The only mystery is why anyone would think the ANC would give a damn about "failing the key test of democracy".
ANC 'power grab' after poll defeat
Telegraph
30/09/2006
South Africa's ruling party has been accused of "failing the key test of a democracy" by trying to reverse its first major election defeat. Helen Zille, from the opposition Democratic Alliance, became mayor of Cape Town after her party won 91 seats in council elections in March, compared with 81 for the African National Congress (ANC).
For the first time since apartheid's demise 12 years ago, an ANC mayor was ousted. Mrs Zille now governs the city in coalition with six small parties but the ANC has responded to defeat by trying to strip her of all her powers. Since the election, Mrs Zille, 55, has governed Cape Town as an executive mayor, with overall responsibility for 22,000 employees and a budget exceeding £1 billion.
But the ANC-controlled government of Western Cape province has proposed reducing her to a powerless symbol with ceremonial duties only. It favours abolishing Mrs Zille's job and running Cape Town with an executive committee. The ANC and its allies would have six of the committee's 10 members. This plan would, in effect, cripple the mayor and return the ANC to power in Cape Town in defiance of the election result.
"It raises the question of whether South Africa is a genuine democracy," said Mrs Zille. "You can't have a democracy when the ruling party only accepts the outcome of the elections it wins. They're failing the key test of a democracy, which is accepting the election result when you lose."
The ANC created the post of executive mayor four years ago. For as long as the party won every election and the mayor was an ANC member, it was happy to run Cape Town in this way. Mrs Zille pointed out that the decision to downgrade her job was only taken after the opposition won the city council election. At present, the ANC runs every other major city. Only in Cape Town is the party proposing to do away with the executive mayor.
... Even if the mayor defeats this bid to oust her, Mrs Zille expects the ANC to try again. "It's like the waves of the sea," she said. "When one goes, you wait for another to gain momentum. They keep coming at you. And then they blame us for causing instability."
Saturday, September 30, 2006
Friday, September 29, 2006
State Stupidity
How somebody thinks this is a good idea baffles me. So called minor offenses will no longer go before the magistrates and will be dealt with by means of a summary 100 pound fine.
Let's set aside any quibbles about police and prosecutors determining guilt. What is mad is that this applies to muggers. Yep. Someone can mug you and will (providing they catch the bugger) simply get a ticket and be sent on there way. Oh and they include assaulting a police officer among these minor offences.
SERIOUS crimes such as assaulting a police officer and mugging will be punished by instant fines of up to £100 from next year under plans to keep hundreds of thousands of offenders out of court.
You would have thought that the State would try and deter as much as possible assault on a police officer by punishing it severly. Otherwise it becomes more difficult to promote the respect for the unarmed police officer.
Tim Worstall has a different suggestion - make assaulting a Politician cost 100 pounds.
Let's set aside any quibbles about police and prosecutors determining guilt. What is mad is that this applies to muggers. Yep. Someone can mug you and will (providing they catch the bugger) simply get a ticket and be sent on there way. Oh and they include assaulting a police officer among these minor offences.
SERIOUS crimes such as assaulting a police officer and mugging will be punished by instant fines of up to £100 from next year under plans to keep hundreds of thousands of offenders out of court.
You would have thought that the State would try and deter as much as possible assault on a police officer by punishing it severly. Otherwise it becomes more difficult to promote the respect for the unarmed police officer.
Tim Worstall has a different suggestion - make assaulting a Politician cost 100 pounds.
Thursday, September 28, 2006
Raise a glass to the fight against Islamism...
An essential article about how liberal values are being defended in Bahrain under the guise of maintaining the right to drink, wear short skirts and smoke cigarettes. (I'm 2 for 3 in showing solidarity with the movement - I just don't have the legs for the short skirts.)
A Bahraini liberal fights for his right to party.
Drinking Liberally
by Joseph Braude
Manama, Bahrain
Civil rights activist Abdullah Al Madani has drawn a line in the sand within this tiny desert island kingdom--and stockpiled plenty of whiskey and beer well behind it. "Let them try and take away our simple pleasures," he warns over a cold one. "We won't go down without a fight." Behind this frothy threat to prohibitionists in Bahrain stand 31 civil society organizations and a new grassroots movement Madani leads called We Have a Right (Lana Haqq). The group has signed up feminists, labor organizers, musicians, and other typical victims of Islamists' restrictive social agenda to a platform espousing equality of religions, genders, lifestyles, and every skirt length. The country's conservatives appear to take the movement seriously enough to denounce it: Several prominent mosque preachers reportedly declared its adherents to be "pagans"--fighting words in Arabia--accusing We Have a Right of spreading alcoholism and prostitution. American policymakers, meanwhile, have largely ignored or snubbed the organization.
"Your National Democratic Institute representative in Bahrain told us we weren't serious," Madani tells me, puffing a cigar between swigs. "He said we should focus on the real issues in Bahrain, and personal liberties will come later." The International Republican Institute, which has also actively engaged Bahraini leaders, has no contact with We Have a Right either. Nor does the State Department's Middle East Partnership Initiative, which now funds several Bahraini projects in tandem with the government and private sector.
But Madani's nascent movement--which is well-publicized and hard to ignore--represents a smart new strategy for Arab liberals in the Middle East, and American reformists active in the region ignore We Have a Right at their own peril. The group's niche agenda exploits the widespread resentment secular Muslims feel toward encroachments on their individual rights by Islamists--while behind the hot button campaign lies a deep and wise long-term vision. The group's initial success in attracting followers in Bahrain, a national Petri dish of the Middle East's political and religious schisms, suggests there may be similar opportunities to galvanize Islamism's opponents in larger Arab and Muslim countries. So, rather than turn a blind eye to Madani's merry crew of libertine activists, the United States would do well to raise a glass to them--and figure out how to promote a similar approach in Iran, Iraq, throughout the Gulf, and beyond.
Read on...
A Bahraini liberal fights for his right to party.
Drinking Liberally
by Joseph Braude
Manama, Bahrain
Civil rights activist Abdullah Al Madani has drawn a line in the sand within this tiny desert island kingdom--and stockpiled plenty of whiskey and beer well behind it. "Let them try and take away our simple pleasures," he warns over a cold one. "We won't go down without a fight." Behind this frothy threat to prohibitionists in Bahrain stand 31 civil society organizations and a new grassroots movement Madani leads called We Have a Right (Lana Haqq). The group has signed up feminists, labor organizers, musicians, and other typical victims of Islamists' restrictive social agenda to a platform espousing equality of religions, genders, lifestyles, and every skirt length. The country's conservatives appear to take the movement seriously enough to denounce it: Several prominent mosque preachers reportedly declared its adherents to be "pagans"--fighting words in Arabia--accusing We Have a Right of spreading alcoholism and prostitution. American policymakers, meanwhile, have largely ignored or snubbed the organization.
"Your National Democratic Institute representative in Bahrain told us we weren't serious," Madani tells me, puffing a cigar between swigs. "He said we should focus on the real issues in Bahrain, and personal liberties will come later." The International Republican Institute, which has also actively engaged Bahraini leaders, has no contact with We Have a Right either. Nor does the State Department's Middle East Partnership Initiative, which now funds several Bahraini projects in tandem with the government and private sector.
But Madani's nascent movement--which is well-publicized and hard to ignore--represents a smart new strategy for Arab liberals in the Middle East, and American reformists active in the region ignore We Have a Right at their own peril. The group's niche agenda exploits the widespread resentment secular Muslims feel toward encroachments on their individual rights by Islamists--while behind the hot button campaign lies a deep and wise long-term vision. The group's initial success in attracting followers in Bahrain, a national Petri dish of the Middle East's political and religious schisms, suggests there may be similar opportunities to galvanize Islamism's opponents in larger Arab and Muslim countries. So, rather than turn a blind eye to Madani's merry crew of libertine activists, the United States would do well to raise a glass to them--and figure out how to promote a similar approach in Iran, Iraq, throughout the Gulf, and beyond.
Read on...
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
Pakistan
I found it very sad, as a massive fan of Imran Khan the cricketer (far better than Botham, in my opinion) to find out how he has been hypocritically pandering to Islamists in Pakistan in his later guise as Imran Khan the politician.
Khan Artist
Imran Khan, the man who sparked the Newsweek riots: Islamist politician by day, London playboy by night
Weekly Standard
31/05/2005
With 17 people dead and anti-American sentiment even higher than usual in the Muslim world, people are looking for someone to blame for the riots that flowed from Newsweek's Koran story. So far, it has been pinned on everyone from Mark Whitaker to the U.S. military. But the real villain is Pakistani politician Imran Khan.
On Friday, May 6 Khan catapulted the 300-word Newsweek story about a Koran being flushed down the toilet into headline news across the Muslim world by brandishing the article at a press conference and demanding that Pakistani president Gen. Pervez Musharraf secure an apology from George W. Bush for the incident. It is unlikely Khan chanced upon the item. Just days before, Khan had tried to spark a similar firestorm over a Washington Times cartoon depicting the Pakistani government as America's lapdog. Clearly in search of grist for the anti-American mill, Khan's demagoguery speaks to his own two-facedness and to a downside of military rule in Pakistan.
Khan embodies the hypocrisy of Muslim elites who inveigh against the West by day and enjoy its pleasures by night. ... After his playing career ended in 1992, Khan entered politics under the tutelage of Lt.-Gen. Hamid Gul, the former Pakistani intelligence chief famous for fueling the Taliban's rise in Afghanistan. (Gul believes that September 11 was a U.S. conspiracy.) Khan, a man who once captained the Oxford University cricket team and was a feature at London's trendiest places, now turned against the culture he had previously enjoyed.
In 1995 he denounced the West with its "fat women in miniskirts" (presumably the skinny ones in miniskirts Khan had dated were okay) and proclaimed that the "West is falling because of their addiction to sex and obscenity." He also chastised Pakistanis who looked to the West for ideas, saying "I hate it when our leaders or elite feel that by licking the soles of the feet of foreign countries we will somehow be given aid and we will progress."
...
Even his political allies find Khan's duplicity hard to take. In 2002 one of his party leaders remarked: "Even we are finding it difficult to figure out the real Imran. He dons the shalwar-kameez and preaches desi and religious values while in Pakistan, but transforms himself completely while rubbing shoulders with the elite in Britain and elsewhere in the West." Khan claims that his marriage proved he wasn't a politician but his divorce and his recent demagoguery show that he now is one, albeit one of the worst sort.
