Save our Pubs and Clubs

3719

save-our-pubs-and-clubs

On Tuesday a new campaign is being launched to 'Save our Pubs and Clubs'. It has the inelegant but informative web address AmendTheSmokingBan.com (launches 22nd June) which sort-of tells you what it's about. The fact is that pubs and clubs have seen a disastrous fall in their trade since the smoking ban came in - and the recession has simply compounded the problem. Pubs are closing – several a week. Which is bad for business, bad for localities, and bad for those drinking habits that the government says it wants to improve – at least in pubs, people are drinking under some kind of supervision, while if they just load up at the supermarket and drink in the street, they're not.

The campaign says that if pubs want to have a designated smoking room, with proper air filtration and the like, why shouldn't they be allowed to? People who didn't like a smoky atmosphere wouldn't have to have one, but those people who wanted a beer and a cigarette could have it.

Anyway, the campaign is being launched in Westminster on Tuesday at 11am. As a non-smoker, I won't be lighting up, but I shall be there supporting the rights of those who want to.

Fighting fascism with fascism

3686

fighting-fascism-with-fascism

People have taken to the street to fight fascism with, er, fascism. Last week's attack on free speech by the UAF (Unite Against Fascism) organization (which sounds suspiciously like an Irish paramilitary wing) was truly anti-liberal and purely fascist in action. It is a tactic that has been increasingly used by the left throughout time: the control of language and the threat of violence against those who do not obey.

Both sides of this argument mirror each other in their actions and their desired outcomes. On one side we have a collection of individuals coalesced around their fear of the unknown, namely ethnically different persons. On the other we have a group who do not understand the most basic human right: free speech. Both groups should be vigorously opposed by all, yet one is openly endorsed by the mainstream parties. Is it any wonder that people choose to vote BNP when they show such a disdain for rights.

It was by ignoring the BNP that allowed them to sneak under the radar and attract voters. The state's role in the demonstration also calls into question the changing relationship between right and wrong protests. The state is rubber stamping protests it approves of by standing aside and allowing this to happen. Equality before the law has vanished. The only way to defeat them is by engaging them and discussing their griefs you can enlighten them. The current approach will not work especially as it merely looks like the establishment wanting to protect their right to use violence either via the police or approved protestors against a 'differently' oriented minority.

The database state

3668

the-database-state

Connectivity is a company which has just launched a new mobile phone directory service. They claim to have 16m of mobile phone numbers in their database. They won't give them out to you, but you call 118800 or go onto their website and say who you want to call, and for £1 they will send that person a text asking if they'll take your call.

The interesting question is where Connectivity laid its hands on 16m of our numbers. It's coy, but the answer is market research companies, online businesses that we buy things from, and brokers who sell lists of numbers.

Actually, I'll find it quite useful to be able to look up people's mobile numbers. But grasping the obvious benefits is how we lose our liberties. Most people want more CCTV, for example, because they think it prevents crime. But when you have millions of them tracking your every move, what it starts to prevent is free movement. And the worrying thing about this 118800 initiative is just how easily new databases of our information can be compiled. Click a mouse, text a friend, use your credit cards, sign up for a storecard, pay your car tax or buy a TV licence, walk in the street under the gaze of CCTV, apply for social benefits, forget to tick the box on that says 'we'd like to share your information with...' and your ID cat is out of the bag, floating around between – well, who knows who?

That's why the proposed National Identity Register is so dangerous. And the NHS patient records system too. Tens of millions of our records, all accessible to whichever of 400,000 civil servants happens to have the right security code. The late lamented Jacqui Smith wanted to keep a note of all our email and phone chats, while the lamentable Jack Straw wanted to share all our information between government departments. They both had to publicly backtrack. But I'm under no illusion that these things are going to happen, or are happening, anyway.

Pirate Bay MEP

3659

pirate-bay-mep

In Sweden the Pirate Party (Piratpartiet) have won a seat in the European Parliament. This party was formed after the increased prosecution of various online sites.

