Yet it was John Major who began the present un-conservative trend when he abolished the right to silence - a key element of the presumption of innocence. If a man is accused, it is for the prosecutors to make the case against him. Nothing should properly be inferred from his refusal to co-operate. So it used to be, but no more.

And now it's Ken Clarke who is sweeping into the trash can of history the principle of open justice. He is seeking to introduce secret courts in circumstances where "national security" is at stake. What does "national security" mean in such a context? Anthony Petro QC tells us in the linked article that evidence about a confession having been extracted by torture

...was successfully suppressed by the government on the grounds that it would damage national security...

Not exactly the most encouraging example.

Clarke tells us that we need secret courts to protect our intelligence sharing relationships with other countries. David Anderson QC, the independent reviewer of Terrorist Legislation, has branded that a "scare tactic".

Former DPP Lord Maconald has said that 

Mr Clarke’s comments look like a smokescreen for plans which are aimed not at keeping the British people safe, but at sparing the embarrassment of the security services when they get mixed up in wrongdoing. Instead of promoting this thoroughly un-British legislation, which is designed to make our courts secret as though we were living in Europe in the 1930s, Mr Clarke and his colleagues in government should concentrate on holding the security agencies to account when they break the law.

Lest you think that these are just the voices of lily-livered sympathisers with our enemies, consider the words of the former top legal advisor to the British Army in Iraq, Colonel Nicholas Mercer

The justice and security bill has one principal aim and that is to cover up UK complicity in rendition and torture. The bill is an affront to the open justice on which this country rightly prides itself and, above all, it is an affront to human dignity.

 
The fact that some of those individuals who are complicit in rendition and torture can not only assist in the drafting of the bill but also vote to cover their tracks is a constitutional scandal.

The bill attacks the sacred principle of the Rule of Law that "be you never so high, the law is above you." It removes a citizen's right to bring a civil action against high officials for violations of their personal rights. As Anthony Peto QC says, 

These rights are so fundamental that for centuries they have been called the rules of “natural justice”.  This brand of justice has “Made in England” stamped all over it. It is our proudest and most enduring national product. This Bill would tarnish the brand for ever.

Could there conceivably be anything less "Conservative"?

Why can't our security services, like those in other countries, give evidence in court? If that threatens the secrecy of their activities, they can give evidence from behind a screen and via a voice changer, provided the judge is duly satisfied of their status. Then their evidence could be tested, they could be cross examined and justice could be done. Yet the British State prefers to screen them from scrutiny. It prefers to suppress evidence of their wrong-doing. It is entirely out of its box; a self-regarding beast operating in its own, not the national, interest. 

I have never been more sure that the greatest enemy of my liberty is the British State. Nor more sadly aware that this does not vary according to the politicians in charge. There could be no better evidence than this odious bill in which the state seeks to protects its own at the expense of those who are supposed to own it. It rather suggests it thinks it owns us.

Doctors out of their boxes

Velvet Glove, Iron Fist: The dictatorship of public health.

I am not quite sure how I missed the linked article back in September but I am glad I found it via Chris Snowdon's review of the year at his excellent blog, Velvet Glove, Iron Fist. The authoritarians of the medical establishment are in many ways our best hope for liberty. This may seem paradoxical, but bear with me.

The greater the State becomes, the more authoritarians it attracts. Wormtongue types are drawn, as so many of them already have been, by the chance to subvert legitimate authority to their own ends while living on the state's plunder. The more they succeed, the more arrogant they become. They see no legitimate boundaries to their control of their fellow men. Our corrupt political class will offer no defence against these parasites unless and until popular resistance threatens their own power. We cannot count on their principles, if indeed they have any. We can rely entirely, however, on their self-interest.

 Where, however, is this resistance to come from? State education, state broadcasting and the generally emasculating effect of the Welfare State have much weakened the yeoman spirit that made England, for most of its history, delightfully ungovernable. The unthinking majority of voters will never rebel - until it's far too late - against threats to freedom of thought. Attacks on their lifestyle however are another matter. Cromwell fell not because the Monarchy won a rematch of its debate with republicanism, but because, having weakened his appeal by forbidding dancing, aleing and Christmas, his hypocrisy in having his son succeed him (just like a King) tipped the scales of popular feeling.

