Some new blogs

My recent spleen venting over the Home Education review has won me some kind words and links from various HE bloggers, so here, returning the compliment, are some links back.

What shall we do today?

Renegade parent

Head-desk

Blogging can throw together some fairly unlikely bedfellows, but with the coming of the civil liberties crisis (if that isn't too strong a phrase) I think things are likely to get stranger still. I've been having an interesting conversation over at Head-desk in particular, and I think it's fair to say that the site's owner is quite surprised to find herself engaging with someone quite as wild-eyed as me. It's rather cool really.

I've not yet had a guest posting on civil liberties from a star of kinky sex films, as has Heresiarch, but I'm sure there will be plenty of surprises to come before we're done. By the way, if you haven't read about civil liberties and kinky sex, I urge you to do so.

Getting children to sign up for the database state

The government is lying.

That's not news, of course. Babies puke, teenagers mope, and politicians tell you any old cack they think they can get away with.

So what are they up to this time? According to a report by ARCH (Action on Rights for Children), the government has been telling local authorities that children from "around the age of 12" can usually give their consent to the sharing of personal information across government departments. Some local authorities have responded by telling their staff that from the age of 12, it is lawful for children to disclose information about themselves, their parents and their families without their parents' knowledge.

It turns out however that this advice is not actually a reflection of the law. It's more like wishful thinking, both on the part of politicians and civil servants. There is one minor upside to all this deceit, and that is that individual civil servants could apparently be held personally responsible if they follow up on the government's advice and start sharing data with only the children's consent. It's rare to find anyone in the public sector being held responsible for anything (it's called "democratic accountability") and a few penpushers being flung in the clink would be sure to encourager les autres.

Is it just me, or is this just a bit uncomfortably reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution, with children encouraged to inform on their parents by an overweening state?

Banning the Dutch prime minister

LabourHome is reporting that if an election were to be held in the Netherlands today, Geert Wilders' Freedom Party would probably emerge as the largest in the Dutch parliament.

Which would give Jacqui Smith the amusing problem of having to ban the Dutch prime minister from these shores.

Something going down

What's happening to the press? Philip Pullman's article on civil liberties in the Times has disappeared into the ether, as apparently has one in the Daily Mail reporting that the BBC's Robert Peston was acting as a government stooge who was being fed stories by Downing Street that might distract attention from the size of the bale-out. The Mail story is still extant. The Pullman article though now seems to have disappeared from the Google cache too.

Here it is, just in case:

Are such things done on Albion’s shore?

The image of this nation that haunts me most powerfully is that of the sleeping giant Albion in William Blake’s prophetic books. Sleep, profound and inveterate slumber: that is the condition of Britain today.

We do not know what is happening to us. In the world outside, great events take place, great figures move and act, great matters unfold, and this nation of Albion murmurs and stirs while malevolent voices whisper in the darkness - the voices of the new laws that are silently strangling the old freedoms the nation still dreams it enjoys.

We are so fast asleep that we don’t know who we are any more. Are we English? Scottish? Welsh? British? More than one of them? One but not another? Are we a Christian nation - after all we have an Established Church - or are we something post-Christian? Are we a secular state? Are we a multifaith state? Are we anything we can all agree on and feel proud of?

The new laws whisper:

You don’t know who you are

You’re mistaken about yourself

We know better than you do what you consist of, what labels apply to you, which facts about you are important and which are worthless

We do not believe you can be trusted to know these things, so we shall know them for you

And if we take against you, we shall remove from your possession the only proof we shall allow to be recognised

The sleeping nation dreams it has the freedom to speak its mind. It fantasises about making tyrants cringe with the bluff bold vigour of its ancient right to express its opinions in the street. This is what the new laws say about that:

Expressing an opinion is a dangerous activity

Whatever your opinions are, we don’t want to hear them

So if you threaten us or our friends with your opinions we shall treat you like the rabble you are

And we do not want to hear you arguing about it

So hold your tongue and forget about protesting

What we want from you is acquiescence

The nation dreams it is a democratic state where the laws were made by freely elected representatives who were answerable to the people. It used to be such a nation once, it dreams, so it must be that nation still. It is a sweet dream.

You are not to be trusted with laws

So we shall put ourselves out of your reach

We shall put ourselves beyond your amendment or abolition

You do not need to argue about any changes we make, or to debate them, or to send your representatives to vote against them

You do not need to hold us to account

You think you will get what you want from an inquiry?

Who do you think you are?

What sort of fools do you think we are?

The nation’s dreams are troubled, sometimes; dim rumours reach our sleeping ears, rumours that all is not well in the administration of justice; but an ancient spell murmurs through our somnolence, and we remember that the courts are bound to seek the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and we turn over and sleep soundly again.

