Bishop Hill Jul 12, 2008 Blogs My posting about gun control the other day has been nominated as post of the week by the Watcher's Council, a group of American blogs.
It's nice to be appreciated. Thanks guys!
Bishop Hill Jul 10, 2008 Civil liberties An interesting post on CiF from Frank Fisher, with a really excellent comments thread. Look out for the contributions from commenter WheatFromChaff.
Bishop Hill Jul 10, 2008 Civil liberties Polling day at last. The weather looks OK. As one DD supporter notes, "Whatever happens, history will record David Davis as the man who took a stand for British freedom".
Following hot on the heels of yesterday's polls showing support for Davis comes the Politics Home tracker which shows that his campaign has made no difference at all. Conservative Home asks "Was it worth it?" and gets taken to task for undermining the Davis campaign by Donal Blaney.
Longrider notes the introduction of curfews in Cornwall. Parents whose children are found out after the government prescribed hour will be punished.
Natalie Rothschild, writing at Spiked, wonders if we'd still be facing surveillance even if there was no terror threat. Sweden, which Mr bin Laden says will not be targeted by Al Qaeda has just instituted some of the most draconian anti-terror legislation in Europe.
Bob Geldof in the Telegraph calls for a big turnout in H&H.
The Guardian apologised for misleading its readers. Davis didn't say that the LibDems had 'funked' the H&H election. Funny that the apology was issued well after the polls were open, and too late for today's edition of the paper.
Our Kingdom thinks the debate has been too much about trivia and not enough about the trade off between liberty and security.
Bishop Hill Jul 9, 2008 Civil liberties An opinion poll on behalf of the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust found little support for 42 days among the general public, especially when it was pointed out to them that 6 weeks was the kind of jail sentence you get for assault. Meanwhile, a poll for politics.co.uk finds significant support for Davis's actions.
Commenters are noting these polls and are concluding that Davis is winning the arguments. (see for example Iain Dale, Benedict White, Tim Roll-Pickering, Donal Blaney, The Guardian). The authoritative Polling Report however reckons that the levels of support shown by the polls are only because the questioners told the subjects about the context of Britain's legal traditions.
4 David Davis 4 Freedom is running a poll too.
The Guardian reckons Davis is making progress in his campaign.
Johann Hari in the Independent reckons it's all very complicated. I think he means he's right behind 42 days.
Spy Blog discusses the exposure by newspapers of a fantasist who claimed he was a former SAS man. Measures in the new Counter-terrorism Bill would make this kind of reporting illegal in future.
Tom Griffin reports on a meeting between Bob Marshall-Andrews and Labour's chief whip. It doesn't inspire much hope that the government actually mean well.
Stephen Tall says that DD is a bounder and a cad or some such. Davis has been quoted as saying that Labour and the LibDems "funked it" by not putting up a candidate in H&H. The LDs of course didn't put up a candidate because he asked them not to. Did he really say it though?
Bishop Hill Jul 9, 2008 Politicians DK has been harassing an MP about her ignorance of some legislation she was voting on. To her credit, Labour's Kerry McCarthy has at least responded to DK's criticisms, although I think she's on pretty shaky ground, having admitted that she didn't understand the VAT on jaffa cakes issue despite having researchers paid to find out this kind of thing for her.
One thing she said caught my attention though:
Yes, I'll get my massively overpaid and underworked team of researchers and caseworkers to spend the rest of the week checking obscure bits of tax legislation, with instructions not to stop until they find out exactly which categories Hula Hoops, Wotsits and Quavers fall into. And let's not forget Twiglets.
For all those who constantly raise the expenditure on staff and office costs - would you rather I didn't employ anyone, didn't follow up on casework, didn't have anyone answer the phones or open the door to the hundreds of people who contact me asking me for help or advice each year?
This instantly made me think of Philip Hollobone, the Conservative MP who manages to deal with his workload without any staff at all. How does he do it?, I wondered.
So I thought I'd write and ask him. A couple of minutes ago, I fired off a short email. Outlook recorded the time as 8:56 am. I've now had a response and Outlook has recorded a time of delivery as 8:55 am! This seems, erm, very efficient!
That was a preliminary "Are you a consituent?" kind of thing, and I've now replied, and had a further response (timed at 9:06am) from Mr Hollobone. He doesn't want to go into the details unfortunately, but it's remarkable that he was able to deal with my, admittedly rather trivial, correspondence in a total of ten minutes.
