Is this democracy?

“Democracy”, says Charles Crawford, ‘the world’s first diplomatic blogoir’, “once was the quintessence of civilisation, based on sophisticated philosophical ideas of responsibility and honesty.” Yet the same Charles Crawford defends – on pragmatic grounds – the use by the USA and UK of intelligence obtained by torture. He doesn’t seem to find any inconsistency in this.

So is democracy really reduced to a moral cesspit in which its professional diplomats labour to assure us that all is for the best in the worst of all possible worlds?

I remember, as an eleven-year-old boy, listening to Neville Chamberlain’s sombre broadcast on 3^rd September 1939, when he announced that we were at war with Germany. He concluded by saying:

“It is evil things that we shall be fighting against - brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution - and against them I am certain that right will prevail.”

It did – but only after a grim struggle in which many terrible things were done by ourselves and our allies, as well as by our enemies.

The wars we are involved in today are of a very different kind. Their essence is an ideological struggle between irreconcilable social systems, one of which – that of our adversaries – is far more deeply rooted in religious beliefs than was Hitler’s war. The motivating force of religious belief is a conviction that one’s thoughts and actions are inspired by a supernatural being. This gives great strength, even to those who are physically weaker than their enemy. Whether the supernatural being really exists is irrelevant: devout belief is all that is required to inspire people to extreme action. Such a belief is nowadays largely lacking in Western democracies and – much more seriously – so is informed belief in, and adherence to, the humane values which distinguish democracy from its critics.

What are these values? First and foremost, freedom of speech and expression. This is the bedrock of democracy, underpinning all other freedoms and rights, because it is only through freedom to speak our minds freely that we can win or defend all our other liberties. Secondly, personal privacy – the right to shape and lead our own lives as we wish, provided that we don’t impinge upon the equivalent rights of others, and to do so without being snooped and spied upon by the State or anyone else. Thirdly, toleration of all views, opinions, and lifestyles which don’t deny equal toleration to others: tolerance is not a one-way street. Fourthly, adherence to rational discourse, as opposed to dogmatically imposed beliefs grounded in uncritical adherence to dogma. Fifthly, commitment to scientific method and experimentation in enlarging our knowledge of how things work and in devising new technologies essential for the future health and wellbeing of humankind. Sixthly, academic integrity and a willingness to follow the argument wherever it leads.

Doubtless there are many other components of democratic thought and practice which can be added to this list. But I hope it is sufficient to demonstrate that democracy cannot exist without open-mindedness. And open-mindedness is the fundamental quality which is largely and ever more rapidly being eroded today. We are living through an era of ‘political correctness’, when the range of acceptable viewpoints is shrinking because they are frowned upon by authority; and legal curbs on free speech have been imposed in the last few years which would have been unthinkable only a couple of decades ago. Even worse, this policy is largely driven by fear of violent reactions by those living amongst us who don’t share our traditional notions of democracy but wish to replace it with alien concepts originating from other parts of the world. Britain is still an open society – just – but we have enemies in our midst.

Our political discourse, and our political debate, is correspondingly debased. There has always been an element of school playground “yah boo sucks” rhetoric in party politics. But when Charles Crawford laments that “we are now reduced to whose imaginary ex-cat stinks the most”, he might ask himself why. My answer is cowardice.

Another load of round globular objects from our Ed

According to today’s Sunday Express, the Children’s Secretary, Ed Balls, has announced that thousands of “the worst families in Britain” are to be put into ‘sin bins’ in a bid to change their bad behaviour.

The government is to spend £400 million to put 20,000 problem families under 24-hour CCTV surveillance in their own homes. They will be monitored to ensure that children attend school, go to bed on time, and eat proper meals. Private security guards will be sent round to carry out home checks.

Around 2,000 families have already been subjected to these ‘Family Intervention Projects’, it seems. But ministers want to target 20,000 more over the next two years, with each costing between £5,000 and £20,000. Pupils and their families will have to sign behaviour contracts (‘Home School Agreements’) every year setting out parents’ duties to ensure their children behave and do their homework.

Balls wants every local authority in the country to fund them. He describes it as “pretty tough and non-negotiable support” for problem families. Other descriptions spring to mind. And – wait for it! – the Conservative Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling calls the scheme “much too little much too late”.

So there you have it. Both this proto-totalitarian government and its likely successors think it’s absolutely OK in 21^st century Britain to place citizens who haven’t been convicted of any crime under round-the-clock CCTV observation in their own homes. Presumably this will include the bathroom – a likely place for a wank and some furtive drug use – the children’s bedrooms, their computers, the attic, the cellar, the garage, the garden and everywhere else. As always, I wonder who will do this snooping, how will they be selected and trained, and who will supervise them?