----------------------
US threatened to bomb Pakistan, says Musharraf
Telegraph
22/09/2006
President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan said that after the September 11 attacks the US threatened to bomb his country if it did not co-operate with America's war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Gen Musharraf, in an interview with the CBS news magazine show 60 Minutes, that will be broadcast at the weekend, said the threat came from the deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, and was given to Gen Musharraf's intelligence director.
"The intelligence director told me that (Armitage) said, 'Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age,'" Gen Musharraf said. "I think it was a very rude remark." Not long afterwards Pakistan announced it was standing with America and its allies in fighting terror. It granted permission for US fighter jets to use Pakistani airspace as the attack began on the Taliban and al-Qa'eda, which were protected by the Afghan militia.
But Mr Armitage told CNN that he never threatened to bomb Pakistan, would not have said such a thing and did not have the authority to do it. He said that he did have a tough message for Pakistan, telling the Muslim nation that it was either "with us or against us," but did not understand how his message was recounted so differently to Gen Musharraf.
----------------------
Musharraf lashes out on US 'book tour'
Telegraph
26/09/2006
General Pervez Musharraf, the president of Pakistan, has attacked his Afghan counterpart on his controversial tour of America.Gen Musharraf, who is visiting the US with the twin aims of promoting his memoirs and representing his country, told Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, that he should stop blaming Pakistan for his own country's instability.
Responding to Mr Karzai's claims that Pakistani religious schools are fanning terrorism across the border, he said: "The sooner that President Karzai understands his own country, the better." He added that Mr Karzai - who is also in the US - was partially to blame for disenfranchising the majority Pashtun ethnic group in Afghanistan, and warned that the Taliban cannot be defeated by military might alone.
The leaders of Afghanistan and Pakistan are due to meet with President George W Bush on Wednesday to discuss ways to bridge their differences.Gen Musharraf is causing a storm in the US with his book, In the Line of Fire, in which he claims that America threatened to bomb Pakistan "back to the Stone Age" if it failed to support the war on terror after the Sept 11 attacks. He also criticises the invasion of Iraq for making the world "more dangerous", and claims that the United States and Saudi Arabia created an extremist "monster" by supporting Islamic groups fighting the Soviet Union's 1979-89 occupation of Afghanistan.
Khan Artist
Imran Khan, the man who sparked the Newsweek riots: Islamist politician by day, London playboy by night
Weekly Standard
31/05/2005
With 17 people dead and anti-American sentiment even higher than usual in the Muslim world, people are looking for someone to blame for the riots that flowed from Newsweek's Koran story. So far, it has been pinned on everyone from Mark Whitaker to the U.S. military. But the real villain is Pakistani politician Imran Khan.
On Friday, May 6 Khan catapulted the 300-word Newsweek story about a Koran being flushed down the toilet into headline news across the Muslim world by brandishing the article at a press conference and demanding that Pakistani president Gen. Pervez Musharraf secure an apology from George W. Bush for the incident. It is unlikely Khan chanced upon the item. Just days before, Khan had tried to spark a similar firestorm over a Washington Times cartoon depicting the Pakistani government as America's lapdog. Clearly in search of grist for the anti-American mill, Khan's demagoguery speaks to his own two-facedness and to a downside of military rule in Pakistan.
Khan embodies the hypocrisy of Muslim elites who inveigh against the West by day and enjoy its pleasures by night. ... After his playing career ended in 1992, Khan entered politics under the tutelage of Lt.-Gen. Hamid Gul, the former Pakistani intelligence chief famous for fueling the Taliban's rise in Afghanistan. (Gul believes that September 11 was a U.S. conspiracy.) Khan, a man who once captained the Oxford University cricket team and was a feature at London's trendiest places, now turned against the culture he had previously enjoyed.
In 1995 he denounced the West with its "fat women in miniskirts" (presumably the skinny ones in miniskirts Khan had dated were okay) and proclaimed that the "West is falling because of their addiction to sex and obscenity." He also chastised Pakistanis who looked to the West for ideas, saying "I hate it when our leaders or elite feel that by licking the soles of the feet of foreign countries we will somehow be given aid and we will progress."
...
Even his political allies find Khan's duplicity hard to take. In 2002 one of his party leaders remarked: "Even we are finding it difficult to figure out the real Imran. He dons the shalwar-kameez and preaches desi and religious values while in Pakistan, but transforms himself completely while rubbing shoulders with the elite in Britain and elsewhere in the West." Khan claims that his marriage proved he wasn't a politician but his divorce and his recent demagoguery show that he now is one, albeit one of the worst sort.
----------------------
US threatened to bomb Pakistan, says Musharraf
Telegraph
22/09/2006
President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan said that after the September 11 attacks the US threatened to bomb his country if it did not co-operate with America's war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Gen Musharraf, in an interview with the CBS news magazine show 60 Minutes, that will be broadcast at the weekend, said the threat came from the deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, and was given to Gen Musharraf's intelligence director.
"The intelligence director told me that (Armitage) said, 'Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age,'" Gen Musharraf said. "I think it was a very rude remark." Not long afterwards Pakistan announced it was standing with America and its allies in fighting terror. It granted permission for US fighter jets to use Pakistani airspace as the attack began on the Taliban and al-Qa'eda, which were protected by the Afghan militia.
But Mr Armitage told CNN that he never threatened to bomb Pakistan, would not have said such a thing and did not have the authority to do it. He said that he did have a tough message for Pakistan, telling the Muslim nation that it was either "with us or against us," but did not understand how his message was recounted so differently to Gen Musharraf.
----------------------
Musharraf lashes out on US 'book tour'
Telegraph
26/09/2006
General Pervez Musharraf, the president of Pakistan, has attacked his Afghan counterpart on his controversial tour of America.Gen Musharraf, who is visiting the US with the twin aims of promoting his memoirs and representing his country, told Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, that he should stop blaming Pakistan for his own country's instability.
Responding to Mr Karzai's claims that Pakistani religious schools are fanning terrorism across the border, he said: "The sooner that President Karzai understands his own country, the better." He added that Mr Karzai - who is also in the US - was partially to blame for disenfranchising the majority Pashtun ethnic group in Afghanistan, and warned that the Taliban cannot be defeated by military might alone.
The leaders of Afghanistan and Pakistan are due to meet with President George W Bush on Wednesday to discuss ways to bridge their differences.Gen Musharraf is causing a storm in the US with his book, In the Line of Fire, in which he claims that America threatened to bomb Pakistan "back to the Stone Age" if it failed to support the war on terror after the Sept 11 attacks. He also criticises the invasion of Iraq for making the world "more dangerous", and claims that the United States and Saudi Arabia created an extremist "monster" by supporting Islamic groups fighting the Soviet Union's 1979-89 occupation of Afghanistan.
Monday, September 25, 2006
U.N (Unbelievably Nuts)
Steyn and Ferguson both comment on last week's U.N Assembly.
Here's Steyn: It may be news to the Council of Foreign Relations types and the Dems, but the U.N. demonstrated this last week that it is utterly incapable of reform. Indeed, any reforms would be more likely to upgrade and enhance the cliques of thugs and despots than of the few states willing to stand up to them. The most sensible proposal this week came from Chavez, who demanded the U.N. relocate to Venezuela. You go, girl! Dershowitz would be better off trying to get America expelled from the U.N., and encouraging it to join a new group of nations serious about defending freedom in the world: It would be a very small club. This week Jacques Chirac dropped the threat of sanctions against Iran. A few months ago, he briefly mused about nuking the Persians, but he's now folded like ... well, not like the Arabs and their tents: They're busily pitching them all over Europe with no plans to fold at all. Anyone who thinks the U.N. is the body to mediate Iran's nuclearization or anything else is more deluded than Ahmadinejad. At this rate, the Twelfth Imam will be the next secretary-general.
And here's Ferguson:I was wondering why the antics of world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly seemed so familiar last week. Then I realised. It was just like a university faculty meeting. Extravagant, long-winded denunciations of the president are what professors do, not politicians. Sure enough, the Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez could not resist brandishing a book by Noam Chomsky – the America-hating darling of all campus Lefties.
Here's Steyn: It may be news to the Council of Foreign Relations types and the Dems, but the U.N. demonstrated this last week that it is utterly incapable of reform. Indeed, any reforms would be more likely to upgrade and enhance the cliques of thugs and despots than of the few states willing to stand up to them. The most sensible proposal this week came from Chavez, who demanded the U.N. relocate to Venezuela. You go, girl! Dershowitz would be better off trying to get America expelled from the U.N., and encouraging it to join a new group of nations serious about defending freedom in the world: It would be a very small club. This week Jacques Chirac dropped the threat of sanctions against Iran. A few months ago, he briefly mused about nuking the Persians, but he's now folded like ... well, not like the Arabs and their tents: They're busily pitching them all over Europe with no plans to fold at all. Anyone who thinks the U.N. is the body to mediate Iran's nuclearization or anything else is more deluded than Ahmadinejad. At this rate, the Twelfth Imam will be the next secretary-general.
And here's Ferguson:I was wondering why the antics of world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly seemed so familiar last week. Then I realised. It was just like a university faculty meeting. Extravagant, long-winded denunciations of the president are what professors do, not politicians. Sure enough, the Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez could not resist brandishing a book by Noam Chomsky – the America-hating darling of all campus Lefties.
Ex Muslim Blogger seeks asylum in Canada
Here is an interesting blog from a Pakistani citzen explaining in great detail why he is seeking asylum in Canada.
Sunday, September 24, 2006
Police to check with Muslim Leaders before raids
The Police have agreed to consult with Muslim Community Leaders before carrying out raids. This sounds like a really silly idea. I would have thought that there was a danger that the targets of the raids would be tipped off. Maybe I'm missing something.
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
A cry for help.
Ok Wembley, I need your help.
I've tried to give this Government the benefit of the doubt (no really I have) but stories like these three listed below seem to confirm all my worse suspisions:
1) Hampering Democracy
Councillors have been banned from discussing local park-and-ride schemes if they own a car under an ethical watchdog created by John Prescott. The Deputy Prime Minister is accused today of undermining local democracy and stifling free speech by imposing "draconian" rules on thousands of councillors.
Even councillors who have been elected specifically to fight a particular issue have fallen foul of the rules and found themselves told they cannot speak or vote on it. A damning report reveals how local authority members are being barred from speaking or voting on subjects simply because they are perceived to have taken a position on the issue.