What he did say was this:
I would certainly say that MPs which employ a large number of staff should be able to offer a near faultless service, with quick and comprehensive responses to enquiries.
And given that his own staff-free service seems remarkably good anyway, it's a hard statement to argue with.
Bishop Hill Jul 8, 2008 Education There's a very good posting at LibDem Voice by someone called Christopher Leslie (wasn't he on Blue Peter once?).
Both Clegg and Cameron are right to support free schools: they offer a great chance to increase civil society, to provide better education in Britain, a greater level of plurality, and parents and children having increased choice and control in their education.
By declaring that the Conservatives will not allow firms to make a profit from the free school system, however, Cameron is failing to fully utilise the opportunities free schools could offer, and which can only be accessed by allowing profit-making into the system. This might be the tokenistic suspicion of any institution making profit from state money; a refusal to take that idea to a public he fears won’t accept it; or that he’d rather see free schools be the sole domain of NGOs - which reveals a scary amount of paternalism. Whichever is the case, Clegg should not make the same mistake.
So while the Tories are saying no to profit-making, here we have a LibDem saying that the profit motive is what will make our schools work properly. Funny times we're living in, funny times.
One of the concerns that people have over free schools is that too many of them will be run by religious extremists who will set about filling the children's heads with all sorts of dangerous nonsense (and that's different to state schools how?) My solution to this is to only allow schools that are profit-making - privatise the lot of them. When the money-making impulse comes up against the religious one, it's Mammon that will win. Bye-bye religious extremists.
Bishop Hill Jul 8, 2008 Civil liberties Some kinds of satnav systems are reported to be retaining data about their users' movements. This information is being accessed by the police.
Davis says he will never forgive Michael Martin, the speaker of the House of Commons, for refusing to allow him to make a resignation statement.
Geoffrey Robertson QC describes attempts by Jack Straw to reinstate the admissability of anonymous evidence in trials as "a perjurers charter".
Tom Griffin considers a little-noticed section of the Terrorism Bill - the proposal to remove coroners from some inquests. This will effectively allow the state to hide behind a wall of secrecy if one of its officers kills someone illegally.
The FT blog points out that the timing of the 42 days debate in the Lords is perfect for DD's campaign. People who know about the issues, like ex-MI5 head Pauline Neville-JonesEliza Manningham-Butler, are queuing up to condemn the proposals as unworkable.
Bishop Hill Jul 6, 2008 A debate on civil liberties was held. DD and the Graun's Henry Porter spoke for the forces of light. The dark side was represented by Denis MacShane and David Aaronovitch. Audio here.
Basher finally got to debate 42 days with a government minister - Tony McNulty on Sky. Video here.
Ian Jack wonders who is going to come second in the by-election. Most likely the Greens he says.
Bob Geldof wrote a piece attacking the erosion of civil liberties. He's now part of the Davis campaign.
Paul Kingsnorth wrote the latest piece on Comment is Free's series on liberty and what it means to the great and good. Kingsnorth says it's all down to the social contract, which he hasn't signed and so he shouldn't be bound by it.
Spy Blog notes that the Home Secretary has stated that there are no legal restrictions on photography in public places. That's the good news. The bad news is that she says that police are free to harass photographers anyway. Rule of law? Never heard of it.
Human Rights Watch says the 42 days bill will undermine counterterrorism efforts.
A Belfast blogger was cleared of intimidation in a victory for free speech.
Bishop Hill Jul 5, 2008 Climate: Cuttings Welcome to the seventeenth edition of Climate Cuttings, in which I round up recent developments on the climate science front, this week with the added bonus of pictures.
Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama published a simplified version of a paper he has submitted for publication. He says that he has looked at clouds from both sides now and that people have been making faulty assumptions about them. He says that previous estimates of the sensitivity of climate to CO2 are therefore wrong. If correct, then the effect of releasing CO2 into the atmosphere is much less than had been thought.
Lucia examined James Hansen's 1988 forecasts (which kicked off the whole global warming fiasco) and found that reality has been a lot cooler than the NASA man's doom-laden prognostications. Read the comments too for an interesting discussion of why climate scientists use anomalies (variation from some mean) rather than actual temperatures - if they didn't, people would see that the scatter between the different forecasts is enormous.
