The gun debate fires off

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After the looting, public confidence in police, society and law has been severely shaken. So shaken, in fact, that the taboo on the gun debate appears to have been lifted. Along with outlandish calls for national service, curfews and media bans, many are now seriously asking why we trust such a small police-force to defend a largely unarmed population. During the riots themselves, those who did not band together in large numbers to protect their own communities, like the residents of Enfield, or the Sikhs or Turks, found themselves questioning why they must be so helpless.

Many in the UK are puzzled by the extraordinary popularity of guns in the US. Along with appeals to the Second Amendment of their Constitution, totally irrelevant in this country, the intelligent pro-gun advocate's position may be summed up by a quotation from science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein: "An armed society is a polite society".

In essence, a well-armed population is not only able to defend itself from foreign aggressors or its own government's potential tyranny, but it works as an effective deterrent from crime, and allows self-defence regardless of strength. You don't try to mug even the weediest guy who could pull a gun out on you. However, pro-gun advocates have to take an all-or-nothing approach in order to get as close to the ambiguity and high risk required for a deterrent to be effective: not only do they argue for widespread possession, but for the right to carry weapons with them at all times, and the right to carry concealed weapons.

After all, if guns are only allowed in the home, then street criminals are hardly going to be dissuaded, though burglars (and looters) might. If guns can be carried, but must be revealed, then criminals need only look at their potential victim before deciding to attack. And finally, it guns are legal yet uncommon, then the chances are that only criminals will purchase them with intent. To this end, some push for a culture of gun-owning, as well as ambiguity.

There are many good counter-arguments. Some cite culture as being a necessary precondition: not every country is like Switzerland (where gun ownership is more or less compulsory, and may explain why it has never been invaded), so gang culture can be a concern. Others reject the usual mantra "guns don't kill, people do" to say that tragic crimes 'of passion' are more likely to occur when the drunk or furious have immediate access to firearms. Finally, some just don't want to live in a country that is armed to the teeth, no matter how polite, just as one wouldn't replace seat-belts with a metal spike pointing at drivers' hearts to promote safer driving. Whatever your position, the taboo has lifted: the debate needs to be a serious one.

Anton Howes is Director of the Liberty League.

We live in reactionary times

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We live in reactionary times. Curfews, national service, and the suppression of an entire medium of communication have all been seriously suggested over the past week in response to the riots. While the prospect of these measures being enacted are thankfully still slim, the fact that they were considered, let alone voiced should be alarming.

Curfews were among the stupider ideas. Creating yet another victimless crime, and lowering respect for the law with a silly and oppressive rule, it would have lent itself to corruption too. You also can't get much more nanny-state than a bedtime. Even setting the ideological case for civil liberty aside, curfews would have been impossibly impractical, requiring a myriad of special exemptions, damaging the economy, and causing huge inconvenience to millions of innocent people.

Wild calls for national service meet similar problems. For a start, it fails to address the problem: authority and enforced 'community engagement' are not the answer to a culture of unjustified entitlement and social atomisation encouraged by the impersonal entitlement state. You also don't encourage a culture of volunteering and socialising by enforcing it, a contradiction in terms.

Even for its own sake, the measure would display a worrying and growing tendency for the state to assume that it owns your time. This is before we even get into the huge impracticalities of any national service scheme, along with the opportunity cost of taking the time out to perform it. Lastly, it would be the culmination of a renewed tendency for demonising entire groups, in this case all young people, regardless of individual circumstance. As a policy that sees only groups, doesn't solve any problems, inconveniences millions, tries to artificially create communities by force, and allows the state to claim ownership of your time, I cannot think of a more stereotypically socialist measure.

Lastly, the blame laid at the feet of social media could not be more absurd. Shooting the messenger has never been the way to win any war, and the 'war against gangs' is no different. By David Cameron's logic, as Charlie Brooker puts it, "perhaps the government could issue us with gags we could slip over our mouths the moment the sirens start wailing".

Anton Howes is Director of the Liberty League.

What price justice?

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Courts are working around the clock to bring justice to the looters. However, at a time when the nature of society itself seems to be up for debate, we should call into question the way we do justice in this country. Instead of having a system balancing restitution, retribution and rehabilitation, we appear to have focussed on the penal effects of prisons to the exclusion of both sense and cost.