And the new laws whisper:

We do not want to hear you talking about truth

Truth is a friend of yours, not a friend of ours

We have a better friend called hearsay, who is a witness we can always rely on

We do not want to hear you talking about innocence

Innocent means guilty of things not yet done

We do not want to hear you talking about the right to silence

You need to be told what silence means: it means guilt

We do not want to hear you talking about justice

Justice is whatever we want to do to you

And nothing else

Are we conscious of being watched, as we sleep? Are we aware of an ever-open eye at the corner of every street, of a watching presence in the very keyboards we type our messages on? The new laws don’t mind if we are. They don’t think we care about it.

We want to watch you day and night

We think you are abject enough to feel safe when we watch you

We can see you have lost all sense of what is proper to a free people

We can see you have abandoned modesty

Some of our friends have seen to that

They have arranged for you to find modesty contemptible

In a thousand ways they have led you to think that whoever does not want to be watched must have something shameful to hide

We want you to feel that solitude is frightening and unnatural

We want you to feel that being watched is the natural state of things

One of the pleasant fantasies that consoles us in our sleep is that we are a sovereign nation, and safe within our borders. This is what the new laws say about that:

We know who our friends are

And when our friends want to have words with one of you

We shall make it easy for them to take you away to a country where you will learn that you have more fingernails than you need

It will be no use bleating that you know of no offence you have committed under British law

It is for us to know what your offence is

Angering our friends is an offence

It is inconceivable to me that a waking nation in the full consciousness of its freedom would have allowed its government to pass such laws as the Protection from Harassment Act (1997), the Crime and Disorder Act (1998), the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000), the Terrorism Act (2000), the Criminal Justice and Police Act (2001), the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act (2001), the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Extension Act (2002), the Criminal Justice Act (2003), the Extradition Act (2003), the Anti-Social Behaviour Act (2003), the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act (2004), the Civil Contingencies Act (2004), the Prevention of Terrorism Act (2005), the Inquiries Act (2005), the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (2005), not to mention a host of pending legislation such as the Identity Cards Bill, the Coroners and Justice Bill, and the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill.

Inconceivable.

And those laws say:

Sleep, you stinking cowards

Sweating as you dream of rights and freedoms

Freedom is too hard for you

We shall decide what freedom is

Sleep, you vermin

Sleep, you scum

On having a revolution

It's often said that the British people no longer care enough about being free to have a revolution. Some do, of course, but the naysayers respond that those who care are too few and too cowed.

I thought of this, when I read the back of a book that was lying on my bookshelves waiting to be read. It was David McCullough's "John Adams", the biography of the second American president which formed the basis of the recent TV series (if you missed it, it was brilliant). Here's the quote:

There was no American nation, no army at the start, no sweeping popular support for rebellion, nor much promise of success. No rebelling people had ever broken free from the grip of colonial empire, and those we call patriots were also celarly traitors to the King.

Maybe we're not so badly positioned after all.

Too depressing to read?

I'm going to be adding this to my shopping list at Amazon. Not that I need to be any more depressed about the state of the country, but he may have some ideas on what to do about it.

Labour's plans for the family

Sometimes it's peaceful:

In the brave new world of [Every Child Matters] parents are almost superfluous and completely interchangeable. They do feature on the pictoral explanation of a child's life, but they appear to have equal status to the 'third sector' and are placed further away from the child than:

• Maternity and Primary Health;
• Children's Centres;
• Extended Schools;
• Integrated Youth Services;
• Lead Professionals;
• Specialist Services;
• Multi-agency Locality Teams;
• The Team Around the Child;
• The Common Assessment Framework [opens pdf]; and
• ContactPoint.

Read the whole thing.

Terminological inexactitude

Libertarians of the left and of the right mean something entirely different when they talk about "liberty". This bodes rather ill for the Convention on Modern Liberty next week.

Click to read more ...

A quick post...

I'm just leaving to go and hear Sir John Houghton, but I've just come across something odd. The Indy is reporting that two American Baptists have been banned from entering the UK because they incite hatred gays.

"Both these individuals have engaged in unacceptable behaviour by inciting hatred against a number of communities.

"The Government has made it clear it opposes extremism in all its forms.

"We will continue to stop those who want to spread extremism, hatred and violent messages in our communities from coming to our country.

"That was the driving force behind the tighter rules on exclusion for unacceptable behaviour that the Home Secretary announced on October 28 last year.

"The exclusions policy is targeted at all those who seek to stir up tension and provoke others to violence regardless of their origins and beliefs."

Phelps, 79, and his daughter Shirley, 51, belong to the US Westboro Baptist Church based in Kansas which calls for homosexuals to be killed.

