James Hammerton's Blog

New home for this blog.

2009-11-21T19:29:00.001Z

I have decided to move this blog over to a new home due to various features available via the Wordpress platform.

Wolfgang Werle was convicted of murdering Walter Sedlmayer

2009-11-15T01:51:00.003Z

Why am I publicising this fact? Because the convicted murderer in question (his name, remember, is Wolfgang Werle) is trying to sue Wikipedia to get references to his murder of Walter Sedlmeyer removed:

Wikipedia is under a censorship attack by a convicted murderer who is invoking Germany’s privacy laws in a bid to remove references to his killing of a Bavarian actor in 1990.

Lawyers for Wolfgang Werle, of Erding, Germany, sent a cease-and-desist letter demanding removal of Werle’s name from the Wikipedia entry on actor Walter Sedlmayr. The lawyers cite German court rulings that “have held that our client’s name and likeness cannot be used anymore in publication regarding Mr. Sedlmayr’s death.”

German media have already ceased using Werle’s full name regarding the attack. Jennifer Granick, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says German publications must also alter their online archives in a bid to comport with laws designed to provide offenders an avenue to “reintegrate back into society.”

“It’s not just censorship going forward. It’s asking outlets to go back and change what is already being written,” Granick said in a telephone interview.

It seems to me the appropriate response to such insanity is to publicise the offending material as widely as possible.

Are you a "domestic extremist"?

2009-10-25T22:57:00.002Z

See Magna Carta Plus News for details on how entirely peaceful, legal protest and merely attending political meetings could get your details recorded on databases of "domestic extremists"...

Cameron agrees to repealing the Identity Cards Act

2009-10-25T16:52:00.001Z

YouTube - David Cameron - Repealing The Identity Cards Act

This is unequivocal!

The unspoken constitution

2009-10-23T15:48:00.004+01:00

The unspoken constitution: a satirical attempt to describe how Britain's "unwritten" constitution works in practice.

Stoking up Islamophobia

2009-10-18T18:10:00.002+01:00

[Hat tip: A commenter at Samizdata]

That's what these people are doing, far more effectively than Geert Wilders could ever manage.

On the BNP's euro election performance

2009-06-09T17:39:00.004+01:00

2 interesting articles are linked to below, the first on the views of those who voted for the BNP in the European elections and the second looking at the BNP's performance in perspective.

Who voted BNP and why? - Channel 4 News:

``Yet the feeling is widespread that white Britons get a raw deal. Seventy seven per cent of BNP voters think white people suffer unfair discrimination these days. But that is also the views of 40 per cent of the public as a whole.

The average British voter is more likely to think that discrimination afflicts white people than Muslim or non-white people. And only seven per cent of the public think white people benefit from unfair advantages, while more than one in three think Muslim and non-white people receive unfair help.

Thus the BNP is tapping into some very widely held views, such as the desire to stop all immigration, and the belief that local councils "normally allow immigrant families to jump the queue in allocating council homes" (87 per cent of BNP voters think this, but so does 56 per cent of the public as a whole).

Yet, depending on how the term "racist" is precisely defined, our survey suggests that the label applies to only around a half of BNP voters. On their own, these votes would not have been enough to give the BNP either of the seats they won last night.

There are two telling pieces of evidence that suggest wider causes of disenchantment. Seven out of 10 BNP voters (and almost as many Green and Ukip voters) think that "there is no real difference these between Britain’s three main parties".

But perhaps the most startling finding came when we tested anecdotal reports that many BNP voters were old Labour sympathisers who felt that the party no longer speaks up for them. It turns out to be true. As many as 59 per cent of BNP voters think that Labour "used to care about the concerns of people like me but doesn’t nowadays".

What is more worrying for Labour is that this sentiment is shared by millions of voters, way beyond the ranks of BNP voters. Overall, 63 per cent of the British public think Labour used to care about their concerns – and only 19 per cent think it does today.''
(bold emphasis added)

The myth of the far right surge - Spiked Online

``The BNP’s share of the Euro-vote is certainly up - but not by much, from 4.9 per cent in 2004 to 6.2 per cent in 2009. In this election, everything was reportedly in the BNP’s favour: a recession, a political crisis, a voting system that favours smaller parties, an election that is routinely used to deliver protest votes because it is not taken seriously, and the kudos of being the one vote that was sure to get up the noses of the political establishment. Yet the BNP still barely registers in British political life except as a bogeyman to be employed by the big parties to scare us down to the polling booths. In fact, the number of votes the BNP received actually fell in the two regions where it won seats compared with the 2004 Euro elections: by almost 3,000 votes in the north-west and by around 6,000 in Yorkshire and Humber. It was the collapse of the Labour vote that allowed the BNP to win seats.

While there is little to suggest that the BNP can make a major impact on political life more generally, the fact that such a pariah party can have any success at all is indicative of the increasing isolation of the mainstream parties. As the Conservative shadow defence spokesman Liam Fox put it, ‘all politicians should be asking themselves “How did we allow this to happen?”’. The answer is that all the mainstream parties can offer is a managerial approach to solving society’s problems. There is so little difference of principle between them that they spend an inordinate amount of time jockeying for position in the febrile atmosphere of the ‘Westminster Village’ in an effort to differentiate themselves. It is no surprise that voters have chosen to give the political elite a kicking at the ballot box, if they could summon up enough enthusiasm to vote at all.

It is this loss of legitimacy - not the highly unlikely prospect of neo-fascist electoral success - which is central to the handwringing. The only way that Nick Griffin and friends will gain more support is if bankrupt mainstream politicians continue to have nothing more to offer than ‘at least we’re not the BNP’.''
(bold emphasis added)

On the UK's Euro election results

2009-06-08T18:09:00.001+01:00

The BBC summarises the results here. The main headline results are of course that UKIP pushed Labour into 3rd place, the BNP won 2 seats and Labour was pushed into 2nd place in Wales by the Tories. The last time Labour failed to be the most popular party in Wales, David Lloyd George was the Prime Minister.

Certainly this is a truly dire result for Labour, an encouraging result for UKIP and a worrying boost for the BNP, but it seems to me there is more going on than that.

Consider the votes for the "established" parties. The Tories, Lib Dems, Labour and, (in Scotland and Wales) the SNP and Plaid Cymru, collectively got 60% of the vote.

40% has gone to UKIP, the Greens, the BNP and a myriad of small parties and independents. In 2004 (summary here), the "established" parties collectively got 66.6% of the vote. If you take just Labour + Tories + Lib Dems the percentage of the vote in 2009 was 57.1% vs 64.2% in 2004. Clearly people have become a lot less inclined to vote for the established parties in these elections.

Also, if we sum the votes for the parties that advocate withdrawal from the EU, that is UKIP + the BNP + NO2EU + the English Democrats + the Socialist Labour Party + United Kingdom First, the total is 27.1%, almost as much as the Tories achieved. Add the Tories' votes, and you have a clear majority (54.8%) voting for parties that are either EU sceptic or outright anti-EU.

Now, consider the Tory vote itself. The Tories will of course be glad to have "won" this election and to have pushed Labour into 2nd place in Wales. However, they polled fewer votes than they did in 2004. The Labour vote has collapsed, with many voters just staying at home and the rest migrating to fringe parties. This election is thus more a rejection of Labour than it is an endorsement of the Tories. The Tories clearly have some way to go to gaining the electorate's trust, though at least they can say their vote has held up well compared to Labour and the Lib Dems as the electorate sidle off to non-mainstream parties.

However, a word of caution must be raised, since the turnout, at 34.2% is very low, lower than the 38% achieved in 2004 and lower than the turnouts for general elections. Indeed this is the prime reason for the BNP's success - in both the regions where it won seats, it polled slightly fewer votes than in 2004, but the lower turnout enabled them to obtain seats as their percentage share was boosted. A high turnout might well have prevented the BNP from gaining any seats. A general election in Britain would clearly see a different picture, more like the picture in the local elections, where Labour were hammered and the Tories obtained 38% of the vote and the Lib Dems held steady.

Just when you thought Gordon Brown's grinning couldn't get worse...

2009-05-06T18:07:00.003+01:00

...he does it whilst posing in front of a swastika.

NewsBiscuit: Campaigners call for national register of MPs

2009-05-06T17:39:00.003+01:00

This spoof made me laugh:

Recent research has estimated the number of MPs in the UK as at least 646, causing many to worry that political activity could be happening on their doorsteps.
Campaign leader Michael Carlisle explained ‘These people are by nature devious and evasive. They will never give a straight answer to a question; they mislead the public, claim inflated expenses, send malicious emails and very rarely show any sense of remorse. We need protecting from these people, if you can call them that. The public has a right to know if one is living in the middle of their community.’

And:

Another possibility being considered is thought to be a watered down version of the scheme whereby individuals can check the register to see if prospective partners are MPs before moving in with them. One man, who wanted to remain anonymous, agreed ‘I’d never have moved in with my partner if I’d known she was a politician, or at least I’d have made sure I didn’t claim for porn on her expense account.’

The minister for double standards (again)

2009-03-29T12:34:00.003+01:00

Lord Myners hid his money in tax haven - Times Online:

LORD MYNERS, the minister in charge of the government’s assault on tax havens, has used a blind trust to conceal £250,000 of his own money in an offshore shelter.
Details of the secret holding have been obtained by The Sunday Times as G20 leaders gather in London pledging to stamp out tax abuses.
Myners transferred 500,000 of his own shares in the Ermitage hedge fund, based in Jersey, into a blind trust when he became a minister in October.

MPs described the holding as “blatant hypocrisy” and said it would undermine the credibility of Gordon Brown’s offensive on tax avoidance.
Myners will come under further pressure this week over his role in signing off a £16.9m pension pot for Sir Fred Goodwin, the disgraced former chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland. Sir Tom McKillop, the former RBS chairman, will hand in a statement to MPs challenging Myners’s version of events.
Company documents obtained by The Sunday Times show Myners held his Ermitage shares as recently as January this year. He concealed the holding from public scrutiny by placing it in a ministerial blind trust. Ministers are not required to disclose publicly the investments transferred to such trusts. He owned the shares while overseeing price-sensitive policy decisions. During this time he met Jersey officials who now say they have “nothing to fear” from any tax haven crackdown.
Last Thursday Myners pledged tough penalties against tax havens. Downing Street officials say a key plank of the G20 summit in London this week will be to impose higher taxes on companies which do business with firms offshore.

The minister for double standards

2009-03-22T12:53:00.004Z

The Times reports:

THE government minister in charge of stamping out corporate tax avoidance has himself set up a business in the tax haven of Bermuda. Lord Myners, already under fire for approving Sir Fred Goodwin’s massive pension from Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), was part-time chairman of an offshore company which avoided more than £100m a year in taxes.
Details of Myners’s involvement in Aspen Insurance Holdings (AIH) have emerged as Gordon Brown seeks to win the backing of heads of government to prise open tax havens at a meeting of the G20 in London on April 2.
Myners, who earned nearly £200,000 from AIH in one year, is also facing questions over share options he accrued during five years as chairman of the Bermuda-based company. Accounts for AIH show that at the end of 2007 Myners held 318,338 share options. On Friday the shares, which are listed on the New York Stock Exchange, closed at $21.64, which would value that stake at £4.8m.

Lights out, Britons told - we're running out of power

2009-03-21T16:02:00.003Z

I wrote earlier about a possible gas shortage, but the evidence of a general energy shortage is mounting too. The Register reports:

Exclusive Carbon quango The Energy Saving Trust has come up with a new reason for Britons to save energy in the home. Our power stations will soon close, and you'll need to do your bit.

That's what one Reg reader discovered, after enquiring about the Trust's calculations on the effectiveness of new low-energy bulbs.

"A reduction in electricity consumption will be essential over the coming decade as a large number of power stations are being withdrawn from service, and as a result there is a gap looming between supply and demand," Graham Crocker was told. "More efficient lighting (which accounts for nearly 20 per cent of domestic electricity consumption) will go some way to alleviating these demand pressures." The answer came from Alex Stuart, assistant manager of services of development at the quango.

"This is the first time anybody has acknowledged that new power capacity will not be delivered on time to replace existing capacity," Peter Lilley MP told us.

There's no doubt that Britain faces a looming energy crisis. CapGemini estimates that a quarter of the UK's energy plant capacity will close by 2015. The nation will also see declining oil and gas output from the North Sea. But new, replacement power generation will not arrive in time.

Fame at last

2009-03-20T14:34:00.002Z

See the first comment on Philip Johnston's excellent piece about the publication of the secret ID card reviews. On the subject of those reviews, see my Magna Carta Plus article.

Lord Mandelson must remain loyal to EU to guarantee pension - Telegraph

2009-03-18T22:17:00.001Z

Lord Mandelson must remain loyal to EU to guarantee pension - Telegraph:

Lord Mandelson is entitled to the cash because he was the EU's trade commissioner from November 2004 to the middle of last year.

Under the terms of the deal, he will receive an index-linked pension of £31,000 a year when he turns 65. The cost of buying such a deal on the private market would be £550,000.

This is in addition to more than £234,000 of "top-up" salary payments and a £15,000 resettlement fee which he will receive over the next three years.

However, European Union rules show that if he speaks out against Europe as a former Commissioner he could be stripped of his pension altogether.

Documents seen by campaigners show that Lord Mandelson and other Commissioners have to abide by certain obligations "both during and after their term of office".

One of these obligations as a staff member of the Commission is to maintain a "duty of loyalty to the Communities".

The rules also note that "an official has the right to freedom of expression, with due respect to the principles of loyalty and impartiality".

If they fail to demonstrate loyalty to the EU, Lord Mandelson can be "deprived of his right to a pension or other benefits", the rules say.

The TaxPayers' Alliance, the campaign group that has uncovered the threat to his pension, said Lord Mandelson had to resolve this "conflict of interest".

It thus appears that anyone who has worked for the EU Commission risks their pension if they dare criticise it.

The Convention on Modern Liberty

2009-03-01T20:57:00.002Z

The first part of my write-up on yesterday's events has been published on Magna Carta Plus.

British Readers: Write to your MPs

2009-03-01T20:56:00.001Z

Phil Booth of NO2ID, quoted by Guy Herbert on Samizdata:

At the Convention on Modern Liberty, I launched NO2ID's request that everyone at the convention – and around the UK – tells their MP right now that they refuse their consent to having their information shared under any "information sharing order", a power currently being slipped onto the statute books in clause 152 of the coroners and justice bill .
Please tell yours too. It's important, and urgent – and something that only YOU can do. If you never have before, now's the time to write to your MP – in a letter, or via www.WriteToThem.com.