Laying down the law as a deterrent is all well and good, but it comes at a cost: is it really worth spending around £10,000 to lock up a man for 3 months, convicted of opportunistically grabbing nothing but £3.50-worth of bottled water? That is not to excuse his actions, but to question the sense in asking the taxpayer to pay even more for this person. Just as many on the 'left' are willing to say their latest pet project should be provided whatever the cost, those on the authoritarian 'right' are equally willing to fetishise justice.

Part of the problem right now is the furious demand for revenge. Rather than identify the underlying causes of the riots, the government seems to be sticking its fingers in its ears and screaming that any attempt to offer an explanation is to excuse criminality. At the same time, it seems to forget the extent to which short prison sentences are akin to criminal training courses - with a recidivism rate of around two thirds, the government is making large numbers of people into fully-fledged criminals.

The truth is that most people are opportunistic. Along with the capability for good and bad, we act according to perceived benefit and cost. Those who looted were not only caught up in mob hysteria, but judged the costs of breaking the law to be lowered by the lack of a police presence. What was alarming, however, was that for so many, they were lowered so much further by the lack of any social constraints on their behaviour. Humiliation and ostracism, along with education and tradition are usually sufficient to stop people attacking one another as we are naturally social beings.

But the momentary collapse in state-enforced law and order revealed the extent to which these social constraints had been hollowed out. Part of this is due to the subsidisation of particular behaviours, and part is due to the crowding out of social and family bonds by the Entitlement State. We must find a way to stop these social constraints from being undermined, and re-examine our unhealthy obsession with retribution at any cost.

Anton Howes is Director of the Liberty League.

Confessions of a former drugs prohibitionist

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The drug legalization debate plays on my heartstrings. I’ve witnessed family and friends ruin their lives through drugs. Some have died from overdoses, while ‘luckier’ friends have been imprisoned. I’ve watched perfectly intelligent friends lose their character. Believe me when I say that I know what drugs do – especially to family life and cherished friendships.

Accordingly, my position on drugs was familiar: the Peter Hitchens position. I shall not try to paraphrase him – you can read his arguments here. But to summarize, my previous views were that drugs are bad so they should be illegal. The drug industry should have harsh-sentences imposed on them when caught.

A conversation with a Dutch friend reinforced this. He said that “the reason that drug legalization worked in Holland was because if you take drugs, you’re still seen as an idiot” (or worse). The United Kingdom’s culture just isn’t accustomed to stigma or peer-pressure (as a means of enforcing a common law morality) any more.

Yet this flawed thinking pervades our tax system. The reason for punitive tax rates is not ‘revenue maximization’. Evidence shows that punitive tax-rates are counter-productive (creating tax avoidance, emigration and the like). The motivation for measures such as the 50p tax rate is not economic, but moralistic. And yet this fallacy still informs people who are committed capitalists and free-marketeers. Not even Milton Friedman could entirely convince me. What are the logical effects of criminalization?

The legalization of cannabis in particular has proven controversial. Opponents see a thin-end of the wedge. More people trying drugs going on to harder drugs; legalizing one substance making the criminalization of other substances less tenable. Cannabis is the easiest drug to intercept. But what does stopping cannabis do? It compels people to supply and demand harder drugs.

Cannabis suppliers are incentivized to grow more potent marijuana. Cheaper, harder drugs will experience demand booms. The first time I was offered drugs was outside of my school's gates by a drug-dealer offering me cheap cocaine. And there are incentives for even more dangerous innovations. As Friedman says: “Crack cocaine would never have been invented… if cocaine had not been so expensive”. I would echo this argument for crystal meth. With harder drugs and the information failure involved in an illegal market, what guarantees of quality are there?

The foremost effect of criminalizing drugs is to protect the criminal gangs that traffic them. The barriers to entry in the drugs market are high and infinitely risky, whilst policing protects the price of their produce. Gang culture would not be financially viable if artificially inflated prices didn’t protect their profits. Prohibition Era USA banned alcohol, yet easy access remained. When alcohol is consumed in large quantities, people do stupid, unattractive things that we may disapprove of. But is that better or worse than keeping Al Capone in business?

Gang culture disproportionately affects and criminalizes the inhabitants of high-density populations in inner cities. By keeping prices artificially high combined with finite incomes funding an infinite desire to acquire drugs, governments are indirectly causing more crimes to be committed. Again, Friedman calculates that 10,000 additional people were killed in the USA through drug-related homicides and gang-warfare. Is it not a moral problem that government intervention over personal-choices is essentially killing thousands of innocent people?

