84. "We must bring in tougher laws and sentences against drug dealers and users."
We tried that. We already know it does not work. Each new dramatic case, each tragic death, each new set of statistics brings on the tabloid editorials. More laws, tougher laws, better enforcement. We tried this last time and the time before. Anyone who suggests that we might try a different approach meets a hail of press vilification, with tearfully bereaved parents demanding that the evil men who led Johnny or Jill astray be locked up, or perhaps executed.
Narcotics are evil, and sensible people should not go down that road. However, they are out there, and young people will be exposed to them. To some their very illegality adds the spice of defiance, giving them an allure that conceals some of their tawdriness.
By criminalizing them we turn them into a profitable industry. Because there are risks of criminal penalties, the price is high, and the rewards of dealing are raised. This leads to a steady supply. Because illegality increases the price, some people turn to crime to fund their habit. Violent street crime and burglary are heavily reinforced by the drug trade, as is embezzlement and fraud. Desperate people take desperate measures.
Police crackdowns sometimes temporarily curtail the supply, raising the price and the profitability of the trade even further. The different solution is to make drugs freely available to be consumed on the premises at high street clinics in towns and cities. They could be under medical supervision, and users might have to agree to medical assessment and perhaps have to view information videos about the health hazards which addicts face. No-one would want to consume recreational drugs like Ecstasy, cocaine or cannabis under such conditions, but these might be legalized generally.
Such a policy would break the link between narcotics and crime, guarantee the safe quality of drugs, and bring their addiction within manageable limits.
HMG's considered thoughts on what to do about drugs is containted in this document. It's an absolute masterpiece, quite the apotheisis of the bureacractic art. There is page after page of detailed plan, of targets to be set and met, of who is the departmental owner of this and that and those oh so vital dates by which "increase the number of DIP conditional cautions to 2,000" will be achieved (March 2009, for those interested).
Unfortunately, there is absolutely nothing at all about the only possible way to actually win the War on Drugs. Declare victory and then smartly retreat by legalising them. It simply isn't possible to wipe out drug use and supply without demolishing every last vestige of civil liberty....on which point they do make one horrendous suggestion:
23. Widen the categories of assets liable for civil recovery and introduce recovery of assets at arrest.
Yes, not content with the current system of seizing the assets of those convicted of no criminal offence they now suggest that upon arrest, that is without even the necessity of a trial even under civil litgation rules, that your house, car, bank account, essentially your life, should be forfeit to the State. I'm sure we're all most confident that they will be speedily returned if charges are not brought, or if a conviction isn't achieved. Aren't we all?
Terrorists constitute the one group which seems to have no difficulty in gaining access to forged and false identification. If ID cards were introduced in Britain, no competently equipped terrorist would be without one. Terrorists do not usually write the word "terrorist" as their occupation; they try to hide their purposes, and only surface as terrorists at the moment of their crime.
It is all very well to talk of higher technology to combat ID card forgery, but the technology of the forgers advances, too, and many terrorist groups have the resources to use it.
What ID cards are actually about is control. They enable authorities to know our movements, along with a great deal of other information. We have always been reluctant to grant gratuitous information to those in authority because we have so often seen it misused. Just as sophisticated phone-tap technology is now used by local authorities to search for people involved in fly-tipping, so we can expect the information on ID cards to make its way rapidly down the scale of offences and be used against individuals suspected of trivial misdemeanors.
We have learned to our cost that every level of government is careless with the information it stores on us. Even if authorities did not misuse the information themselves, it is quite likely that their slipshod controls would make it easy for those with criminal intent to do so. There have been incidents of highly sensitive information lost on mislaid disks, or stolen while inadequately protected. The very collection of so much information together would create risks of it falling into the wrong hands.
Government talks of combating terrorism, but the real purpose of ID cards is probably to control employment of illegal immigrants or to fight benefit frauds. There are better and less expensive ways of doing this than subjecting the whole citizenry to an ID card regime.
60. "Alcohol should be made more expensive and less widely available to combat binge drinking and yobbery."
Many people who put no great faith in the price mechanism elsewhere happily advocate big price increases for things they disapprove of. Such things include smoking, budget air tickets, petrol, and alcohol. Price increases can indeed change behaviour, but it is poorer people who are hit hardest; the rich can afford the increase.
The assumption behind the anti-alcohol campaign is that low prices promote binge drinking, and the attendant anti-social behaviour sometimes seen in young drinkers. It is by no means clear that this is true. People in some other countries where alcohol is cheaper do not have the binge drinking or lout problem to anything like the same extent. It seems to be a cultural thing which affects some countries more than others.
An increase in the price of drink would probably just prompt a switch among binge drinkers to cheaper types, or perhaps to illegal substitutes. Meanwhile respectable middle-aged couples would have to pay more for their bottle of wine, and the great majority of Britons who do not binge drink and commit anti-social acts would be punished for the sins of the minority who do.