Anthony Watts has a fascinating post about an odd rise in temperature at the climate station in Tucumari, New Mexico. An apparently good station had a sudden rise in temperatures around the year 2000. More dodgy adjustments by the scientists? No - it appears to be down to land use, and more specifically, irrigation, something that Roger Pielke Snr has been saying for years. How much of the alleged global warming is actually due to the increasing use of irrigation?
A panel of Nobel prize winners was split on whether man is causing dangerous climate change. Three out of seven revealed themselves as sceptics. Luboš Motl has the roundup.
Roger Pielke Snr wrote about the different definitions of climate and weather and concludes that climate prediction is necessarily more difficult than weather prediction because the weather system is a subset of the climate system. And as they can't forecast weather more than a couple of days ahead.....
Eleven of fourteen expert teams predicted that this summer's Arctic melt would be more severe than last year's. Climate Audit says there's no sign of it happening yet, and if it's going to happen, it should happen in the first half of July. The Register published an excellent roundup of recent shenanigans in the science and media reporting of Arctic warming.
Meanwhile, Andrew Revkin had the exclusive on a forthcoming paper in Science which seems to backpedal on the idea that the Greenland icesheet is in imminent danger of collapse.
Bjorn Lomborg made the call for technological solutions rather than economic suicide.
June temperature records were published. It's still chilly, with last month being the third coldest this century.
And that's it. Please feel free to drop me any interesting links.
Bishop Hill Jul 4, 2008 Education In my day, English Lit exams were strictly about dead white males. O' Level consisted of Shakespeare, Chaucer and GBS, and very dull it was too. Still, it gave you backbone, as well as teaching you the valuable life skill of being able to sleep with your eyes open while maintaining an expression of rapt attention. Not a bit like today's dumbed down stuff, where some of the authors are actually not men, and what is worse, some of them are still alive too! The impudence of it!
Still, say one thing for it, if you got stuck with the meaning of part of the Miller's Tale, you couldn't drop a question to Geoffrey Chaucer on his blog to find out exactly what he meant.
Bishop Hill Jul 4, 2008 Civil liberties Will Hutton said that liberty belonged to both left and right.
Davis himself has an article up at the Spectator arguing that the government's security strategy is the worst of all worlds - "draconian, expensive and ineffective".
And finally, someone from the government is going to debate Davis in public. Creepy Tony McNulty will face off against the forces of light on Sky news on Sunday.
Tim Collins, he of the eve of battle speech in Iraq, writes a piece about fighting terrorism without giving up civil liberty.
The campaign
The Greens say that David Davis won't debate with them.
" Just give us the bloody civil liberties!" Bob Geldof is going to Hull to speak on behalf of Davis.
The BBC are campaigning for Labour - "move along, nothing to see here".
Bishop Hill Jul 3, 2008 Energy Latest news from the Guardian:
Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75% — far more than previously estimated — according to a confidential World Bank report obtained by the Guardian. The damning unpublished assessment is based on the most detailed analysis of the crisis so far, carried out by an internationally-respected economist at global financial body.
And as we all know, Friends of the Earth lobbied the government hard to get the biofuels obligation put in place. Environmentalism kills!
Bishop Hill Jul 3, 2008 Civil liberties This is a question that has been bouncing round in my head, probably for years. Maybe I've been visiting too many libertarian blogs. But then again, maybe there's something in it. We'll see.
A couple of things prompted me to write all this down. Firstly a line in Jan Morris's recent article about civil liberties on Comment is Free and secondly an article on gun control by an American campaigner called Dave Kopel.
Morris first.
Even the middle classes, once the very backbone of robust individualism, are not immune to the contagion. They all think twice about expressing their views in case they say something that is politically incorrect.
She might as well have been speaking about me, because the idea that gun control might be behind our loss of civil liberties is deeply, deeply politically incorrect. It's an idea which is likely to get one labelled as a "nutter". A couple of years ago, I couldn't have imagined holding this kind of belief. But perhaps things are changing, now the civil liberties debate is in full flow, and maybe it's time to try the idea out for size. We'll see.
Morris goes on the predict our eventual decline into submissiveness and eventually into totalitarianism.
A few more generations of nagging and surveillance and we shall have forgotten what true freedom is. Young people will have foregone the excitements of risk, academics will temper all thought with caution, and the great public will accept without demur all restrictions and requirements of the state. Ours will be a people moulded to docility, perfect fodder for ideologues.