A reasonable concern remaining is the potential increase in people either trying or becoming addicted to drugs. Rachel has already pointed out that addicts are dealt with by police officers and judges rather than health and rehabilitation services. But I think there’s a wider philosophical point: Addicts make their own individual choices. It is their choice to seek help or reap the consequences of drug-addiction. Why, at everyone else’s expense, should addicts be protected from their own selfishness?

If, as prevailing opinion dictates, over one’s own body the individual is sovereign, then criminalizing a drug addict over a personal choice that doesn’t affect anyone else is immoral and paternalistic. Moreover, why should taxpayers guarantee the costs of intervening in something that they’re not responsible for? Encouraging drug-addicted parasitism, leeching off of the taxpayer is at least as immoral as when the welfare state actively encourages long-term unemployment. Prohibition is at the root of many social evils: we should start looking at the trees to see the forest for what it is.

Squaring the circle of sexual harassment

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Actor Jeremy Irons has come under fire following comments he made to the Radio Times lamenting the rise of legal cases involving claims of sexual harassment. He argued that legislation, and the resulting claim culture, has "gone too far" and that most people are "robust" enough to deal with flirtatious forms of mere "communication." Without looking too much at Mr Irons' reputation, and risk being swayed either by his roguish personality or seemingly questionable attitudes towards women, it could, perhaps, be argued that Irons actually has a point.

Sexual harassment legislation has been accused of being both unnecessary and a potential violation of our right to free speech. Instances of sexual harassment, particularly verbal ones, often boil down to individual interpretations of offence, a matter which government cannot legitimately legislate on.

Walter Block in Defending the Undefendable (PDF) sets out the argument that entrepreneurial self interest effectively persuades employers to discourage offensive action of any kind. Employees need to attract both female customers as well as female employees to remain competitive. Providing a safe and comfortable working environment is just good business. Whilst this element of competition does not ensure the absence of sexual harassment, it is a seemingly superior preventative option than blunt governmental intervention.

Further to this, through harassment laws the government suppresses speech and behaviour it deems harmful and potentially offensive opening a Pandora's Box of what is offensive or not. The government cannot assume all women will shrug off the forms of "communication" Irons defends. It therefore assumes that all women could, and potentially should, be offended by any level of suggestive behaviour. By imposing liability upon employers, harassment law incentivises employers to restrict their employees' civil liberties in order to cover their own backs, an infringement that is unlikely to be challenged within hierarchical companies.

Irons' comment that "any woman worth her salt" can deal with a "man putting his hand on (her) bottom" may be a step too far, but his arguments concerning the rise of legal cases involving sexual harassment claims in the workplace can be justified. State involvement in the public interactions of individuals runs a huge risk of infringing upon civil liberties and, at best, can be seen as a poorer method of discouraging offensive behaviour in the workplace. Left to employers' devices, incidents of sexual harassment can be better avoided as they seek to provide the best working conditions to attract the best workers possible.

The tragedy of drug prohibition

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The sudden (yet not entirely unexpected) death of singer Amy Winehouse last month adds fuel to the fire of debate regarding the Government's treatment of drugs and drug-taking. The media focus on and wide public knowledge of celebrities indulging in drug use only serves to remind us that anti-drug laws have had little to no moderating effecting on people's behaviour. Away from the seemingly untouchable lives of the rich and famous the criminalisation of drugs appears only to worsen the social realities of drug users and has offered little in the way of practical help.

This failure isn't going unnoticed either. Liberal Democrat Party members are expected to back a motion to legalise cannabis and decriminalise drug use at their party conference in Birmingham next month. The motion, quite rightly, states that there is "increasing evidence that the UK's drug policy is not only ineffective and not cost effective but actually harmful, impacting particularly severely on the poor and marginalised."

Prohibition means that police, rather than medical professionals, are put in charge of dealing with drug users, be they recreational or habitual. As a result users are punished not treated, costing the government an estimated £2.6 billion a year (according to action group Addaction) in "criminal procedural costs" alone, and marking even occasional users with criminal records that damage their employability and consequentially tarnish the UK economy. Whilst drug offences may be seemingly part and parcel of the music industry the social and economical cost to us mere humans is enormous.

Since Amy's death her father, Mitch Winehouse, has met with the Commons Home Affairs Committee to highlight the gaps in addiction services offered by the NHS. While this is an issue that certainly needs addressing it seems the government are unwilling to look at the crux of the escalating problem. Decriminalisation would free the government from the massive economic burden of trying and imprisoning users as well as undermine the culture of crime that the drug trade perpetuates.