Similarly there are those who urge that pubs and bars should have reduced opening hours to deny drinkers the opportunity. Again, it seems that facilities enjoyed the many are opposed in order to target the abuse committed by a few. Determined binge drinkers would continue to drink, but at home or outside, rather than in licensed premises where the decision of the proprietor when to stop serving them exercises at least some restraint.
Countries which make it difficult to drink through state monopolies or huge liquor taxes seem to suffer greater drink problems than more easy-going ones. To curb drinking excesses, it is the culture that must be changed, not the availability of alcohol.
What rights do parents have over the embryos that they have created, or in conjunction with science via IVF? This issue has been raised recently in light of a proposal within the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill that:
Persons or embryos that are known to have a gene, chromosome or mitochondrion abnormality involving a significant risk that a person with the abnormality will have or develop a serious physical or mental disability, a serious illness or any other serious medical condition must not be preferred to those that are not known to have such an abnormality.
The government is worried that parents would seemingly choose to disable their offspring. They live in fear of such cases as Sharon Duchesneau and her partner who deliberately chose a deaf man to be the sperm provider to their act of artificial insemination. This was done to increase the likelihood of producing a deaf child, something they ultimately did, with their son being deaf in one ear and severely hard of hearing in the other. These actions do raise legitimate questions, most importantly why should people not be able to have children that bear a likeness to themselves?
After all you may freely choose your partner, so why can’t you freely choose your embryo, fully aware of the consequences of that choice. Some will find it shocking that potential parents would wish to disadvantage (in a conventional interpretation of societal norms) a child in such a way, but that disadvantage should only be borne by the parents and the child. Within a free society the wider community would require the parents and offspring to take full advantage of modern advances in technology and medicine to integrate and in no way burden others.
The proposed legislaton represents a dictat that would not be out of place within the NHS. But the current government has never fully understood the difference between public and private spheres; it has no respect for private choice, private spheres or individual liberty. We are thus left in a situation where the unborn child belongs to the state.
59. "We need a Human Rights Bill to protect our liberties."
A Human Rights Bill is something which looks plausible on the surface, but disastrous when you look deeper into it. Such a bill would be a written codification of the liberties which Parliament thinks should be enshrined into a written law. In fact most of our liberties come from conventions and assumptions added to over the centuries. Some were acquired from individual laws passed by Parliament, some arose from celebrated legal judgements which enshrined an important principle.
Any attempt to write them all down will be forced to simplify them into a manageable text. Many of them have the nuances of precedents which arose in practice and are difficult to codify. Inevitably, such a text would be given priority over the history, losing subtle threads of association in the process.
Furthermore, once the principle of a Human Rights Bill were established, every pressure group in the country would try to get their particular hobby horse through its door and admitted as a 'human right.' People would campaign to get the rights of children not to be chastised by their parents, and the right of unborn foetuses to be protected from abortion, or from mothers who drink or smoke. The right to free and equal education would be inserted to have independent schools closed down. The Bill would be an instrument to get the force of law to do things which elected Parliaments have thus far declined to do. In its drafting it would be near impossible to keep the contentious 'positive rights' separate from the negative rights which have constituted our liberties.
Parliaments have been scant respecters of those liberties in recent years, but a Human Rights Bill, far from protecting them, would open the floodgates to even more abuse and erosion of them, taking away our freedom in order to give others what some think should be their 'rights.'
57. "Children should be taken into care at the slightest hint of any parental abuse."
Some child abuse campaigners broaden the definition to make it seem more prevalent than it is. 'Child abuse' used to mean physical violence or sexual abuse, but campaigners try to include parents who might smack a naughty child, or even verbally assail one in an intimidating manner. This broad definition devalues the seriousness of horrific acts by putting them on a par with verbal or mild physical chastisement. On this definition, most children are abused.
On the more serious definitions of abuse, there are obviously cases where the only way to protect a child from an abusive parent is to remove the child to a safe place. But even in cases of real abuse, there are often better ways of protecting the child than by taking it into care. The best environment for a child is reckoned to be a family home, whatever type of family. When abused children are asked what they want to happen, most do not want to be taken into care; they want the abuse to stop.
When a child is taken into care, it sets back their potential development and achievement. Children in care, particularly those in institutions, do not fare as well on average than those who remain with their families. Obviously a balance has to be struck, and if alternative remedies like supervision, counselling and therapy prove effective, they are to be preferred to care orders.
In the notorious Cleveland case, many children were taken from their parents on the evidence of a child abuse 'expert' acting on a crackpot theory of abuse. There were similar cases allegedly involving devil-worshipping cults in the Scottish islands which also turned out to be the obsessions of officials rather than real abuse. These cases illustrate the dangers of giving officials too much power, and of the need for children's courts to keep tight rein on their powers.
