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.

Nothing new under the sun

I had intended composing a New Year Message for 2009, pointing out that the crisis we are currently involved in is not just political, economic, financial, or military - it is first and foremost a moral crisis: the wholesale abandonment of honesty. Then I remembered that Rudyard Kipling had said all this far better than I could ever contrive to:

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The Gods of the Copybook Headings

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AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

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Censors on the prowl

“I’m not trying to curb free speech”, says Andy Burnham, Secretary of State for Culture, Media & Sport, announcing his proposals for internet viewing restrictions, “I just want to protect the public from ‘unacceptable’ material”.


All would-be censors pay lip-service to free speech. The trouble is, they don’t seem to know what it is. In their book, you can say whatever you want – as long as they don’t disagree with it. You can read or view whatever you want – as long as it doesn’t offend their notions of what is ‘harmful’, ‘indecent’, or ‘offensive’.


Mr Burnham considers that clips of beheadings [for instance] are too shocking to be shown, and that children – it’s always children – must be ‘protected’ from violent or sexual content.


So presumably under the new Burnham dispensation the daily television news bulletins are going to be radically sanitised. No more scenes of fighting, bombing, civilian casualties, people dying of starvation, anywhere in the world? No more fictional murders? No more representations of the crucifixion on religious programmes?


An age-based rating system is to be applied, and presumably parents and others whose children watch material considered ‘unsuitable’ by Mr Burnham and his bunch of censoring nannies will be comitting yet another newly created offence.


To justify this latest invasion of parental rights and privacy, an NSPCC poll is cited which found that three out of four children had been ‘disturbed’ by images they had seen on the internet. “Most parents have no clue what their children are up to online”, said a self-important NSPCC nanny figure, implying that she did, and that they were up to no good.


Of course many parents don’t have much inkling of what’s going on in their childrens’ minds a lot of the time. Nor should they, if the children are to develop their own sense of identity and independence. Do we really want to live in a world where it is considered improper for children ever to be disturbed by what they see or hear, so that they are consequently ill-equipped to deal with the shocks and traumas which they will inevitably sometimes encounter as they go through life?


I suppose Mr Burnham will be all for banning Grimm’s Fairy Tales next. They and their kind provided many an agreeable frisson of horror in my childhood days.


These busybody censors keep popping up like jack-in-the boxes. Why can’t they mind their own business, and get off our backs? A quarter of a century ago, I wrote an essay on ‘Pornography and Free Speech’, pointing out that freedom of expression is the essential bedrock of democratic liberty which underpins all other freedoms, and making the case against censorship exercised on grounds of taste. I said, in part:


“I start from the premise that all censorship is evil, because it diminishes human freedom and interferes with the spontaneity of communication. In an ideal world there would be no censorship, but the world we live in is far from ideal; and for the foreseeable future there will be some censorship. What there is should be as limited as possible, and should be kept under constant and vigilant scrutiny. The burden of proving that censorship is the lesser evil in any given instance should always lie upon those (be they the representatives of the State or private bodies or persons) who seek to impose it. And such proof should include solid evidence of demonstrable harm, greater than the harm wrought by the proposed censorship, to an individual, to a group, or to society as a whole, if the article or information in question remained uncensored.


“Such harm can usually be proved in cases of legitimate restriction of information on grounds of State security or libel upon an individual (even though the law on these matters is widely acknowledged to be defective and awaits legislative improvement). In matters of public taste and morals, however, tangible evidence of harm or damage is much more elusive. These questions are essentially subjective - and it is for this reason above all that I believe the less the law intrudes into the realm of public and private morality, the better.


“All censorship is a hindrance to the free flow of facts, of opinions and of ideas; and therefore, regardless of the motive with which it is imposed, censorship constitutes a distortion of spontaneous communication between human beings. I would not wish to argue that communication should never be restricted by convention or even sometimes by law; but I do maintain that every instance of such restriction ought to be scrutinised vigilantly in a democratic society, and that the onus of justifying it should be upon those authorities or individuals seeking to impose it. The only possible guiding principle for a society that is tolerably free in fact as well as in name has to be that enunciated by John Stuart Mill in his essay On Liberty (1859) that

‘If all mankind minus one were of the opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind’.


“Censorship is the intervention of a third mind between the communicator and those to whom the communication is addressed. The censor says: ‘For a reason which seems good to me, I must stop this information reaching you.’ (‘You’ may be either a specific individual, a class of individuals, or the public at large.)


“What is censored may be a fact, an opinion or a scene. A censored fact may be true or untrue. A censored opinion may be well-founded or ill-founded. A censored scene may be real or imaginary. As Mill points out, society can be harmed just as much by the censoring of falsehoods and errors as by the suppression of truth - not least because the truth or falsehood of information and opinions can only be established by free discussion and full examination of all the available evidence.


“The censor's ‘good reason’ for censoring a fact is usually that a person learning it would be harmed (this argument is frequently advanced as a ‘reason’ for not giving sex education to adolescents); or that a third party would be damaged by it (the basis on which the laws of libel are founded and on which legal measures to protect privacy are advocated by some people); or that the community or the State would be harmed (the raison d'etre of the Official Secrets Acts). The ‘good reason’ for censoring an opinion about society is usually that it would undermine the established order (i.e. it is seditious) or that it is highly offensive to the feelings of certain groups in society (e.g. the Race Relations Acts, blasphemy). The ‘good reason’ for censoring an opinion about an individual or a group is usually that the person or the group would be harmed or offended by its publication. The censor's ’good reason’ for censoring a scene is usually that it will harm the people seeing it or that some of them are outraged by it: this is the common justification for censorship of pornography. In other situations, censorship may simply be used as a repressive weapon by the State or other authority without being directly related to the content of the material which is being censored.