And you can see it happening all around you as the surveillance state grows, and freedoms that we once took for granted are legislated into the history books. It really is time to make a stand.
And what about Dave Kopel? Kopel is a libertarian writer and researcher; he was formerly professor of law at New York University and the [Update: an assistant] attorney general for the state of Colorado. Clearly then, he is a man of some intellectual stature. However he is also a prominent supporter of the right of the American public to carry firearms and his stand on this issue would surely lead a majority of people in this country to categorise him as a "gun-nut". I'm sure I am doing myself no favours by mentioning his ideas on this side of the Atlantic, but as I said, perhaps people might now be ready to consider a different view. We'll see.
Some weeks back, I came across an article Kopel co-wrote with another lawyer called All The Way Down The Slippery Slope: Gun prohibition in England and some lessons for civil liberties in America (link). Like Jan Morris, Kopel also sees Britain ceasing to care about civil liberties - he describes how a people can lose what he calls their "rights-conciousness". He then tries to explain this in terms of the history of gun control in the UK.
After tracing the history of gun ownership from its nineteenth century apogee to full prohibition today, Kopel sets out the effects of the ban on civil liberties in Part IX of the essay. Although his view is that gun prohibition in Britain was not behind the loss of civil liberty, he doesn think that it played an important part:
[A]ll civil liberties in Great Britain have suffered a perilous decline from their previous heights. The nation that once had the best civil liberties record in Western Europe now has one of the worst. The evisceration of the right to arms has not, of course, been the primary cause of the decline, although, as this Essay will discuss later, it has played a not inconsiderable role. More generally, the decline of all British civil liberties appears to stem from some of the same conditions that have afflicted the British right to arms.
This section of the essay is worth reading just to feel the sense of incomprehension that Kopel has as he reels off the list of restrictions on their liberty that the British have allowed their rulers to inflict on them.
While Kopel makes a strong case against what is currently being called the salami slicing of civil liberties, his thesis that gun control hasn't been a primary cause is starting to seem to me to be wrong, at least for some of the civil liberties problems we face.
Take CCTV. Our city streets are, by common consent, violent, dirty unpleasant places for the most part. Only young strong men are likely to feel safe in many parts of the country, and then only if they are in a gang. As Justin Webb's recent article on violence in America made clear, American streets just aren't like this.
Why is it then that so many Americans - and foreigners who come here - feel that the place is so, well, safe?
A British man I met in Colorado recently told me he used to live in Kent but he moved to the American state of New Jersey and will not go home because it is, as he put it, "a gentler environment for bringing the kids up."
This is New Jersey. Home of the Sopranos.
Brits arriving in New York, hoping to avoid being slaughtered on day one of their shopping mission to Manhattan are, by day two, beginning to wonder what all the fuss was about. By day three they have had had the scales lifted from their eyes.
I have met incredulous British tourists who have been shocked to the core by the peacefulness of the place, the lack of the violent undercurrent so ubiquitous in British cities, even British market towns.
"It seems so nice here," they quaver.
Well, it is! [...]
Ten or 20 years ago, it was a different story, but things have changed.
And this is Manhattan.
Wait till you get to London Texas, or Glasgow Montana, or Oxford Mississippi or Virgin Utah, for that matter, where every household is required by local ordinance to possess a gun.
Folks will have guns in all of these places and if you break into their homes they will probably kill you.
They will occasionally kill each other in anger or by mistake, but you never feel as unsafe as you can feel in south London.
It is a paradox. Along with the guns there is a tranquillity and civility about American life of which most British people can only dream.
Webb is clearly surprised by this, but he deserves praise for telling it as it is. To Americans it's probably less of a shock. 
The science fiction writer Robert A Heinlein was pointing out the connection between civility and arms as far back as 1942, when one of his characters opined that "an armed society is a polite society". And when you think about it, the paradox that Webb sees is only on the surface. As soon as you realise that noone in their right mind would get aggressive with or be rude to someone carrying a gun, it all becomes painfully obvious.
So in America, an armed people has retained old-fashioned manners and old-fashioned civil liberties. This is the common law approach to public order that we used to have here. Civil society was responsible for law and order, and every member of the public was required (that's required, not advised) to intervene if they saw a crime being committed. Perhaps partly because of that requirement people were able to carry arms for their defence. 