2) Labour Party officials have met to work out ways of closing hospitals without jeopardising marginal seats:
Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, called for those at the meeting to be provided with “heat maps”, showing marginal Labour seats where closures or reconfigurations of health services could cost votes.
3) Government attacks on Privacy:
Last week, in a significant announcement issued under the guise of an innocuous-sounding "information-sharing vision statement", the Government proposed to reverse the presumptions of confidentiality under which Whitehall has, until now, conducted its relationships with businesses and individuals. Departments will be able to share personal information obtained for one purpose with other departments that might want it for an entirely different reason. In effect, they will be able to gather all this data in one place, something we were always assured would not happen.
[...]
Once you accept that the government has the right to know where you are at all times, to demand that you tell its agents when you move home or to render up your private musings at its behest, then you have changed the nature of the individual's relationship to the state in a way that is totally alien to this country's historic, though ill-defined, covenant between the rulers and the ruled.
Please explain how these stories aren't just signs of a hopelessly corrupt, undemocratic, tired, meddling Government (we'll leave aside the cash for peerages scandal and increasing authoritarianism).
Yours sincerely,
Floating voter
I've tried to give this Government the benefit of the doubt (no really I have) but stories like these three listed below seem to confirm all my worse suspisions:
1) Hampering Democracy
Councillors have been banned from discussing local park-and-ride schemes if they own a car under an ethical watchdog created by John Prescott. The Deputy Prime Minister is accused today of undermining local democracy and stifling free speech by imposing "draconian" rules on thousands of councillors.
Even councillors who have been elected specifically to fight a particular issue have fallen foul of the rules and found themselves told they cannot speak or vote on it. A damning report reveals how local authority members are being barred from speaking or voting on subjects simply because they are perceived to have taken a position on the issue.
2) Labour Party officials have met to work out ways of closing hospitals without jeopardising marginal seats:
Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, called for those at the meeting to be provided with “heat maps”, showing marginal Labour seats where closures or reconfigurations of health services could cost votes.
3) Government attacks on Privacy:
Last week, in a significant announcement issued under the guise of an innocuous-sounding "information-sharing vision statement", the Government proposed to reverse the presumptions of confidentiality under which Whitehall has, until now, conducted its relationships with businesses and individuals. Departments will be able to share personal information obtained for one purpose with other departments that might want it for an entirely different reason. In effect, they will be able to gather all this data in one place, something we were always assured would not happen.
[...]
Once you accept that the government has the right to know where you are at all times, to demand that you tell its agents when you move home or to render up your private musings at its behest, then you have changed the nature of the individual's relationship to the state in a way that is totally alien to this country's historic, though ill-defined, covenant between the rulers and the ruled.
Please explain how these stories aren't just signs of a hopelessly corrupt, undemocratic, tired, meddling Government (we'll leave aside the cash for peerages scandal and increasing authoritarianism).
Yours sincerely,
Floating voter
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Ted Honderich on Terrorism
Just caught the second half of a Channel 5 documentary The Real Friends of Terror, a work purportedly of moral philosophy by a philosophy professor, Ted Honderich, a name I vaguely remember from college days. I say purportedly, because I think its real purposes was to see how many times you can say the phrase "neo-Zionism" in a 45 minute show. A quick look at the guest list will give you some idea:
Rt. Hon.Tony Benn, minister in several Labour governments
Lord Ian Gilmour, minister in several Conservative governments
Mr Reg Kees, father of a British soldier killed in Iraq
Baroness Helena Kennedy, barrister and human rights advocate
Dr. Ghada Karmi, academic and consultant to the Palestinian Authority
Dr. Brian Klug, Senior Research Fellow & philosophy tutor
Prof. Steven Rose, Department of Biology, Open University
Baroness Jenny Tonge, past member of the Liberal Democrat shadow cabinet.
I saw half the programme and I reckon the least demented among the interviewees I saw was probably Tony Benn. The show actually went way past outrageous and into downright ridiculous. An example of the philosophical rigour (I paraphrase, but not by much):
Benn: I equate stealth bombers with suicide bombers, they both kill innocent people
Interviewer: What about intention to kill innocents?
Benn: Doesn't matter, it's only the fact of killing that matters.
That someone who pretends to be a moral philosopher could just let that statement go unchallenged... unspeakable. Other gems were Jenny Tonge saying that what Bush/Blair should have done on 9/11 was "sort out Palestine".
Apparently next week (so 26/09/06, presumably Ch5, 19:15) David Aaronovitch is giving the other side, so should be worth watching. But this one was something special. I have the last 20 mins on video if anyone wants.
For more on Honderich: he talked about The Principle of Humanity, and has written about his views here.
Rt. Hon.Tony Benn, minister in several Labour governments
Lord Ian Gilmour, minister in several Conservative governments
Mr Reg Kees, father of a British soldier killed in Iraq
Baroness Helena Kennedy, barrister and human rights advocate
Dr. Ghada Karmi, academic and consultant to the Palestinian Authority
Dr. Brian Klug, Senior Research Fellow & philosophy tutor
Prof. Steven Rose, Department of Biology, Open University
Baroness Jenny Tonge, past member of the Liberal Democrat shadow cabinet.
I saw half the programme and I reckon the least demented among the interviewees I saw was probably Tony Benn. The show actually went way past outrageous and into downright ridiculous. An example of the philosophical rigour (I paraphrase, but not by much):
Benn: I equate stealth bombers with suicide bombers, they both kill innocent people
Interviewer: What about intention to kill innocents?
Benn: Doesn't matter, it's only the fact of killing that matters.
That someone who pretends to be a moral philosopher could just let that statement go unchallenged... unspeakable. Other gems were Jenny Tonge saying that what Bush/Blair should have done on 9/11 was "sort out Palestine".
Apparently next week (so 26/09/06, presumably Ch5, 19:15) David Aaronovitch is giving the other side, so should be worth watching. But this one was something special. I have the last 20 mins on video if anyone wants.
For more on Honderich: he talked about The Principle of Humanity, and has written about his views here.
Monday, September 18, 2006
Great Britain - A Land Fit For Criminals
This is an extraordinarily powerful review of what appears to be an extraordinarily powerful book:
Real Crime, Fake Justice
Theodore Dalrymple
City Journal, Summer 2006
For the last 40 years, government policy in Britain, de facto if not always de jure, has been to render the British population virtually defenseless against criminals and criminality. Almost alone of British government policies, this one has been supremely effective: no Briton nowadays goes many hours without wondering how to avoid being victimized by a criminal intent on theft, burglary, or violence.
An unholy alliance between politicians and bureaucrats who want to keep prison costs to a minimum, and liberal intellectuals who pretend to see in crime a natural and understandable response to social injustice, which it would be a further injustice to punish, has engendered a prolonged and so far unfinished experiment in leniency that has debased the quality of life of millions of people, especially the poor. Every day in our newspapers we read of the absurd and dangerous leniency of the criminal-justice system. On April 21, for example, even the Observer (one of the bastions of British liberalism responsible for the present situation) gave prominence to the official report into the case of Anthony Rice, who strangled and then stabbed Naomi Bryant to death.
Rice, it turned out, had been assaulting women since 1972. He had been convicted for assaulting or raping a total of 15 women before murdering Naomi Bryant, and it is a fair supposition that he had assaulted or raped many more who did not go to the police. In 1982, he grabbed a woman by the throat, held a knife to her, and raped her. Five years later, while out of prison on home leave, he grabbed a woman, pushed her into a garden, held a knife to her, and raped her for an hour. Receiving a life sentence, he was transferred to an open prison in 2002 and then released two years later on parole as a low-risk parolee. He received housing in a hostel for ex-prisoners in a village whose inhabitants had been told, to gain their acquiescence, that none of the residents there was violent; five months after his arrival, he murdered Naomi Bryant. In pronouncing another life sentence on him, the judge ordered that he should serve at least 25 years: in other words, even now the law has not quite thrown away the key.
Only five days later, the papers reported that 1,023 prisoners of foreign origin had been released from British prisons between 1999 and 2006 without having been deported. Among them were 5 killers, 7 kidnappers, 9 rapists and 39 other sex offenders, 4 arsonists, 41 burglars, 52 thieves, 93 robbers, and 204 drug offenders. Of the 1,023 prisoners, only 106 had since been traced. The Home Office, responsible for both prisons and immigration, still doesn’t know how many of the killers, arsonists, rapists, and kidnappers are at large; but it admits that most of them will never be found, at least until they are caught after committing another offense. Although these revelations forced the Home Secretary to resign, in fact the foreign criminals had been treated only as British criminals are treated. At least we can truly say that we do not discriminate in our leniency.
Scandal has followed scandal. A short time later, we learned that prisoners had been absconding from one open prison, Leyhill, at a rate of two a week for three years—323 in total since 1999, among them 22 murderers. This outrage came to light only when a senior policeman in the area of Leyhill told a member of Parliament that there had been a crime wave in the vicinity of the prison. The member of Parliament demanded the figures in the House of Commons; otherwise they would have remained secret.
None of these revelations, however, would have surprised a man called David Fraser, who has just published a book entitled A Land Fit for Criminals — the land in question being Great Britain, of course. Far from being mistakes—for mistakes repeated so often cease to be mere mistakes—all these occurrences are in full compliance with general policy in Britain with regard to crime and criminality.
Fraser was a probation officer for more than a quarter of a century. He began to doubt the value of his work in terms of preventing crime and therefore protecting the public, but he at first assumed that, as a comparatively lowly official in the criminal-justice system, he was too mired in the grainy everyday detail to see the bigger picture. He assumed also that those in charge not only knew what they were doing but had the public interest at heart.
Eventually, however, the penny dropped. Fraser’s lack of success in effecting any change in the criminals under his supervision, and thus in reducing the number of crimes that they subsequently committed, to the great misery of the general public, was not his failure alone but was general throughout the system. Even worse, he discovered that the bureaucrats who ran the system, and their political masters, did not care about this failure, at least from the point of view of its impact on public safety; careerist to the core, they were only concerned that the public should not become aware of the catastrophe. To this end, they indulged in obfuscation, statistical legerdemain, and outright lies in order to prevent the calamity that public knowledge of the truth would represent for them and their careers.
