Nosemonkey's EUtopia

I for one will always trust a government that failed so abjectly in battling BSE and continiues to fail in fighting bovine TB when they tell us that there’s no need to follow the French example of quarantining and vaccinating poultry in the face of the constant spread of H5N1 bird flu across Europe…

Update: As if by magic, Tony Blair appears and contradicts his own minister by saying farmers should start preparing to put their birds into quarantine… (And, irritatingly, the BBC have simply updated the earlier story, rather than creating a new page. I really wish they would stop doing that.)

Yaaaay! Sign me up for one of those biometric ID cards with my fingerprints and stuff. Nothing could ever go wrong!

So, that’s �750,000 compensation due to fingerprints being misidentified (a handy precedent set). We’re constantly told that these ID cards will have a 99.9% accuracy rate. The UK has a population of 60 million. 0.01% failure rate means 60,000 people misidentified. 60,000 x �750,000 = erm… �45 BILLION.

Britblog Roundup 53

Sound familiar? It’s almost exactly the same nonsense John Reid came out with a couple of weeks ago, just before the footage of British troops beating up some Iraqis emerged.

Only this time he goes even more mental – we should be “slow to condemn our troops” because they are “increasingly constrained not just by international law and conventions, the standards we want to keep, but by media scrutiny, by videophones, by mobile phones, by satellite dishes”. Eh? Mobile phones, videophones and satellite dishes? You what, John?

Read this passage from Locke’s First Treatise of Government, and tell me there aren’t any parallels. It’s late and I’m a bit drunk, so I may well be reading too much into it. But the parallels are there:

“Since there have been a generation of men sprung up in the world that would flatter princes with an opinion that they have a Divine right to absolute power, let the laws by which they are constituted and are to govern, and the conditions under which they enter upon their authority be what they will, and their engagements to observe them never so well ratified by solemn oaths and promises, they have denied mankind a right to natural freedom, whereby they have not only, as much as in them lies, exposed all subjects to the utmost misery of tyranny and oppression, but have also so unsettled the titles and shaken the thrones of princes… as if they had designed to make war upon all government and subvert the very foundations of human society.”
(John Locke – An Essay Concerning False Principles, Chapter I: Of Slavery and Natural Liberty)

This is an attack on Divine Right theory and absolute monarchy written in the wake of a Civil War that kicked off (in large part) over misuse of sovereign power, and designed to justify a military coup that was launched for the same reason. It is very much of its time.

Substitute “Divine Right” for “right by election” (the famous “democratic mandate”), and “absolute monarchy” for “the right to do what we want as long as we have a sufficient majority in parliament”. It’s not a perfect parallel, to be sure, but there are surely similarities.

The thing to remember is that in Britain there are still, even in the 21st century, no checks on the power of Parliament other than the right of the monarch to refuse the royal assent to any Act passed by the two Houses. This right to refuse royal assent, commonly called the Royal Veto, has not been used in nearly 300 years. As such, it effectively no longer exists.

The Royal Veto is, however, the ONLY check we currently have on the ability of any government with a sufficient majority to pass any law it likes. This is very easy to foget. Many deny it. But in terms of strict constitutional law, it remains entirely true.

Personally, I find this terrifying – especially after the events of the last week.

Without the check of the Royal Veto, Parliament – not the people – is sovereign. Which means there is no check on Parliament whatsoever. Parliament can alter any part of the constitution whenever it likes. If Parliament becomes complacent, if a government has a sufficient majority in Parliament, a government can do whatever it likes.

None of our freedoms are sacred. None are inviolable.

As long as the government has a sufficient majority, Parliament can pass any laws it likes – including a law which abolishes Parliament itself, abolishes elections, and sets up a dictatorship.

Hey, look… you know – what’s more important? The right to hold elections and have a say in how the country is run, or the right not to be blown to pieces by EEEVIL TERRORISTS?

Under British constitutional law, the government has the right to abolish elections if it can pass legislation amending the law stating that elections need to be held. Under British constitutional law, were Tony Blair to get a bill through Parliament that abolished Parliament itself, we would have no longer have the right to elect our leaders or determine our laws, and no legal right to dispute the removal of this power..