The state can beat up as many anti-statist intellectuals as it likes and no-one will protest. Let it beat up the smokers, drinkers and pie-fans however and popular resistance can be expected - even from those usually too idle to move further than to the nearest Greggs. Doctors with God complexes may therefore be our best hope. Perhaps as we enter the final phase of end-of-year excess, we should be campaigning for votes to be proportionate to BMI, units of alcohol per week or fags per day?

Leery about Leveson

It's too soon to react properly to the Leveson Report, as has been graphically illustrated by the meanderings of people trying to do so on TV in the past hour. Two thousand pages of judicial prose are hard to digest. He has played a canny political game. By declaring he will take no further part in the debate to come he has cleverly ensured his reputation for posterity. Any bad things that happen in his wake will be the fault of others. As he said, the ball is back in the politicians' court.

As he was only asked to review the dying, if not yet quite dead, duck of the mainstream media, the main effect of his efforts will be to widen the already hilarious gap between what newspapers publish and what is available on the internet. That will weaken the credibility of the print media, and its demise will be accelerated in consequence. That worries me. The idea that the only professional news-gatherers in the world of journalism will be those in the broadcast media is a dire prospect. Newsnight, anyone?

The BBC is already the most influential news medium in Britain. If its undue influence is further bolstered, then let's at least drop the myth of its impartiality. Let it be set free to be openly the Pravda of British broadcasting and let Murdoch launch Fox News UK. Let a hundred schools of thought contend and let the public be the judge.

The idea that a press Code should be enforced by a regulator independent of both the industry and the state sounds great, but OfCom - the body Leveson suggests should "validate" the regulatory regime is a state agency staffed by well-paid and self-interested bureaucrats. People will angle for such jobs and obtaining the favour of politicians will be far more relevant to them than that of editors. Corruption will creep in, as it must in all bodies funded by force. The "great and the good" will dominate. If OfCom has any scope to "de-validate" the regulator or veto individual appointments to its review panel, directly or indirectly, then it will pretty soon be pulling strings behind the scenes. In a very British way, of course - with a nod and a wink over a G&T.

My only immediate criticism of the specifics of Leveson's report is that I am alarmed by his idea of what might be a meaningful incentive to newspaper owners to sign up for "voluntary" regulation. The only suggestion I have heard from him in this respect is for aggravated or punitive damages in libel cases where the relevant publication had not submitted to the Code. That's a frighteningly subtle suggestion. After all, most of us will be outside the Code. I heard someone from the Huffington Post (I think) on Sky News express total confidence that blogging is safe from all this, because internet publication is, or can be, extra-territorial (like this blog, hosted in the US and protected by the First Amendment). But our defamation law has extra-territorial reach, as witness those men of power who visit our courts specifically to use it to silence their critics. Guido Fawkes' blog is offshore but Paul Staines can be sued for libel in England so long as it can be read here. Foreign courts (including those in the US) will enforce any judgements against him under international treaties, without question.

If aggravated damages for libel by "outlaw" publications become the norm, can anyone seriously imagine that the social media will long remain aloof? Guido's readership, after all, is already far greater than that of all the political journals in Britain combined. It's likely to grow far more as the chilling effect of the new code takes effect. Indeed, I suspect he will be the only real winner from Leveson as fear of big fines further emblandens the mainstream press and as politicians obliged to disclose their every contact with journalists turn to him (as some already do) to publish the leaks and smears that are the tools of their revolting trade.

How politicians act on Leveson's recommendations, given that he has trodden such a delicate political line, is now far more important than the detail of his report. We must be alert to their games. Leveson hasn't killed free speech in Britain, but that's not to say they won't use his magnum opus as cover to do so.

Just what is the point of the Conservative Party?

I know many of my liberty-minded friends have little time for Liberty (fka the National Council for Civil Liberties). At times in its history it has been little better than a leftist front falsely associating highly illiberal people with the idea of freedom. Sometimes, however, it gets it right and though sometimes I have to hold my nose to be so, I am a member.

Yesterday I received a mailing from Shami Chakrabarti asking for money (they always ask for money) and urging me to write to my MP about the Communications Data Bill. 