The collective intellectual dishonesty of those who worked in the system so outraged Fraser—and the Kafkaesque world in which he found himself, where nothing was called by its real name and language tended more to conceal meaning than to convey it, so exasperated him—that, though not a man apt to obtrude upon the public, he determined to write a book. It took him two and a half years to do so, based on 20 years of research, and it is clear from the very first page that he wrote it from a burning need to expose and exorcise the lies and evasions with which he lived for so long, lies and evasions that helped in a few decades transform a law-abiding country with a reputation for civility into the country with the highest crime rate in the Western world, with an ever-present undercurrent of violence in daily life. Like Luther, Fraser could not but speak out. And, as events unfolded, his book has had a publishing history that is additionally revealing of the state of Britain today.
By example after example (repetition being necessary to establish that he has not just alighted on an isolated case of absurdity that might be found in any large-scale enterprise), Fraser demonstrates the unscrupulous lengths to which both bureaucrats and governments have gone to disguise from the public the effect of their policies and decisions, carried out with an almost sadistic indifference to the welfare of common people.
He shows that liberal intellectuals and their bureaucratic allies have left no stone unturned to ensure that the law-abiding should be left as defenseless as possible against the predations of criminals, from the emasculation of the police to the devising of punishments that do not punish and the propagation of sophistry by experts to mislead and confuse the public about what is happening in society, confusion rendering the public helpless in the face of the experimentation perpetrated upon it.
The police, Fraser shows, are like a nearly defeated occupying colonial force that, while mayhem reigns everywhere else, has retreated to safe enclaves, there to shuffle paper and produce bogus information to propitiate their political masters. Their first line of defense is to refuse to record half the crime that comes to their attention, which itself is less than half the crime committed. Then they refuse to investigate recorded crime, or to arrest the culprits even when it is easy to do so and the evidence against them is overwhelming, because the prosecuting authorities will either decline to prosecute, or else the resultant sentence will be so trivial as to make the whole procedure (at least 19 forms to fill in after a single arrest) pointless.
In any case, the authorities want the police to use a sanction known as the caution—a mere verbal warning. Indeed, as Fraser points out, the Home Office even reprimanded the West Midlands Police Force for bringing too many apprehended offenders to court, instead of merely giving them a caution. In the official version, only minor crimes are dealt with in this fashion: but as Fraser points out, in the year 2000 alone, 600 cases of robbery, 4,300 cases of car theft, 6,600 offenses of burglary, 13,400 offenses against public order, 35,400 cases of violence against the person, and 67,600 cases of other kinds of theft were dealt with in this fashion—in effect, letting these 127,900 offenders off scot-free. When one considers that the police clear-up rate of all crimes in Britain is scarcely more than one in 20 (and even that figure is based upon official deception), the liberal intellectual claim, repeated ad nauseam in the press and on the air, that the British criminal-justice system is primitively retributive is absurd.
At every point in the system, Fraser shows, deception reigns. When a judge sentences a criminal to three years’ imprisonment, he knows perfectly well (as does the press that reports it) that in the vast majority of cases the criminal in question will serve 18 months at the very most, because he is entitled automatically, as of right, to a suspension of half his sentence. Moreover, under a scheme of early release, increasingly used, prisoners serve considerably less than half their sentence. They may be tagged electronically under a system of home curfew, intended to give the public an assurance that they are being monitored: but the electronic tag stays on for less than 12 hours daily, giving criminals plenty of opportunity to follow their careers. Even when the criminals remove their tags (and it is known that thousands are removed or vandalized every year) or fail to abide by other conditions of their early release, those who are supposedly monitoring them do nothing whatever, for fear of spoiling the statistics of the system’s success. When the Home Office tried the tagging system with young criminals, 73 percent of them were reconvicted within three months. The authorities nevertheless decided to extend the scheme. The failure of the British state to take its responsibilities seriously could not be more clearly expressed.
Fraser draws attention to the deeply corrupt system in Britain under which a criminal, once caught, may ask for other offenses that he has committed to be “taken into consideration.” (Criminals call these offenses T.I.C.s.) This practice may be in the interests of both the criminal and the police, but not in those of the long-suffering public. The court will sentence the criminal to further prison terms that run concurrently, not consecutively, to that imposed for the index offense: in other words, he will in effect serve the same sentence for 50 burglaries as for one burglary, and he can never again face charges for the 49 burglaries that have been “taken into consideration.” Meanwhile, the police can preen themselves that they have “solved” 50 crimes for the price of one.
One Probation Service smokescreen that Fraser knows from personal experience is to measure its own effectiveness by the proportion of criminals who complete their probation in compliance with court orders—a procedural outcome that has no significance whatever for the safety of the public. Such criminals come under the direct observation of probation officers only one hour a week at the very most. What they do the other 167 hours of the week the probation officers cannot possibly know. Unless one takes the preposterous view that such criminals are incapable of telling lies about their activities to their probation officers, mere attendance at the probation office is no guarantee whatever that they are now leading law-abiding lives.
But even if completion of probation orders were accepted as a surrogate measure of success in preventing re-offending, the Probation Service’s figures have long been completely corrupt—and for a very obvious reason. Until 1997, the probation officers themselves decided when noncompliance with their directions was so egregious that they “breached” the criminals under their supervision and returned them to the courts because of such noncompliance. Since their own effectiveness was measured by the proportion of probation orders “successfully” completed, they had a very powerful motive for disregarding the noncompliance of criminals. In such circumstances, all activity became strictly pro forma, with no purpose external to itself.
While the government put an end to this particular statistical legerdemain, probation orders still go into the statistics as “successfully completed” if they reach their official termination date—even in many cases if the offender gets arrested for committing further offenses before that date. Only in this way can the Home Office claim that between 70 and 80 percent of probation orders are “successfully completed.”
In their effort to prove the liberal orthodoxy that prison does not work, criminologists, government officials, and journalists have routinely used the lower reconviction rates of those sentenced to probation and other forms of noncustodial punishment (the word “punishment” in these circumstances being used very loosely) than those imprisoned. But if the aim is to protect the law-abiding, a comparison of reconviction rates of those imprisoned and those put on probation is irrelevant. What counts is the re-offending rate—a point so obvious that it is shameful that Fraser should have not only to make it but to hammer it home repeatedly, for the politicians, academics, and journalistic hangers-on have completely obscured it.
By definition, a man in prison can commit no crimes (except against fellow prisoners and prison staff). But what of those out in the world on probation? Of 1,000 male criminals on probation, Fraser makes clear, about 600 will be reconvicted at least once within the two years that the Home Office follows them up for statistical purposes. The rate of detection in Britain of all crimes being about 5 percent, those 1,000 criminals will actually have committed not 600, but at least 12,000 crimes (assuming them to have been averagely competent criminals chased by averagely incompetent police). Even this is not quite all. Since there are, in fact, about 150,000 people on probation in Britain, it means that at least 1.8 million crimes—more than an eighth of the nation’s total—must be committed annually by people on probation, within the very purview of the criminal-justice system, or very shortly after they have been on probation. While some of these crimes might be “victimless,” or at least impersonal, research has shown that these criminals inflict untold misery upon the British population: misery that they would not have been able to inflict had they been in prison for a year instead of on probation.
To compare the reconviction rates of ex-prisoners and people on probation as an argument against prison is not only irrelevant from the point of view of public safety but is also logically absurd. Of course the imprisoned will have higher reconviction rates once they get out of jail—not because prison failed to reform them, but because it is the most hardened, incorrigible, and recidivist criminals who go to prison. Again, this point is so obvious that it is shameful that anyone should have to point it out; yet politicians and others continue to use the reconviction rates as if they were a proper basis for deciding policy.
Relentless for hundreds of pages, Fraser provides examples of how the British government and its bloated and totally ineffectual bureaucratic apparatus, through moral and intellectual frivolity as well as plain incompetence, has failed in its elementary and sole inescapable duty: to protect the lives and property of the citizenry. He exposes the absurd prejudice that has become a virtually unassailable orthodoxy among the intellectual and political elite: that we have too many prisoners in Britain, as if there were an ideal number of prisoners, derived from a purely abstract principle, at which, independent of the number of crimes committed, we should aim. He describes in full detail the moral and intellectual corruption of the British criminal-justice system, from police decisions not to record crimes or to charge wrongdoers, to the absurdly light sentences given after conviction and the administrative means by which prisoners end up serving less than half their time, irrespective of their dangerousness or the likelihood that they will re-offend.
According to Fraser, at the heart of the British idiocy is the condescending and totally unrealistic idea—which, however, provides employment opportunities for armies of apparatchiks, as well as being psychologically gratifying—that burglars, thieves, and robbers are not conscious malefactors who calculate their chances of getting away with it, but people in the grip of something rather like a mental disease, whose thoughts, feelings, and decision-making processes need to be restructured. The whole criminal-justice system ought therefore to act in a therapeutic or medical, rather than a punitive and deterrent, fashion. Burglars do not know, poor things, that householders are upset by housebreaking, and so we must educate and inform them on this point; and we must also seek to persuade them of something that all their experience so far has taught them to be false, namely that crime does not pay.
All in all, Fraser’s book is a searing and unanswerable (or at least so far unanswered) indictment of the British criminal-justice system, and therefore of the British state. As Fraser pointed out to me, the failure of the state to protect the lives and property of its citizens, and to take seriously its duty in this regard, creates a politically dangerous situation, for it puts the very legitimacy of the state itself at risk. The potential consequences are incalculable, for the failure might bring the rule of law itself into disrepute and give an opportunity to the brutal and the authoritarian.
You might have thought that any publisher would gratefully accept a book so urgent in its message, so transparently the product of a burning need to communicate obvious but uncomfortable truths of such public interest, conveyed in such a way that anyone of reasonable intelligence might understand them. Any publisher, you would think, would feel fortunate to have such a manuscript land on his desk. But you would be wrong, at least as far as Britain is concerned.
So uncongenial was Fraser’s message to all right-thinking Britons that 60 publishers to whom he sent the book turned it down. In a country that publishes more than 10,000 books monthly, not many of which are imperishable masterpieces, there was no room for it or for what it said, though it would take no great acumen to see its commercial possibilities in a country crowded with crime victims. So great was the pressure of the orthodoxy now weighing on the minds of the British intelligentsia that Fraser might as well have gone to Mecca and said that there is no God and that Mohammed was not His prophet. Of course, no publisher actually told him that what he said was unacceptable or unsayable in public: his book merely did not “fit the list” of any publisher. He was the victim of British publishing’s equivalent of Mafia omerta.
