Proceeds of crime

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Good old Labour. In an attempt to make Britain a safer and better place to be, they have devised yet another way to terrorise the public into ensuring that we never, ever commit even the most minor of crimes. Beware you fare-dodgers and council tax shirkers, for under an extension of the Proceeds of Crime Act you too can join the ranks of Drug Baron and SuperPimp by having your home raided, cash confiscated and assets frozen. However, it won’t be the bobby breaking down your door, it will be a new army of power-crazy councils, quangos and agencies.

Alan Johnson is expected to announce the measure next week. Sneaking it in through a Statutory Instrument, there will be no need for MPs to debate the issue, and so bodies such as Local Councils, TfL and the Royal Mail can expect to use these powers independent from police control fairly swiftly.

However, Labour instructs us not to panic. Each empowered body will receive ‘financial investigators’ trained and monitored by a quango. This is a very good thing apparently, because they become “less reliant on more traditional law enforcement agencies" like the pesky police. Quite right, why should someone trained in upholding the law decide when the right time to confiscate somebody’s wealth is, when a faceless bureaucrat would do so much more eagerly? We are assured that this extension shall not be exploited or abused; presumably in the same way that anti-terrorism legislation has not been used to rifle through bins and deny school places. The move will also boost the fight against crime and free up police time, although the memo neglects to mention if it will also increase bureaucracy, direct resources towards hunting petty offenders and increase paranoia amongst citizens every time they fail to ‘touch in’ with their oyster card.

It would be quite easy to assume that most bodies given these new powers will scarcely use them, deciding they should focus on their real jobs and that if a criminal deserves to have assets frozen that is a matter for the police. However, the promise of a cut of the confiscations may just be alluring enough to encourage use of the POCA left, right and centre.

These new measures are draconian, invasive and rather unnerving, threatening each and every one of us with having our means of survival cut off for the slightest misdemeanor. It seems that no act is too low, no sum of money too small for Labour to try and plug the deficit with it.

Here come the stormtroopers

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For the first time ever British Police Officers will conduct permanent patrols through the streets armed with fully automatic submachine guns. The measure is supposed to help areas where gang violence levels are on the rise, but does it really take submachine gun wielding cops to lower crime? How much does it take for British citizens to finally realize that the government is taking control of their lives? And how long will it take before the police institute a curfew in those areas, or police patrols like these become a regular occurrence in all of London? This measure taken should not be tolerated. It is severely damaging to the already frail social freedoms that Britons are allowed.

These patrols are supposed to be a means of reducing gang violence and illegal gun sales, and according to the police are ‘intended to be a reassuring presence for residents’. However, I can think of very few things more intimidating than seeing uniformed police walking down my street with submachine guns. I know that there must be line somewhere between policing and state control, but the government has blurred that line to the point that citizens don’t notice anymore. I personally feel that individuals should have the right to bear arms, and I didn’t think it could get any worse than denying individuals this right. I was wrong. The only thing worse is to send out permanent patrols armed with military grade weapons after taking away everyone else’s guns.

All steps toward state control start with good intentions. At some point people need to stand up and declare that good intentions are not enough to justify denying personal freedoms.

Spencer blogs regularly on gun control here.

Sex trafficking: no evidence for Harman's law

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Harman's sex trafficking law is based on feeble, fraudulent evidence.

Here's the line. Women are being trafficked into Britain and forced to become sex slaves. We know this because the massive Operation Pentameter, involving 55 police forces, six government departments and various NGOs, led to the arrest of 528 sex traffickers. On the basis of this, Harriet Harman is rightly pushing through a bill to make it illegal to pay for sex with a prostitute controlled by someone else.

Except it's all lies. As Nick Davies reports, the six-month investigation actually failed to find a single sex trafficker. Ten of the 55 police forces arrested nobody at all. Some 122 of the 528 arrests claimed never happened (they were wrongly recorded, or phantom arrests designed to chase targets). Half (230) were women – suggesting that the Operation was a convenient excuse to harass prostitutes and clock up more arrest figures.

