The Last Ditch

Il est interdit d'interdire

Link: Olympic torch extinguished amid Paris protests - Telegraph.

It seems the spirit of 1968 lives on and that French protesters remain both more stylish and more effective than their British counterparts. Despite the protective and (disgracefully) protected presence of hireling thugs of foreign powers in both London and Paris, our French cousins managed to extinguish the Olympic flame not once, but twice.

I do love to see the pomposity of authority punctured. Within hours of their head announcing - with an implied sneer at London - that his officers would guard the flame "like a visiting Head of State", the Paris police saw it snuffed out on their watch. You have to smile. I wish our Head of State no harm, but I do hope they guard our Head of Government to the same standard next time he is in Paris.

Olympic torch relay nearly abandoned

Link: Olympic torch relay nearly abandoned - Telegraph.

Listening to the Today programme this morning I was struck forcibly by how far the debate on civil liberties has moved on. The presenter noted that those welcoming the Olympic torch needed no permission to be there while those protesting against China's policies needed police consent. However, the police officer being interviewed saw no problem. He said those cheering the torch were "celebrating" like football supporters and should not be under restriction. The protesters however, were properly subject to control. "We are just enforcing the law," he said, which used to be a valid point before politicised senior officers campaigned actively for greater police powers.

The debate was entirely on the ground defined by the current government. No-one questioned whether police should have the power to determine who should protest. No-one argued that it was their job to intervene only if those expressing public views actually threatened life, limb or property. No-one suggested that policing judgements based on intention - essentially on the thoughts of those involved - might be inherently wrong. No-one queried the right of police officers to determine that T-shirts bearing particular slogans are a threat to public order.

The whole concept of  "public order" offences empowers those who offer a violent response when provoked. If we who find Che Guevara T-shirts offensive were to assault anyone we found wearing one, then it would be a public order offence to go out with that murderer's face on your chest. As we - quite rightly - don't offer violence, it is not. Yet yesterday those wearing t-shirts with anti-Chinese slogans were ordered to remove them or cover them up.

For some time we classical liberals have been trying to make the point that repeatedly splitting the difference between liberty and oppression does not constitute a valid political debate. Sadly, that has been the essence of our public dialogue for some time. Now, like true soviets, we debate only the propriety of policing judgements, rather than question the state's right to make them.

Rachel speaks sooth

From China I can't get to her blog but Rachel from North London has both told it like it is and fed enough of it to RSS for me to read it. I want to send you there and I want you, if you please, to do exactly as she directs. Not because she was a victim of terrorist violence, but because she is right.

All credit to her for keeping her wits and speaking sooth when she could have succumbed to victimhood and self-pity instead though. For that (and for recognising the worth of unsung hero Shami Chakrabati) she deserves much praise.

So (corrected, with thanks to those who pointed out it was broken) here's the link

Secret Inquests

Link: Window on the World: INQUEST condemnation.

Step by step we move toward a police state. Why would a government want an inquest into a suspicious death to be held in secret using government-nominated lawyers? Might it be, perhaps, that the suspicion in question falls on itself? These are powers no honest government should even consider asking for.

Beware the sanitisation of public debate

Link: Taking Liberties - Simon Clark - Home - Beware the sanitisation of public debate.

Claire Fox, director of the Institute of Ideas, makes some very good points about free speech. Do read the whole thing. And while you are over there, why not sign up for a feed from the new "Taking Liberties" blog, which promises to be an important new voice from a broadly libertarian standpoint.

Alice through the ideological looking-glass

Link: I've changed my mind on inheritance tax - Telegraph.

Dear God, this is in a "right wing newspaper?"

My family has never believed in inherited wealth. The idea of having a son who was a trustafarian, or a daughter who was an It girl, would horrify them. For generations they have turned out scientists, doctors, lawyers, teachers, vicars, civil servants and museum curators.

Money has never been their primary motive. When one great great uncle did finally make some money as chairman of the Ashanti goldfields in South Africa, he didn't share it among his nieces and nephews. On his death, he gave it all to help pay off the national debt (Gordon Brown would appreciate that), and handed his two Canalettos to the King.

Giving the net proceeds of taxed income to cretins to squander does not seem to me noble. Had he no family he would like to make independent, perhaps Alice's great great uncle could have founded a charitable foundation? What a tosser. As for giving his art to an aristocrat sitting on the untaxed accumulated wealth of a thousand years, what can one say? She may admire her relative. I think he was unhinged.

Inheritance is one of the few issues where Right and Left - Irwin Stelzer and Will Hutton - agree. Both believe that individuals and society do best when everyone has the same financial start in life.