Jack Straw has been making noises that could signal a 'compromise', but the only acceptable action is to remove clause 152 entirely from the bill. It is not linked to any other clause, despite being sandwiched between other powers and so-called safeguards offered to the information commissioner. It cannot be improved, and Straw can't be allowed to merely "dilute" it. Clause 152 just has to go.

It's imperative that in coming days every MP hears from his or her constituents. Please tell them you refuse consent to having your information, taken for one purpose, arbitrarily used for any other purpose. And ask them to vote clause 152 off the bill.

I've done it, I urge anyone concerned about this measure to do it.

Reminder: The Convention on Modern Liberty 28th Feb

2009-02-15T17:27:00.004Z

Just a reminder that on the 28th February, the Convention on Modern Liberty gets underway in London with parallel sessions in Glasgow, Belfast, Manchester, Cardiff, Cambridge and Bristol.

Is Britain facing a gas shortage?

2009-02-15T14:41:00.003Z

EU Referendum writes:

The source of this information is Centrica, owner of British Gas, which says that, on present trends, its main reserve will be totally depleted in a little over three weeks. And though extra gas can be imported from Norway and the Netherlands to make up any shortfall, serious breakdowns have hit pipelines from both countries in the past week.

Thus we are told that the crisis reveals an extraordinary failure to plan for the future as supplies of gas from the North Sea have run down, turning Britain into an importer of the fuel. Though now dependent on overseas supplies, it keeps only about a quarter as much gas in reserves as France, Germany and Italy, making it uniquely vulnerable to shortages and price hikes.

As we have observed, though, this is only half the story. The underlying problem is the excessive reliance on gas for electricity generation, a problem that is set to get considerably worse as generators build new gas-generation capacity to fill the gap caused by the lack of a coherent energy policy and the insane emphasis on renewables.

The scale of the current problem though is quite daunting. Three-quarters of the country's reserves are stored by Centrica in an old North Sea gas field, called Rough, some 9,000ft below the seabed off the East Yorkshire coast.

This year – thanks largely to ~~global warming~~ the cold weather – its gas has been pumped at record rates. It is now 24 percent lower than at this time last year, and 49 percent less than the year before. Everything depends on the weather and the Met Office expects the cold back by the beginning of March. On past form, that means we should be alright, but you never know. The Met Office could break the habit of a lifetime and get it right.

The credit bubble and the market

2009-02-15T14:34:00.002Z

Matthew Parris makes an interesting point:

So amid all the doom-mongering and recanting, I have an assertion to make. The market has not failed. The present collapse is evidence that the market is working. Confidence bubbles are an inherent feature of a free market system. Panics — confidence vacuums — are an inherent feature too. The test of the theory of market capitalism is whether the system provides from within itself the means to prick both.
It does. The first — a confidence bubble — has been pricked. We are now sucking ourselves the other way: into a confidence vacuum. In time this too will be pricked. The market will steady.
The bubble that has just burst was based, worldwide, on financial services. Financial services are a product. It is true they are a product critical to the efficient functioning of the market (so is electricity, so is oil) but that just makes them an unusually important product. From time to time products fail in any market. They may fail through force majeure — droughts, floods, pestilence. They may fail due to inherent flaws — airships, Thalidomide, blue asbestos. Or they may fail through ignorance, trickery or the credulity of human beings — Madoff, the property bubble, the repackaging of sub-prime debt.
The present financial crash has been precipitated by product failure of the third kind. Trade in financial instruments too opaque for even those who traded in them to assess them properly, and bonus incentive schemes that acted against the interests of the companies offering them, fuelled a banking bubble that has now burst.
But ask: what pricked it? Did politicians rumble the trade? Did governments, or international forums or symposiums, provide the sharp instrument? Did academic research and expertise expose the dodgy product? Did statutory regulators apply the pin? No, the free market wised up and pricked this bubble. Politicians and finance ministers (if they had had the power) would have tried to keep it inflated. The market puffed itself up, and then, without intervention — despite intervention — the market let itself down. The speed with which this has happened has been awful, but however inconvenient for many or catastrophic for a few, correction is not a failure of the market, but a success.

10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know

2009-02-15T00:02:00.002Z

10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know is an informative look at how you can tailor your Facebook settings to protect your privacy. There's more to those Facebook settings than you might realise.

On the impact of increasing mandatory redundancy payments

2009-02-07T17:57:00.004Z

The Independent reports:

The minimum amount of money that employers must pay staff they make redundant is set to be increased by the Government, The Independent has learnt. In another attempt to ease the pain of those worst affected by the recession, ministers have launched a review of the minimum payments to which people are entitled by law when they lose their job. With around 1,500 posts being axed each week, unemployment will soon pass the two million mark and could eventually rise to more than three million.
The plan emerged on the day that the Bank of England reduced interest rates to 1 per cent, the lowest in its315-year history, and warned of a "severe and synchronised downturn" in the global economy.

At present, statutory redundancy pay is based on a week's pay for each full year's service between the ages of 22 and 41, and one-and-a-half week's pay for older workers. Total payouts are capped at £7,000 and £10,500 respectively because wages above £350 a week and service of more than 20 years are ignored. Some 46 per cent of the workforce earns more than £350 a week. But Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary, plans to propose a more generous scheme in his submission to the Chancellor Alistair Darling ahead of the Budget this spring.

Although no decision has been made, a big one-off rise in the £350-a-week limit is under consideration.

Other options include lowering the qualifying period for redundancy payments from two years' service to one year, and raising the tax-free limit for more generous pay-offs. Since 1988 the first £30,000 has not been subject to tax, but the TUC wants it raised to £50,000. However, ministers may decide to focus any help on lower-paid workers by boosting minimum payments.

MPs and unions have launched a campaign for higher payoffs because the maximum pay figure used in the formula has declined from 203 per cent of average weekly earnings when the scheme was launched in 1965 to 56 per cent today. They want the limit linked to earnings rather than inflation in future. But employers are warning that at a time when many firms are desperate to keep costs down, bigger payouts could result in more job cuts.

Certainly, for those made redundant, an increased redundancy payment will help them get through their period of unemployment. However, as Guy Herbert points out, this is not the only impact such a measure has.

There are several negative effects from such a move:

If a firm is considering making redundancies in order to cut costs, then an increased redundancy payout will encourage them to lay people off earlier than they otherwise would - if they were to employ the person for a longer they have to pay them their wages plus the redundancy payout. In marginal cases, this can make the difference between an employer holding onto a worker during the recession and letting him go. E.g. employers who try to hold onto someone until business picks up will find it more risky to do so - the cost of holding on to someone only to let them go if things don't go as well as expected will have gone up.
The measure effectively increases the cost of labour by increasing the overheads associated with employing someone. It will thus make employers more averse to hiring people in the first place.
By increasing the costs businesses incur, they also increase the risk of the business failing completely and being unable to make redundancy payments.

This measure thus seems counterproductive to me, in that it is liable to increase the amount of unemployment and prolong the recession.

The only people to benefit from this are those who would have been made redundant anyway, and even there, by making employers more averse to hiring, this benefit may be offset by prolonging the period of unemployment.

A further point: By announcing that minimum redundancy payment increases are being considered, the government is encouraging any company considering making people redundant to do so before any such changes are made.

I wonder if the government consider such issues before pronouncing on something.

300,000

2009-02-07T13:59:00.002Z

There is a saying that 85% percent of statistics are made up on the spot. The EU Referendum blog has noted 300,000 is a common figure occurring in official or political announcements. The aforementioned saying couldn't possibly explain this pattern could it?

The Credit Crunch: What the lenders were doing

2009-01-31T17:47:00.004Z

From "The Crunch", by Alex Brummer, pages 42-43:

To get an idea of how all this worked in practice, and to understand why it was built on such shaky foundations, take the fictional example of Mr and Mrs Jerome Smith of downtown Cleveland. They are persuaded by Fast Talking Mortgage Brokers Inc. (FTMB) to buy their shabby clapboard property with a $100,000 mortgage. The interest rate of 10 per cent is being waived for the first two years. In fact, interest has not been forgiven but is being rolled up with the original mortgage, increasing the debt to $120,000. FTMB, having taken an arrangement free from the Smiths, then sells on the mortgage to Grasping Investment Bank (GIB) of New York, which pays the broker a commission for the mortgage. GIB wraps up the Smiths' loan with dozens of other loans to other Smiths from poor neighbourhoods around the country and renames it Smith Mortgage Obligation (SMO), and then pays its favourite credit rating company, Stamped & Correct, to certify the SMO as good quality debt. The attraction of this SMO is its 10 per cent return at a time when government bonds are getting between 2 and 3 per cent.

But rather than selling SMO directly to clients, GIB takes another route. It creates a new company --- a special purpose vehicle called GIB Capital --- and this borrows from other banks cheaply and uses the money to buy Smith Mortgage Obligation. GIB then offers shares in GIB Capital, now the proud owner of SMO, to clients, who lap up the shares because of the high return.

Grasping Investment Bank benefits from the process in several ways. It has collected profits and commission on the sale of the SMO and also benefits from leverage (borrowing) because it is using someone else's money. GIB has also cleverly placed the SMO off its balance sheet in the special purpose vehicle, which it does not have to disclose on its accounts as a liability. It can stretch its capital further and will not have the regulator on its back.

Thus not only are mortgages given to people who are likely to find it difficult to pay them, but they are rated on a dubious basis, responsibility for them is diffused amongst several players, proper accounting of the debt is obscured by creating the special purpose vehicle and extra borrowing from banks is used to facilitate the whole process. It seems to me this process was bound to hide the riskiness of the mortgages from the investors.

Note that SMO in this scenario is an example of a collateralized debt obligation.

Sunny Hundal on the Convention on Modern Liberty

2009-01-21T20:38:00.004Z

[Update: Details of the Blogger's Summit are now up at the Convention website]

Sunny Hundal, blogging at Liberal Conspiracy, has posted his own take on the Convention on Modern Liberty. In particular he highlights the panel discussion for bloggers:

So, what does this mean for you?

openDemocracy have been kind enough to offer a special panel discussion for bloggers, which will be organised by Liberal Conspiracy. I would like to give an activist feel, not just a space for a calm talking-heads discussion with people coming out more frustrated than they went in.

Over the coming weeks, we need to ask:
- how we should look at privacy differently;
- how different powers affect our liberties, uniting football fans, clubbers, Muslims and even technologists.
- what can be done about it.

Ideally, I’d like to see a situation where, by the time we get to the event, we are looking to get organised and move forward, not just reiterate the issues that could have been discussed online anyway.

In my view the Convention has the potential to be a turning point leading to the halting and reversal of the erosion of civil liberties over the past 10 to 15 years in the UK. If people think hard about what needs to come out of the Convention, as Sunny suggests here, it will help to ensure that the Convention will become such a turning point.

[Thanks to Guy Aitchison for alerting me to Sunny's article.]

Convention on Modern Liberty in Glasgow and Belfast

2009-01-17T22:23:00.003Z

I posted earlier about the Convention on Modern Liberty on the 28th February 2009.

The venue and draft programme of the Glasgow Convention are now up. The venue is: Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Strathclyde, James Weir Building, 75 Montrose Street, Glasgow G1 1XJ.

Details of the Belfast Convention are also up now.

Banking bill removes obligation on Bank of England to report money printing

2009-01-11T21:56:00.004Z

The Telegraph reports:

The Government is set to throw out the 165-year old law that obliges the Bank to publish a weekly account of its balance sheet – a move that will allow it theoretically to embark covertly on so-called quantitative easing. The Banking Bill, which is currently passing through Parliament, abolishes a key section of the law laid down by Robert Peel's Government in 1844 which originally granted the Bank the sole right to print UK money.

The ostensible reason for the reform, which means the Bank will not have to print details of its own accounts and the amount of notes and coins flowing through the UK economy, is to allow the Bank more power to overhaul troubled financial institutions in the future, under its Special Resolution Authority.

However, some have warned that it means: "there is nothing to stop an unreported and unmonitored flooding of the money market by the undisciplined use of the printing presses."

Guido Fawkes' blog spotted this last year. The offending section of the Banking Bill states:

Section 6 of the Bank Charter Act 1844 (Bank to produce weekly account) shall cease to have effect.

Section 6 of the Bank Charter Act 1844 states:

6. An account of the amount of Bank of England notes issued by the issue department of the Bank of England, and of gold coin and of gold and silver bullion respectively, and of securities, in the said issue department, and also an account of the capital stock, and the deposits, and of the money and securities belonging to the said governor and company in the banking department of the Bank of England, on some day in every week to be fixed by the [F1 commissioners of inland revenue], shall be transmitted by the said governor and company weekly to the said commissioners, in the form prescribed in the schedule hereto annexed marked (A.), and shall be published by the said commissioners, in the next succeeding London Gazette in which the same may be conveniently inserted.

It's clear that the Banking Bill does remove the obligation to produce a weekly report on how much money the Bank of England issues. It therefore enables this information to be legally withheld from scrutiny, and thus enables the BoE to issue money covertly (at least until any other required reporting mechanisms come into play). The question then is:

Why would the bill include such a measure if they didn't at least want the option to be available?

Why do "bubbles" occur in the financial markets?

2009-01-10T23:03:00.005Z

Virginia Postrel, writing for the Atlantic magazine, discusses experiments some economists have been running that seek to provide insight into the behaviour of financial markets.

The basic idea is simple. You offer the subjects investments which provide 15 regular dividends of $0.24 during the course of the experiment (alternatively you offer a range of possible payments that average $0.24). The subjects then trade those investments with each other. There are 60 rounds of trading, with dividends paid every fourth round.

In theory, no one should pay more than the expected value of the investment at each round of trading, namely the amount of money that is still left on that dividend. At the start, this is $3.60. After the first payment, it falls to $3.36 and so on. This is not what happens. Postrel writes:

Here, finally, is a security with security—no doubt about its true value, no hidden risks, no crazy ups and downs, no bubbles and panics. The trading price should stick close to the expected value.

At least that’s what economists would have thought before Vernon Smith, who won a 2002 Nobel Prize for developing experimental economics, first ran the test in the mid-1980s. But that’s not what happens. Again and again, in experiment after experiment, the trading price runs up way above fundamental value. Then, as the 15th round nears, it crashes. The problem doesn’t seem to be that participants are bored and fooling around. The difference between a good trading performance and a bad one is about $80 for a three-hour session, enough to motivate cash-strapped students to do their best. Besides, Noussair emphasizes, “you don’t just get random noise. You get bubbles and crashes.” Ninety percent of the time.