“Are the censor's ‘good reasons’ really good? The answers must depend not only on whether the harm he fears is real, but also on whether it outweighs the counter-harm which censorship does to freedom of speech. Any act of censorship, whatever its pretext, is by its very nature a political action: it is the exercise of power by one group over another. In a democratic society the presumption must always be in favour of free speech. If any other presumption prevails, the society is no longer free and open, but will - albeit gradually - become closed and authoritarian.


“Surely, in the end, it is safer to run the risks involved in a free and open society where views, attitudes and opinions are expressed which one does not necessarily approve of, than to live under a regime where free enquiry and expression are stifled and suppressed. Censorship is a habit of mind which, once it gains a foothold, spreads like a cancer. Whatever its starting point, the end of the censor's road is likely to be the same: repression of ‘dangerous’ ideas, not only about sex but about morals, politics, art and life.


“I detest censorship and would-be censors because they attack my freedom - and yours - to read, see, hear and do what I - and you – choose…The attempt to preserve people [including children] from harm by keeping them in ignorance of whatever may ‘morally pollute’ them strikes me as not only misconceived and futile, but as positively evil in its consequences. Living is, by its very nature, a dangerous process; and it is only by being conscious of the depths, as well as of the heights, of human imagination that we can make meaningful choices and accept full moral responsibility for ourselves. Bad things happen in the world, whether we are allowed to know it or not: and we shall never overcome evil by being kept in ignorance of its existence.”


So my message to Andy Burnham and his ilk is: “Keep your censoring activities within your own household, and confine them to your own children. Let other parents, and their children, take responsibility for their own reading, viewing and listening choices.”



NO to the Nanny State!

Shum contradickshun, shurely?

In his Christmas message, the moderator of the Presbyterian Church of Wales, the Reverend Haydn Thomas, pondered the meaning of "good will to all men”.

"It means showing tolerance towards all people, no matter what their creed, race, gender or politics," he said.

"It means accepting that everyone has a right to express their opinion even though they don't necessarily believe the same as you."

He then said he was 'hurt' by the two members of the Welsh assembly who invited poet Patrick Jones to read his poems at the Senedd in Cardiff Bay.

The poet's reading of his collection of poems Darkness Is Where The Stars Are led to protests and claims that his work was "obscene and blasphemous".

- BBC report

Whatever happened to melody?

To Ben’s incredulous scorn, Anticant sometimes listens to a pop music station calling itself Mellow Magic, which has the silly slogan “more music, less talk” – an obvious lie each time they say it! Far from being mellow, much of their output is raucous and tuneless. I suppose I hang on hoping that the next track will be an old familiar friend, or at least hummable to – but what is mostly on offer is:

[a] men who ‘sing’ as if they have clothes pegs clipped to their noses;

[b] a growing tribe of women with the nasty habit of making rasping ‘hawking’ noises from the backs of their throats as if they are about to be sick [and so far as I’m concerned, the sooner the better];

[c] persons of both sexes who HOWL like dogs baying at the moon, and seem to have no idea of voice production - though I suppose that old-fashioned notion went out with the advent of portable microphones;

[d] thunderously loud thumping backups which often drown out the puny voices, reminding me of those heavy forge hammers in the steelworks I used to visit of old;

[e] last but not least, the over-rated ‘superstars’ – the utterly talentless Madonna, Elton John giving his famous imitation of Donald Duck in a tizzy, George Michael sounding like a mouse with tonsillitis, and Will Young, who gets ever more epicene.

Whatever happened to the easy listening music of my youth and young adulthood, performed by artists who knew how to enthral and delight an audience – Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett [happily still with us], and this side of the pond, David Whitfield, Matt Monro and their ilk?

And still more, what has become of the charming genre of musical comedy and light operetta: Noel Coward, Ivor Novello, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Rodgers and Hammerstein…..?

What beats me is who pays these people to perform, and even more who wants to listen to them?

Now there’s a nice Christmas rant for you! Obviously, Anticant is getting old. And, sometimes, nostalgically grumpy.

What an idea!

I find something irresistibly comic about the Archbishop of Canterbury, in his Christmas sermon, telling people that they shouldn't expect magical solutions to their problems.

Christmas is for everyone

When I was young in the mid-twentieth century, Christmas wasn’t politicised in the way that it – like almost everything else – has become today. Whether you were a Christian or not, Christmas was an uncomplicatedly happy time of the year – magical for some: a festive break in the middle of winter’s gloom, enjoyed (or ignored) by everyone in whatever way they chose, without officious priests, politicians, or journalists telling them how they ‘ought’ to be celebrating it.

To my mind, that is as it should be. But nowadays, we are ceaselessly assailed with the injunctions of the Politically Correct – ‘those who know best‘ - about what we should and should not do at Christmas. The ineffable Mr Ed Balls’ Department for Children, Schools and Families has even issued 150,000 leaflets called "Tis The Season To Be Careful", warning people to guard against (among other things) the danger of gravy exploding in microwaves! [Thanks to Ken at ‘Nanny Knows Best’ for this tit-bit.]

Even Christians are admonished not to celebrate the birth of their Saviour in a fashion which may be ‘offensive’ to those of other faiths: being ‘offensive’ is now a major crime in the eyes of the PC brigade, who ignore the obvious fact that being offended is a choice, and that sensible people for the most part choose to put up with it instead of kicking up a petulant fuss.

I am not a Christian, but I have no objection to Christians – or any one else - celebrating Christmas in whatever fashion they choose. How they do it is their business, and no-one else’s.

If that includes letting the gravy go ballistic, so be it.