The Government plans to instruct private companies to collect and store our "communications data". That means records of emails, web activity, texts and phone calls - for the entire population. The reasons for storing the data are very broadly defined. Access could be granted to hundreds of public bodies for reasons that have nothing to do with fighting crime.

This amounts to mass, blanket surveillance of the population - outsourced to the private sector. 

Yes, the Snooper's Charter - seen off during the last Labour government - is back. Compare and contrast the government's stance on our privacy with its approach to its own - as witness the dishonestly-named Justice and Security Bill which will create secret trials in the land of habeas corpus and Magna Carta.

I now have to ask myself what exactly is the point of the Conservative Party? It, and its coalition partners, promised they would roll back Labour's assault on civil liberty. These latest proposals suggest otherwise.

All organisations funded by force are immoral - Part 3: The US Government

 

And of course, if you substitute the Labour Party for the Democratic Party, the same is true of the Welfare State in Britain.

h/t Catallaxy files

The Tyranny of Utility: Behavioral Social Science and the Rise of Paternalism

The Tyranny of Utility: Behavioral Social Science and the Rise of Paternalism | The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty.

There are some interesting thoughts in this review of a book about the threat to liberty from behavioural social science. Are we liberty- and market-minded folk too hung up on the practical utility of our ideas in economic terms? After all the left doesn't care about efficiency. When I pointed out to a leftist professor recently that, while markets were having a tough time in the regulated West, they had brought 100 million out of poverty in the (economically) unregulated East, he answered in a flash, "yes but are those richer Asians really happier?"

A lot of us libertarians are unhappy at the prospect of being bossed, even if we could imagine rulers so wise as to give us better lives than we could ourselves. Freedom is a good for us in itself, just as equality is a good for the left even if it means that on average everyone is poorer. Sometimes although we complain about leftists with a tendency to domination it seems the real problem is with their rank and file supporters being submissives who actually want to be bound, gagged and abused. Telling such people how much better off they would be if they took responsibility for their own lives is perhaps unlikely to convince?

Maybe, as our arguments are not being evaluated by sceptics on utilitarian grounds we should make more emotional appeals? I realise that's an argument for closing this dry-as-dust blog, but what do you think?

Protect your Freedom – Please retweet and respond!

Protect your Freedom – Please retweet and respond! — Anna Raccoon.

I refer my gentle readers to Anna's linked post today. It is important. The state is seeking extended powers to interfere in personal relationships between citizens with legal capacity to make their own decisions. Telling social workers to "get lost" will result, if such powers are granted, in actions incompatible with a free society. Telling self-selected statist busybodies to "get lost" is often, of course, the first duty of a free citizen.

Most responses to the Department of Health's consultation will be, in the natural course of things, from the aforementioned self-selected statist busybodies - either those serving the state or their political cheerleaders.

Please therefore consider following the links in Anna's post or this one to obtain the consultation questions and then file your own responses by email or post. I have reproduced my own responses (submitted in my real name) below but please respond in your own words. You might like to consider not picking up the civil servants' poor use of English, for example, as I failed to resist doing. Your objective is to persuade, after all. Good luck with that.

Question 1: Do you agree that there is a gap in the proposed legislative framework for people with mental capacity, which this power would address?

No

Question 2: What are your views on the proposal that there should be a new power of entry, enabling the local authority to speak to someone with mental capacity who they think could be at risk of abuse and neglect, if a third party prevents them from doing so?

I strenuously object to the creation of any such power. In fact I would welcome the abolition of most existing such powers.

Question 3 (for care and support professionals working in adult safeguarding): How many times in the last 12 months, have you been aware of a situation where, had this power existed, it would have been appropriate to use it? What were the circumstances?

N/A

Question 4: What safeguards would we need to ensure local authorities use such a power effectively and appropriately?

Any such safeguards would merely raise the question "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" There is no appropriate use of such a power. A person with legal capacity should never have his or her choices second-guessed by the state. This is a dangerous, immoral (perhaps even amoral) proposal incapable of being ameliorated by safeguards.

For example, would the following provide adequate safeguards?

• A warrant would be applied for from a Circuit Judge (e.g. a nominated judge of the Court of Protection).