So much for security.

Why should this be? Postrel suggests:

Experimental bubbles are particularly surprising because in laboratory markets that mimic the production of goods and services, prices rise and fall as economic theory predicts, reaching a neat equilibrium where supply meets demand. But like real-world purchasers of haircuts or refrigerators, buyers in those markets need to know only how much they themselves value the good. If the price is less than the value to you, you buy. If not, you don’t, and vice versa for sellers.

Financial assets, whether in the lab or the real world, are trickier to judge: Can I flip this security to a buyer who will pay more than I think it’s worth?

Why can't I do the same thing with non-financial goods and services?

My suggestion is as follows. Obviously, for some cases, it is simply not possible (I cannot sell my haircut onto someone else!). In most cases people will buy something in order to use it (rather than to sell it on) and what they will pay for a good limits what anyone else will pay for the good in order to sell it on. In markets where people regularly sell things second hand (books, computers, cars, etc) they do not expect to get the price they got for the new product.

In these cases a used product has less value than an unused product - it may be less shiny, it may have developed some faults, and its lifetime will be shorter than for a new product. The same cannot be said of financial products such as shares or futures. The fact that someone owned a share before I did does not, by itself, devalue the share.

Postrel continues:

In an experimental market, where the value of the security is clearly specified, “worth” shouldn’t vary with taste, cash needs, or risk calculations. Based on future dividends, you know for sure that the security’s current value is, say, $3.12. But—here’s the wrinkle—you don’t know that I’m as savvy as you are. Maybe I’m confused. Even if I’m not, you don’t know whether I know that you know it’s worth $3.12. Besides, as long as a clueless greater fool who might pay $3.50 is out there, we smart people may decide to pay $3.25 in the hope of making a profit. It doesn’t matter that we know the security is worth $3.12. For the price to track the fundamental value, says Noussair, “everybody has to know that everybody knows that everybody is rational.” That’s rarely the case. Rather, “if you put people in asset markets, the first thing they do is not try to figure out the fundamental value. They try to buy low and sell high.” That speculation creates a bubble.

Thus bubbles seem to be an inherent feature of financial markets. Those who profit most buy early and sell midway through the bubble:

In fact, the people who make the most money in these experiments aren’t the ones who stick to fundamentals. They’re the speculators who buy a lot at the beginning and sell midway through, taking advantage of “momentum traders” who jump in when the market is going up, don’t sell until it’s going down, and wind up with the least money at the end. (“I have a lot of relatives and friends who are momentum traders,” comments Noussair.) Bubbles start to pop when the momentum traders run out of money and can no longer push prices up.

Does this mean that no one is to blame for the "credit crunch"?

Well there's more to this story. After a few repeats of the experiment with the same subjects, you no longer get bubbles. This is not because the participants learn the true value of the dividends though:

But work that Noussair and his co-authors published in the December 2007 American Economic Review suggests that traders don’t reason that way.
In this version of the experiment, participants took part in the 15-round market four times in a row. Before each session, the researchers asked the traders what they thought would happen to prices. The first time, participants didn’t expect a bubble, but in later markets they did. With each successive session, however, they predicted that the bubble would peak later and reach a higher price than it actually did. Expecting the future to look like the past, they traded accordingly, selling earlier and at lower prices than in the previous session, hoping to realize a profit before the bubble burst. Those trades, of course, changed the market pattern. Prices were lower, and they peaked closer to the beginning of the session. By the fourth round, the price stuck close to the security’s fundamental value—not because traders were going for the rational price but because they were trying to avoid getting caught in a bubble.

“Prices converge toward fundamentals ahead of beliefs,” the economists conclude. Traders literally learn from experience, basing their expectations and behavior not on logical inference but on what has happened in the past. After enough rounds, markets work their way toward a stable price.

There is a twist here. The traders end up with behaviour that is optimal for a given environment. Change this environment and their experience may no longer apply. Indeed further experiments confirmed this:

In research published in the June 2008 American Economic Review, Vernon Smith and his collaborators first ran the standard experiment, putting groups through the 15-round market twice. Then the researchers changed three conditions: they mixed up the groups, so participants weren’t trading with familiar faces; they increased the range of possible dividends, replacing four possible outcomes (0, 8, 28, or 60) averaging 24, with five (0, 1, 8, 28, 98) averaging 27; finally, they doubled the amount of cash and halved the number of shares in the market. The participants then completed a third round. These changes were based on previous research showing that more cash and bigger dividend spreads exacerbate bubbles.
Sure enough, under the new conditions, the experienced traders generated a bubble just as big as if they’d never been in the lab. It didn’t last quite as long, however, or involve as much volume. “Participants seem to be tacitly aware that there will be a crash,” the economists write, “and consequently exit from the market (sell) earlier, causing the crash to start earlier.” Even so, the price peaks far above the fundamental value. “Bubbles,” the economists conclude, “are the funny and unpredictable phenomena that happen on the way to the ‘rational’ predicted equilibrium if the environment is held constant long enough.”

One can draw various implications from this. Postrel mentions two:

That people should beware markets where lots of cash chases a few good deals. Presumably she has in mind the research showing that increasing the amount of cash increaases the risk of a bubble occurring.
That big changes in the financial markets can cause bubbles even with experienced traders since their knowledge is no longer valid.

I'd add that it follows that if state intervention in financial markets causes an increase in the amount cash in those markets, it risks generating a bubble. There is also an increased risk if state interventions (or anything else) nullify the experience the traders in those markets have, or if such interventions encourage large numbers of inexperienced people to enter the markets.

Both Postrel and Charles R. Morris, author of The Trillion Dollar meltdown, point out that the cutting of interest rates by the Federal Reserve frees up more cash to buy financial instruments. Morris blames Greenspan for cutting interest rates and keeping them low during the 2000s, thus causing a flood of cash into the financial markets. The findings reported in Postrel's article suggest he might have a point.

However interest rate changes are only part of the story. There are other forms of state intervention in the market and there were other factors feeding into the bubble (e.g. trading in new, complex financial instruments came to dominate the markets for example, as Morris shows). I hope to cover these other aspects in later posts.

NO2ID Video: Take Jane

2009-01-10T10:44:00.003Z

This video highlights one of the problems that the National Identity Scheme(NIS) is likely to make worse.

Whilst the above scenario could happen (I think it is quite likely to happen), the following have happened and involve similar problems with existing government databases:

Many other examples can be found via this Magna Carta Plus article.

The NIS will make these problems worse by requiring people to register changes of address (on pain of penalties upto £1000), by storing data in one central database accessed by all public bodies and by facilitating the cross-linking and sharing of data by those public bodies.

Review: The Trillion Dollar Meltdown

2009-01-08T01:43:00.007Z

A question I have regarding the current financial/economic woes being attributed to the "credit crunch", is this: Why did the money lenders give out loans on easy terms to people who were likely to default on them? The prime example of this is the so-called ninja loan.

Providing an answer to this question (in terms of the decision making of those managing the loans) is perhaps the most useful aspect of "The Trillion Dollar Meltdown", by Charles R. Morris, a US centric examination of the credit crunch. By explaining complex financial instruments such as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and credit default swaps, Morris illustrates how several factors drove the accumulation of toxic debt:

The originators of loans would simply end up selling them on, thus weakening their dependence on the ability of the borrowers to pay the loans back.
The subsequent handling of the loans was then split up amongst many different parties, aggravating what Morris describes as the "Agency problem", the problem of ensuring that an employee, contractor or other party performing a service for you does not act against your interests.
There was increasing reliance on complex, mathematical constructs to guide investment decisions. The models the constructs were based on only imperfectly modeled the real world and break down in times of economic stress.

On this basis, it seems to me that the use of difficult to understand models to package loans up into complex financial instruments along with the diffusion of responsibility for managing the loans amongst those trading such instruments may have enabled high levels of risky debt to accumulate.

The originators of loans were incentivised simply to sell as many loans as they could, since they were no longer dependent on the loans being paid off. They'd simply be paid for arranging the loans in the first place.

The people who were subsequently managing the loans, and thus had an interest in ensuring they didn't buy too much risky debt, were those trading in the financial instruments. The complexity of the instruments (combined with optimistic ratings by the credit rating agencies) obscured the real risks from those people.

This is by no means the full story, since one also has to consider the legal/institutional framework within which this was taking place. For example, there is the role of financial regulators and other forms of government intervention in the financial system to consider as well. There is also the behaviour of the borrowers to consider too.

Morris does address the role of the financial regulators in the US. He blames Alan Greenspan for keeping interest rates low thus enabling a sustained period of cheap credit to develop, and he also blames "free market" ideology and financial deregulation. However here I find him less convincing. My main point is that in many significant respects, the financial system is not a "free market". For example, the very fact that the Federal Reserve has a monopoly on printing money and sets interest rates shows we're not talking about a "free market".

Moreover, Morris himself argues that the financial services sector in the US enjoys "inordinate privileges", pointing out for example that in a free market, a sector that takes high risks, like the financial sector does, would occasionally endure periods of big losses, as well as enjoying periods of high profits. But while the industry certainly enjoyed the high profits, its losses are often offset by government bailouts (NB: Morris was writing before the recent bailout programmes announced by Western governments).

Morris cites an example where Countrywide was paid $22 billion by the Atlanta Federal Home Loan Bank when they incurred losses that were likely to lead to insolvency. Providing bailouts to loss making companies is most definitely not a "free market" approach. Nor is it a "free market" when a privately run student loan organisation gets subsidies from the state (to take another example Morris criticised). The privileges enjoyed by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae (the two big mortgage providers in the US) are also incongruous with a "free market" approach, and the role of these privileges in the credit crunch is not examined by Morris.

My point here is not to argue for the "free market" but to suggest that blaming "free market" ideology for failures in a system that enjoys considerable state intervention that goes beyond merely setting the rules of the game is perverse, especially when you simultaneously argue that some of the interventions directly contributed to the failures concerned!

Overall, the book may well prove useful to people wishing to understand the behaviour of the lenders in the credit crunch, but Morris's attempt to blame it all on "deregulation" and the "free market" going too far is not convincing.

Convention on Modern Liberty: 28th February 2009

2009-01-03T01:18:00.004Z

The Convention on Modern Liberty is a convention being organised for the 28th February 2009. To quote from the website:

"A call to all concerned with attacks on our fundamental rights and freedoms under pressure from counter-terrorism, financial breakdown and the database state"

This looks like it will be an interesting set of events, with conventions planned in London, Belfast, Birmingham, Cambridge, Glasgow, Manchester, Southampton and Swansea.

I'll post more news when I get it.

Happy New Year!

2009-01-01T16:11:00.000Z

To all the readers of this blog, I wish you a happy 2009!

Amnesty International launches petition against "42 days"

2008-10-06T12:17:00.001+01:00

[Hat tip: UK Liberty]

Amnesty International have launched an online petition against the British government’s proposals to allow people to be detained for up to 42 days without charge if they’re suspected of terrorism. At the time of writing, it has 2856 signatures.

Meanwhile, The Times is reporting that the government have decided not to use the Parliament Act should the 42 days proposal be defeated in the House of Lords. The Counter Terrorism Bill returns to the Lords later this week.

Large Hadron rap

2008-08-22T22:35:00.000+01:00

NO2ID Nine cleared of charges

2008-07-23T20:46:00.002+01:00

We've all been cleared. Several of us, myself included, have received letters from the procurator fiscal telling us our court appearance tomorrow is cancelled and no criminal proceedings will be taken with regards to the charges.

Geraint also phoned the procurator fiscal and was told that the case has been closed and all charges dropped. More details here.

Why should civil libertarians back David Davis's re-election?

2008-07-05T17:39:00.002+01:00

My answer to this question can be found here.

Nine NO2ID protestors arrested in Edinburgh

2008-07-02T01:00:00.001+01:00

On Monday, 9 protestors, including me, all involved with the NO2ID campaign, were arrested in Edinburgh and charged with breach of the peace.

You can see some reports and discussion about this at the following links:

This STV report
This report in the Herald
This BBC Scotland report
A thread on NO2ID’s forums
Guy Herbert’s Samizdata article
Another thread on NO2ID’s forums

At this time, I’ll make the following points:

we were all peaceful at all times during the protest
only 1 protestor sneaked into the meeting. Geraint Bevan, the coordinator of NO2ID Scotland got into the meeting at the start under the cunning ruse of walking up to the registration desk and claiming to be one of the people named on the badges on display.
prior to entering the hotel, we were protesting peacefully outside, causing curiosity, amusement and the occasional message of support from the passing public.
when the hotel manager approached us and asked us to leave, Geraint (by this time physically thrown out of the meeting) asked if it were OK for us to leave after STV had conducted an interview with him. The manager agreed.
when the interview was over, we made to leave immediately, only to find the police had been called. At no point prior to this were we given any intimation the police were called or were going to be called. Prior to the hotel manager asking us to leave, we were not told by any member of staff that we should leave.
when we entered, we entered peacefully, quietly, carrying placards, with an STV camera crew in tow. The people at the head of our procession did not wear masks.
we were officially arrested at 12.30 (after a considerable length of time when the police took our details).
we regard this charge as a ridiculous jumped up charge.
we will be fighting this charge.
Geraint faces a separate charge related to events in the meeting. This will also be fought.

David Davis campaign website

2008-06-26T22:21:00.001+01:00

See my post at Magna Carta Plus for details.

Pledge to help David Davis win his by-election

2008-06-14T12:11:00.001+01:00

Over at Pledgebank.

What David Davis is talking about.

2008-06-12T22:08:00.004+01:00

In his resignation speech, David Davis talks of the "slow strangulation" of fundamental freedoms. The articles in this blog already document some of this. You can follow some of the links under the topics list in the side bar on the left or otherwise search the blog for articles of interest.

However more documentation can be found over at Magna Carta Plus. The latest article provides some pointers to get you started.