So, while some may see Winehouse's death as a wake up call for the Government to pursue a more aggressive tact with drug users and pushers, instead her demise should be seen as another nail in the coffin of the government's drug prohibition policies. Yes, rehabilitation methods need to be greater pursued, but this seems like an uphill battle whilst drug users are still condemned by the Government and society as morally-corrupted criminals.

What really caused the London lootings?

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As is inevitable, partisan politics has tried to impose simplistic narratives on the phenomenon of nation-wide looting and arson, to the detriment of finding a solution to the real, root causes of the malaise eating at British society. Those on the statist 'left' appear to blame a variety of socio-economic factors, such as unemployment, inequality, and relative poverty. Those on the statist 'right' instead view the problem as nothing but the breakdown of public order, with opportunists clambering into the holes left by the perceived lack of authority and discipline on the streets, in the schools, and in the home. Both views of course hold a grain of truth, but there are other underlying factors that have largely been conveniently ignored.

Unemployment could well be a significant factor. The areas initially hit seem to bear a strong correlation to areas of high youth unemployment. However, this explanation, along with cries of inequality and poverty, is both insulting to the hard-working and law-abiding poor, and offers little answer as to why the kids are having fun rather than expressing anger and frustration at the system. Gleeful malice rather than anger at the system is not the sign of the young person with limited opportunities. It also fails to explain why the looters are attacking their own localities, sometimes without aiming to steal anything, merely to destroy: to loosely paraphrase Brendan O'Neill, they are more than happy to "s— on their neighbours' doorsteps".

The 'break-down of authority' narrative seeks to answer these questions. It sees marriage-less families, communities without cohesion, and a general lack of discipline or punishment within the system. This may well be true, but it seems to focus on these symptoms to the neglect of their underlying causes. After all, why do some immigrant and religious groups maintain their cohesion in the face of public disorder, like the Sikhs and Turks did, and others do not? It also fails to account for the constant complaint of the young looters that they do not receive 'respect', and are too oppressed by authority.

So what is the true explanation? The underlying causes all seem to point to a dangerous mixture of a centralised and impersonal welfare state, along with a surveillance state that seeks to control in small yet demeaning ways. The latter would account for the perceived discrimination and oppression, a major complaint having been the police's use of stop-and-search powers. The former would account for high unemployment by promoting welfare dependency; but most crucially the sense of entitlement and 'rights' that accompanies it. It would account for the breakdown of marriage through distorted incentives, the atomised communities and the resultant lack of social feedback loops that the statist 'right' like to call 'discipline'.

By receiving their benefit from some faceless entity, there is no obligation to justify it to those who pay for it, no punishment when they waste it, and no obligation to stay an integral part of the family or community that cares. Self-reliance and the interdependent relationship with local, family and social communities has been gradually yet drastically replaced with individualised reliance on a single, faceless entity. The misplaced sense of entitlement then seems the natural result of a youth spent only as an unconditional receiver. It is like getting water from a tap in a lone room rather than from a shared lake: the tap-user is then more than happy to defile that lake for whatever reason, having been brought up free of the immediate and damning social consequences. It then falls to the law to punish instead. Once that law is challenged, there is then no social element left to prevent wanton vandalism and theft - this appears to be what has just happened, with the hollowness of social constraints laid bare for all to see.

Identifying the role of the impersonal welfare-surveillance state offers the most comprehensive explanation of the looting. It takes into account the socio-economic concerns of unemployment and welfare dependency, but points out that the cultural element caused by the erosion of basic respect for others, for communities and society must be taken into account too, along with the pervasiveness of the state's presence in everyday life. If we want to solve this problem in the long term, we need to concentrate on the cause, not on the symptoms. Perhaps welfare needs to be more local and personal, rooted in the communities that pay for it; perhaps welfare needs to stop trapping people in dependency. Perhaps we should move to take the state out of welfare altogether and allow the personal, caring and communal element to thrive. Whatever the policy, solutions must be found to the right problems, not those that are simply politically convenient.

Anton Howes is Director of the Liberty League.

Stop this authoritarian knee-jerk

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At times when unrest is widespread, civil liberties tend to be neglected. If the primary function of the state is to protect its citizens from attack, then basic liberty is most at stake when there is no security of persons or property. But what measures should be resorted to in order to keep the peace? The knee-jerk authoritarians immediately latched onto the ideas of using rubber bullets, bringing in the army, and even imposing curfews. It may well be that all three of these measures could have returned order in the short term, but at what cost?