I checked out that last bit though, which says their Church calls for gays to be killed. Also the bit about "violent" messages. There's no mention of it on Phelps' Wiki page. Does he incite violence, or merely hatred? That's a crucial difference in my book. Is there perhaps some spinning from the Indy here?

No time to check now, but I'll look into it when I get a chance.

Eurosceptics read this

Home Ed blogger Gill Kilner has taken a look at the government's sinister Every Child Matters agenda and finds its roots in the work of the colleagues in Brussels.

It's getting hard to reconcile support for the EU with support for civil liberties, wouldn't you say?

What would you keep?

A propos of my earlier post on what recent legislation we should try to repeal in order to reclaim our lost civil liberties, I was struck by the thought that it might be easier to simply repeal every piece of legislation introduced since 1997.

Off the top of my head I can think of nothing Messrs Blair and Brown have done that is worthy of retention. Have I missed something or shall we ditch the lot?

Hope, or expectation?

I've been away for a long weekend, and have come back to find that the colleagues in the blogosphere have been keeping up the pressure on the civil liberties front. Chris Dillow's piece on the coming police state is well worth a look.

With Labour now trailing badly in the polls, a Tory landslide seems all but certain, so there is at least hope that things might change. My thesis for tonight is that, while hope there may be,  expectation of any great change on civil liberties is a position that is not warranted by the facts, and is not therefore an adequate response to big government encroachment on the realm of the individual.

While I was rude about David Davis's absence from the media during the Wilders affair, a commenter on that thread pointed out that subsequent to my posting he had staked out the civil liberties argument on Question Time and that is certainly welcome. The rest of his party (with certain honourable exceptions) have been pretty craven in their silence. During my recent absence they have restricted themselves to issuing statements about food labelling and bonuses in state-owned banks.Before that it was a task force on maths teaching headed by B-list television celeb - a policy (if we can dignify it with that title) that would not have been out of place in any of the last ten years of Labour government.

Is this reticence part of a wider campaign among the Tories to simply let Labour lose the next election by giving them no firm Tory policy positions to attack? Or perhaps Conservatives agree with the arguments that the war on terror necessitates an expansion of the state security apparatus to levels unknown outside the communist bloc? We simply can't know what the Tories' true position is. The problem is that David Cameron has shown himself quite ready to go back on campaign promises after he is elected, so even if a statement were to be made, it is hard to know if we should believe him anyway.

Can we really face the prospect of going into the next election merely hoping for the best from the Conservative party? For me, civil liberties campaigners need to publish a list of legislation that should be repealed as the first action of an incoming government. No votes for anyone who doesn't sign up to it. The LibDems have of course already mooted a Great Repeal Act, but that was frankly not great enough. The encroachments of Brown and Blair go much further and much deeper than can be countered by the repeal of a dozen acts of Parliament. It's also worth noting that the website they set up at the time (2006) is now defunct.

Here's a partial list of suggestions (pinched from here).

1. Restrictions on protests in Parliament Square.Sections 132 to 138; Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005
2. Identity Cards:Identity Cards Act 2006
3. Extradition to the US: Part 2, Extradition Act 2003
4. Conditions on public assemblies: Section 57, Clause 123, Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003.
5. Criminalising trespass. Sections 128 to 131, Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005
6. Control orders: Section 1, Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005.
7. DNA retention. Sections 78-84, Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001, Sections 9-10, Criminal Justice Act 2003
8. Public interest defence for whistleblowing. Official Secrets Act 1989.
9. Right to silence: Sections 34-39, Public Order Act 1994 - England and Wales
10. Hearsay evidence: Sections 114-136, Criminal Justice Act 2003

Plus more here

1. Serious Organised Crime & Police Act 2005, Part 4
2. Anti-Social Behaviour Acts 1998 - 2003 in full
3. Crown copyright
4. Drugs Act 2005
5. Misuse of Drugs Acts (all)
6. Prevention of Terrorism Acts 1973 to present
7. Anti-Terror, Crime & Security Act 2001
8. Racial & Religious Hatred Act 2006
9. Freedom of Information Act 2000, s. 36
10. Protection from Harassment Act 1998
11. Sexual Offences Act 2003

To which I would add

1. RIPA Act
2. Civil Contingencies Act

I haven't examined most of these in any detail, but it's fair to say there are many familiar names there. I'm sure this is just scratching the surface.

Should Shami Chakrabarti resign?

As I pointed out in my posting the other day, Shami Chakrabarti and David Davis have both been consipicuous by their absence from the debate over whether Geert Wilders should have been allowed into the country.