More on the anti-Scientology protesters fined in Birmingham

2008-06-02T22:47:00.002+01:00

Regarding my previous article, this thread on the Enturbulation forums is well worth reading in full. The main points I draw from it are as follows:

The protesters had been warned twice that they were not allowed to leaflet in the area concerned and were issued £50 fixed penalty notices under the Clean Neighbourhood and Environment Act 2005. This Act has a clear exemption for material handed out for political purposes or for a religion or belief. It seems to me that protesting against Scientology counts as a political purpose.
The protesters were warned that if they used the word "cult" on a sign or a flyer they will be arrested for religious hatred! Note that the Religious and Racial Hatred Act also has a protection for freedom of speech (see Section 29J of the amendment to the Public Order Act) that reads:
Nothing in this Part shall be read or given effect in a way which prohibits or restricts discussion, criticism or expressions of antipathy, dislike, ridicule, insult or abuse of particular religions or the beliefs or practices of their adherents, or of any other belief system or the beliefs or practices of its adherents, or proselytising or urging adherents of a different religion or belief system to cease practising their religion or belief system.

If the facts of the case are as described in that forum, then it seems to me that the police's actions in this case do not accord with the law.

West Midlands police fine anti-Scientology protesters for handing out leaflets?

2008-06-02T18:31:00.003+01:00

[Hat Tip: The Pub Philosopher]

I'd be grateful if anyone can confirm/corroborate this story...

According to a post on enturbulation.org:

A mini raid on the "org" in Birmingham today ended with four demonstrators handing out leaflets being issued with £50 fixed penalty tickets by Police and a Birmingham city warden under the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act.

On two previous ocassions Police had warned them they were breaking the law for handing out leaflets.

Another interesting interpretation or perhaps (mis) interpretation of the law given the Act was designed to stop people handing out commercial flyers, and Section 8.8 of the act allows for the "distribution of leaflets where the distribution is charitable or religious purposes so as not to inhibit right to freedom of expression and freedom of thought and conscience and religion enshrined in the European Convention of Human Rights and the Human Rights Act 1998"..

A PCSO from the same police force recently told a couple of Christians that they could not hand out leaflets in a Muslim area.

Sunday Herald article on Glasgow police banning "cult" placards last weekend

2008-06-01T13:58:00.005+01:00

The Sunday Herald have a report on the events I witnessed last weekend. Apparently they got this comment from Strathclyde Police:

Strathclyde Police admitted officers had stopped activists using the word "cult" after receiving a complaint.

A spokeswoman said: "The word is not a breach of the peace in itself. However, in this case it was exacerbating the situation and our stance was that we had to remove that.

"From a policing point of view, a balance has to be struck between the right to assemble and hold a meeting and other persons' rights to go about their business or demonstrate without being obstructed or hindered."

I've seen the protesters out several times in recent weeks. As far as I can tell they have not hindered the public using Buchanan Street nor have they prevented the Scientologists from organising their "free stress tests". They have simply held up placards and worn masks. They may have used some chants but if so I've not witnessed that. To me, it seems they have done nothing wrong and the police have failed to justify their action.

If someone you're protesting against can get the police to remove your placards simply because they (claim to) find a word on the placard offensive, then it seems to me the right to peaceful protest is dead.

Scientology, Britain's police and politicians

2008-05-25T17:45:00.004+01:00

In light of the recent episodes regarding Scientology and the police, I decided to see what stories were around relating to Scientology's influence in Britain. I came across a number of stories:

Apparently, the Labour party have been given thousands of pounds from the Church of Scientology and allowed a Scientology-backed stall at one of their conferences. From the link:
They allowed the charity, the Association for Better Living and Education (ABLE), to take a stall at the party's annual conference in Manchester.
Exhibitors at the conference have to pay up to £13,500. The stand was part of an extensive lobbying operation by Scientology members to promote its drug treatment programme, Narconon, and the criminal rehabilitation scheme Criminon.
Correspondence obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the Evening Standard reveals how Graeme Wilson of the Church of Scientology met Baroness Scotland - then a Home Office minister - in Manchester in September.
Baroness Scotland was later invited to attend the opening of the Scientology's new base in London and was handed information about Narconon.
The Church of Scientology has spent thousands of pounds on gifts for members of the City of London Police:
The Church of Scientology appears to be involved in an effort to woo officers from the City of London police - an unlikely partnership perhaps, but one that seems to be blossoming. Details of how more than 20 officers, from constables to chief superintendents, have been invited to a series of engagements by the scientologists over the last 15 months have been revealed by a freedom of information inquiry by the Guardian.
The hospitality included guest invitations in May for two constables and a sergeant to attend the premiere of Mission Impossible 3 in Leicester Square, where they were able to rub shoulders with the best known Scientologist of all and the star of the film, Tom Cruise.
The Guardian requested details of meetings between police and scientologists after a senior officer from the City appeared as a guest speaker at the opening of the £23m Scientology centre near St Paul's Cathedral last month.
At the lavish ceremony, Chief Superintendent Kevin Hurley, the fourth most senior officer in the force, praised the scientologists for the support they had provided after the July 7 attacks, when followers of L Ron Hubbard's movement appeared at the police cordons of the Aldgate bomb site offering help to those involved in the emergency operation. The relationship flourished in the following months, according to the City police's register of hospitality, which all officers are required to fill out.
The Metropolitan Police have given the Church access to data on security alerts.

The police have also used Scientology leaflets in anti-drugs drives in Britain's schools:
In total 1m booklets are distributed each year. They label alcohol and antidepressants as “poison” and say that oxycodone, a prescription painkiller, is “as powerful as heroin”.
A booklet on heroin says methadone, the drug used by the NHS to treat heroin addicts, is as dangerous as the class A drug and should not be prescribed.
Martin Barnes, of DrugScope, the drugs information charity, said: “These booklets fall short and should not be allowed in schools.”
Met officers have attended meetings in London and West Sussex hosted by the church, aimed at forging links with “community leaders”. They were briefed about the Say No to Drugs campaign and given information packs - although Scotland Yard said working with the church should not be seen as an endorsement.

Clearly the Church of Scientology are gaining some influence in Britain.

Glasgow anti-Scientology protestors told to bin "cult" signs

2008-05-24T18:10:00.009+01:00

Today I was helping out at the Glasgow NO2ID's stall in Buchanan Street. As we were packing up, Geraint, the Glasgow No2ID group coordinator mentioned that the police had been called to an anti-Scientology protest taking place further up the street.

I'd noticed the "free stress test" stalls run by the Scientologists earlier in the day, and we were both curious as to what was happening so we went to chat to the protestors. The police were still talking to them when we got there. I was told by one protestor that a "May Day" flag had been confiscated, and that they were being told that the word "cult" was offensive and, if I recall correctly, if they continued to use it it would constitute a "breach of the peace".

Also, I personally witnessed one of the protestors taking some signs to the bin at the direction of one of the officers. The signs being binned apparently used the word "cult". Geraint later told me he'd seen a the protestors holding a sign saying "Cult" with an arrow on it which was held so as to point at the scientologists. This was presumably one of the binned signs. The protestors were however allowed to continue their protest, though the were told to make sure they were well over the other side of the street from the Scientologists. I'll add that the police were perfectly civil towards the protestors as far as I could tell.

However apparently Glasgow police think it is "offensive" to describe Scientology as a cult, or at least were willing to act on the basis of offence caused to whoever phoned them up to complain (most probably one of the Scientologists).

And this episode, along with the recent episode in London (which has had a happy ending thankfully), illustrates why "causing offense" should not be considered a valid restriction on freedom of speech or the right to peaceful protest. People can (claim to) take offence at ANYTHING, including purely factual statements. Not causing offense may be good manners, but you should not be required by law to do so since that allows people to silence those whose message they simply don't like and to silence those exposing awkward truths.

The Church of Scientology would love to have the power to silence its critics and it seems the idea that causing offence is sufficient grounds to curb someone's speech or protests is beginning to give them that power here in Britain.

Scientology is a cult...

2008-05-21T20:28:00.007+01:00

...according to this court judgement from Judge Latey, who repeatedly describes Scientology as a cult:

In Re: T Minors (Transcript of judgments given on 10th December 1975) the Court of Appeal was concerned with children one of whose parents was a member of another and very different sect. In the course of his judgement Lord Justice Scarman (as he then was) stressed that "it is conceded that there is nothing immoral or socially obnoxious in the beliefs and practices of this sect". Scientology is both immoral and socially obnoxious. Mr. Kennedy did not exaggerate when he termed it "pernicious". In my judgement it is corrupt, sinister and dangerous. It is corrupt because it is based on lies and deceit and has as its real objective money and power for Mr.
Hubbard, his wife and those close to him at the top. It is sinister because it indulges in infamous practices both to its adherents who do not toe the line unquestioningly and to those outside who criticise or oppose it. It is dangerous because it is out to capture people, especially children and impressionable young people, and indoctrinate and brainwash them so that they become the unquestioning captives and tools of the cult, withdrawn from ordinary thought, living and relationships
with others.

Also, here is the definition of the word "cult" from the Compact Oxford English Dictionary online:

cult

• noun 1 a system of religious worship directed towards a particular figure or object. 2 a small religious group regarded as strange or as imposing excessive control over members. 3 something popular or fashionable among a particular section of society.

It seems to me, from reading Judge Latey's judgement, that Scientology falls under the second definition above. Why am I saying this now? Because there are those seeking to prevent people from being able to describe Scientology as a cult, including the City of London Police, according to the Register:

His sign read: "Scientology is not a religion, it is a dangerous cult."

Within five minutes of arriving, the teenager was approached by a female police officer and told he was not allowed to use the word "cult" to describe Scientology, and that the Inspector in charge would make a decision. Soon afterwards officers again approached, read Section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986 and handed him this notice.

The Act makes it an offence to display "any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting, within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby".

The Register article also states:

City of London Police gave us this statement:

City of London police had received complaints about demonstrators using the words 'cult' and 'Scientology kills' during protests against the Church of Scientology on Saturday 10 May.
Following advice from the Crown Prosecution Service some demonstrators were warned verbally and in writing that their signs breached section five of the Public Order Act 1986.

One demonstrator, a juvenile, continued to display a placard despite police warnings and was reported for an offence under section five. A file on the case will be sent to the CPS.

I hope this case gets thrown out, otherwise people's ability to say what they believe to be true, and engage in peaceful protest, will have been seriously undermined.

Why Julian Simon is both right and wrong

2008-05-17T22:55:00.002+01:00

[This is the followup to my earlier article about Julian Simon.]

Now I'll restate this line of thought into a theory that will appear again and again in the book: More people, and increased income, cause resources to become more scarce in the short run. Heightened scarcity causes prices to rise. The higher prices present opportunity, and prompt inventors and entrepreneurs to search for solutions. Many fail in the search, at cost to themselves. But in a free society, solutions are eventually found. And in the long run the new developments leave us better off than if the problems had not arisen. That is, prices eventually become lower than before the increased scarcity occurred. (From The Ultimate Resource 2, Chapter 3)

This is perhaps the key passage in Chapter 3 of Simon's book. It highlights a key part of the drive that has led humanity to develop a dizzying array of technologies, achieve the longest lifespans, the most comfortable lifestyles and the healthiest populations in history. It also illustrates why Paul Erhlich lost his infamous bet with Julian Simon.

Unfortunately, the copy of the book on the internet I've been using seems to have Chapter 3 cut short, so I don't have the reasoning there that takes Simon from the problems of defining "natural resources" discussed in Chapter 2 and the passage above to his conclusion that resources are not finite. However, an article of his published at the Cato Institute, does shed some light:

...the term "finite" is not only inappropriate, it is downright misleading when applied to natural resources. The mathematical definition of "finite" is quite different from a useful economic definition.

For instance, the quantity of services we obtain from copper should not be considered "economically" finite because there is no way of counting them appropriately. We should also consider the possibilities of using copper more efficiently, of creating copper or its economic equivalent from other materials, of recycling copper or even obtaining copper from sources beyond planet Earth.

Therefore, a working definition of the total services that we could obtain from copper now or in the future is impossible to construct. (emphasis added)

There is also his reply to critics in which he says:

Finiteness by itself is not testable, except insofar as the fact that no one is able to state the absolute size of the relevant system (our cosmos) demonstrates the absence of finiteness in its dictionary sense. But the relevant evidence we have available - decreasing prices and increasing substitutability - is not what one would expect from a finite system. (emphasis added)

And:

Nothing I have written is intended to suggest that during any particular period there may not be too much use of any resource, renewable or non-renewable; indeed, I expect temporary overuses (for example, overuse of forest resources in various countries in various centuries) just as I expect boom-and-bust cycles in all other human endeavors. But this is a matter of management and adjustment in dealing with, and riding out, the ups and downs, rather than a matter of ultimate finiteness.(emphasis added)

From this I posit that Simon's argument can be boiled down to the following:

As reserves of resources run down, the resulting price rises spur the search for new sources of them, for more efficient ways of using them and for ways of substituting other resources for them.
The long run trend (for centuries) has been for the price of resources to continue falling. Temporary shortages have often led to discoveries that leave humanity better off than before those shortages occur.
We do not know, ultimately, what resources are available to humanity in the long run. All we know is what resources are available now/in the forseeable future, given current technology.
We don't know whether the universe is finite or not, and we cannot thus state that the resources available to us are finite. The long run trend of falling prices and greater abundance of resources seems at odds with the assumption of finiteness.
Since we do not know what resources will be ultimately available to us, we cannot say they are finite in any meaningful sense.

There are several problems here:

We do know that the earth is finite. This is an incontrovertable fact. There is a finite amount of energy reaching earth from the sun each year, and a finite amount of matter falling to earth each year from outer space. Until we can exploit extra terrestrial resources at least as easily as we currently exploit the resources on earth, i.e. until we can escape the confines of earth as easily as we can escape the confines of a continent, this really does limit how many people the earth can support and the standard of living those people can enjoy. That seems unlikely to happen for at least a century --- on that timescale the most I'd expect is colonies on the moon and a manned trip to mars.
The trend for falling resource costs is a matter of a few centuries -- this is a short time compared to (a) recorded history (b) the existence of humanity. We know that civilisations in the past have thrived and then collapsed. It seems likely that some of them died because of resource shortages.
For the process of resource discovery and creation to keep us from "running out", it must produce new resources at or above the rate at which we consume them. If we're to rely on this process to prevent disaster, we must therefore posit that there will always be sufficient resources that can be reached via the process within the timescale required to stave off disaster, at every point in time. It seems to me unlikely that this can be guaranteed.

Simon is correct to highlight the existence of the process of resource discovery and creation, and at a highly abstract level he is even right that we don't know whether the resources ultimately available to humanity are finite or not. But the process is not automatic, and even when running efficiently, it is not guaranteed to provide us with all the resources we might need at a given point in time.

To act as if resources are infinite, when we know that running out is a real possibility and when even our most advanced science and technology tells us we can do no more than an exploratory flight to our nearest planetary neighbour (let alone colonise it, terraform it or get there in the sort of timescale we can travel to other continents) would be irresponsible.