Fortunately, all three proposals proved unnecessary when the police were finally deployed in full force: London has seen minimal violence since Tuesday, and the spread to the West Midlands and Manchester seems to have been contained. At the same time, communities had a chance to recover and organise themselves, with resident patrols most noticeably in Enfield, and touching scenes of Sikh and Muslim solidarity as they pledged to guard each others' neighbourhoods in Birmingham.

But imagine the authoritarians had had their way. The use of rubber bullets or water cannon could have caused an escalation of violence, suddenly focusing attention on attacking and targeting authority itself rather than the sporadic and spontaneous opportunism we have seen so far. Likewise, the use of the army would have been a huge admittance of systemic police failure, causing us to seriously re-examine the use and necessity of the police force as we know it. This may have been a good thing if institutional change were needed, but calling it into question at a time of crisis could only have caused further uncertainty.

The use of curfews would have been a severe restriction of the freedoms of all citizens, adversely affecting everyone instead of targeting and deterring criminals. It is astounding that it was considered seriously at all, even without all of the additional impracticalities of enforcement and exemption for special cases. Lastly, it is also worth remembering the old adage that there is nothing so permanent as a temporary state policy: you curtail civil liberties for immediate security at the peril of never regaining them. The lesson from this week was that the restoration of order merely required better enforcement of existing procedures, rather than the accrual of extra state power at the expense of our liberty.

Anton Howes is Director of the Liberty League.

Freedom of Communication is helping communities defend themselves. Don't curb it

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The blame laid on social media for the looting is both misguided and dangerous. It is like blaming print media for the French Revolution, and neglects the fact that social media is part of the solution too. If communities are to reclaim the streets from disorder and fear, then people need to be able to organise themselves in opposition to the looters, and in order to clean up after them.

The best example of this is this collection of heart-warming tweets that should hopefully restore some of your faith in humanity, and the majority of law-abiding people. The proposal to shut down mobile communications would therefore do more harm than good: people need to be able to organise their communities, to check up on their friends and family, to stay informed about the location of violence in order to stay safe, and to use instant images and videos of the protests to identify looters and bring them to justice. Furthermore, it is now possible to track the violence and culprits due to the open and transparent nature of the BlackBerry broadcasts being used by looters.

We need to recognise that the rules of the game have changed, just as with every leap forward in communication technology. Organisation is faster than it was before - this means violence can be organised quickly, but means that counter-violence and defence can be organised just as quickly too. Any curbs on this freedom of communication and speech would not only harm everyone's liberty and the ability to defend against violence, but would misunderstand the socio-cultural nature of the problem. People do not incite violence because they have twitter; they incite violence because they are themselves violent.

These thugs are socially atomised, growing up in a system where they can receive 'rights' and privileges from a faceless, centralised and impersonal entity, never having to justify their taking from the communities and societies around them. This centralised welfare state means they effectively indirectly loot the rest of the community already - is it really any surprise that they are willing to take matters into their own hands for mindless fun? We've essentially been telling them for decades that they can.

Anton Howes is Director of the Liberty League.

We need a Supercop

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With the riots and looting in London stretching into another day, David Cameron's idea of making Bill Bratton the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police is looking like an inspired idea. Or it would have been, had the Home Secretary not vetoed it because he was an American.

Well, if you can have a Swede or an Italian running the England football team, you can sure have an American running London's policing. Especially one who was instrumental in turning around crime in New York. His view was that crime and disorder are not caused by the economy, racism or poverty, but by the illegal behaviour of groups and individuals – pretty much as the Home Secretary has been saying, in fact. And that if you allow such illegal behaviour to go unchecked, it undermines public confidence in the police and indeed more widely, in their society.

Successful policing, he insisted, is about leadership and focus. Not something the Yard has been noted for recently. And it is individual officers who are the key asset in getting to grips with things. Bratton cut New York's appalling murder and violent crime rates by half – yes, half – in just two years by his community policing initiative. He ended the domination of the gangs. Not community in the sense of the police trying to be nice to every different and mutually opposing local political group, but community in terms of being part of the community, being seen, and being approachable, so that local people saw the police as on the same side, and police saw the local people as part of the solution, not the problem. Back to Sir Robert Peel, in fact: the police and the public are the same people.

Bratton's achievements were not about spending money, but about pro-active community policing – and, crucially, prevention. Fix the broken window, clean up the graffiti, and people will value their neighbourhood more, and be less tolerant of the criminals. Deal with the small, quality of life, human problems and then you will be able to deal with the big, organised crime and violent disorder problems because you will have the public on your side.