This would only help if the legislation granting the powers was clear (as it could not by definition be) that the state has no right to interfere in the life choices of those with legal capacity. Since the intent of the proposed legislation is precisely to create such a right, the judge would have no ability to restrict such action and the warrant would merely use the judiciary as camouflage, further soiling its reputation for independence in the process.

• The local authority would present the court with evidence of the need for the warrant.

See above.

• The local authority would ensure that there is a process by which the occupiers of the premises understand that they can complain about the way in which a power has been used. The local authority would have to verbally inform the affected persons how they might access that process

See above. There is no point in a right to complain about such a loss of liberty, if it is backed by law. One wonders, by the way, how they would inform anyone other than "verbally". Draw them a picture, perhaps?

Question 5: Do you have any other comments?

The British State is too powerful. After decades of growth to the point where it now consumes the majority of national resources and is strangling to economic death the nation it purports to serve, it is unsurprising that it attracts employees who have no sympathy with personal liberty. In my view, no-one who respects our right to live life as we please would wish to be part of such an aggressive apparatus. Once the state is staffed by substantial numbers of such people, proposals like these are to be expected and it is the job of government, as the people's representative, to oppose not promote them.

No further extension of the state's already-excessive power can possibly be justified. Any government worthy of the names "conservative" or "liberal" or "democrat" would be slashing its powers in order to set the British people free not listening to calls to authorise meddling in the lives of those with legal capacity.

How to deal with Twits

Let Twitter twits stew in their own juice | John Kampfner | Comment is free | The Guardian.

John Kampfner's linked article refers to trolls as "the green ink brigade." This made me smile. Before there was a 'net people used to communicate (sometimes maliciously) by analogue means. There were letters (like emails), postcards (like Facebook messages) and telegrams (like tweets). If you wanted to "blog", you could have pamphlets printed or write a letter to a newspaper. It was all terribly interactive in its way, but the interaction was tediously slow.

I had a letter published in The Times when I was 19 and every bit as handsome (If not quite as ripped) as a certain Olympic diver in the news. I was surprised over the following days to receive letters from mad people all over the world who had read it. In those simpler times, the papers printed enough of your address to let people write to you. Not all the letters I received were in green ink, but enough were to suggest a correlation between that colour and a lunatic desire to tell strangers you hate them. Hence "the green ink brigade."

I did not consider myself "harassed". I did not call the police. Had I done so, they would have told me to get lost. Had I persisted, they would have prosecuted me for wasting their time. Nor did I go to a copy shop and make copies to send to everyone in my (analogue) address book with a covering note whingeing about how unfair they were. Had I done so, I would not have expected my friends, family and other contacts to send them in turn to their friends. Still less would I have expected them to write to the mad people concerned in abusive terms.

I simply took the letters and (after giggling over them with my girlfriend) threw them in an analogue of the digital bin on my desktop. I was so little traumatised that I have never thought about them again until today.

Ah, but you say, those were olden times and everything is different now. You are right. Not only have electronic means made both fair and foul communications faster and easier, they have vastly enhanced the analogue trash can. Not only can I delete hate mail with a keystroke, I can also block the author from writing to me again. So useful and effective are these defensive technologies that I often wish they existed in meatspace. How wonderful to reach out and right click the pub bore to mute him.

My post yesterday provoked a debate on a reader's Facebook page, where I was dismissed as a witless reactionary for defending free speech. My antagonist applauded the arrest of said idiot and thought hate speech and threats of violence (however implausible from a pathetic, inarticulate little boy) should have criminal repercussions. Even as she agonised over what should, and should not, be permitted she failed to understand how her difficulties illustrated the futility of the exercise. How much simpler to insist on the absolute freedom of everyone to express their ideas, however obnoxious and ridiculous, and then get on with one's life.

Mr Daley received his abuse in a direct tweet to him. Only the abusive fool's foolish followers could read it at that point. He could have blocked the fool in less time than it took him to retweet him. He could then have continued to luxuriate in the warm bath of twittery idolatry that his looks and athletic talent have earned. Instead he chose to go to the cheap, easy and instant modern equivalent of the copy shop and post office so that his outraged idolaters could become an angry and abusive electronic mob and the Dorset Police could have their fifteen minutes of ill-deserved fame.