Technology and humanity's impact on the environment

2008-03-01T23:12:00.006Z

Note: I haven't forgotten about my promised followup to my article on Julian Simon, it will appear after this one.

Two people have commented on my article on the recent paper from the Optimum Population Trust, namely Martin Desvaux, the paper's author, and Tim Worstall, the blogger with an interest in economics, who's also been critical of Desvaux's paper.

The question at issue is whether technology increases or decreases humanity's impact on the environment and whether T in the I=PAT equation should be considered to be a multiplicative term or whether we should divide bed T. Note that I measures the human impact on the environment, P is the population and A is a measure of consumption (or affluence).

I have thus far sided with Tim Worstall's view that technology helps us reduce our impact on the environment, however whilst Devaux acknowledges that technology can do so, he argues that overall it has been a driver in increasing humanity's impact on the environment. From his comment:

I think it is safe to state that, since the industrial revolution, technology has enabled us to reduce infant mortality, increase food production and increase life expectancy, all of which have caused the largest population explosion in the history of humankind. I think we can also safely assume that in that arena T is greater than 1 as a result. Such progress was possible only because we could extract oil, coal and gas out of the ground in ever increasing quantities, transport it via road, rail, pipe and sea* all around the world which, I feel sure you will agree, has also had a T-greater-than-one impact on the environment. In addition, we get most of our fertilizers from hydrocarbon technology. Without fossil fuels and thereby electrical energy, medical advances would have been impossible, We would not have been able to develop (to mention those which immediately spring to mind): warm homes, fridges, leisure centres Olympic stadia, moon shots, as well as several billions of cars, millions of lorries, ships buses, railways, aircraft, agricultural machinery factories, processing plant …. with all the infrastructure of roads, ports, depots, etc that these entities require.

What Devaux is saying here is that the advances in technology associated with the industrial revolution and the fossil fuel economy have led to a huge increase in both population and affluence, which has led to an increase in humanity's impact on the environment, and thus we should consider T to be a multiplicative variable, with value greater than 1 in the I=PAT equation.

I think this is a misunderstanding of the role of T in the equation. Suppose we rewrite the equation to give us T in terms of the other three variables. We then get T=I/(PA). T is thus measuring the environmental impact per unit of consumption, where A is consumption per head of population and P is the size of the population. Stated in these terms, we can see that T does not measure "technology" per se (as I argued here) but rather measures a variable which technology can influence.

As Tim Worstall points out, Desvaux is double counting. Desvaux suggests that technological changes drove an increase in population and an increase in affluence, thus implying T should have a value > 1. The problem is that in the I=PAT equation, P and A already reflect those increases, thus to incorporate those increases in the value of T involves incorporating them twice!

This illustrates a weakness of the I=PAT equation. It treats P, A and T as independent variables when in fact there are feedbacks between them. But Desvaux is surely correct that technological advance enabled the large human population we now have and the levels of affluence we now see, and as I pointed out earlier, increases in affluence have led to a fall in birth rates in developed countries (and increasingly elsewhere) and thus to a slowing of population growth in recent decades.

But equally one can point out that without our technology, it simply wouldn't be possible to support over 6 billion people, and we would devastate the environment if we were to try doing so. So where does this leave us on whether technology increases or reduces our impact on the environment?

My view is this. Technology can do both. We employ technology because it makes things easier to do. It can do this in various ways:

It can substitute for human labour. For example, a man who spends 30 mins walking to work each day might buy a car to reduce the journey time to 10 mins. Getting to work is now easier and more comfortable, but his environmental impact has increased and he will be using more resources. E.g. instead of moving one human to and from work, he's now moving one human plus a ton or two of metal and thus using more energy.
It can enable us to do things we couldn't or wouldn't do before. E.g. the man who buys a car to shorten his journey to work now visits his relatives 60 miles away several times a year, where previously he would have used public transport and only gone once or twice at most. Again this increases the impact on the environment, but this time it is because the man is engaging in more activities than he used to. Another example is the summer holiday abroad that many people take which they could not do were it not for the advent of air travel.
It can enable us to do things with fewer resources. Suppose the man who bought the car above, later on buys a new car with twice the fuel efficiency. His journeys to/from work and his relatives now have a lower environmental impact since less fuel is needed to power these journeys.
It can enable us to tap new or previously unconsidered resources. For example, the internal combustion engine indicated that some black gooey liquid, commonly called oil, actually has its uses and advances in pumping and drilling technology enabled us to extract oil from previously inaccessible places. This of course had a considerable environmental impact, though supporting 6 billion people without such a concentrated portable energy source would likely have devastated the environment were it to be tried.

Whether overall technology will increase or reduce environmental damage depends on the choices we make. If the environmental damage becomes serious enough we will choose to mitigate it. If the cost of such damage can be internalised so that e.g. the polluter pays for his pollution, then technology will tend to develop in more environmentaly friendly ways. We should thus look at ways in which technology can reduce the value of T in the I=PAT equation.

Julian Simon, the limits to growth and infinite resources

2008-02-23T16:17:00.006Z

The Earth's physical resources are finite. We threaten our future if we try to live beyond those means, so we must build a sustainable society that guarantees our long-term future.

The above quotation comes from a document describing the philosophical basis of the Green Party. The late economist, Professor Julian Simon, rejected this view in his book, The Ultimate Resource 2. To quote from Chapter 3 (entitled "Can the supply of natural resources - especially energy - really be infinite? Yes!"):

Chapter 2 showed that natural resources, properly defined, cannot be measured. Here I draw the logical conclusion: Natural resources are not finite. Yes, you read correctly.

So here we have a deceased but influential economist claiming that resources are infinite! Note the "properly defined" bit above. The following paragraph from the summary of Chapter2, illustrates the thinking here:

Material-technical forecasts of resource exhaustion often go wrong for two reasons. (1) No matter how closely defined, the physical quantity of a resource in the earth is not known at any time, because resources are sought and found only as they are needed; an example is the increase in the known supplies of such resources as copper, as shown in table 2-1 and figure 2-1. (2) Even if the physical quantities of particular closely defined natural resources were known, such measurements would not be economically meaningful, because we have the capacity to develop additional ways to meet our needs - for example, by using fiber optics instead of copper wiring, by developing new ways to exploit low grades of copper ore previously thought not usable, and by developing new energy sources such as nuclear power to help produce copper, perhaps by extracting it from sea water. Thus the existing "inventory" of natural resources is operationally misleading; physical measurements do not define what we will be able to use as future supplies.

What Simon has demonstrated is that it is hard to measure what resources are available in the earth, that we don't know what future means of providing those resources or substituting for them will become available and it is thus hard to define what resources the earth can/will ultimately provide to humanity.

However he has not demonstrated that the earth can provide us with "infinite" resources, merely that we do not know what resources it could ultimately provide us with. However Chapter 3 is where he attempts to demonstrate that resources are in fact "infinite". I shall tackle the reasoning there in my next article.

One might ask why I am bothering with this. The answer is that, whilst Simon is wrong about getting "infinite" resources from the earth, he has sound arguments to make about the economics of resource usage/scarcity and I believe he goes wrong in an "interesting" way. Understanding where he goes wrong can help understand what the real situation is regarding "the limits to growth".

Blog topics

2008-02-21T21:00:00.005Z

I'm currently adding labels to old posts produced before labels were added to blogger.com.

The result so far is an increased list of topics in the "Topics" side bar (this used to be labelled "Labels"), plus an increased number of articles indexed by the labels. My aim is to get rid of the (renamed) "Google Searches" side bar that I used a substitute for labels. I won't necessarily catch all articles, but hopefully it will make it easier for readers to look up the material that interests them in this blog.

The Commoner-Erhlich Equation

2008-02-20T23:02:00.007Z

Further to my previous article, on the report from the Optimum Population Trust, I've been doing a bit of digging around on the I=PAT equation. Remember here that I is the measure of the impact of humanity on the environment and P is the population and A is a measure of affluence (or consumption). The question is what is T measuring? The OPT reports talks about T somehow measuring "technology".

Anyway according to Wikipedia, T is in fact humanity's ecological impact per unit of consumption. A is measured as consumption per capita. So by multiplying the population P by the consumption per capita A, you get total consumption, after which you multiply by T the total impact per unit consumption to get I, the total environmental impact of the population and its level of consumption.

Given this, it is clear Tim Worstall's criticism of the I=PAT equation, saying that we should divide by T, not multiply by it, is mis-placed. Mr Worstall is treating T as if it measures technological sophistication. I agree with him that technological advancement reduces our environmental impact, at least for a given standard of living and population size, but that is not what T is measuring here. Technological advancement allows us to e.g. use less energy and resources and/or reduce pollution per unit of consumption. Thus such advancement reduces the value of T. The question then is whether the equation is an adequate description of what's going on. It assumes independence of its variables and it also assumes the variables can be measured reasonably accurately. It seems to me both assumptions are questionable.

For example, there may be feedback loops between the variables that aren't catered for and it's not entirely clear how one would measure either "consumption" or "environmental impact" in a clear, accurate manner.

Technology, Affluence and the Optimum Population Trust

2008-02-20T19:27:00.004Z

The Optimum Population Trust recently published a study which claims that Britain's optimal population is about 17 million people:

If the UK had to provide for itself from its own resources, it could support a population of only 17 million – 43 million less than its latest official population figure* - according to new research by the Optimum Population Trust.

Even if the UK dramatically improved its sustainability with a 60 per cent cut in carbon emissions by 2050 - the target set by the present Government - UK “overpopulation” would grow from 43 to 50 million, the research shows. This is because projected population growth of 17 million**, taking the country’s population to 77 million by 2050, would cancel out the sustainability benefits of carbon savings.

The sustainability of human populations: How many people can live on Earth? ***, published today (Monday February 18), is based on a new analysis of biological capacity and ecological footprinting data. It suggests that in 2003, the last year for which comprehensive data are available, total world population was 6.3 billion but the sustainable figure was 5.1 billion. Global overpopulation was thus 1.2 billion. (italics in original)

A 9-page report based on this study can be downloaded here. From pages 2 to 3:

Not surprisingly, the impact of this population growth on the environment since 1750 has been extensive. Now, not a day goes by without news of droughts, floods, famines, conflicts over resources, extinctions, and, in the last 20 years, the increasingly evident effects of global warming. This impact has been expressed in what has become known as the Commoner-Ehrlich Equation:

I = P x A x T.

This states that the impact (I) on the environment is directly proportional to the population size (P), the ‘affluence’ (A) (defined as the resources a population consumes and wastes) and technology (T) through which we (1) prolong life, (2) produce things more quickly and cheaply (thus feeding back into consumerism and affluence) and (3) grow food faster which feeds back into ‘population’. This equation thus neatly summarises the impact of humankind on the planet.

Note that it is assumed that technology is multiplicative factor that increases the human impact on the environment. Yet technology mitigates the impact we have on the environment by enabling more efficient use of resources and/or less polluting methods to be used.

It is technology that has enabled us to sustain the large population we currently have on earth, living longer and healthier than at any time in history. Remove the technology and the environment would be devastated as people desparately try to grow food and obtain water using methods that simply cannot sustain us. Indeed, based on similar points to mine above, Tim Worstall argues that we should divide by T rather than multiply. However reading further, it seems that T isn't measuring technological advancement, but rather the impact of technology on the environment:

Politicians, unsure what to do, offer solutions which include suggestions such as: develop fuel-efficient cars; change to efficient light bulbs; fly less; build renewable energy and nuclear power plant; increase mass transit systems; and plant trees. These solutions only address the reduction of the affluence and technology variables of the equation, but never the population variable.

Reducing impact by decreasing affluence (consumption) only partly addresses the problem since populations are growing faster than affluence – for example, in Africa. Technology, meanwhile, tends not to “decrease” at all. Whilst it can be used to reduce the impact of affluence, it is likely that its benefits in energy saving devices will be cancelled out by its disadvantages, as businesses continue to use it to maximise their economic growth via consumerism. So, realistically, impact will continue to rise since economic growth demands it. This is bad news since, as we will now see, human impact on the planet is already unsustainable. (italics in original)

Here the paper acknowledges that technology can in fact reduce the impact of humanity on the environment (though it argues that the drive to economic growth will then cancel this out). To retain T as a multiplicative variable, whilst acknowledging that it can reduce humanity's impact on the environment, one must consider it to be a measure of the impact of our technologies on the environment, rather than a measure of advancement. Technological advancement will thus tend to reduce T, and I'd suggest it has been doing so for centuries whilst increasing population and affluence have offset the reductions in impact it enabled.

An interesting point is that there is no mention in this study of one of the main findings in demography which is that increasing affluence has lead to a fall in birth rates resulting in slow population growth rates or even declining populations in rich countries. This implies that rising affluence may in fact help with the goal of slowing population growth, a finding that is at odds with the arguments presented on the OPT's paper.

I intend to return to other aspects of this paper in later posts.

Yusuf Al-Qaradawi and freedom of speech

2008-02-07T21:17:00.000Z

Inayat Bunglawala, writing in the Guardian, claims that the British government's refusal to give Yusuf Al-Qaradawi a visa, thus refusing permission to enter the country, violates Qaradawi's freedom of speech:

Gordon Brown's government has finally caved in to the noisy mob who have been angrily demanding that the elderly Islamic preacher, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, should be refused a visa to come to the UK for medical treatment.

Well, so much for free speech. You will recall that during the Satanic Verses and the Danish Cartoons row, British Muslims were repeatedly lectured to about the need to adapt to western notions of free speech. You may not like what is written or drawn, we were told, but as long as it does not break the law, you need to learn to put up with it.

The problem with this argument is that Mr Qaradawi's freedom of speech has not in fact been curtailed. His words have not been banned from the media or the internet, he can continue giving interviews, making speeches, etc. It's just he's been refused permission to enter the country, which is no more of a violation of his freedom of speech than if I were to refuse him entry to my house.

The point is that freedom of speech is the right to express your views with your own resources, or resources you otherwise have permission to use, to anyone willing to listen. Freedom of speech does not give me the right to enter your house without your permission. Similarly it does not give a non-citizen the right to enter a country, whether he wishes to do so in order to spread his views or simply to have a holiday. The non-citizen must get permission from the country's government to do so (said government exercising this power on behalf of the people of that country).