What tosh. Inherited wealth provides a counterbalance to the overmighty state. If you embark on your career with nothing, as I did, you are fairly unlikely to find leisure in your lifetime to oppose the full-time gangsters of government, who have nothing better to do than impede wealth-creation and squander 45% or more of such wealth as is created despite them. When I expressed my youthful doubts about the morality of inherited wealth to Sir Keith Joseph, he said "it's an irrelevance. 'clogs to clogs in three generations.'" He was right.

In fairness, Alice gets the point to some extent. After remarking that she is "beginning to side" with Nigella Lawson's husband who will leave his wealth to his own child, she notes (somewhat grudgingly):

Nor is inherited wealth necessarily damaging to society.

Where is the heir to Thatcher to point out the feebleness of that thought? Doesn't "society" (which seems in practice to mean "me and people like me who want something for nothing from others") have to justify the extreme measure of confiscating people's already-heavily-taxed life savings? Why does a columnist in a "Conservative" newspaper start from the premise that the retention by the owners' families of their assets must be somehow justified to "society?" She goes on to note that:

The majority of British philanthropy comes from second-, third- or fourth-generation wealth. Britain would become very sterile if it were composed only of the self-made man or woman or the recipients of state support.

More than that, Alice. Britain would not merely be more "sterile" but much poorer. If the fruits of your lifetime's work are to be expropriated on your death, you will squander them. Is that prudent? Is that likely to promote the public good? Measures to prevent you squandering them (the inevitable consequence of your actions, in the twisted logic of social morality) will simply ensure that you never trouble to accumulate them in the first place. You will adopt the economic logic of the Communist era, expressed by workers in Poland by the saying "Standing up or lying down, it's still six zloties an hour."

Why are the British so focussed on the question of what to do with wealth? Most of us are quite poor. Surely the issue of how best to generate wealth is far more important? The research referenced in this pompous article (our Alice incredulously reports) shows that people want to pass on their money to their children. That desire motivates them to work, save and create. Frankly that should be enough. But our Alice, like so many others in our country is motivated more by envy than anything else. As witness her concluding paragraph:

If meritocrats such as Nigella are so keen on giving everyone the same start, it is the glaring inequality in schooling that they should be tackling rather than inheritance. It is the private education that Nigella's children receive that will give them the greatest advantage in life rather than any treasure chest they might be handed at 18.

Rousing stuff, comrade. I agree that inequality in British education is a scandal. However I do not blame those who pay from net income for their own children's education, thus sparing the state a burden (after having already paid through taxation for the education of many others). I blame the ideological cripples, past and present, who have trashed Britain's system of state education. Nigella Lawson is a fool, but to blame her for inequality of opportunity because she paid to educate her kids is like blaming the buyers of Mercedes-Benzes for the poor quality of Ladas. No bonfire of the Benzes will make Ladas run more smoothly.

Phones tapped at the rate of 1,000 a day

Link: Phones tapped at the rate of 1,000 a day - Telegraph.

Every time I try to convince myself that my concerns about the state of Britain are simply those that middle-aged men have had since Shakespeare first coined the phrase "going to the dogs," a story like this appears. 1,000 applications a day is the merest tip of the iceberg of course as Ministers have other powers which do not require applications to be made or communications intercepts to be reported. The security services probably do not trouble with such formalities either.

All the necessary apparatus is in place for Britain to be a police state. The police are politicised. State employees are inured to abuse of citizens' rights. There is a climate of fear. And the public is looking the other way. This story should have led to rioting on the streets. The politicians who engineered the situation should be in fear for their personal safety. But the story does not rate the front pages and the people lack the energy even for a collective shrug of the shoulders.

When I tell friends and colleagues that I no longer plan to retire to England because I fear it will be a totalitarian state by then, there is a look in their eyes which suggests they think I am barmy. There is now so much evidence that if my fears come to pass, they will look back and say they were barmy not to have shared them.

Leaked Home Office memo on ID.

Link: Shades of Grey » Voluntary my Arse!.

All praise to Ian and his cohorts for hosting a leaked memo from the Home Office, which the excellent No2ID campaign fears may be suppressed by injunction. As I am safely in Russia (and my blog is hosted in the United States) I am happy to host another copy (below). Good luck enforcing an injunction, chaps.

Download nis_options_analysis_outcome.pdf

'Terror law plans to be unveiled'

Link: 'Terror law plans to be unveiled'.

For once the craven, useless BBC tells the truth, albeit inadvertently. These are indeed "terror laws." We should all be more afraid of them than we are of the hapless, if fanatical, incompetents of Al Qaeda who far more frequently blow themselves up and set themselves on fire than do us any serious harm. I travel by air almost every week and would willingly accept whatever slight risks might be involved reverting to pre-9/11 airport security. I know no frequent traveller who would not.