Legally, there now seems to be little doubt that it was unlawful to exclude Wilders, the showing of his film having gone off with barely a murmur of dissent in his absence, and with Wilders having actually visited Britain a matter of weeks ago without any discernable trouble. The Home Secretary is going to be extremely hard pushed to justify his exclusion on any legal basis.

So in legal terms, he should have been here, and those who support the concept of the rule of law should be incandescent over the Home Secretary's behaviour. Likewise, anyone with the remotest interest in civil liberties should be fuming too. So where are our champions of civil liberties? Why have they not been shouting from the pages of every newspaper in the land? Davis, nothing. Chakrabarti, nothing. The Liberal Democrats? Don't make me laugh.

David Davis is a politician and has presumably made a political calculation that he has little to gain from speaking out in favour of Wilders' coming to the UK, and a great deal to lose in terms of his future career (we assume that he will eventually seek high office again). We expect little else from politicians and can write off the LibDems on the same grounds.

Chakrabarti has no such excuse. She is the head of Liberty, a body that exists solely to speak out in favour of civil liberties. She has failed miserably to do so. Her silence over Wilders is not unprecedented either. She has made it abundantly clear that she doesn't feel that freedom of speech extends to nasty people; her words on Question Time last week can have left nobody in any doubt about that. She also has previous form on the "disappearing act" she has performed in the last few days, notably when Liberty maintained a determined radio silence over the Sikh play Bezhti.

Chakrabarti has demonstrated over the years that she will not stand up for those whose views she deems unacceptable. She will not defend unpleasant views. She will not speak out for unpleasant people. She hates racists so much that she will allow fundamental British freedoms to be trampled underfoot in order allow these views she detests so much to be crushed, regardless of the importance of the freedoms that are lost with them, and regardless of the duties entailed in her position.

What is the point of the woman? It is possible to find people with views like that in any pub, Conservative Association or working men's club in the country. People who think civil liberties are a secondary consideration are two-a-penny in the pages of the Guardian or the Telegraph. Why do we need Liberty if not to make the difficult case of basic freedoms for everyone?

Chakrabarti and Liberty are not champions of civil liberties. In many ways they are a direct threat to the English model of individuals untrammelled in what they can say and think. She should stand down and make way for somebody who wants civil liberties for everyone, not just the favoured few.

The North Briton

John Wilkes was the scandal-mongering eighteenth century writer who finally won a measure of freedom of speech for the people of these islands. Wilkes was a libertine and a libertarian and the scourge of the establishment; the Guido Fawkes of his time (I'm talking literary matters here; I have no idea if Guido shares Wilkes' predeliction for group sex). 

Since Liberty are clearly not bothered about the Wilders affair, and David Davis, our other reputed champion of civil liberties has likewise gone AWOL, I thought I would make my humble contribution to the debate by quoting a section from the famous issue number 45 of Wilkes' scandal sheet, the North Briton. In his text, Wilkes set about giving offence to all and sundry, including the commendable innovation of accusing the king of lying, in the process neatly laying fair claim to the Englishman's right to give offence.  He also made a general defence of fundamental British liberties in the face of the onslaught against them by politicians of the day. These transgressions by the political class are eerily familiar. Wilkes ended by coming close to a call for rebellion. Readers may wish to discuss the relevance of this idea to the modern fight for civil liberties.

Wilkes had got hold of a copy of the speech that the king was to make at the closing of Parliament and his response - issue 45 of the North Briton - was ready to roll as the king delivered it. No 45 featured page after page of sarcasm and invective against ministers, but I am going to quote a couple of paragraphs directly relevant to us today. The king had called on the members of Parliament to "promote in your several counties that spirit of concord and that obedience to the laws, which is essential to good order".

Concord? How can concord be promoted in the cider-producing counties, where private houses are now made liable to be entered and searched at pleasure?... A nation as sensible as the English, will see that a spirit of concord, when they are oppressed, means a tame submission to injury, and that a spirit of liberty ought then to arise, and I am sure ever will, in proportion to the weight of the grievance they feel. Every legal attempt of a contrary tendency to the spirit of concord will be deemed a justififable resistance, warranted by the spirit of the English Constitution....

The prerogative of the crown is to exert the constitutional powers entrusted to it in a way, not of blind favour and partiality, but of wisdom and judgment. This is the spirit of our constitution. The people too have their prerogative, and, I hope the fine words of Dryden will be engraved on our hearts. 'Freedom is the English subject's prerogative'.

 The colourful story of Wilkes and his fight for liberty is told in John Wilkes - The scandalous father of civil liberty by Arthur H Cash, on which this posting is based.

Good point

Head of Legal asks why we've heard nothing from Liberty or David Davis on the Geert Wilders affair. I guess Liberty aren't going to defend him because he's too right wing and Davis won't because people might think he is too.