When asked, Pirate Party leader Rick Falkvinge told TorrentFreak: “We’ve felt the wind blow in our sails. We’ve seen the polls prior to the election. But to stand here, today, and see the figures coming up on that screen… What do you want me to say? I’ll say anything".

The party has been formed as a libertarian/civil liberty party who are particularly aggrieved, about the mass surveillance so prevalent in Europe and the increasing state of cyber-surveilance.

Rumors that upon the news of the win the gathered fans shouted "arrrr" have yet to be confirmed.

Inciting violence

3617

inciting-violence

Recent announcements from the UK's Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith caused some controversy when she released a list of the 16 people banned from the UK. The main reason why these people had been barred from entering the UK was due to what they had said on a variety of issues. One of those on the list, Michael Weiner (Savage) a radio DJ in the US, is now suing the Home Secretary for damages reasoning that he has been defamed.

The majority on the list are there because their speeches on a broad swathe of issues have been judged to be offensive. Not by society, not by single individuals who have complained, but by a clique within the Home Office. They are now the arbiters of taste and decency, the 'philosopher kings' that rule our society and the firewall that protects us from harm. We are seemingly incapable of acting in a rational way. The Home Office has failed to understand the cornerstone of liberty: free speech.

We all have the right to say what we like, even when the language can cause harm to someone; the rational person though tempers their speech so as not to cause harm. But when we pronounce on issues directly to an audience, we do not know how that audience will react, even when we charge them to act in a certain way. The state can, and should, only step in when actual physical harm is pertained to be about to take place, the state cannot assume that inciting violence through others via speech is in effect threatening a specific person. It is not. The lumpen assumptions the Home Secretary makes is one that slices society into sections pitting them against each other. She and her minions are the ones who are inciting violence and we should begin by ignoring them, as any rational person would.

Repugnant transactions

3577

repugnant-transactions

There's a whole series of things which we might class as (and some indeed do do so) repugnant transactions. They're not things which clearly breach someone else's rights or liberties, not things which obviously do damage to non-participants, but rather things which have such huge "Eeeeew!" factors that people think it right that they should be banned. The current drive to make the purchase of sex illegal perhaps, driven as it seems to be by an insistence that this is just icky rather than any reasoned or reasonable logic.

Our system of regulating the market in haploid cells seems to suffer from a particularly bad case of what I regard as this form of hypocrisy.

Thousands of British women desperate to have a child are going abroad every year to have fertility treatment in order to avoid NHS waiting lists and a shortage of donated eggs......Couples here are able to exploit the fact that, in some countries, women who choose to donate eggs can be paid, said Culley, with some donors in America receiving up to $10,000. In Britain, by contrast, tight regulation of fertility means egg donors receive only expenses. "All the evidence is that cross-border reproductive care is growing. Women here do this for all sorts of reasons," she said. "There is a serious shortage of eggs, donated sperm is in shorter supply than before, the cost can be cheaper abroad and some people want IVF which they can't get on the NHS."

Now perhaps this is indeed a repugnant transaction but that surely is something for the participants to decide, no? If they find it repugnant then there will be no transaction. But why if you or I find it repugnant then they should be banned from that transaction is something rather more difficult to justify.

It's also entirely futile as in this modern world people can simply hop on Easyjet and organise it somewhere where the prejudices of British prodnoses hold no sway. As with the stories mentioned of eggs being used from impoverished Ukrainian women to create these designer babies: something which you might expect the British left to wholeheartedly approve of. For isn't this we who are rich taking care of and raising the child of one less fortunate?

Consider the state the law is in in this area. It's entirely legal to, although the reason to do so would be a little mysterious, pay a man to perform a hand shandy. it would be illegal for you to use the resultant haploid cells to create a pregnancy. It would be legal for you to create a pregnancy out of the results of such manipulation if no money changed hands. Which all seems extremely odd.