The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill – which proposes bypassing parliament and allowing ministers, who have not been elected to the offices they hold and some of whom have never been elected to any office whatsover (e.g. the Lord Chancellor or Lord Adonis), to amend legislation and bring in new laws as they see fit – is the first step down this path.

Tony Blair’s recent assaults on our civil liberties have finally got me reading a bit of political philosophy again. To wit, some pertinent quotes from John Stuart Mill:

On Liberty, Ch.II – “Let us suppose… that the government is entirely at one with the people, and never thinks of exerting any power of coercion unless in agreement with what it conceives to be their voice. But I deny the right of the people to excercise such coercion, either by themselves or by their government. The power itself is illegitimate. The best government has no more title to it than the worst. It is as noxious, or more noxious, when exerted in accordance with public opinion, than when in opposition to it.”

On Liberty, Ch.IV – “there are, in our own day, gross usurpations upon the liberty of private life actually practised, and still greater ones threatened with some expectation of success, and opinions propounded which assert an unlimited right in the public not only to prohibit by law everything which it thinks wrong, but in order to get at what it thinks wrong, to prohibit any number of things which it admits to be innocent…

“A theory of ‘social rights’ the like of which probably never before found its way into direct language: being nothing short of this – that it is the absolute social right of every individual, that every individual shall act in every respect exactly as he ought; that whosoever fails thereof in the smallest particular, violates my social right, and entitles me to demand from the legislature the removal of the grievance. So monstrous a principle is far more dangerous than any single interference with liberty; there is no violation of liberty it would not justify; it acknowledges no right to any freedom whatever, except perhaps that of holding opinions in secret, without ever disclosing them: for, the moment an opinion which I consider noxious passes any one’s lips, it invades all the ‘social rights’ attributed to me by the Alliance.”

Locke, Mill and Paine should be the major sources for anyone wishing to find eloquent expressions of precisely why what Blair is doing is wrong. Possibly even Burke:

“Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little”

“When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle”

and

“The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts”

(Initially posted as a comment over at Great Britain, Not Little England, where MatGB is pondering how to organise the resistance.)

Having problems finding a plumber? Well those kindly souls over in Brussels are trying to save you from your misery with the Services Directive, allowing the Daily Mail the joy of umpteen thousand headlines about German Garbage collectors stealing our wastepaper, unions and the like to moan about how the increased competition will drive down prices (like that’s a bad thing?) and the wonderous workers of Whitehall to – as they do with every EU directive, a prime cause of anti-EU grumblings – implement the thing so bloody enthusiastically that it’ll doubtless become law to have at least one hairdresser of Slavic descent in every salon in the land.

It’s naturally all a lot more complicated than that and I’m merely being facetious as I’m still enraged by the Westminster votes of the last few days, so check out EUPolitix’s handy guide so you can pretend to be all knowledgable when the result of the EU Parliament’s vote comes through later today.

Update (11:45am): They’ve passed it.

Today at Prime Minister’s Questions, responding to ex-Tory leader William Hague, Tony Blair said

“He and I stood in a democratic election in 2001 and I… remember the result”

The obvious implication, of course, is that in a democratic vote, the electorate chose Blair over Hague.

Now correct me if I’m wrong, but in the 2001 election, Tony Blair stood for election in Sedgefield, County Durham, William Hague in Richmond, Yorkshire. Only 22 miles away from each other, perhaps, but entirely different constituencies. Hague and Blair have never stood against each other in any election.

In other words, yet more proof – as if any were needed – that Blair doesn’t understand the concept of the British system of representative democracy. Hence the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill – wiping out the inconvenience of Parliamentary scrutiny once and for all. He genuinely thinks that everyone voting Labour was voting for him personally. He genuinely thinks that what he wants, he should get.

(Hey – it was in the manifesto, so ALL LABOUR MPs HAVE A DUTY TO VOTE FOR IT, as the manifesto is the Little Red Book containing all the unbounded wisdom of Chairman Blair. Unless the thing that was in the manifesto has subsequently fallen out of favour with the leadership, like the partial smoking ban or commitment not to raise university tuition fees, in which case it shalt verrily be airbrushed from the official history of the glorious reich.)