In practice permission is often granted by default, assuming you apply/arrive through legal channels. But governments have always had the power to refuse permission, a power which the are supposed to exercise in defence of the country concerned (e.g. to repel foreign invaders or anyone else who poses a risk to that country's population). In this case, the British government has decided Al-Qaradawi poses some sort of threat. Whether they are right in that decision is a separate matter from any alleged violation of freedom of speech.

Mr. Bunglawala is confusing freedom of speech with the right to be provided with a platform of one's choice in a location of one's choice. No one has that right.

Online tax return system considered "too risky" for the famous

2008-01-26T21:00:00.000Z

[Hat tip: Samizdata and Tim Worstall]

From a report in the Telegraph:

The security of the online computer system used by more than three million people to file tax returns is in doubt after HM Revenue and Customs admitted it was not secure enough to be used by MPs, celebrities and the Royal Family.

Thousands of "high profile" people have been secretly barred from using the online tax return system amid concerns that their confidential details would be put at risk.

And:

From this year, anyone wishing to file a self-assessment tax return after October will have to do so online or face stiff penalties.
However, HMRC has a list of those excluded from the new rules who must send hard copies of returns for "security reasons".
Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to use the electronic system to make the Jan 31 deadline this week.
Tax records contain bank details, national insurance numbers, salary and details on investments and savings - all valuable to fraudsters.
On Friday, senior accountants said they had concerns over the security of the system - apparently confirmed by the Revenue's secret policy.
Mike Warburton, of the accountants Grant Thornton, said: "Either the Revenue have a system which can guarantee confidentiality for all or they should defer plans to force online filing. It is extraordinary that MPs and others can enjoy higher security."
Mark Wallace, of the Taxpayers' Alliance, said: "This double standard is unacceptable. If the online system is not secure enough for MPs, why should ordinary taxpayers have to put up with it?"

This is of course the same HMRC who lost 25 million child benefit records. Why should anyone, famous or otherwise, trust these people or their online system to keep their personal data safe?

Happy 2008!

2008-01-05T17:19:00.000Z

2008 looks as if it could be a crucial year in British politics. The current government's poll ratings have dropped substantially and seems to be beset by problem after problem. If they cannot turn things around they'll be on course to lose the next general election.

Also, in the wake of story after story depicting loss of personal data through incompetence, it looks people are finally waking up to the dangers of the national identity scheme and the other huge surveillance/database schemes the British government has been pursuing over the last decade or so. This development has yet to kill off the national identity scheme however, but if it does so, it will mark a major blow for civil liberties and privacy. Such a development would suggest that the tide is turning against the onslaught on civil liberties and privacy we've been seeing from this government. It's been a long time coming.

2008 is also a crucial year for the US and thus the world, with George W Bush's presidency into its final year and presidential elections being held. Given the US's role as the most powerful country in the world, a change of direction from its government will have an impact on everything from middle east politics to efforts to deal with climate change.

I expect 2008 to be an interesting year.

Apostasy and the Koran

2007-12-06T20:53:00.000Z

Apostasy means the abandonment of a belief or principle. In a religious context, it generally means abandoning one's faith.

Today, The Times carries a report about a British woman who converted to Christianity, from Islam, who is receiving police protection because of death threats received from members of her family. She is reported as saying:

“I know the Koran says that anyone who goes away from Islam should be killed as an apostate so in some ways my family are following the Koran. They are following Islam to the word. But I do not think every Muslim would actually act on that,” she said.

I've seen it claimed that the Koran (aka the Quran) does not demand that people be killed for apostasy. Moreover, in the book "No God but God", Reza Azlan states:

"...apostasy and treason were near identical terms in seventh-century Arabia. However the relationship betwen the two has endured in Islam, so that even today there are some Muslims who continue to make the unsubstantiated and un-Quranic assertion that the two sins --- apostasy and treason ---deserve the same punishment: death." (page 119, emphasis added)

There is a quotation from the Koran itself, often used to bolster this message, from Sura 2,256 which, in three different translations, seems unequivocal that there should be no compulsion in religion:

"YUSUFALI: Let there be no compulsion in religion: Truth stands out clear from Error: whoever rejects evil and believes in Allah hath grasped the most trustworthy hand-hold, that never breaks. And Allah heareth and knoweth all things.
PICKTHAL: There is no compulsion in religion. The right direction is henceforth distinct from error. And he who rejecteth false deities and believeth in Allah hath grasped a firm handhold which will never break. Allah is Hearer, Knower.
SHAKIR: There is no compulsion in religion; truly the right way has become clearly distinct from error; therefore, whoever disbelieves in the Shaitan and believes in Allah he indeed has laid hold on the firmest handle, which shall not break off, and Allah is Hearing, Knowing."

In my own copy of an edition of Rodwell's translation of the Koran, this verse reads:

"Let there be no compulsion in religion. Now is the right way distinct from error. Whoever shall deny Thagout and believe in God - he will have taken hold of a strong handle that shall not be broken: and God is He who Heareth, Knoweth." (page 27)

So four different translations give much the same message, suggesting the Koran does indeed suggest that "there shall be no compulsion in religion". But this does not prove that the Koran does not prescribe death as a punishment for apostasy, it merely proves that one of its many verses would contradict any such prescription.

There is a verse that, it has been argued, does suggest that apostates should be killed, namely Sura 4,89. From the three translations:

"YUSUFALI: They but wish that ye should reject Faith, as they do, and thus be on the same footing (as they): But take not friends from their ranks until they flee in the way of Allah (From what is forbidden). But if they turn renegades, seize them and slay them wherever ye find them; and (in any case) take no friends or helpers from their ranks;-
PICKTHAL: They long that ye should disbelieve even as they disbelieve, that ye may be upon a level (with them). So choose not friends from them till they forsake their homes in the way of Allah; if they turn back (to enmity) then take them and kill them wherever ye find them, and choose no friend nor helper from among them,
SHAKIR: They desire that you should disbelieve as they have disbelieved, so that you might be (all) alike; therefore take not from among them friends until they fly (their homes) in Allah's way; but if they turn back, then seize them and kill them wherever you find them, and take not from among them a friend or a helper." (emphasis added)

And from my copy of Rodwell, page 58 (as Sura 4,91, presumably due to differences in the translations):

"They desire that you should be infidels as they are infidels, and that ye should be alike. Take therefore none of them for friends, till they have fled their homes for the cause of God. If they turn back, then seize them, and slay them wherever ye find them; but take none of them as friends or helpers." (emphasis added)

Here it seems to me that one can interpret these passages to mean that apostates should be killed, and some of the four translations above suggest that more strongly than others. However one of the translations hints that "turning back" involves enmity from the apostates (as opposed to mere disbelief), suggesting that it may be possible to interpret this passage somewhat differently.

Nevertheless there seems to be scope for somone applying a literal interpretation of the Koran to conclude, from Sura 4,89, that apostates should be killed, despite Sura 2,256.

However, I suspect the belief that apostates should be killed most likely stems from the Hadith (the traditional writings about the life of Mohammed and what he said that Muslims draw on in addition to the Koran), rather than the Koran per se. The Hadith have quotations from Mohammed that clearly state that the punishment for apostasy is death, (such as this one and this one). The Koran is ambiguous (albeit clear that Allah has a dim view of apostates), but the Hadith are not.

Does being non-Muslim entail holding blasphemous beliefs? (Part Two)

2007-11-16T21:43:00.001Z

In my previous post, I argued that Steve Edwards' argument (that being a non-Muslim entailed holding certain beliefs the expression of which a proposed law against "gratuitous insults" against a religion would necessarily proscribe) falls down because it relied on believing that Muhammad was evil when this was not entailed by disbelieving that Muhammad received instruction and revelation directly from God and not entailed by believing Muhammad lied when he claimed to have received such word from God.

However, it seems to me that a version of the argument can be constructed that does hold water.

I, as an atheistically/agnostically inclined non-Muslim, hold the belief that Muhammad did not receive instruction/revelation from God. Logically speaking, I thereby believe that, unless he's been misrepresented, Muhammad was a false prophet who was, at best, mistaken.

To someone who believes that Muhammad was God's Prophet on earth and that his revelations are the unerring word of God, my belief is blasphemous and an insult to their religion. Ergo a law against blasphemy directed at Islam (or at religion in general) would proscribe my expression of this view.

However one could argue that the proposed law was actually against gratuitous insults against a religion and thus my ability to express my beliefs was not threatened. For example, if I state that belief as part of a defence of my position of being a non-Muslim, surely that is not gratuitous, because my purpose is to explain/defend myself, not to insult Muslims?

One problem here is who is to judge whether my statement is a "gratuitous" insult or not? If a law against gratuitous insults is in place, then my mere expression of a belief that a particular Muslim regards as insulting to his religion would be grounds for suspicion that I may have committed the offence. I.e. the police might arrest me, even if they later drop charges or I'm able to persuade the court it wasn't gratuitous. The point is that the existence of such a law will deter expression of any views that some vocal Muslims find insulting, because of the risk of arrest and prosecution.

Whether you've broken the law or not depends on whether the court decides you've been gratuitous or not. The police may therefore decide that it is better to arrest you (and thereby appease an angry mob?) and let the court decide (so the police can say to the mob it wasn't their decision?), lest they let you get away with an insult that would have been found to be gratuitous by the court.

Also, surely, we should be allowed to express our sincerely held views without them needing to pass a test of "gratuitousness"?

The only restriction on this right is that I do so using only those resources I have legitimate access to (e.g. my blog or a newspaper where the editor has agreed to publish) and only to people willing to listen (anyone who reads my blog or the newspaper, all of whom have a choice not to read either the blog or the newspaper and to ignore the article concerned even if they read other things).

I do not have a right to harass/intrude upon Muslims (or anyone else) going about their daily lives by e.g. walking up to them in the street and telling them what I think, or worse, bursting into their mosques or homes to do the same.

But I do, and should, have the right to express such a view in privacy to friends, in debates about the issue where I'm invited to speak, or in any medium where readers can choose whether they read/listen and what they read/listen to and where the owners of the medium give me permission.

Otherwise, we allow people to silence those they do not like via giving them a veto over what people are allowed to say. All they need to do to exercise the veto is raise hell and act "outraged" at the offence/insult they claim is caused to them. Such an approach is unlikely to be beneficial to social harmony, unless people give up on the idea of being able to freely express sincerely held views!

Does being non-Muslim entail holding blasphemous beliefs?

2007-11-16T20:46:00.000Z

Samizdata recently quoted an interesting article by Steve Edwards. At the time I first read the article, I thought it a cogent argument (as indicated in my comment at Samizdata), but now I'm not so sure.

Edwards attempts to demonstrate that being a non-Muslim logically entails holding beliefs that Muslims will find blasphemous on the ground that they entail holding less than flattering views of the Prophet Muhammad. As such, any laws against "gratuitously insulting" Muhammad will have the logical effect of proscribing any attempt by a non-Muslim to explain and defend their position, and should thus be rejected on freedom of speech grounds.

I reproduce the core of Edwards' argument below, interspersed with my own comments:

Commenting on the most ‘offensive’ of the cartoons, Shearmur suggests that such a ‘gratuitous insult to the Prophet’ Mohammad could be grounds for legal sanctions.[...] As mentioned before, he also proffers that ‘polite contestation of religious claims’ should be protected speech. What then, shall we make of any polite contestation of a religious claim that, by necessity, leads the interlocutor to make a seemingly ‘gratuitous insult to the (alleged) Prophet’?

A Muslim is somebody who believes that a man called Mohammad (who lived around the turn of the 6th-7th Century AD) was the last in a long line of prophets in the Near East, and who passed on certain revelations and instructions directly from God Himself. By logic, a non-Muslim is somebody who does not accept that Mohammad was any such prophet, and thereby rejects his teachings as not having come from God. (emphasis in original)

The first logical error arises here. Take Edwards' definition of a Muslim. He effectively defines a Muslim as someone who believes all of the following propositions:

There once lived a man called Muhammad.
He lived around the turn of the 6th/7th centuries.
He was a prophet.
He was also the last in a long line of prophets.
He passed on certain instructions and revelations directly from God.

Logically speaking, on the above definition of a Muslim, a non-Muslim is anyone who regards at least one of the propositions above to be false, but Edwards defines a non-Muslim simply as someone who regards proposition 5 (and there by 3 and 4) to be false. Yet logically the non-Muslim may simply believe Muhammad was actually called Fred or that she(!) lived in the 18th century, or that he was not the last in a long line of prophets (e.g. he could be the only prophet or someone else was a prophet after him).

However arguably the above beliefs would all be regarded as blasphemous by devout Muslims, so perhaps this logical error does not undermine the more general claim that a non-Muslim must of logical necessity hold beliefs that a Muslim will find blasphemous.

Let us reflect further on the epistemology of a non-Muslim—if, contrary to Mohammad’s claims (assuming he has been represented correctly), we do not believe that he was any such prophet from God, what do we truly think of the man?

The answer must be one of three possibilities: either Mohammad was a liar, or he was deluded (that is to say, he was deeply mistaken), or he was mad.[...] These are the only possible conclusions of the intellectually honest non-Muslim. (emphasis in original)

Actually I disagree. The logical implication of not believing that Muhammad did receive instructions and revelations directly from God, is simply that Muhammad either lied or was mistaken. Whether the mistake was down to "madness" or "delusion" or some other issue (failure to comprehend what his body/mind were doing?) is something one need not commit to. So the question is then whether believing Muhammad was mistaken is blasphemous and liable to violate the proposed law against such blasphemy. I'll take it as read that viewing Muhammad as a liar will be blasphemous.

Let us ponder one of the three possibilities—that Mohammad was a liar. Would it be unreasonable then to posit that a man willing to deceive many thousands of people, perhaps out of hunger for power or self-aggrandisement, could be labelled as ‘evil’?

This is a bit of a straw-man. Believing that Muhammad was lying about the matter does not logically entail that he did so out of hunger for power or self aggrandisement. He may have genuinely believed that the religion he was founding would help mould a better society and was willing to lie in that cause. It could even be argued that the development of an Islamic empire, with some significant achievements to its credit, suggests that Islam did provide an advance on the Arab society that went before it, and thus Muhammad did bequeath a better society to Arabs (admittedly at the expense of a lot of battles and conquests).

If so, on what basis do we object to an extremely negative portrayal (either graphic or prose) of such an ‘evildoer’? Whether or not such a portrayal may appear ‘gratuitous’ or provoke widespread anger, it would nonetheless be a justifiable expression of dissent. Therefore, to place legal sanctions on any such piece of literature is to necessarily outlaw opposition to, and disagreement with, Islam to a logical denouement; this suggests we are implicitly calling for the abolition of the right to proclaim oneself a non-Muslim in clear and in certain terms. That is, one may still be a nominal ‘non-Muslim’ free of harassment, but one cannot explain and defend one’s position in any significant detail without committing the now-proscribed act of blasphemy.