Not only is it odd, it leads to much fertility treatment being the province only of those with the money to escape our own dear NHS which is horribly handicapped by the rarity of those who will donate the necessary cells without the incentive of a cash payment.

The answer to all of this seems blindingly obvious. Ignore those who squeal that others are violating the squealers' most closely held prejudices on what is not icky and, with the proviso that rights and liberties of others are not trampled in the process, allow individuals to decide for themselves what are and are not repugnant transactions.

If this might mean that people are paid for their eggs and their sperm then so be it: the joy and pleasure both of and from the children so engendered will outweigh the outrage.  And once again prove that there are some things simply too important not to have markets in them.

Freedom and justice

3524

freedom-and-justice

In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affair

Walter Lippmann (1889-1974), An Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society, 1937

Burn in peace

3482

burn-in-peace

How do you dispose of yourself after you have ‘shuffled off this mortal coil’? Ideally you’d leave instructions with those who you have left, and they would be free to follow through with them, so long as your disposal didn’t interfere/cause harm to others. Alas, it seems that even in the 21st Century the enlightened masters that lord it over us stand in the way of our desires even when we are dead. A devout Hindu wishes to be cremated upon a funeral pyre, but having sought out permission first from his local council, who refused on ‘impractical grounds’ he then took his claim to the High Court. They rejected his wishes, agreeing with the council on grounds of impracticality, and that it didn’t infringe on his human rights in either area of religious freedom or his right to privacy. Morton Blackwell’s first rule of the public policy process should have been observed: Never give a bureaucrat the chance to say no!

If  Mr Ghai had taken the same approach as Dr William Price*, whilst ensuring that he harmed no one else, he could have perhaps forced the debate. Instead he handed the opportunity to refuse his simple demand to a bureaucrat and an inept legal system. When one looks at the history of cremation it seems that this latest ruling is a step back to the times when the “higher authority" of the land laid claim to your body and could forcibly direct you to behave in a certain way through the projection of guilt via sin. We will now have to see if the Court of Appeal has any sense of religious freedom/privacy issues. Perhaps there is a wealthy individual who could donate the use of part of his private land so that a dying man’s wishes could be granted so that he could dye at peace.

Currently though it seems that it will take us some time before we are at one with each others differing desires and that death itself should continue to be viewed as a taboo subject. It is time that the government realised that we do not belong to them, or owe our existence to them. Perhaps they could leave us to burn in peace.

* Dr Price was a druid/eccentric who cremated his deceased 5 day old child Jesus Christ Price in a pagan ceremony atop a hill. Obviously horrifying the natives of Llantrisant, but not the judge at his subsequent trial who found that cremations were not illegal. Such forward thinking from a judge in 1884.

The confiscation of passports and driving licences

3379

the-confiscation-of-passports-and-driving-licences

Citizens having their identification confiscated by unelected government officials for failing to complying with the state – It’s the type of scene we might expect from an old war movie set in Nazi Germany. But if the government gets its way, these authoritarian stamps on our liberty will could soon become reality in 21st century Britain.

Under current plans the government would give power to the Child Support Agency (and their impending successor the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission) to confiscate the passports and driving licences of parents refusing to pay child support. Initially, the Conservatives objected the move, but it will now be included in the Welfare Reform Bill.

The fact that the state feels it has the right to encroach upon an individual’s freedom to the extent of removing their driving licence is madness and ill thought out, while the significance of the driving licence is an obscure aspect to the legislation. A worrying aspect of the plans is that private firms could also be given the power to remove passports without a court order.

This blows the rule of law, accountability, democracy and liberty out of the water. This legislation would usurp and bypass the age-old notion of a fair trial by jury to the unelected.

We can only hope that the Lords Constitution Committee rejects this legislation and that the next government we have understands the meaning of freedom.

Bus Angels

3367

bus-angels

You couldn't make it up. Is devolution the opposite of evolution? It would appear so.