Personal privacy and dignity no longer exist in this country. If it is permissible for the authorities to inflict this outrageous system upon ‘problem families’ (as defined by whom?), it won’t be long before they do it to everyone deemed socially unacceptable, out of the mainstream, or politically incorrect. It will swiftly escalate first to unpopular minority groups such as gypsies, gays, prostitutes, animal rights and anti-nuclear campaigners, and then to religious groups and minority political parties. Ultimately it will happen to every citizen, and Orwell’s Big Brother will have well and truly arrived.

On the television this morning Labour’s deputy leader, Harriet Harman, was glibly declaring that in this country everyone is innocent until they have been proved guilty. She can tell that to the marines. I have no love for problem families on sink estates who plague the community with drug turf wars, knife crime, and general yobbishness. But to place them or anyone else under constant CCTV monitoring in their own homes at the say-so of some government or local authority jobsworth is a negation of every principle of justice and it is to be hoped that the courts will in due course rule that such practices are illegal.

What is really frightening is that they should ever have been contemplated, let alone deemed tolerable by any responsible agency. Civil liberties apart, brute compulsion and humiliation without any attempt to convince children and their parents of the benefits of learning will only breed sullen resentment and runs counter to all sound educational theory and practice.

Is this happening here now?

"What no one seemed to notice was the ever widening gap between the government and the people. And it became always wider... the whole process of its coming into being was above all diverting, it provided an excuse not to think....for people who did not want to think anyway gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about.... and kept us so busy with continuous changes and 'crises' and so fascinated..... by the machinations of the 'national enemies,' without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us.....

"Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted’, that unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these 'little measures'.....must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing.....Each act is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next.

"You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even talk, alone.....you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble.' But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes.

"That's the difficulty. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed.

"You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things your father.....could never have imagined."

- MILTON MAYER, They Thought They Were Free, The Germans, 1938-45 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955)
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New Year food for thought

In his Financial Times Maverecon blog, Willem Butler says:

“I have become convinced that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance against the encroachment by the powers of the state on the private domain. The better-intentioned a government professes to be, and the better-intentioned it truly is when it first gains office, the more it is to be distrusted.

“After even the most liberal-minded, open-government-committed party takes hold of the reins of government, it takes never more than a single term of office, four years - five at the most - before paranoia takes over. Disagreement becomes dissent, dissent becomes disloyalty, disloyalty becomes betrayal and betrayal becomes treason. The public interest merges seamlessly with the private interest of the incumbents. The state bureaucracy, where it has not been taken over by government loyalists on day one of the new administration, is gradually transformed into an arm of the government. Some formal checks and balances often remain, parliament and the courts among them, but they too are often feeble to begin with and weaken further as the term office of the incumbent government lengthens.

“I have watched this process at work in the UK since I returned here in 1994. It was breath-taking and depressing to observe the transformation of New Labour after 1997, from the party of open government, human rights and civil liberties into an increasingly paranoid group of power-hogging and repressive political control freaks, who have done more damage to fundamental human rights in the past 11 years than any other (sequence of) government(s) in any comparable-length stretch of time since the Glorious Revolution. Fortunately, despite their worst intentions, they have not been very competent - a more competent government could have done much more damage to our freedom and civil liberties.”

There are some interesting comments, one of which, by ‘Blissex’, points out that

“New Labour’s major fault is that they are too poll driven (following rather than leading public opinion), and therefore they have been unwilling to resist the strong demand by a majority of the voters for more repression, less civil liberties, more state interference in private lives.

“If you notice, the Tories have been campaigning for the same, but even further to the right, as it were.

“The big driver is the growing number of elderly rentiers among voters, people who much prefer (the illusion of) safety to liberty, people who are just a little less authoritarian than the usual flog-n-hang them class.

“ASBOs, CCTV, detention without trial, … are all wildly popular with voters, and every time the government or the opposition want to pander to buy themselves some votes without spending they propose new nasty attacks on liberty, especially the liberty of nasty young people to misbehave and irritate their elders.

“The greatest threat to liberty is not the parties, which only do what the polls tell them, but voters, whose demand for practical fascism has driven a lot of politics in the USA and the UK (and several other countries, as in many the baby boom generation has reached middle and old age) over the past 2-3 decades.

“These voters are sitting pretty, vested in careers, pensions, properties, and their main feeling is fear; they see all change as a threat, not an opportunity, a threat to their enjoyment of all they are vested in.”

Fear and self-interest rule OK?

My thanks to Tyger for highlighting the above.

DD and the 24 pygmies

Something distinctly odd is happening in the Haltemprice and Howden by-election, sparked off by David Davis’s impulsive decision to resign his seat over the ‘42 days’ issue.

Although he has since broadened his campaign to embrace other important civil liberties matters of great concern to the electorate, the government has ostentatiously declined to run a candidate against him, dismissing his stance as a ‘stunt’. The LibDems are not running against him because they support his position. The only other mainstream party to run a candidate is the Greens, who are putting themselves forward as being sounder on civil liberties than Davis himself is.