Fortunately, he did not give up, as he sometimes thought of doing. The 61st publisher to whom he sent the book accepted it. I mean no disrespect to her judgment when I say that it was her personal situation that distinguished her from her fellow publishers: for her husband’s son by a previous marriage had not long before been murdered in the street, stabbed by a drug-dealing Jamaican immigrant, aged 20, who had not been deported despite his criminal record but instead allowed to stay in the country as if he were a national treasure to be at all costs cherished and nurtured. Indeed, in court, his lawyer presented him as an unemployed painter and decorator, the victim of racial prejudice (a mitigating circumstance, of course), a view that the prosecution did not challenge, even though the killer had somehow managed alchemically to transmute his unemployment benefits into a new convertible costing some $54,000.
The maternal grandmother of the murdered boy, who had never been ill in her life, died of a heart attack a week after his death, and so the funeral was a double one. It is difficult to resist the conclusion that the killer killed not one but two people. He received a sentence of eight years—which, in effect, will be four or five years.
I asked the publisher the impossible question of whether she would have published the book if someone close to her had not had such firsthand experience of the frivolous leniency of the British criminal-justice system. She said she thought so: but what is beyond dispute is that the murder made her publication of the book a certainty.
A Land Fit for Criminals has sold well and has been very widely discussed, though not by the most important liberal newspapers, which would find the whole subject in bad taste. But the book’s publishing history demonstrates how close we have come to an almost totalitarian uniformity of the sayable, imposed informally by right-thinking people in the name of humanity, but in utter disregard for the truth and the reality of their fellow citizens’ lives. Better that they, the right-thinking, should feel pleased with their own rectitude and broadmindedness, than that millions should be freed of their fear of robbery and violence, as in crime-ridden, pre-Giuliani New York. Too bad Fraser’s voice had to be heard over someone’s dead body.
Real Crime, Fake Justice
Theodore Dalrymple
City Journal, Summer 2006
For the last 40 years, government policy in Britain, de facto if not always de jure, has been to render the British population virtually defenseless against criminals and criminality. Almost alone of British government policies, this one has been supremely effective: no Briton nowadays goes many hours without wondering how to avoid being victimized by a criminal intent on theft, burglary, or violence.
An unholy alliance between politicians and bureaucrats who want to keep prison costs to a minimum, and liberal intellectuals who pretend to see in crime a natural and understandable response to social injustice, which it would be a further injustice to punish, has engendered a prolonged and so far unfinished experiment in leniency that has debased the quality of life of millions of people, especially the poor. Every day in our newspapers we read of the absurd and dangerous leniency of the criminal-justice system. On April 21, for example, even the Observer (one of the bastions of British liberalism responsible for the present situation) gave prominence to the official report into the case of Anthony Rice, who strangled and then stabbed Naomi Bryant to death.
Rice, it turned out, had been assaulting women since 1972. He had been convicted for assaulting or raping a total of 15 women before murdering Naomi Bryant, and it is a fair supposition that he had assaulted or raped many more who did not go to the police. In 1982, he grabbed a woman by the throat, held a knife to her, and raped her. Five years later, while out of prison on home leave, he grabbed a woman, pushed her into a garden, held a knife to her, and raped her for an hour. Receiving a life sentence, he was transferred to an open prison in 2002 and then released two years later on parole as a low-risk parolee. He received housing in a hostel for ex-prisoners in a village whose inhabitants had been told, to gain their acquiescence, that none of the residents there was violent; five months after his arrival, he murdered Naomi Bryant. In pronouncing another life sentence on him, the judge ordered that he should serve at least 25 years: in other words, even now the law has not quite thrown away the key.
Only five days later, the papers reported that 1,023 prisoners of foreign origin had been released from British prisons between 1999 and 2006 without having been deported. Among them were 5 killers, 7 kidnappers, 9 rapists and 39 other sex offenders, 4 arsonists, 41 burglars, 52 thieves, 93 robbers, and 204 drug offenders. Of the 1,023 prisoners, only 106 had since been traced. The Home Office, responsible for both prisons and immigration, still doesn’t know how many of the killers, arsonists, rapists, and kidnappers are at large; but it admits that most of them will never be found, at least until they are caught after committing another offense. Although these revelations forced the Home Secretary to resign, in fact the foreign criminals had been treated only as British criminals are treated. At least we can truly say that we do not discriminate in our leniency.
Scandal has followed scandal. A short time later, we learned that prisoners had been absconding from one open prison, Leyhill, at a rate of two a week for three years—323 in total since 1999, among them 22 murderers. This outrage came to light only when a senior policeman in the area of Leyhill told a member of Parliament that there had been a crime wave in the vicinity of the prison. The member of Parliament demanded the figures in the House of Commons; otherwise they would have remained secret.
None of these revelations, however, would have surprised a man called David Fraser, who has just published a book entitled A Land Fit for Criminals — the land in question being Great Britain, of course. Far from being mistakes—for mistakes repeated so often cease to be mere mistakes—all these occurrences are in full compliance with general policy in Britain with regard to crime and criminality.
Fraser was a probation officer for more than a quarter of a century. He began to doubt the value of his work in terms of preventing crime and therefore protecting the public, but he at first assumed that, as a comparatively lowly official in the criminal-justice system, he was too mired in the grainy everyday detail to see the bigger picture. He assumed also that those in charge not only knew what they were doing but had the public interest at heart.
Eventually, however, the penny dropped. Fraser’s lack of success in effecting any change in the criminals under his supervision, and thus in reducing the number of crimes that they subsequently committed, to the great misery of the general public, was not his failure alone but was general throughout the system. Even worse, he discovered that the bureaucrats who ran the system, and their political masters, did not care about this failure, at least from the point of view of its impact on public safety; careerist to the core, they were only concerned that the public should not become aware of the catastrophe. To this end, they indulged in obfuscation, statistical legerdemain, and outright lies in order to prevent the calamity that public knowledge of the truth would represent for them and their careers.
The collective intellectual dishonesty of those who worked in the system so outraged Fraser—and the Kafkaesque world in which he found himself, where nothing was called by its real name and language tended more to conceal meaning than to convey it, so exasperated him—that, though not a man apt to obtrude upon the public, he determined to write a book. It took him two and a half years to do so, based on 20 years of research, and it is clear from the very first page that he wrote it from a burning need to expose and exorcise the lies and evasions with which he lived for so long, lies and evasions that helped in a few decades transform a law-abiding country with a reputation for civility into the country with the highest crime rate in the Western world, with an ever-present undercurrent of violence in daily life. Like Luther, Fraser could not but speak out. And, as events unfolded, his book has had a publishing history that is additionally revealing of the state of Britain today.
By example after example (repetition being necessary to establish that he has not just alighted on an isolated case of absurdity that might be found in any large-scale enterprise), Fraser demonstrates the unscrupulous lengths to which both bureaucrats and governments have gone to disguise from the public the effect of their policies and decisions, carried out with an almost sadistic indifference to the welfare of common people.
He shows that liberal intellectuals and their bureaucratic allies have left no stone unturned to ensure that the law-abiding should be left as defenseless as possible against the predations of criminals, from the emasculation of the police to the devising of punishments that do not punish and the propagation of sophistry by experts to mislead and confuse the public about what is happening in society, confusion rendering the public helpless in the face of the experimentation perpetrated upon it.
The police, Fraser shows, are like a nearly defeated occupying colonial force that, while mayhem reigns everywhere else, has retreated to safe enclaves, there to shuffle paper and produce bogus information to propitiate their political masters. Their first line of defense is to refuse to record half the crime that comes to their attention, which itself is less than half the crime committed. Then they refuse to investigate recorded crime, or to arrest the culprits even when it is easy to do so and the evidence against them is overwhelming, because the prosecuting authorities will either decline to prosecute, or else the resultant sentence will be so trivial as to make the whole procedure (at least 19 forms to fill in after a single arrest) pointless.
In any case, the authorities want the police to use a sanction known as the caution—a mere verbal warning. Indeed, as Fraser points out, the Home Office even reprimanded the West Midlands Police Force for bringing too many apprehended offenders to court, instead of merely giving them a caution. In the official version, only minor crimes are dealt with in this fashion: but as Fraser points out, in the year 2000 alone, 600 cases of robbery, 4,300 cases of car theft, 6,600 offenses of burglary, 13,400 offenses against public order, 35,400 cases of violence against the person, and 67,600 cases of other kinds of theft were dealt with in this fashion—in effect, letting these 127,900 offenders off scot-free. When one considers that the police clear-up rate of all crimes in Britain is scarcely more than one in 20 (and even that figure is based upon official deception), the liberal intellectual claim, repeated ad nauseam in the press and on the air, that the British criminal-justice system is primitively retributive is absurd.
At every point in the system, Fraser shows, deception reigns. When a judge sentences a criminal to three years’ imprisonment, he knows perfectly well (as does the press that reports it) that in the vast majority of cases the criminal in question will serve 18 months at the very most, because he is entitled automatically, as of right, to a suspension of half his sentence. Moreover, under a scheme of early release, increasingly used, prisoners serve considerably less than half their sentence. They may be tagged electronically under a system of home curfew, intended to give the public an assurance that they are being monitored: but the electronic tag stays on for less than 12 hours daily, giving criminals plenty of opportunity to follow their careers. Even when the criminals remove their tags (and it is known that thousands are removed or vandalized every year) or fail to abide by other conditions of their early release, those who are supposedly monitoring them do nothing whatever, for fear of spoiling the statistics of the system’s success. When the Home Office tried the tagging system with young criminals, 73 percent of them were reconvicted within three months. The authorities nevertheless decided to extend the scheme. The failure of the British state to take its responsibilities seriously could not be more clearly expressed.
Fraser draws attention to the deeply corrupt system in Britain under which a criminal, once caught, may ask for other offenses that he has committed to be “taken into consideration.” (Criminals call these offenses T.I.C.s.) This practice may be in the interests of both the criminal and the police, but not in those of the long-suffering public. The court will sentence the criminal to further prison terms that run concurrently, not consecutively, to that imposed for the index offense: in other words, he will in effect serve the same sentence for 50 burglaries as for one burglary, and he can never again face charges for the 49 burglaries that have been “taken into consideration.” Meanwhile, the police can preen themselves that they have “solved” 50 crimes for the price of one.