Christian blogger Cranmer is taking heat over his controversial suggestion that Daley should have turned the other cheek. He didn't even need to be so noble. Had he published his telephone number or address in the old days, he would have received fan mail/calls and hate mail/crank calls in about the same proportions (if not the same numbers, because of the cost of paper, envelopes, stamps and phone calls) as he received gooey/abusive tweets. The analogue versions would have been far harder to deal with. By setting up a Twitter account he similarly invited communications, but at least he doesn't have to hire secretaries to sift through the mail bags or security guards to bar access to his home. He can just block the idiots and bask in the fanmail.

So why all the stupid laws? Why the waste of precious police time? Why the unnecessary expenditure on Crown Prosecutors who - to the precise extent they think about such matters - are plainly surplus to requirements? Why are we wasting the time of learned judges? And why oh why did Parliament think it clever to make "malicious communication" a crime punishable by six months imprisonment or a £5,000 fine? Have none of these people anything useful to do? If not, great. Let them get off the public payroll and spare the overburdened taxpayers all these costs.

Oh, and MP's? Before you get your coats, please repeal this stupid law.

That way, madness lies

It is such a cliché to tell a policeman engaged on trivia that he should be catching burglars that - though we all think it - only the least educated of us now say it out loud. Yet what else, really, is one to say to the Dorset Police? They have arrested a young Twit known as @Rileyy_69 for his unpleasant tweet to an Olympic diver. Is Dorset really so peaceful a shire that this is an honest-to-God arrestable offence?

I have been repeatedly burgled. I lost a ring and my first good watch from my parent's home (they lost much more). Mrs Paine and I had all our wedding gifts stolen from our first home. Even in the home that has not (yet) been robbed, I pay insurance premiums that make me a victim of crime. Not one person has ever been arrested in connection with tangible harms done to me. Yet a foolish boy makes a stupid remark on Twitter and the full majesty of the law descends.

That mere words are now criminal in the land that pioneered the rule of law and once prided itself on the forthrightness of its yeomen is beyond me. Yet my fellow citizens seem - for the most part - unconcerned or even approving. Theirs is the ethic of the afternoon TV show, where sentiment rules the head and fists fly for imagined slights. More athletes have been dropped from their teams for racist tweets than for blood doping and otherwise sensible people say "Of course these ejections are justified..." It's a running and jumping contest, boys, not a vicar's tea party. Who cares what sports people think? That they think at all is a pleasant surprise.

Goodness knows I am in no mood to defend someone who taunts a young chap who lost his father to cancer. Yet his nasty words were just that. Words. They were the dark but logical corollary of the sentimentality that held him out as honouring his late father by his athletic achievements. Have he and his coaches not motivated him by the fear of doing precisely what @Rileyy_69 nastily accused him of; letting his late father down?

I do hope his name is not published. This young fool's life should not be rendered even more unpromising because he said something nasty and silly. As a boy of his age I was exhorting everyone who would listen to rise up and slaughter the bourgeoisie in the name of "the masses." This, to the approval of my leftist teachers who thought my murderousness showed my heart to be in the right place. And to the amusement of everyone else, because my words were of no consequence. Have we lost that common sense?

@Rileyy_69 is no worse than I was. I venture to guess, gentle reader, that you were foolish yourself in your youth and have said things that would have sounded as bad on Twitter as they looked on the wall of the bike shed. These new technologies allow us to disseminate our foolishness more widely than before, but that's really no reason to take it more seriously.

Drivers to have 10-year health checks

Drivers to have 10-year health checks under driver licence reforms - Telegraph.

I have absolutely no desire to survive my driving licence. Life without driving a car is unthinkable to me. It's bad enough that the government claims the right to decide who may operate this particular type of machine at all, but imagine the scope this will give the nanny statists given their constant redefinition of the word "health".

Do you drink more than their made-up safe limit per week? Do you smoke? Are you (like most of the England rugby team) in excess of their stupid BMI ratio? Do you believe the British state your greatest foe? You are clearly unhealthy in body, mind or both.

Dear government, please go and do something useful. Like finding ways to stop bankrupting our nation.