Of the 406 real arrests, 153 had been released weeks before the police announced their 'success', 106 without any charge at all, and 47 being cautioned for minor offences. Of the rest, 73 were charged with immigration breaches, 76 convicted on drugs raps, and others died or disappeared.

Only 22 people were finally prosecuted for trafficking, including two women. Seven were acquitted. The net haul from this vast operation was 15 successful prosecutions. Of those, just five men were convicted of importing women and forcing them to work as prostitutes (two of whom were already in custody).

So that's the 'huge success' that allowed Jacqui Smith and now Harriet Harman, to claim that 'thousands' of women were being trafficked, and to push a Bill through Parliament. So much for evidence-based policy: I would feel happier if they just said that they found prostitution disgusting and wanted to outlaw it for our own moral good. At least that would be honest. This is simple deception, a fraud on the public.

Sex workers are opposing the new legislation. They know that every time governments 'get tough' on prostitution, they are the ones who suffer. The police just have another excuse to go on fishing trips, round up a few girls, and boost their arrest figures so that they get Brownie points and the Chief Constable gets a better bonus. And to prove that they are not 'controlled', girls will start working alone, rather than in flats with a maid to look after them, which will make them more vulnerable to abuse and attack. Thanks, Harriet.

Dr Butler's book The Rotten State of Britain is now in paperback.

The EU is listening...

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In the past the European Union has been accused of being virtually deaf to the wants and needs of its members populace. The recent reactions to referenda being a classic example. Well it seems the EU is mending its ways and is going to listen to them. They are planning to listen to them all the time, whatever they are doing.

"Project INDECT aims to mine data from television, internet traffic, cellphone conversations, p2p file sharing and a range of other sources for crime prevention and threat prediction.

So rest assured whatever you are doing the EU will be listening to your every word or online action. Reassuring isn't it?

Spirit in the sky

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The fact that a man in Texas is on death row and is to be executed in under a month is to come as no surprise. However, what should raise a few eyebrows is the influence that God’s word appears to have had in deciding this.

Khristian Oliver burgled a man, beat him with his own rifle and shot him in the face. Yet jurors have admitted that during his trial several, highlighted copies of the Bible had been passed around, and that attention to brought to passages such as "And if he smite him with an instrument of iron, so that he die, he is a murderer: the murderer shall surely be put to death."

Perhaps Oliver deserves the absolute punishment. For a man to be put to death, the jury must unanimously decide on the death penalty, free from outside influence. People’s outlooks are shaped by important figures and events in their lives, and for many people religion is a very strong influence. For such people, religion is an internal influence; something which already guides their judgments and decisions. The problem in this case is that the deliberation process in this trial reached a point where Bibles were used and quoted. However, the US constitution calls for the separation of state and religion. Just because one person believes in God doesn’t mean the law should be based around an interpretation of his wishes.

With all likelihood Oliver was a very nasty man and deserves his fate. However, as the American constitution went to great lengths to extract personal religious beliefs from law, the nature of his sentence is disappointing. Every US citizen is entitled to a free and fair trial, clearly this one has been tainted. Perhaps Oliver should not be meeting his maker just yet.

Marriage privatization

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The debate over the whether or not homosexuals should have the opportunity to marry has been greatly debated in the past year – especially in America with the passing of proposition 8 banning gay marriage in California. The problem inherently found within both arguments is that neither side will ever give in to the other regardless of future government rulings on the matter. If gay marriage is made legal, all the institutions and individuals that opposed it today will continue to oppose it after the fact. This is similar to what we see in the debate over abortion. The problem within the debate is not with the debaters, but with the moderator. What right does government have to regulate marriage; better yet, do we really want government telling us what is moral and what is not? Morality is private, and unless there is the risk of immediate harm to others, government should stay out.

When western governments decided to remove themselves from religion it was a great step forward for both religion and the general public. Religious beliefs are extremely personal and in many cases private. If individuals decide to unite themselves with a specific religious assembly that group may have guide lines or rules that they expect those individuals to follow. These are essentially private contracts and they have worked very well among religions, and government has been able to remain completely neutral. Marriage for most people is a religious affair and is also a very personal matter. The government should not have the right to issue licenses for marriage. A private marketplace where individuals are able to enter into private contracts with each other would be optimal. Religious institutions will have the right to apply specific clauses or articles to those contracts if the marriage is to be conducted under the authority of that church, therefore providing for all religious beliefs within marriage.