One Probation Service smokescreen that Fraser knows from personal experience is to measure its own effectiveness by the proportion of criminals who complete their probation in compliance with court orders—a procedural outcome that has no significance whatever for the safety of the public. Such criminals come under the direct observation of probation officers only one hour a week at the very most. What they do the other 167 hours of the week the probation officers cannot possibly know. Unless one takes the preposterous view that such criminals are incapable of telling lies about their activities to their probation officers, mere attendance at the probation office is no guarantee whatever that they are now leading law-abiding lives.
But even if completion of probation orders were accepted as a surrogate measure of success in preventing re-offending, the Probation Service’s figures have long been completely corrupt—and for a very obvious reason. Until 1997, the probation officers themselves decided when noncompliance with their directions was so egregious that they “breached” the criminals under their supervision and returned them to the courts because of such noncompliance. Since their own effectiveness was measured by the proportion of probation orders “successfully” completed, they had a very powerful motive for disregarding the noncompliance of criminals. In such circumstances, all activity became strictly pro forma, with no purpose external to itself.
While the government put an end to this particular statistical legerdemain, probation orders still go into the statistics as “successfully completed” if they reach their official termination date—even in many cases if the offender gets arrested for committing further offenses before that date. Only in this way can the Home Office claim that between 70 and 80 percent of probation orders are “successfully completed.”
In their effort to prove the liberal orthodoxy that prison does not work, criminologists, government officials, and journalists have routinely used the lower reconviction rates of those sentenced to probation and other forms of noncustodial punishment (the word “punishment” in these circumstances being used very loosely) than those imprisoned. But if the aim is to protect the law-abiding, a comparison of reconviction rates of those imprisoned and those put on probation is irrelevant. What counts is the re-offending rate—a point so obvious that it is shameful that Fraser should have not only to make it but to hammer it home repeatedly, for the politicians, academics, and journalistic hangers-on have completely obscured it.
By definition, a man in prison can commit no crimes (except against fellow prisoners and prison staff). But what of those out in the world on probation? Of 1,000 male criminals on probation, Fraser makes clear, about 600 will be reconvicted at least once within the two years that the Home Office follows them up for statistical purposes. The rate of detection in Britain of all crimes being about 5 percent, those 1,000 criminals will actually have committed not 600, but at least 12,000 crimes (assuming them to have been averagely competent criminals chased by averagely incompetent police). Even this is not quite all. Since there are, in fact, about 150,000 people on probation in Britain, it means that at least 1.8 million crimes—more than an eighth of the nation’s total—must be committed annually by people on probation, within the very purview of the criminal-justice system, or very shortly after they have been on probation. While some of these crimes might be “victimless,” or at least impersonal, research has shown that these criminals inflict untold misery upon the British population: misery that they would not have been able to inflict had they been in prison for a year instead of on probation.
To compare the reconviction rates of ex-prisoners and people on probation as an argument against prison is not only irrelevant from the point of view of public safety but is also logically absurd. Of course the imprisoned will have higher reconviction rates once they get out of jail—not because prison failed to reform them, but because it is the most hardened, incorrigible, and recidivist criminals who go to prison. Again, this point is so obvious that it is shameful that anyone should have to point it out; yet politicians and others continue to use the reconviction rates as if they were a proper basis for deciding policy.
Relentless for hundreds of pages, Fraser provides examples of how the British government and its bloated and totally ineffectual bureaucratic apparatus, through moral and intellectual frivolity as well as plain incompetence, has failed in its elementary and sole inescapable duty: to protect the lives and property of the citizenry. He exposes the absurd prejudice that has become a virtually unassailable orthodoxy among the intellectual and political elite: that we have too many prisoners in Britain, as if there were an ideal number of prisoners, derived from a purely abstract principle, at which, independent of the number of crimes committed, we should aim. He describes in full detail the moral and intellectual corruption of the British criminal-justice system, from police decisions not to record crimes or to charge wrongdoers, to the absurdly light sentences given after conviction and the administrative means by which prisoners end up serving less than half their time, irrespective of their dangerousness or the likelihood that they will re-offend.
According to Fraser, at the heart of the British idiocy is the condescending and totally unrealistic idea—which, however, provides employment opportunities for armies of apparatchiks, as well as being psychologically gratifying—that burglars, thieves, and robbers are not conscious malefactors who calculate their chances of getting away with it, but people in the grip of something rather like a mental disease, whose thoughts, feelings, and decision-making processes need to be restructured. The whole criminal-justice system ought therefore to act in a therapeutic or medical, rather than a punitive and deterrent, fashion. Burglars do not know, poor things, that householders are upset by housebreaking, and so we must educate and inform them on this point; and we must also seek to persuade them of something that all their experience so far has taught them to be false, namely that crime does not pay.
All in all, Fraser’s book is a searing and unanswerable (or at least so far unanswered) indictment of the British criminal-justice system, and therefore of the British state. As Fraser pointed out to me, the failure of the state to protect the lives and property of its citizens, and to take seriously its duty in this regard, creates a politically dangerous situation, for it puts the very legitimacy of the state itself at risk. The potential consequences are incalculable, for the failure might bring the rule of law itself into disrepute and give an opportunity to the brutal and the authoritarian.
You might have thought that any publisher would gratefully accept a book so urgent in its message, so transparently the product of a burning need to communicate obvious but uncomfortable truths of such public interest, conveyed in such a way that anyone of reasonable intelligence might understand them. Any publisher, you would think, would feel fortunate to have such a manuscript land on his desk. But you would be wrong, at least as far as Britain is concerned.
So uncongenial was Fraser’s message to all right-thinking Britons that 60 publishers to whom he sent the book turned it down. In a country that publishes more than 10,000 books monthly, not many of which are imperishable masterpieces, there was no room for it or for what it said, though it would take no great acumen to see its commercial possibilities in a country crowded with crime victims. So great was the pressure of the orthodoxy now weighing on the minds of the British intelligentsia that Fraser might as well have gone to Mecca and said that there is no God and that Mohammed was not His prophet. Of course, no publisher actually told him that what he said was unacceptable or unsayable in public: his book merely did not “fit the list” of any publisher. He was the victim of British publishing’s equivalent of Mafia omerta.
Fortunately, he did not give up, as he sometimes thought of doing. The 61st publisher to whom he sent the book accepted it. I mean no disrespect to her judgment when I say that it was her personal situation that distinguished her from her fellow publishers: for her husband’s son by a previous marriage had not long before been murdered in the street, stabbed by a drug-dealing Jamaican immigrant, aged 20, who had not been deported despite his criminal record but instead allowed to stay in the country as if he were a national treasure to be at all costs cherished and nurtured. Indeed, in court, his lawyer presented him as an unemployed painter and decorator, the victim of racial prejudice (a mitigating circumstance, of course), a view that the prosecution did not challenge, even though the killer had somehow managed alchemically to transmute his unemployment benefits into a new convertible costing some $54,000.
The maternal grandmother of the murdered boy, who had never been ill in her life, died of a heart attack a week after his death, and so the funeral was a double one. It is difficult to resist the conclusion that the killer killed not one but two people. He received a sentence of eight years—which, in effect, will be four or five years.
I asked the publisher the impossible question of whether she would have published the book if someone close to her had not had such firsthand experience of the frivolous leniency of the British criminal-justice system. She said she thought so: but what is beyond dispute is that the murder made her publication of the book a certainty.
A Land Fit for Criminals has sold well and has been very widely discussed, though not by the most important liberal newspapers, which would find the whole subject in bad taste. But the book’s publishing history demonstrates how close we have come to an almost totalitarian uniformity of the sayable, imposed informally by right-thinking people in the name of humanity, but in utter disregard for the truth and the reality of their fellow citizens’ lives. Better that they, the right-thinking, should feel pleased with their own rectitude and broadmindedness, than that millions should be freed of their fear of robbery and violence, as in crime-ridden, pre-Giuliani New York. Too bad Fraser’s voice had to be heard over someone’s dead body.
Thursday, September 14, 2006
The Liberal case for controlled Immigration
This article on US immigration probably isn't everyone's cup of tea, but I thought it was interesting to hear the Libertarian case against unlimited immigration. It's a thought provoking piece and makes a powerful arguement that open borders actually threaten the freedoms of a Liberal society.
The Fallacy of Open Immigration
'To the degree that a nation is like a house, and requires the security of a house, its inhabitants must have the ability to decide whom they wish to invite inside, whom they wish to enjoy the many investments already made in it. If the house is designed to protect individual liberty, its maintenance requires the exclusion of people whose ill-advised decisions might endanger liberty's protective mechanisms.'
No one has the right to move to a free country and destroy its freedom. But this is precisely what happens when people who are unused to the political culture of individual liberty, or who disapprove of it, swing the balance of national decisions.
Many libertarians imagine that all economic and political problems will be solved if only the proper economic and political framework is established: free enterprise, limited government, clear recognition of individual rights. But the question is, How can such a framework, such a "house," be preserved? It can't be preserved if people must continually be convinced, by the tens of millions, that liberty is a good idea, better than the welfare state or some structure of political repression and intolerance. It can be preserved only by a culture in which the vast majority of people assume that individual liberty and responsibility are the ultimate political good. Not every culture makes these assumptions.
There is no foreign army occupying Mexico, Canada, or Saudi Arabia. The political systems, the political errors, of these countries are the result of their own political cultures, just as America's political errors result from its own political culture. An essentially libertarian political system must be supported by essentially libertarian cultural assumptions, by a culture in which virtually no one sees a cartoon satirizing a religious figure and immediately concludes, "Somebody should be punished for this."'
The Fallacy of Open Immigration
'To the degree that a nation is like a house, and requires the security of a house, its inhabitants must have the ability to decide whom they wish to invite inside, whom they wish to enjoy the many investments already made in it. If the house is designed to protect individual liberty, its maintenance requires the exclusion of people whose ill-advised decisions might endanger liberty's protective mechanisms.'
No one has the right to move to a free country and destroy its freedom. But this is precisely what happens when people who are unused to the political culture of individual liberty, or who disapprove of it, swing the balance of national decisions.
Many libertarians imagine that all economic and political problems will be solved if only the proper economic and political framework is established: free enterprise, limited government, clear recognition of individual rights. But the question is, How can such a framework, such a "house," be preserved? It can't be preserved if people must continually be convinced, by the tens of millions, that liberty is a good idea, better than the welfare state or some structure of political repression and intolerance. It can be preserved only by a culture in which the vast majority of people assume that individual liberty and responsibility are the ultimate political good. Not every culture makes these assumptions.