However, there are no fewer than 24 other candidates. Here is the full list:

• Grace Christine Astley - Independent
• David Laurence Bishop - Church of the Militant Elvis Party
• Ronnie Carroll - Make Politicians History
• Mad Cow-Girl - The Official Monster Raving Loony Party
• David Craig - Independent
• Herbert Winford Crossman - Independent
• Tess Culnane - National Front Britain for the British
• Thomas Faithful Darwood - Independent
• David Michael Davis - Conservative
• Tony Farnon - Independent
• Eamonn "Fitzy" Fitzpatrick - Independent
• Christopher Mark Foren - Independent
• Gemma Dawn Garrett - Miss Great Britain Party
• George Hargreaves - Christian Party
• Hamish Howitt - Freedom 4 Choice
• David Icke - No party listed
• John Nicholson - Independent
• Shan Oakes - Green Party
• David Pinder - The New Party
• Joanne Robinson - English Democrats: Putting England First
• Jill Saward - Independent
• Norman Scarth - Independent
• Walter Edward Sweeney - Independent
• Christopher John Talbot - Socialist Equality Party
• John Randle Upex - Independent
• Greg Wood - Independent
• 
  

While I haven’t read these peoples’ election manifestos, most of them would appear to be distinctly unserious, and one pauses to wonder why so many are prepared to risk a lost deposit.

Could it possibly be that some of the battle-hungry 25 are covert government supporters, drafted in to distract the electors from the important issues DD is raising, and to turn the by-election into the ‘farce’ which ZaNu Labour claims it to be?

Just a thought.

Why David Davis's campaign matters

Regardless of what you think about his politics generally, or his views on other topics, David Davis has clearly struck a national nervepoint in resigning from the Commons to fight a by-election on the issue of our fast-vanishing civil liberties.

The complacency with which mainstream politicians, and the British public in general, have up to now accepted the drastic and hitherto unthinkable reduction in our personal rights imposed upon us during the past decade on the pretext of 'fighting terror' is deeply depressing to someone who, like myself, has campaigned throughout their life for a free, tolerant and civilised society.

Ken Frost puts it better than I can in his latest 'Nanny Knows Best' post:

"The state and a compliant ignorant media are responsible for the level of paranoia in this country. We are building our own prison and hell on earth with our own hands, brick by brick, petty restriction by petty restriction."

It is time for everyone who values their own independence, privacy, and freedom to think as we choose and live without fear to unite against the creeping [and creepy] encroachments of the authoritarian-minded Nanny State.

Big Brother Britain

Some interesting comments. The sheeple are starting to get restive at last!

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

This is Blair's legacy.

Taking liberties - Blair 2007 style

Thanks to Aphra Behn for drawing our attention to this.

So what's new?

“The surveillance and terror that operates in Nineteen Eighty-Four was intended for [a small number of inner party elite] only. The bulk of the population are ignored. The situation in East Germany and Russia was far worse. There it was not just the party members who were spied upon but everyman, unlike Nineteen Eighty-Four when being in the party even offered some protection. Mass surveillance in Britain is now possible almost at this level, without any great improvement in technology. Electronic telephone exchanges mean that any phone can be tapped at will without the need for elaborate mechanical operations to fit the taps. The advent of the ‘smart card’ could soon lead to the ‘smart’ identity card which would have on it all that the authorities need to know about a person. Medical practitioners in the south west of England have used such cards for some years and a patient produces a card which is wiped through a viewer to produce, on screen, their case history. If smart identity cards became compulsory, as some government officials have urgently suggested, then anyone stopped would immediately have to produce a card which would be wiped by an officer in his car to reveal all he wanted to know. The stage beyond that, already in use for dogs, is to inject a chip beneath the skin. At the moment the authorities in Britain are only considering this for prisoners and other offenders. This is an Orwellian world that Orwell indeed foresaw but applying to the entire population, not just an elite.

“The key phrase always used to justify such ideas is ‘The innocent need have nothing to fear’. Whenever that phrase is used in final justification, as it was used in Nazi Germany, Communist Russia and no doubt every other totalitarian state since the dawn of history, then infringement of civil liberties is certain and freedom, as it is understood in America, and as it was understood in Britain in the nineteenth century,…will have passed. The gloss of the consumerist society will not be able to hide what has happened. And the word used to describe this tendency is still ‘Orwellian’ or, more simply, ‘Big Brother’. The justification of the need for such a regime was always, in the past, the fear of communism, or invasion, or revolution. With the ending of the cold war and the collapse of the Soviet regime these reasons fall away. What is left is the most human motive of all, the motive of the righteous who have persecuted through the ages: power. As Orwell has O’Brien say when forcing Winston to admit that most absurd untruth, that two and two make five, ‘We are the priests of Power.’

- from The Larger Evils by W. J. West. This was written in 1992!

Hear, hear!

"It is not terrorists who are a threat to our way of life, it is the politician who uses the threat of such to crank down on liberty, to create a climate of fear, to make our lives a misery."

LONGRIDER on his blog yesterday.