The privatization of marriage would essentially end the debate over gay marriage because any institution in opposition to it will not be forced to recognize them or perform them. State incentives to marry would disappear and therefore allow individuals to enter into marriage for legitimate reasons reducing fraud. Some studies have even found that the rise in state sanctioned marriages correlates with government expansion over time. The argument for privatization is neither for or against gay marriage; it is an argument against government regulating morality.

Spencer Aland blogs regularly here.

Police use child abuse tapes for PR

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Police have released interview tapes of child abuser Vanessa George. That should worry us all.

Justice is flouted so routinely these days that you may feel they can't do anything more to shock us. And then this happens. Nursery worker Vanessa George,39, has been found guilty of abusing young children at the nursery where she worked. Given that anyone who comes within 100 yards of a child these days has to go through Criminal Records Bureau checks, you might wonder how that can happen. Well, the system seems to be wrecking scout groups, schools and after-hours clubs, who have seen a bit drop in parents volunteering to help out – innocent parents who simply can't bear the intrusion of a CRB investigation – though it doesn't seem to stop the real abusers.

Maybe, as with the Soham murders, it was just police incompetence. But even that is not the real shocker. Really shocking is that the police interview tapes with Vanessa George have been released to the BBC and are now all over the internet.

Police interview tapes came in for one reason alone. There were so many cases of defendants pleading that they had been bullied into confessions by police questioning that, to protect the public against any possibility of police abuse, it was ruled that all police interviews should be taped. It would also ensure that what appeared as evidence in court was properly extracted and did actually correspond to what a defendant said.

Now interviews are conducted on video, not just audio. A relief to innocent people who are accused of things they didn't do, you might think. Until you find that the police are releasing your tapes to the BBC, as they did in this case – complete, of course, with their own commentary: "She clearly knows what she did was wrong..." and "She was still trying to manipulate the situation..." etc etc. Yes, she's guilty, yes, she's going to jail, and good thing too. But the duty of the police is to prosecute cases, not to put their own spin on them. Something brought in to protect the public is now being used for police PR.

It's truly amazing. How are the police going to get anyone to confess to anything if they imagine that edited snippets of their tapes are going to be splattered all over the BBC and the internet? I've often said that if you are arrested by the police, the best thing to do is to say absolutely nothing. Yes, they will hold you as long as they can out of spite, but at least you won't be set up, and the BBC won't be playing tapes of you saying something unfortunate for the next twenty years. Just because Vanessa George has been found guilty doesn't make it any better. Today it's tapes of guilty people. Soon it will be tapes of anyone they pull in, plus commentary, if they figure that a bit of public outrage might help the case against them. You might think the rules of natural justice mean that could not possibly happen. But seeing how far our liberties have been eroded, it's surely only a matter of time.

Dr Butler's book The Rotten State of Britain is now in paperback.

I realise that I'm blinkered but....

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Yes, I know, a shock isn't it, my admitting to being blinkered. But I am of course: the logic of unilateral free trade is unassailable so I never really understand those who would complicate matters. For example, there's a campaign going on about the GSP + access that Sri Lanka has to the EU. The essential point of which is that since, as is at least alleged, the Sri Lankan government is being beastly to at least part of the Tamil population then this special access to the EU market should be denied to all Sri Lankans.

All of which sounds really rather strange to someone like me. No, I understand the idea of having special access: it's not for any reasons of economic logic, it's all about politics here within the EU. There are enough lobbyists in Brussels to make sure that the EU will never become a free trader across the boundaries of the zollverien. Sad but true: the best that can happen is that some free traders can sometimes manage to have exceptions made to the rules that prevent the poor of the world from sending us their produce. Essentially this happens by pointing to a place which is so poor, so benighted, oppressed perhaps by the tricks of nature, and saying that you're going to impoverish these people just to please your industrial protectionists? These people? And so it has been with Sri Lanka.