As indicated above, I believe the argument fell down by this point. Believing Muhammad did not receive revelations and instructions from God does not entail believing he was a liar and believing he was a liar does not entail believing he was evil. Yet Edwards' argument seems to be based on these straw men.

However, I think the conclusion has legs and can be supported in a different manner. I shall explain why in my next post.

Three cheers to...

2007-11-01T21:29:00.000Z

...whoever arranged for the Imperial March from Star Wars to be played whilst King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia met the Queen!

[See also: Samizdata's take on this]

The Elected Representatives (Prohibition of Deception) Bill

2007-10-18T20:30:00.000+01:00

Would it be nice if our elected representatives were required to be honest? Well, a private member's bill has just been published which, if it became law, would make it an offence for MPs, members of the devolved assemblies, MEPs and elected mayors (or agents acting on their behalf) to make, or publish a statement they know to be false, misleading, or "deceptive in a material particular".

Someone accused of this offence can raise the following defences:

they did not know, or could not reasonably have been expected to know, the statement was false, misleading or deceptive in a material particular.
they had no part in causing or permitting the statement to be made or published.
they took all reasonable care to ensure the statement was accurate.
they acted in the interests of national security.

If found guilty, they face a fine and being barred from standing for election for up to 10 years.

An offence of making false, frivolous or trivial accusations of deception is also created, punishable by a fine.

Being a private member's bill it is unlikely to get very far, but would any of our political parties be willing to include in in their manifestos for election? It might provide a means for restoring trust in the political system.

Glasgow No2ID Music Gig

2007-07-16T22:52:00.000+01:00

Glasgow's No2ID group, campaigning against the government's national identity scheme, have organised a fundraising music gig for the 26th July at Barfly, 260 Clyde Street, Glasgow, doors open at 8pm. Tickets are £5 in advance, £6 on the door. You can buy them here.

The gig takes place on both floors with downstairs featuring rock/metal and upstairs for acoustic/experimental music.

Bands appearing include: Mama Mayhem, Serpico, Marshan, Stonesthrow, Warped Memories and Traquair.

See also the No2ID music site on myspace.

The new London Olympics logo has had it...

2007-06-04T20:48:00.000+01:00

...see Tim Worstall for details.

Crazy Britain

2007-03-26T20:55:00.000+01:00

So, you're an experienced fireman, called out to help someone who's in trouble in a freezing river and you dive in and drag her out, saving her life. A cause for congratulation perhaps? Nope, apparently the fireman is facing an investigation and possible punishment for breaching health and safety regulations. (Hat tip: UK Liberty).

NO2ID Comedy Gig in Glasgow

2007-02-17T12:39:00.000Z

NO2ID, in conjunction with Ha Ha Comedy, are organising a comedy gig as part of the international comedy festival currently in progress in Glasgow, Scotland. It’s organised for the 24th March, 8pm, at the Old Fruitmarket. Tickets £10 or £8 for concessions.

See here for full details.

Update: Confirmed comedians for this event include: You owe me glue, Glen Wool, Patrick Monahan, Toby Hadoke, Des Maclean and Lucy Porter.

Britain's surreal "junk food" advertising ban

2007-01-01T18:20:00.001Z

[Hat Tip: Tim Worstall]

Last year, the government decided to introduce new rules to ban the advertising of "junk food" to children. This of course requires the government to decide what is and is not junk food, and apparently this has now been done. The Telegraph provides examples of what can and cannot be advertised to children:

Marmite, Flora Lite, half-fat cheddar cheese, Dairylea triangles, bran flakes, camembert, sugar-coated puffed wheat, instant hot oat cereal, Jaffa cakes, reduced calorie mayonnaise, multi-grain hoop cereal, half-fat creme fraiche, takeaway chicken nuggets, potato waffles, Greek yoghurt (sheep), ham, sausages, bacon rashers, low-fat spreads, peanuts, cashew nuts, pistachio nuts, peanut butter, raisins, sultanas, currants, low-fat potato crisps, olive oil, butter, pizza, hamburgers, tomato ketchup, chocolate, brown sauce, cola, lemonade

Here's what can be advertised to children:

Plain fromage frais, fish fingers, lasagne ready meals, currant buns, malt loaf, frozen roast potatoes, chicken curry with rice ready meal, frozen oven chips, sliced white bread, cottage cheese, supermarket frozen chicken nuggets, milk, brazil nuts, canned strawberries in
syrup, diet cola, chocolate-flavoured milk.

Apparently, the regulations are based on how much fat, sugar or salt there is in 100g of the product and take no account of likely portion sizes. Take Marmite as an example. In a 4g serving (which would be about typical for spreading on toast) you'd only get 0.5g of salt (Recommended Daily Allowance[RDA]: 6g).

The trouble is that in 100g of Marmite you'll get 11g of salt, well over the RDA, hence the "junk food" status. However, no one in their right mind would ever eat that much Marmite in one serving (half of one of the new squeezy containers, or 80% of one of the traditional small glass jars), let alone do so on a regular basis!

Furthermore, the following companies (though not necessarily the products they sell) can be advertised to their brands to children:

McDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Burger King, Cadbury's, Kellogg's

I.e. the main pushers of junk food are allowed to carry on advertising their restaurants to kids, whilst individual products can be advertised (or not) on a ridiculous basis that equates eating 100g of Marmite with eating 100g of pizza when Marmite simply is not eaten in such large portions, and pizza is often eaten in bigger portions.

What utter nonsense.

Happy New Year

2007-01-01T18:17:00.000Z

Sorry for the lack of posts in December, I hope you've all had a good Xmas and I wish you a Happy 2007!

Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act

2006-11-25T20:50:00.001Z

My take on this is now up at the Magna Carta Plus weblog.

Some news items

2006-11-21T22:40:00.001Z

Here's a brief roundup to help catch up on recent developments in various areas:

The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill is now The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act 2006. I'll comment on this later at Magna Carta Plus, for now here is the response and discussion from some other campaigners against this bill.
An e-petitions web page has been set up at the Prime Minister's web site, and one of the petitions subsequently created is an anti-ID cards petition, which has had thousands of signatures so far. These petitions will apparently be sent to the PM, once completed, and a response given to them.
The Liberal Democrats are asking for nominations for legislation to be repealed in a "Freedom Bill", and have identified 10 pieces of legislation they think should be repealed, including the Identity Cards Act and the legislation that introduced control orders.

Anyway that's all for now.

New look

2006-11-21T22:28:00.000Z

I've chosen a new look for the blog, in order to take advantage of some new features in Blogger. Unfortunately choosing a new template has meant losing some of the things from the old template, although only until I get round to pasting them in from my backup copy of that template.

However, one of the things I'd like to do is switch to using Blogger's own commenting system rather than the Haloscan provided comments I used to use, which predated Blogger's comments and were the only means of providing for comments that I originally had. I think this will probably mean losing the Haloscan comments however, but then there were only a few comments contained there. If anyone reading this can indicate a way of getting Blogger to display the old comments only in old articles and new comments only in new articles, I'd be most interested.

The Islamophobia Awards -- my alternative nominations

2006-10-14T19:36:00.001+01:00

The Islamic Human Rights Commission organises the annual Islamphobia Awards, and have revealed the nominations for this year's awards. It seems to me though that the following people have done more to stoke up Islamophobia than many of the nominations listed there:

The organisers and participants of this rally responding to the publications of cartoons of Mohammed outside Regents Park Mosque in February, which called for the beheading of those who insult Islam, threatened Europe with a real Holocaust and included the chant "Denmark, USA, 7/7/ on its way".
The rioters who torched embassies in response to the Danish cartoons.
The people who issued death threats against the cartoonists and who placed bounties on the cartoonists' heads.
The people issuing death threats against Robert Redeker, driving him into hiding, after he wrote a column critical is Islam for the French newspaper "La Figaro".
Anjem Choudary who called for the Pope (and indeed anyone who "insulted Islam") to be executed, after one of the Pope's speeches was deemed to have insulted Islam, for its use of this quotation from a Byzantine Emperor: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached". Note that the Pope did not endorse this view of Mohammed in his speech, rather he used the quotation to kick off a discussion about violence and religion.

Surely, by conforming to the stereotype of the angry intolerant Muslim, who will threaten, if not carry out, acts of violence over any perceived insult to their religion, these people have been stoking up Islamophobia far more effectively than e.g. Jack Straw asking Muslim women to remove their veils or the Pope using an ancient quotation during a speech?

Renew for Freedom

2006-05-07T20:28:00.001+01:00

With the passing of the Identity Cards Act 2006, the law enabling the creation of the national identity register (NIR) and accompanying ID card in Britain, No2ID has launched its Renew for Freedom campaign.

The idea is to get as many people as possible to renew their passports during the month of May (i.e. this month!). Those that do so will end up with a passport valid for 10 years and will do so before the point at which renewing passports will entail registering on the NIR.

The government has so far indicated that, from 2008 onwards, passport renewals will entail registering on the NIR and getting a card (though the card, but only the card, can be opted out of until 2010). They are keen to get as many people onto the system as possible. Clearly if the scheme is to be scrapped, it will help to ensure that as many people as possible refuse to register. If the numbers are large enough it will make compelling people to get a card unviable.

Renewing your passport now will therefore enable you to hold out against having to register on the NIR for longer than it would otherwise. Also, renewing now minimises the risk of being compelled to register on the NIR should the government move the timetable forward.

Tory peers cave in and let the Identity Cards Bill become an Act

2006-03-30T00:45:00.000+01:00

Tory peers have accepted an amendment to the Identity Cards Bill allowing people renewing passports to opt out of getting an ID card until 2010. However they still have to register on the system, which means this "compromise" is nothing of the sort. So much for the Tory party defending civil liberties.

More details here.

Why the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill is worse than the Civil Contingencies Act

2006-03-16T22:58:00.001Z

I've posted this article on Magna Carta Plus as well as here. It follows up on my earlier article on the government's new enabling bill.

In my earlier coverage of the ~~Abolition of Parliament~~ Legislative and Regulatory Reform(LRR) Bill, I think I have underestimated how much power it gives to government ministers. I now think this bill actually gives more power to government ministers, in practical terms, than the Civil Contingencies Act (CCA).

The CCA explicitly gives Ministers both the powers of legislating via an Act of Parliament and the powers of the Royal Prerogative. However those powers are supposed to be invoked only in an emergency, are time limited to 7 days, albeit renewable, and have various other constraints such as not modifying the CCA itself or the Human Rights Act. There are protections for the courts and criminal offences created under CCA regulations can carry only 3 months imprisonment.

The possibility that the LRR is worse than the CCA was pointed out to me when discussing the bill in this thread on the usenet group, uk.politics.misc. One poster makes the following points:

The LRR is designed ostensibly to be used in the normal course of governing, where the Civil Contingencies Act (CCA) is supposed to be used only in emergencies.
The LRR can amend any legislation, where the CCA cannot be used to alter the CCA itself or the Human Rights Act.
The LRR can be used to delegate legislative power, without apparent limit, to anybody the specified in an appropriate order.
The LRR can be used to alter or abolish any rule of law.

The key matter I hadn’t considered fully before is this. The orders under the LRR can be used to confer legislative power on Ministers, such that they would then be able to legislate without any reference to Parliament at all. Given the government’s ability to control Parliamentary procedure (e.g. to ensure the negative resolution procedure is used), it would be possible for such a transfer of power in the favour of Ministers to occur without any vote in Parliament occurring!

This transfer could be achieved by sneaking the measure into a suitably large and convoluted order that implements a policy strongly backed by the governing party, and hoping it will either not be noticed due to the lack of time for scrutinising the order (this lack of time being arranged by the government) or if it is noticed it will be allowed through because the governing party’s MPs and Peers do not wish to abandon a key policy.

Remember there is no possibility for making amendments that would allow MPs or Peers to selectively modify problematic areas of the parliamentary orders. At best a request to revise the order can be made to the government which the government can consider and reject, or for that matter implement in any way it pleases. The Ministers will be in control at every step unless MPs or Peers vote the order down in its entirety.

I thus fear that if this bill passes we will not only see increasing amounts of legislation passed via parliamentary order with little or no scrutiny, but we will see Ministers being given increasing powers to legislate directly without reference to Parliament. The bill really should be entitled the Abolition of Parliament bill. The Abolition of Parliamentary Scrutiny Bill moniker I’ve been using in some posts is thus too mild a description of the threat this bill makes to Parliament’s role.

The March for Free Expression needs funds

2006-03-15T21:45:00.000Z

The organisers of the March for Free Expression, scheduled for the 25th March need to raise £2500 to cover insurance and are asking for donations for this purpose. Anyone interested in donating can do so via Paypal on their website.

Another enabling bill...

2006-03-14T22:20:00.001Z

Back in 2004, I got rather concerned about the Civil Contingencies Bill (now the Civil Contingencies Act[CCA] 2004) which allows government ministers to obtain absolute power by claiming there's an emergency, albeit on a temporary but renewable basis. There is very little a Minister could not do under the regulations the CCA allows, though the Human Rights Act and the CCA itself are protected from alteration.

Whilst I maintain that the legal situation regarding the CCA is as I describe above, and that the CCA is a dangerous law that in the hands of a ruthless government could be used to institute a dictatorship, it does seem to me that it is somewhat unlikely to be used this way in practice. It would be a blatantly dictatorial act and would be seen as such by both the British population and the world at large, and thus it would require a government that does not care about the image it gives to the world.

More likely abuses of the powers in the CCA might occur in the event of a genuine emergency -- for example using the CCA to enhance the power of the state with laws that then get backing from a manipulated Parliament, using the emergency as cover. Instituting permanent outright rule by decree using the CCA however is unlikely unless we really do get a would be Hitler residing in Downing Street.

Now, however, the government has a bill going through Parliament which would give Ministers the power to amend, modify or repeal any legislation whatsoever via parliamentary order. This bill is the anodyne sounding Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, and I've covered it in detail over at the Magna Carta Plus blog.