There are some elements of a free society which are far more important than democracy. Indeed democracy is no guarantee of a free society at all. You can democratically elect tyrants (e.g. Nazi Germany, present-day Iran, future Iraq and Pakistan). You can equally enjoy freedom without democracy, if your rulers are constrained by the rule of law. I would rather deal with past constitutional monarchies in England, than the unlimited quasi-republic of today. The intrusions into my life of state power would have been far less frequent and I really don't have any more influence over the choice of my rulers now than I would have had then. Rather, "legitimised" by their democratic mandate, my "democratic rulers" have ventured farther into my private life than any monarch would have safely dared.

The principal value of democracy is that it should - if functioning correctly - be a constraint on government power. Once democracy leads government to venture where it has no place, it ceases to be legitimate. Once it leads to 4.1 million idlers enslaving their fellow men by voting en bloc to have the omnipotent state steal one half of others' working lives to provide them with a sinecure income, it is no longer democracy, but a criminal conspiracy.

For me, habeas corpus is more important than the right to vote. The protection of my private property against theft or government confiscation is more important than the right to vote. My right to bear arms to protect my family from British criminals carrying an estimated 4 million firearms is more important than the right to vote.

So even if a majority of my fellow citizens believes, and expresses that belief through its democratic representatives, that the state should be able to hold me without trial and without charge for 42 days, I deny the state's right to do so. I am innocent until proven guilty.  The police should assemble their evidence before they arrest me, not while I am in custody. Even if it were not stupidly impractical (if I am guilty, all evidence will be destroyed as soon as my associates realise I have been arrested) it would not justify depriving me of my freedom without due process of law.

A free society does not involve mutual subjugation. History shows the majority to have been wrong more often than not on most points of importance, but that's not my point. Even if the majority was always right, it does not give it the right to impose its view. We are all in a minority on some point or another, and we are all unfree unless we can insist (to any point short of concrete harm to others) upon that point. A democracy is a matter of selecting a government to do the proper, limited tasks of government, not of choosing a tyrant.

The present government long since overstepped all limits of political decency. It seems to think itself our mother, our father and the sole arbiter of our welfare. Nor is HM Opposition doing its job properly.  I am disgusted by the tone of the debate on this subject. No party speaks from principle. All parties are making electoral judgments as to voters' perceived views on a non-existent trade-off between safety and freedom. They have no right to make those judgments.

That the majority of my countrymen may be idiots who think "it will not happen to me;" that they may be racists who think these powers will only be used (as the record suggests, by the way, may be true) against darker-skinned citizens of a particular faith; that they may be gutless ****s who would give up their freedoms rather than stand up for them like men, should not be my problem.

The continued demolition of our freedoms and our real human rights (as opposed to the ersatz versions promoted by our oppressors) will not reduce terrorism. It will legitimise and therefore increase it. I am a patriotic, law-abiding citizen, but I am not far from believing there to be  justification for the violent overthrow of the British State. Jefferson was right. There is no stable system of government which can secure liberty indefinitely. The present British Constitution is effete, decadent, worn-out and spent. As Jefferson said;

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. it is its natural food.

With a heavy heart, fellow-Britons, I suggest it will soon be time for some forestry.

Everyone to be fitted with zips?

Link: The Daily Mash - EVERYONE TO BE FITTED WITH A ZIP.

I have so busy coughing and spluttering in apoplectic indignation at the proposal to nationalise English corpses that I have not found time to blog about it. Now that the ever-brilliant Daily Mash has published the linked article, to do so would be redundant.

Why do I say "English", not "British" corpses? Because state body-snatching is a devolved function apparently, so Welsh and Scots corpses will not be rifled without their prior consent. I don't doubt that harvested English organs will find their way into their better-funded hospitals though, so they can continue to live off us even after we die.

I would not fancy my chances in an NHS hospital if my kidney would save the life of a Cabinet Minister or a member of his family. Mind you, like many a better expert than myself, I would not fancy my chances in an NHS hospital anyway.

English people may not typically be religious, but they clearly do not regard the remains of their dear departed family members as mere trash. If they did, they would not spend £1.3 billion a year on lovingly disposing of them. Our Prime Minister, whose remains I would cheerfully recycle as a dance floor were it not for my concern for his family's feelings, takes a more utilitarian view of the Anglo-Saxon stiff.

Now that Labour has identified your loved ones body parts as material for recycling how long before they start charging you to take them away? How long after that before they want to micro-chip the moribund, to make sure their bits are lawfully disposed of? It is on days like this that I wish I were a swear-blogger.