But then we get to the part I really don't understand. Assume all the allegations are true. The Tamils, or some subset of them, are indeed being oppressed by the Sri Lankan government. Our response now is going to be to raise import duties and barriers to exports from Sri Lanka? Really? We're going to make ourselves poorer to protest the actions of a far away government? We're going to make the subjects of that government poorer to protest the actions of that government? Really?

In the name of protecting some of the poorest in the world we're going to make them even poorer? Surely the answer is to have even fewer trade restrictions so that we can continue to alleviate that poverty?

Tories hire Nudge author Thaler

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Will Nudge author Richard Thaler cut regulation or build a new Tory Nanny State?

University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler has reportedly joined the Conservative party as an adviser on regulatory issues. This may be good news for the cleanliness of British urinals, but not much else.

Professor Thaler is the doyen of the school of ‘behavioural economics’, which is based on such non-astonishing insights as the fact that human beings are not wealth-maximizing automata; they procrastinate, lack self-control and occasionally act like headless chickens. He recently wrote an article in The New York Times in which he compared the average punter to Homer Simpson! Behavioural economics thus represents yet another attack on the straw man notion that the validity of free markets depends on rational humans and perfect markets. Adam Smith certainly never made any such claims. He noted that it was all about higgling, bargaining and propensities to ‘truck, barter, and exchange’. Behavioural economics is yet another excuse for intervention, as if the return of Keynesianism wasn’t bad enough!

The Bible of the ‘new’ economics is Professor Thaler’s Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness, which he co-authored with Cass Sunstein, President Obama’s regulatory czar. The book is aimed at promoting an oxymoronic ‘paternal libertarianism,’ a ‘real Third Way’. Thaler and co-author Sunstein make the claim – much beloved of Communist rhetoricians – that there is no ‘real’ freedom. Since all choices are made within particular ‘contexts’, policymakers are obliged to become ‘choice architects’, subtly rigging our environment to stop us making the ‘wrong’ decisions. For support, the authors quote – with an example whose bizarre triviality you could not make up if you were deliberately trying to discredit them -- how Dutch airport authorities reduced urinal spillage by 80% by etching target flies into the porcelain!

It seems that people can’t even piss straight without someone in authority telling them how.

Tory nudging

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Richard Thaler, co-author of the book Nudge will be joining Camp Cameron as an adviser on regulation. Should the Conservatives form the next government, he will sit in a regulatory “star chamber" designed to analyse the impact and effect of proposed regulation.

Thaler is an American behavioural economist whose work has long been popular with the Conservatives. He argues that the concept of humans as fully rational and logical is wrong; instead, we often react instinctively, affected by emotion or acting in ignorance. In essence, Thaler doesn’t believe that we are entirely capable of making our own decisions. Instead he suggests that the government should create social nudges that encourage and influence us to make the ‘best’, socially useful decision. Examples include presumed consent for organ donation, and the proposed Tory policy of comparing a household’s energy expenditure with their neighbours on the bottom of gas and electricity bills.

Thaler calls such ideas examples of “libertarian paternalism"; they are deemed libertarian because they do not force anyone to change their habits, yet they are paternalistic because they assume that the governments’ desired outcome is the most correct. A major problem is that this work is based upon an individual’s unconscious and psychological reactions to the situations before them. ‘Nudging’ people to act in a certain way requires the manipulation of these reactions, such as our ‘herd instinct’, encouraging people to 'make the right choice'. As Lib Dem MP Danny Alexander claims: “There's something worryingly illiberal about all this Nudge stuff. If governments wanting to change our behaviour don't need to explain what they're trying to do, how they're trying to do it, or what outcome they're after, then they are ignoring what voters want."

The influence of economists like Thaler add to the creation of our Nannying State, where citizens are perceived as too ignorant and base to rely on their own desires and morals. It is difficult to see how principled views such as a reluctance to donate organs can be ob ‘wrong’, even if we do make rash and impulsive decisions in day-to-day life.

One hopes that we have enough awareness not to be nudged. However, if we are as susceptible as Thaler claims it is a serious cause for concern. Perhaps it is better to be shoved than nudged; at least then you can retaliate in self-defence.