An article from the Telegraph from a few years back tells the story of a group of Latvian anarchists who attempted a wages robbery in Tottenham. Their intended victims fought back and they were forced to flee, pursued across London by a posse of doughty citizens, both armed and unarmed, who eventually apprehended them. (The police had lost the key to their gun cupboard, and were unable to assist).
This is how it used to be. However it simply doesn't happen like this any more. In the twentieth century we took an entirely different approach to firearms, with the freedom to go armed being steadily eroded by means of successive small legislative and administrative steps - what is now called "salami slicing". First there was licencing and registration, and then tighter and tighter restrictions on who could have a gun, followed by tighter and tighter restrictions on what guns they could have, and how many, and how they had to store them. Eventually the populace was entirely disarmed, and now society can only fall back on the police for its defence.
The first thing to notice about this process is that it has reduced the number of law enforcement officers on the streets to a tiny fraction of what it was. In the nineteenth century, as we've seen, every adult was responsible for upholding the law and preventing crime. Now we are, quite correctly, advised to leave all this to the police - obviously they are now the only ones with the wherewithal to come out alive from a brush with the criminal classes.
With such a devastating loss of policing manpower, there is now a fleetingly small chance of a law enforcement officer being on hand when a crime is committed. This in turn has meant that the former state of affairs, where the law could intervene as a crime was committed or soon afterwards, has become impossible to pursue with conviction any longer. There is simply not the manpower to do so. With a horrible inevitability, the state has had to try to convince criminals not to commit crimes in ways other than presenting them with a risk of being caught in the act.
The traditional way of doing this was of course to make the punishments severe enough to discourage people, but with much of the middle classes persuaded that long prison sentences were illiberal, this approach too has suffered. Capital and corporal punishment have likewise fallen by the wayside, and because of the same erroneous presumption that such punishments were irreconcilable with liberalism.
As a result, the state has had to resort to methods used in places where the state doesn't have the confidence of the people. It has taken on all the powers of surveillance that we would associate with a police state - CCTV, DNA database, warrantless searches, fingerprinting children, ID cards, in a desperate bid to convince criminals that the risk of being caught is so high as to make the effort pointless. But with prison sentences handed out so sparingly, and so regularly cut short by parole boards, the criminal classes are simply not convinced that the risks outweigh the rewards. They know where the CCTV cameras are and the crime wave simply shifts to somewhere less overlooked.
Looked at this way the root cause of the wave of authoritarian legislation which threatens to swamp us is not authoritarianism so much as "woolly liberalism". We won't punish criminals adequately, so we get more criminals. We won't allow the law-abiding to uphold the law, so our streets get swamped with CCTV. Witnesses can't defend themselves guns, so we have to allow anonymous evidence in court. Women can't defend themselves from rapists, so they shouldn't go out alone. The opinionated can't defend themselves from retribution, so better to legislate them into silence.
We find ourselves between the horns of a dilemma. The idea of rearming the populace is greeted by most "right-thinking" members of the middle classes as evidence of a kind of madness, an idea to get you cast out from polite society. "We don't want to end up like America", they will say, as they check the locks on their doors and windows, and test the burglar alarm one more time.
But the alternative is to continue our increasingly precipitous slide down the slippery slope that ends up with the UK resembling North Korea.
America or North Korea. You decide.
Bishop Hill Jul 3, 2008 Health Much excitement over at the Centre Right blog, where Simon Chapman says that the EU's decision to allow patients to seek medical treatment whereever they like and to reclaim their costs from the NHS is really just the Tories' old Patient Passport policy dressed up in new clothes.
He's probably right, but he's missing one rather important point. The NHS currently manages demand by means of rationing - which is to say they only provide as many services as they can afford to deliver. As use of the Patient Passport becomes widespread, the NHS will lose this ability to manage demand. If the NHS can't afford to deliver, patients will go overseas and reclaim their costs, so the NHS will end up paying anyway. Since demand for free healthcare is essentially limitless (everyone wanting to live forever), the whole system will go into meltdown.
So how then can we manage demand if patients can seek treatment whereever they like?
Roll on Singapore style healthcare accounts.
Bishop Hill Jul 3, 2008 Blogs OK so we've had the fake George Bush memo exposure, and the odd factual inaccuracy spotted, but this is quite a good one: a blogger in the US has found a factual error in a ruling of the Supreme Court. The justices' mistake is so important as to invalidate the whole ruling.
What do they do now, I wonder?