There is no foreign army occupying Mexico, Canada, or Saudi Arabia. The political systems, the political errors, of these countries are the result of their own political cultures, just as America's political errors result from its own political culture. An essentially libertarian political system must be supported by essentially libertarian cultural assumptions, by a culture in which virtually no one sees a cartoon satirizing a religious figure and immediately concludes, "Somebody should be punished for this."'
Did you hear the one about the Prophet's penis?
An alleged quip about the Prophet's penis led to torture and 13-years in jail in Saudi Arabia.
Brian Whitaker
Hadi Saeed al-Mutif grew up in the countryside in southern Saudi Arabia and at the age of 18 started training to become a policeman. Two months into his training, Hadi had gathered with other recruits for afternoon prayers, as required by the rules. "Let us pray upon the Prophet .." the Imam said - at which point Hadi allegedly quipped: "... and upon his penis".
A couple of his fellow recruits reported Hadi to the authorities at the training centre and he was ordered to stand under the Saudi flag for two hours as a punishment.
That might have been the end of the matter, except that a military inspector happened to be visiting at the time. Instead, this silly incident set in motion a train of events which is still continuing after almost 13 years, involving every level of Saudi Arabia's Byzantine justice system and even reaching the ears of the king.
Read on...
Makes you grateful for the freedom to tell the joke about Jesus saying "I can see your house from here..."
Brian Whitaker
Hadi Saeed al-Mutif grew up in the countryside in southern Saudi Arabia and at the age of 18 started training to become a policeman. Two months into his training, Hadi had gathered with other recruits for afternoon prayers, as required by the rules. "Let us pray upon the Prophet .." the Imam said - at which point Hadi allegedly quipped: "... and upon his penis".
A couple of his fellow recruits reported Hadi to the authorities at the training centre and he was ordered to stand under the Saudi flag for two hours as a punishment.
That might have been the end of the matter, except that a military inspector happened to be visiting at the time. Instead, this silly incident set in motion a train of events which is still continuing after almost 13 years, involving every level of Saudi Arabia's Byzantine justice system and even reaching the ears of the king.
Read on...
Makes you grateful for the freedom to tell the joke about Jesus saying "I can see your house from here..."
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
Monday, September 11, 2006
David Cameron outlines his vision for US-UK relationship
Not the catchiest heading I've ever written, but I felt uncomfortable writing (or at least beginning) with anything too flippant on the five year anniversary of 9/11.
David Cameron, however, has marked the occasion with a speech in which he distances his Conservatives from the "failures" of neo-con foreign policy, while outlining his own vision of a "liberal conservative" one.
According to the FT he 'hit out' with an 'outspoken attack'. The Times has him in a 'clash' with Baroness Thatcher.
Given the hyperbolic use of nouns in (even broadsheet) news reporting you might be forgiven for thinking that Cameron showed the sensitivity of a Chelsea footballer, calling Bush a cunt before wiping his arse on the stars and stripes.
This is not the case. Indeed, I strongly recommend reading the whole speech, which you can find here.
I think it's quite a clever speech. It looks like he's laying the groundwork for a post-Bush White House (which of course there will be in 2008). Regardless of whether the new occupant is a Democrat or a Republican there will no doubt be some degree of distancing from the Bush strategy. It also struck me that the speech potentially outflanks Gordon Brown, staking out the 'I'd do things differently' ground before he gets there. (Though it's very much worth reading the Fink's analysis, which is is essentially that he denies being a neo-con while supporting neo-con policies.) And the bit that really tickled me (purely as a close reader) was the bit in which he implied that the Conservatives were the only ones who really 'got' the special relationship, that they were the traditional custodians of it and that Tony Blair (and New Labour) were too inexperienced and were generally ballsing it all up. (DC's chosen metaphor is the diffenece between old and new friends.) I also liked his apparent repudiation of democracy as an end in itself.
Of course, there are things I don't like - I wasn't thrilled with the word 'disproportionate' popping up again (though I'll give him that Israeli air strikes may not have been the best strategy - that particular debate goes on elsewhere.) Also his use of the 'junior partner' metaphor seems curiously unironic. I believe (though can't cite a reliable source) that it was orginally a slightly more rueful phrase and certainly a post-war one. I'm not sure it is correct to apply it to Churchill / Roosevelt (or for that matter Thatcher / Reagan).
This would be the point where I would ordinarily sum up and offer some form of conclusion. But I don't really have one. I thought it was a good speech overall with a decent grasp of some of the challenges. What he would do (or would have done) differently I'm not sure.
David Cameron, however, has marked the occasion with a speech in which he distances his Conservatives from the "failures" of neo-con foreign policy, while outlining his own vision of a "liberal conservative" one.
According to the FT he 'hit out' with an 'outspoken attack'. The Times has him in a 'clash' with Baroness Thatcher.
Given the hyperbolic use of nouns in (even broadsheet) news reporting you might be forgiven for thinking that Cameron showed the sensitivity of a Chelsea footballer, calling Bush a cunt before wiping his arse on the stars and stripes.
This is not the case. Indeed, I strongly recommend reading the whole speech, which you can find here.
I think it's quite a clever speech. It looks like he's laying the groundwork for a post-Bush White House (which of course there will be in 2008). Regardless of whether the new occupant is a Democrat or a Republican there will no doubt be some degree of distancing from the Bush strategy. It also struck me that the speech potentially outflanks Gordon Brown, staking out the 'I'd do things differently' ground before he gets there. (Though it's very much worth reading the Fink's analysis, which is is essentially that he denies being a neo-con while supporting neo-con policies.) And the bit that really tickled me (purely as a close reader) was the bit in which he implied that the Conservatives were the only ones who really 'got' the special relationship, that they were the traditional custodians of it and that Tony Blair (and New Labour) were too inexperienced and were generally ballsing it all up. (DC's chosen metaphor is the diffenece between old and new friends.) I also liked his apparent repudiation of democracy as an end in itself.
Of course, there are things I don't like - I wasn't thrilled with the word 'disproportionate' popping up again (though I'll give him that Israeli air strikes may not have been the best strategy - that particular debate goes on elsewhere.) Also his use of the 'junior partner' metaphor seems curiously unironic. I believe (though can't cite a reliable source) that it was orginally a slightly more rueful phrase and certainly a post-war one. I'm not sure it is correct to apply it to Churchill / Roosevelt (or for that matter Thatcher / Reagan).
This would be the point where I would ordinarily sum up and offer some form of conclusion. But I don't really have one. I thought it was a good speech overall with a decent grasp of some of the challenges. What he would do (or would have done) differently I'm not sure.
Sunday, September 10, 2006
Steyn on John Howard
Here's Mark Steyn writing in his inimitable style on John Howard, the Australian PM:
'Look, I'm a supporter of the Bush doctrine to spread liberty throughout the Muslim world, but I support it on hard-headed grounds of national security. You only have to watch a couple of minutes of the lads in Gaza and southern Lebanon on the telly every night to realise freedom comes pretty low down on the list of their hearts' desires. So, when the US President insists on reprising the line week in week out, he begins to sound utopian, if not utterly deluded. American conservatives would appreciate a rationale less hermetically sealed from reality.*
By contrast, the Prime Minister's rhetoric meets what the law used to regard as the "reasonable man" test. When Howard refers to blokes "raving on about jihad" and the way that those so inclined are "utterly antagonistic" to a free society, he's merely stating the obvious in a way that other Western leaders can't quite bring themselves to do. His words align with reality, and one can't underestimate the value of that.
[...]
The day after the London bombings, Blair said that the terrorists would not be allowed to "change our country or our way of life". Of course not. That's his job, from accelerating European integration to his "reform" of the House of Lords. The British Prime Minister has turned the upper chamber into a house of cronies, the Islamists would like to make it a house of imams.
But once you accept the idea of tearing up a thousand years of history, the rest is largely a difference of degree. After a decade of modish vandalism, Blair has abandoned a lot of his sillier novelties because he's belatedly understood the dangers that arise when your citizens start to feel unmoored from their past. Howard didn't need to learn that on the job.'
*If even Steyn is qualifying his support for Bush, the President is really in trouble.
'Look, I'm a supporter of the Bush doctrine to spread liberty throughout the Muslim world, but I support it on hard-headed grounds of national security. You only have to watch a couple of minutes of the lads in Gaza and southern Lebanon on the telly every night to realise freedom comes pretty low down on the list of their hearts' desires. So, when the US President insists on reprising the line week in week out, he begins to sound utopian, if not utterly deluded. American conservatives would appreciate a rationale less hermetically sealed from reality.*
By contrast, the Prime Minister's rhetoric meets what the law used to regard as the "reasonable man" test. When Howard refers to blokes "raving on about jihad" and the way that those so inclined are "utterly antagonistic" to a free society, he's merely stating the obvious in a way that other Western leaders can't quite bring themselves to do. His words align with reality, and one can't underestimate the value of that.
[...]
The day after the London bombings, Blair said that the terrorists would not be allowed to "change our country or our way of life". Of course not. That's his job, from accelerating European integration to his "reform" of the House of Lords. The British Prime Minister has turned the upper chamber into a house of cronies, the Islamists would like to make it a house of imams.
But once you accept the idea of tearing up a thousand years of history, the rest is largely a difference of degree. After a decade of modish vandalism, Blair has abandoned a lot of his sillier novelties because he's belatedly understood the dangers that arise when your citizens start to feel unmoored from their past. Howard didn't need to learn that on the job.'
*If even Steyn is qualifying his support for Bush, the President is really in trouble.
Friday, September 08, 2006
Wanker
I must begin with an apology as this post will undoubtedly be of very limited interest to some impdecers, but the epithet that headlines this entry was what sprang from my lips when I saw which minister is having to explain the government's wonderful 'shop a smoker' hotline.
Plans for 'shop-a-smoker' hotline
Plans for 'shop-a-smoker' hotline
Have a break... or else!
I wonder how many of us have at some time in our working lives failed to comply with this particular EU directive?
Business forced to adopt EU six-hour work limit
By David Charter, Europe Correspondent
EMPLOYEES will be banned from working for more than six hours without a break after a defeat for the Government in Europe.
Businesses were ordered yesterday to ensure that their staff took minimum rest periods, after existing guidelines were dismissed as “meaningless” by the European Court of Justice.
The ruling means that employers must ensure that staff take off at least 11 hours between working days, and have a minimum of 1 day off a week, as well as a 20-minute rest after every 6 hours of work. Business groups said that employees would be unable to choose to work long hours to earn more money because they would be forced to take breaks against their will.