... Is that is doesn't exist. That was Mick Hume's take in Friday's Times, and I think he gets it about right:
If there is indeed a problem with our late-night drinking laws, it is that many of us, on the rare occasion we get out, still cannot enjoy a pint after midnight at the weekend. That's what I call antisocial.
He cites the government's official review, which showed that the introduction of '24-hour drinking' two years ago has extended average Saturday opening times by just 21 minutes. Certainly this chimes with my experience: for all the tabloid furore about the liberalization of the licensing laws, I am constantly frustrated by how hard it is to find a late-opening pub or bar, even in central London.
Indeed, for many pub landlords this 'liberalization' has been nothing of the sort. Licensing was pretty simple in the old days – you just turned up at the Magistrates court every so often to renew your alcohol license. The process was cheap and easy. But now councils employ full-time staff to oversee the new licensing laws. And bureaucrats inevitably make trouble, insisting on endless inspections and paperwork.
Add this to the smoking ban, and is it any wonder that 1,409 pubs closed down in 2007 (compared with just 102 in 2005)? If only the government would just leave us alone...
55. "When people are accused of serious crimes, they should have no right to remain silent."
The reason why people were allowed to remain silent was that one of the law's principles maintained that no person could be forced to testify against themselves. It is a defendant's choice whether to go into the witness box and face cross-examination; they cannot be forced to. The right to silence is part of that principle, and no jury was allowed to count it against an accused if that right were exercised.
The principle is a serious disincentive to torture. If people cannot be forced to make statements or to give evidence, the authorities have much less reason to use torture to make them incriminate themselves. The police in many countries, including ones where torture is banned, have used bullying, intimidating techniques, and what amounts to psychological warfare to secure 'confessions' of dubious value – people will do anything to stop the oppression. The right to silence was an important part of protection against that kind of treatment. If people cannot be required to testify against themselves, it throws suspicion on 'confessions' which might have been extracted under duress.
This right to silence has now been modified to allow prosecutors to invite juries to draw inferences about it. In other words, if people choose to remain silent, it may count against them in court. It crucially modifies the presumption of innocence which has been a cornerstone of justice. By remaining silent, an accused could demand that the prosecution must prove their guilt. Now a jury might be asked to hold it against an accused that they did not choose to prove their innocence.
It also increases police powers to subject innocent people to questioning. Even if they have done nothing, a refusal to answer police questions might subsequently be used against them in some future charge laid against them.
I spoke at the Oxford Union on Thursday against the idea of positive discrimination or affirmative action. I rested my argument on three pillars. The first was that to discriminate in favour of some inevitably involves discriminating against others. Those who have worked to qualify for university or to gain a job are rightly affronted if the place goes to someone with lower qualifications but who happens to belong to an approved group.
My second point was that to treat people in groups rather than as individuals diminishes them a little, even dehumanizes them to a small degree. We should not be concerned with what groups people come from, but with where they might go. It is somewhat patronizing to demand high standards generally, but to lower the standards for people from certain groups.
The third pillar of my argument was that those who lose out when others receive positive discrimination have done nothing to deserve it. Why should people be punished for deeds which some of their ancestors might have been involved in? None of mine were likely to have owned or traded slaves. Indeed, in ancient times they quite possibly were slaves themselves. I doubt if any joined the redcoats in conquering continents. And even if any of our Roman ancestors might have mistreated Gauls or Carthaginians, is that a reason why less qualified Gauls and Carthaginians should be given favoured treatment today.
To my surprise and pleasure, positive discrimination was voted down by a large majority.
We tried that. We already know it does not work. Each new dramatic case, each tragic death, each new set of statistics brings on the tabloid editorials. More laws, tougher laws, better enforcement. We tried this last time and the time before. Anyone who suggests that we might try a different approach meets a hail of press vilification, with tearfully bereaved parents demanding that the evil men who led Johnny or Jill astray be locked up, or perhaps executed.
Terrorists constitute the one group which seems to have no difficulty in gaining access to forged and false identification. If ID cards were introduced in Britain, no competently equipped terrorist would be without one. Terrorists do not usually write the word "terrorist" as their occupation; they try to hide their purposes, and only surface as terrorists at the moment of their crime.
Many people who put no great faith in the price mechanism elsewhere happily advocate big price increases for things they disapprove of. Such things include smoking, budget air tickets, petrol, and alcohol. Price increases can indeed change behaviour, but it is poorer people who are hit hardest; the rich can afford the increase.
What rights do parents have over the embryos that they have created, or in conjunction with science via IVF? This issue has been raised recently in light of a proposal within the 
A Human Rights Bill is something which looks plausible on the surface, but disastrous when you look deeper into it. Such a bill would be a written codification of the liberties which Parliament thinks should be enshrined into a written law. In fact most of our liberties come from conventions and assumptions added to over the centuries. Some were acquired from individual laws passed by Parliament, some arose from celebrated legal judgements which enshrined an important principle.