Welcome to our Blairite New World, where smoking is banned while greenhouse gas emissions rise; where foxhunting is banned but animal testing booms; where reading the names of soldiers killed in an illegal war gets you arrested, but calling for beheadings and terrorist attacks in response to some cartoons lets you wander free; where every British citizen is tagged and tracked while terrorists are ignored.

That one little throw-away remark shows that Blair genuinely believes that he – personally – has a mandate for all his vastly contradictory policy decisions, and that his cult of personality is progressing apace. It is also yet another example of why he won’t step down until Gordon Brown has made himself sufficiently indistinguishable from the Dear Leader as to make any transition seamless.

Kim Il-Blair will be replaced by Kim Brown-Il. That time is coming, and when it does, the change will be all but imperceptible. It’s time to get out, before they prevent us from doing even that.

Update: Unity at Talk Politics reads legislation so the press, public and politicians don’t have to (not that, it would appear, they do anyway):

“If you think the votes that will take place over the next two days on the Terrorism Bill are about the ‘glorification of terrorism’, then like the BBC in this report, you have got things very badly wrong… The main amendment to this section of the Bill that the government will be moving today seeks not to reintroduce the offence of glorifying terrorism but merely to remove a definition of ‘indirect encouragement’ inserted by the Lords… What we have here is quite simply a framework for law-maling by propaganda; an attempt to define the precise parameters of this offence by banging away at the public in the press with their preferred definition – which does include glorification – in the hope that when the time comes and a relevant case comes to court, jurors will have swallowed their bullshit wholesale and deliver a precedent that suits their purposes.”

Update 2: MPs are idiots. Passed by 315 votes to 277. GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH.

For all those maniacs who think the BBC is biased:

“World Television produces the fake news, but its efforts are entirely funded by the Foreign Office, which spent �340m on propaganda activities in the UK alone in 2001. A comprehensive post- 9/11 overhaul means that this figure has probably markedly increased since then…”

For those who still care, this would be well worth digging into in more detail, perhaps starting with the propaganda channel’s website. This isn’t new, as this report from March last year shows. It is, however, yet another reason to send me apopleptic. My anger levels are at a genuinely violent level today – and following the precedent of yesterday’s anti-smoking vote, I utterly demand that the government bans itself for the sake of my health.

ID cards to be forced on us? Check.

Pointlessly over-riding the market in an utterly hypocritical PR move? Check.

Final step – attempt to introduce thoughtcrime.

Won’t somebody rid me of this troublesome government?

Update: This. Update 2: Also this (mostly…), and this is pretty much perfect. Update 3: Also try this. Maybe it really is time to revive the Whig party…

Total ban on smoking in public places by 200-odd votes?

BASTARDS.

That’s it, this country is beyond redemption.

Tony Blair achieves stage one in his attempt to force me to emigrate. Stage two to follow later today.

Of course, now that they’re going to tie passports in to ID cards and force us all to have the buggers, I’d better get my act in gear and find a country without such mental authoritarians in charge (preferably one that allows me to smoke in pubs) to give me citizenship asap, or (thanks to the government’s ever so generous concession to make it “volunatary”) the only way to avoid having the barcode tattooed firmly on my forehead will be to find a remote part of Dartmoor and avoid all human contact for the rest of my days.

I think I’m probably rather too angry adequately to express just how much I despise this God-awful, craven, cowardly bastard of a government, and every single MP who voted in favour of that horrendously illiberal bill.

Update: Oh, and am I right in thinking that, following this question from Tory Ben Wallace, Charles Clarke has admitted that all a terrorist/dodgy criminal type need do is fly to Ireland, get a fake Irish passport and then hop on a boat to Liverpool before being allowed free travel throughout the UK? Or was Shadow Home Secretary David Davis correct in suggesting that, for the ID cards plan to work, the Irish government will also have to adopt the bloody things, re-introducing somewhat unfortunate similarities to the old colonial days?

Update 2: A Kate Hoey follow-up solicited the following from the Safety Elephant:

“Once it is compulsory to register, Irish citizens resident here would be obliged to register. The common travel area is unaffected in principle by that definition, although, as I told the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden, a series of practical questions arise that are subject to active discussion in those circumstances.”

So yes, it would appear that the Irish bypass will be well and truly open to all dodgy foreigners with bombs and the like.

Please also note the Freudian slip “once it is compulsary”. It’s only a matter of time, kids…