But Brussels said that the decision simply brought Britain in line with the rest of Europe.
Read on...
It's a tricky one. On the one hand I do think that employees have a right to avoid being forced to work lengthy hours without a break. However, I have also been part of businesses that frequently required (and indeed thrived) on midnight oil burning sessions and to be completely honest I look back on the days when I regularly worked a 70-80 hour week with a certain measure of pride. (It's worth mentioning that I was paid overtime.)
The bit that bothers me is this:
The ruling from the court in Luxemburg stated: “The [DTI] guidelines are liable to render the right of workers to daily and weekly rest periods meaningless because they do not oblige employers to ensure that workers actually take the minimum rest period, contrary to the aims of the Working Time Directive.”
Not being forced to work long hours is one thing. Being forced NOT to work long hours is another. Can anyone suggest a sensible balance between regulation and personal freedom on this issue? (A genuine question, not a rhetorical gauntlet.)
Business forced to adopt EU six-hour work limit
By David Charter, Europe Correspondent
EMPLOYEES will be banned from working for more than six hours without a break after a defeat for the Government in Europe.
Businesses were ordered yesterday to ensure that their staff took minimum rest periods, after existing guidelines were dismissed as “meaningless” by the European Court of Justice.
The ruling means that employers must ensure that staff take off at least 11 hours between working days, and have a minimum of 1 day off a week, as well as a 20-minute rest after every 6 hours of work. Business groups said that employees would be unable to choose to work long hours to earn more money because they would be forced to take breaks against their will.
But Brussels said that the decision simply brought Britain in line with the rest of Europe.
Read on...
It's a tricky one. On the one hand I do think that employees have a right to avoid being forced to work lengthy hours without a break. However, I have also been part of businesses that frequently required (and indeed thrived) on midnight oil burning sessions and to be completely honest I look back on the days when I regularly worked a 70-80 hour week with a certain measure of pride. (It's worth mentioning that I was paid overtime.)
The bit that bothers me is this:
The ruling from the court in Luxemburg stated: “The [DTI] guidelines are liable to render the right of workers to daily and weekly rest periods meaningless because they do not oblige employers to ensure that workers actually take the minimum rest period, contrary to the aims of the Working Time Directive.”
Not being forced to work long hours is one thing. Being forced NOT to work long hours is another. Can anyone suggest a sensible balance between regulation and personal freedom on this issue? (A genuine question, not a rhetorical gauntlet.)
Thursday, September 07, 2006
Anti-Semitism on the rise in the UK
Today the Report of the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism in the UK was published. Panel chairman is Denis MacShane, and here's his comment:
Anti-semitism is back
Guardian
07/09/06
Our parliamentary report finds that many British citizens who happen to be born Jewish face unacceptable harassment, intimidation and assault.
Another report:
British Jews facing more anti-Semitic sentiment than ever
Haaretz
09/07/06
Ian Duncan-Smith and the loathsome Bunglawala debated it on the Today Program this morning:
0730 There has been a disturbing rise in anti-Semitism in Britain. Listen
Here's what the loathsome one is defending:
Muslims boycott Holocaust remembrance
The Sunday Times
January 23, 2005
On the same Today Program there was another very interesting debate between the even-more-loathsome Steven Rose (organiser of the academic boycott of Israel) and Shalom Lapin, a peacenik left-wing Israeli academic. An unusually good choice of debating partner for Rose, Lapin does a great job of exposing the moral and factual bankruptcy of Rose's position. Well worth a listen
Related:
Important Decisions: Jewish graveyards attacked in the UK
Important Decisions: Ditch Holocaust day, advisers urge Blair
Anti-semitism is back
Guardian
07/09/06
Our parliamentary report finds that many British citizens who happen to be born Jewish face unacceptable harassment, intimidation and assault.
Another report:
British Jews facing more anti-Semitic sentiment than ever
Haaretz
09/07/06
Ian Duncan-Smith and the loathsome Bunglawala debated it on the Today Program this morning:
0730 There has been a disturbing rise in anti-Semitism in Britain. Listen
Here's what the loathsome one is defending:
Muslims boycott Holocaust remembrance
The Sunday Times
January 23, 2005
On the same Today Program there was another very interesting debate between the even-more-loathsome Steven Rose (organiser of the academic boycott of Israel) and Shalom Lapin, a peacenik left-wing Israeli academic. An unusually good choice of debating partner for Rose, Lapin does a great job of exposing the moral and factual bankruptcy of Rose's position. Well worth a listen
Related:
Important Decisions: Jewish graveyards attacked in the UK
Important Decisions: Ditch Holocaust day, advisers urge Blair
Tony Blair R.I.P?
This battle between Tony Blair and the rest of the Labour Party feels like Politics at its most absurd to me (the leaked memo of Blair's farewell tour was really beyond parody).
Gordon Brown might want to hold off popping the champagne corks just yet though. Westminster Blogger Guido has an interesting take on Blair's statement today. According to him Blair has left himself what he calls the Aznar option (where he would stand down as Party Leader BUT not as PM).
Here's Blair's statement:
"The next party conference in a couple of weeks will be my last party conference as party leader, the next TUC conference next week will be my last TUC - probably to the relief of both of us." (nothing about standing down as PM)
Interestingly, Blair has been rumoured to have asked the Cabinet Secretary and Cabinet office to look into the constitutionality of him remaining PM after resigning as Leader of the Labour Party.
Interesting theory, personaly, I still think he's toast.
For more on this story see here & here.
Gordon Brown might want to hold off popping the champagne corks just yet though. Westminster Blogger Guido has an interesting take on Blair's statement today. According to him Blair has left himself what he calls the Aznar option (where he would stand down as Party Leader BUT not as PM).
Here's Blair's statement:
"The next party conference in a couple of weeks will be my last party conference as party leader, the next TUC conference next week will be my last TUC - probably to the relief of both of us." (nothing about standing down as PM)
Interestingly, Blair has been rumoured to have asked the Cabinet Secretary and Cabinet office to look into the constitutionality of him remaining PM after resigning as Leader of the Labour Party.
Interesting theory, personaly, I still think he's toast.
For more on this story see here & here.
Monday, September 04, 2006
Inheritance tax - the case for abolition
Interesting, wonder if any of you are convinced by Daley's arguments for abolishing inheritance tax?
The evil of inheritance tax lies in punishing the thrifty
By Janet Daley
Telegraph Comment
04/09/2006
Which of these households is the most deserving: two spinster sisters who have spent their lives caring for their parents, a married couple without children, a married couple with children, a gay couple in a civil partnership with children, a gay couple in a civil partnership without children?
Depending on your personal scale of values, you might rank these cases variously, but I doubt that many of you would feel comfortable with the peremptory arbitrariness of the Government's order of merit. Under the present rules of inheritance tax, the households without children – both heterosexual and homosexual – are the only ones that escape untouched. When either of the partners in such a ménage dies, the other inherits the entire estate, including the shared home, without having to pay a penny to the Treasury. The savings that the childless couple has accumulated (which are likely to be considerably more than those of the couple with children) will be untouched by the state. The childless are the outright winners in the Treasury's inheritance lottery.
Next comes the married couple (or the gay couple in a civil partnership) with children, who will enjoy the same exemption as the childless when one of them dies. But the children who have presumably been at the centre of their shared lives – for whom they have worked, saved and aspired together – will be hit, on the death of the second, by a 40 per cent tax on whatever is left to them. No matter that this money was taxed when it was earned, and again when it was invested.
Then there are the absolute losers in this game: the two spinster sisters who have devoted their lives selflessly to the care of elderly relatives and each other. The surviving one will get clobbered instantly and brutally on the death of her sibling. Because their relationship, however loving and stable it may be, is not a sexual partnership, they get no recognition at all from the state.
Just such a couple, Joyce and Sybil Burden, both in their eighties, are now challenging what they consider to be unlawful discrimination against them in the European Court of Human Rights. The sisters worked on their father's farm during the war and then went on to care for their parents and two aunts until they died. They remain in the family home, which cost £7,000 to build in the 1960s and which is now estimated to be worth £875,000. Needless to say, having to pay 40 per cent of the difference between this sum and the absurd inheritance tax threshold of £285,000 on the death of either of them would mean the surviving sister having to sell the home in which she has spent her self-sacrificing life. Can this be right? Does it strike you as just or appropriate?
read on...
The evil of inheritance tax lies in punishing the thrifty
By Janet Daley
Telegraph Comment
04/09/2006
Which of these households is the most deserving: two spinster sisters who have spent their lives caring for their parents, a married couple without children, a married couple with children, a gay couple in a civil partnership with children, a gay couple in a civil partnership without children?
Depending on your personal scale of values, you might rank these cases variously, but I doubt that many of you would feel comfortable with the peremptory arbitrariness of the Government's order of merit. Under the present rules of inheritance tax, the households without children – both heterosexual and homosexual – are the only ones that escape untouched. When either of the partners in such a ménage dies, the other inherits the entire estate, including the shared home, without having to pay a penny to the Treasury. The savings that the childless couple has accumulated (which are likely to be considerably more than those of the couple with children) will be untouched by the state. The childless are the outright winners in the Treasury's inheritance lottery.
Next comes the married couple (or the gay couple in a civil partnership) with children, who will enjoy the same exemption as the childless when one of them dies. But the children who have presumably been at the centre of their shared lives – for whom they have worked, saved and aspired together – will be hit, on the death of the second, by a 40 per cent tax on whatever is left to them. No matter that this money was taxed when it was earned, and again when it was invested.
Then there are the absolute losers in this game: the two spinster sisters who have devoted their lives selflessly to the care of elderly relatives and each other. The surviving one will get clobbered instantly and brutally on the death of her sibling. Because their relationship, however loving and stable it may be, is not a sexual partnership, they get no recognition at all from the state.
Just such a couple, Joyce and Sybil Burden, both in their eighties, are now challenging what they consider to be unlawful discrimination against them in the European Court of Human Rights. The sisters worked on their father's farm during the war and then went on to care for their parents and two aunts until they died. They remain in the family home, which cost £7,000 to build in the 1960s and which is now estimated to be worth £875,000. Needless to say, having to pay 40 per cent of the difference between this sum and the absurd inheritance tax threshold of £285,000 on the death of either of them would mean the surviving sister having to sell the home in which she has spent her self-sacrificing life. Can this be right? Does it strike you as just or appropriate?
read on...
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