The crux of the matter here is that the bill provides a fast track procedure, lasting a maximum of 2 months, with which the government can push through legislation, at best subject to a single vote in each of the Houses of Parliament. The orders cannot be amended and there is very little opportunity for MPs or Peers to scrutinise the orders concerned. And if the negative resolution procedure is used to pass these orders, a vote would be required to stop the legislation, instead of being required to approve it. Note that, typically, MPs and Peers will get just 90 minutes to debate parliamentary orders before voting them and then will be asked to vote "yes" or "no" -- no chance of amendment is offered though the government can revise the orders under the so-called "super affirmative" procedure.

Various Acts already give Ministers powers to issue such orders in variously limited circumstances, e.g. to make regulations or relatively small legislative changes, as secondary legislation. This bill would enable them to make primary legislation via these orders. Not one Act of Parliament is protected from being rewritten this way, where the Civil Contingencies Act is protected from itself and cannot be used to alter the Human Rights Act 1998. The orders could thus be used to remove what flimsy safeguards there are in the Bill as it currently stands and could be used to change any legislation from the "anti-terror" laws to the Scotland Act (which set up the devolved parliament).

The likely result if this legislation is passed seems clear to me. A government seeking to ensure it gets its policies implemented will tie MPs and Peers up dealing with relatively unimportant Acts of Parliament and push their favoured policies through via parliamentary order, using their control of the committees to ensure minimal scrutiny and that their favoured procedure is used (e.g. the negative resolution procedure which requires a vote to stop an order being passed rather than to approve it).

See Spy.org.uk for an example of a Parliamentary order being passed without a vote (it renewed the Control Orders legislation) after a short debate. This bill would allow all legislation to be passed under the same procedures!

Whilst the Bill's powers are not technically as severe as the powers granted under the CCA, they are an affront to parliamentary democracy and would be a major step towards rule by decree. And because there would still be a Parliamentary facade to the legislative process used, the exercise of the bill's powers would not look so blatantly dictatorial as the CCA, even though the effect might well be the same.

Given the bill's powers would be permanent powers, not emergency powers, it could be used to gradually and subtly relegate Parliament to little more than a talking shop. For this reason, it may actually be more dangerous than the CCA in practice.

It is also worth noting that the government has further plans for diminishing the ability of MPs to scrutinise the governments actions and hold the government to account.

Other sites covering this bill include:

Cartoon wars mini-roundup

2006-03-12T00:11:00.001Z

A couple of stories I forgot to put in my previous article:

Michelle Malkin highlights a BBC report that the Yemeni newspaper editor who allowed cartoons to be published in the Yemen Observer in order to condemn them is not only languishing in jail, as Harry's Place reported before, but might face the death penalty if the prosecution get their way!
Malkin also reports on a pro-Denmark rally, supporting freedom of speech, that was held on Friday in San Francisco.

Cartoon wars roundup (4)

2006-03-11T22:57:00.001Z

The Danish cartoons affair continues to rumble on, even if it's not making as much headline news as it was:

Little Green Footballs (LGF) reports that the EU are considering demands from Arab countries to "fight defamation of the religion", apparently the Organisation of the Islamic Conference and the Arab league are demanding that the Mohammed affair is never repeated (i.e. no one publishes such cartoons again).
Also cited by LGF, is the (Australian) Daily Telegraph's report that Danish Muslim clerics are demanding an apology from the Danish government over the cartoons, and call for changes in Danish and European laws:
“We want the laws in Denmark and the European Union to be changed, either to have free speech for everyone including on the Holocaust and anti-Semitism, or to change the law to respect religious figures like Mohammad,” Suweidan said.
Back in February, some students in Afghanistan threatened to join Al-Qaeda if further cartoons 'abusing' the Prophet Mohammed were published.
Harry's Place notes that publishing the cartoons in order to condemn them does not necessarily protect a newspaper from prosecution in Muslim countries:
As I've said it's a deviation from the normal rule that a Defendant can't be guilty of something if he didn't intend to commit an offence. To give an example one can't be charged with murder if one accidentally shoots another person while cleaning a gun. The end result may be the same - a dead body, but the difference is in the intention of the person who held the gun. It's not fair to jail someone for the murder of another where he didn't intend to kill him.

That sort of distinction doesn't seem to exist in Yemen where three newspaper journalists decided to publish the infamous MoToons in their newspapers in order more effectively to condemn them as blasphemous:

Mr. Assadi, who once worked as a part-time correspondent for The New York Times, is one of three Yemeni journalists facing criminal charges for republishing the cartoons. The other two are Abdulkarim Sabra, the managing editor of the weekly Al Hurriya, and Yehiya al-Abed, a reporter for that paper. The men were jailed for two weeks last month, before being released on bail. The three stand accused of insulting their faith by publishing the images, a crime approaching heresy. In each case, the editors' stated intention was to condemn the drawings. In the case of The Observer, the images were obscured by a black X.

The Yemeni journalists aren't the only ones in the Muslim world in trouble for dabbling with the cartoons:

Eight other journalists in five countries are facing prosecution for reprinting the cartoons

Muslim journalists beware: you may consider the images blasphemous, provocative or outrageous, you may deface, cover up or partially obscure the images, but publishing them is still likely to get you into big trouble as this snippet from the Yemeni court demonstrates:

The lawyers also reminded the court of a story from the days of the prophet in which a woman was executed for insulting him, and he praised her killer, a citation The Observer took as a threat to demand that the editor be sentenced to death. He currently faces a year in jail or a fine.
A rally in support of Denmark was organised for the 11th March, in Toronto, Canada. This article reports on how it went, apparently they estimate 100 to 150 people turned out. Note that a march for freedom of speech is planned for the 25th March in Trafalgar square.
A rally criticising the cartoons, and praising Mohammed as a peaceful man took place in Houston, Texas on Friday, though fortunately without the violence that has marred other anti-cartoons protests.
In Russia, a website that had printed the cartoons received an official warning stating that the website had "committed an action aimed at arousing religious and social hatred and set up a real threat of causing damage to the social security". The website was told to remove the violation immediately.

Some freedom of speech related stories

2006-03-07T20:34:00.003Z

Sorry for the lack of posting recently, I didn't have as much time to post over the last week or two.

Anyway, the furore over the Danish cartoons has finally subsided, at least in terms of riots and embassy torchings. However the issue hasn't died, and other events are also highlighting the issues related to freedom of speech:

A march for freedom of expression is being organised for the 25th March in Trafalgar Square in London, which already boasts support from several organisations and a Lib Dem MP. There is also a petition to sign for those who can't make it.
George Galloway, the Respect MP, has apparently claimed that the publication of the cartoons was a worse act than 9/11 and the 7/7 bombings, thus equating publishing 12 rather innocuous cartoons with actions that, combined, cost roughly 3000 lives.
A "Proclamation of Global Civility" has been launched by some British Muslims, calling for the press complaints commission code of contact to be modified to prevent publication "insulting" references (including pictures) to anyone's creed or conscience.
On a more highly publicised note, David Irving has been jailed in Austria for denying the Holocaust, in an act that many regard as an attack on freedom of speech. A dissenting view, arguing that what happened with Irving was not about freedom of speech but about public lying, can be found here.
A group of writers and journalists, including Salman Rushdie and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, have launched a manifesto against "the new totalitarianism" of "Islamism", citing the reaction to the Danish cartoons and the need to defend freedom and secular values against religious totalitarianism.
The British National Party published a leaflet with one of the cartoons juxtapositioned with a picture of the London protestors who called for those who insult Islam to be beheaded, asking which images the reader finds more offensive.
Michelle Malkin cites the case of a school in the US which is trying to reconcile its art classes with the taboo some Muslims have against drawing people.
The hacking of Danish websites and other sites supportive of the Danes over the cartoon protests continues.
On a different topic, a protest in support of experimenting upon animals was organised in Oxford, in defiance of anti-vivisectionists who have been engaging in threats and intimidation against anyone associated with the University, over the building of its new animal laboratories.

Clearly the issue of freedom of speech, and where any limits should be drawn, has become a live topic since the publication of the cartoons and the subsequent furore, spurred on by other contemporary events such as the jailing of Irving, the acquittal of Nick Griffin of the BNP on charges of inciting racial hatred, the ongoing clash between anti-vivisectionists and those who support animal experimentation, and the watering down of the British governments Incitement to Religious Hatred bill. This is against a backdrop of continual erosion of civil rights by the British government, including the right to peaceful protest and freedom of speech itself.

Freedom of speech is clearly a value that is under assault. Nevertheless, it has its defenders.

Cartoon wars roundup(3)

2006-02-19T19:30:00.001Z

The Danish cartoons controversy continues to generate stories around the world:

10 people were killed in Libya in clashes during a protest outside the Italian consulate, after an Italian minister appeared on TV wearing a T-shirt with one of the cartoons emblazoned on it. The minister concerned has since resigned, alongwith a Libyan minister.
MEPs have condemend the violent protests and expressed solidarity with Denmark.
Denmark has temporarily shut its embassy in Pakistan. There are now 5 Danish embassies closed since the row surfaced.
The University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign suspended the editors of its student newspaper after the paper published the cartoons.
A student newspaper at Harvard University has published the cartoons, prompting anger amongst some students and a forum to discuss the controversy.
The front doors of the Gallup Independent in New Mexico were smashed on the day the paper printed the cartoons. Messages on the stones demanded a public apology.
Muslims demonstrated in front of the Danish consulate in Los Angeles.
There were further anti-cartoons protests in London and in New York.
In Nigeria, some Muslim rioters attacked Christians and burned churches, resulting in 15 deaths, during an anti-cartoons protest.
In India, a minister of the Uttar Pradesh state government has offered $11.5 million to anyone who beheads any of the cartoonists who depicted Mohammed.

No wonder the cartoonsts are in hiding.

Flemming Rose in his own words.

2006-02-18T20:37:00.001Z

In the Washington Post, Flemming Rose, the cultural editor of Jyllands-Posten, who solicited the cartoons that much of the Muslim world is in uproar over, has defended his decision to solicit and publish the cartoons. His article is well worth reading in full.

Rose makes clear he was worried about the self-censorship people were exercising due to intimidation and fear of reprisals should they be perceived to have insulted or criticise Islam. Here are some passages which I found interesting:

We have a tradition of satire when dealing with the royal family and other public figures, and that was reflected in the cartoons. The cartoonists treated Islam the same way they treat Christianity,Buddhism, Hinduism and other religions. And by treating Muslims in Denmark as equals they made a point: We are integrating you into the Danish tradition of satire because you are part of our society, not strangers. The cartoons are including, rather than excluding, Muslims.

--

One cartoon -- depicting the prophet with a bomb in his turban -- has drawn the harshest criticism. Angry voices claim the cartoon is saying that the prophet is a terrorist or that every Muslim is a terrorist. I read it differently: Some individuals have taken the religion of Islam hostage by committing terrorist acts in the name of the prophet. They are the ones who have given the religion a bad name. The cartoon also plays into the fairy tale about Aladdin and the orange that fell into his turban and made his fortune. This suggests that the bomb comes from the outside world and is not an inherent characteristic of the prophet.

--

Has Jyllands-Posten insulted and disrespected Islam? It certainly didn't intend to. But what does respect mean? When I visit a mosque, I show my respect by taking off my shoes. I follow the customs, just as I do in a church, synagogue or other holy place. But if a believer demands that I, as a nonbeliever, observe his taboos in the public domain, he is not asking for my respect, but for my submission. And that is incompatible with a secular democracy.

--

As a former correspondent in the Soviet Union, I am sensitive about calls for censorship on the grounds of insult. This is a popular trick of totalitarian movements: Label any critique or call for debate as an insult and punish the offenders. That is what happened to human rights activists and writers such as Andrei Sakharov, Vladimir Bukovsky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Natan Sharansky, Boris Pasternak.

The regime accused them of anti-Soviet propaganda, just as some Muslims are labeling 12 cartoons in a Danish newspaper anti-Islamic.

--

But tragic demonstrations throughout the Middle East and Asia were not what we anticipated, much less desired. Moreover, the newspaper has received 104 registered threats, 10 people have been arrested, cartoonists have been forced into hiding because of threats against their lives and Jyllands-Posten's headquarters have been evacuated several times due to bomb threats. This is hardly a climate for easing self-censorship.

Clearly the fear of reprisals mentioned above has proven to be well founded, and it seems to me that publication of the cartoons by other papers is both an act of solidarity with Rose and defiance against this intimidation, despite the Jack Straws and Bill Clintons of this world condemning the cartoons.

I think the cartoons themselves are mostly innocuous and unfunny but also open to different interpretations as Rose points out.

One cartoon, which shows Mohammed at the gates of heaven and some suicide bombers outside with Mohammed saying "Stop! Stop! We've run out of virgins" did make me chuckle. It seemed to me this was lampooning a belief that suicide bombers are indoctrinated with, namely that they'll receive 72 virgins in heaven for carrying out their "martyrdom" operation. This reprehensible belief, which provides a religious motivation for attacks like those of 9/11, 7/7, Bali and of course the blowing up of Israelis in their shopping centres and restaurants, deserves to be mocked and ridiculed. I think the cartoon was perfectly justifiable and should not be insulting to anyone but the likes of Osama Bin Laden.

Those who are claiming to be insulted by these cartoons are insisting on a particular interpretation of them to do so, and are also trying to control (whether via the violence and threats or via peaceful political means) what we can and cannot print in our newspapers. Indeed some them ask us, as non-believers, not to depict Mohammed at all or they will treat it as a deep insult and a deliberate provocation. That is intimidation, and it is an attack on freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

Cartoon Wars roundup (2)

2006-02-17T23:36:00.000Z

Some more links related to the Danish cartoon affair:

This Dutch animation makes its point well. Note that "gevoelig" means "sensitive". Spotted via Michelle Malkin's blog.
On the 7th February it was reported that an Iranian newspaper is running a competition to create anti-semitic cartoons and challenged Western newspapers to publish them in the name of freedom of speech. In response to this, an Israeli publisher decided to hold its own competition for anti-semitic cartoons to be created by Jews!
Amitai Sandy, a graphic artist with the publishers Dimona Comix stated "We’ll show the world we can do the best, sharpest, most offensive Jew hating cartoons ever published!" and "No Iranian will beat us on our home turf!".
Clearly these guys know how to take the piss with style, and somehow, I don't think their response is quite what the Iranian newspaper expected... (Hat Tip: The Pub Philosopher).
The Pub Philosopher notes that on Tuesday (yes, St Valentine's day), the British Embassy in Iran was petrol bombed and that the attack was reported in Germany, Taiwan and the United Arab Emirates, but not the British media! I've been able to find this report from Reuters on the Yahoo UK website however. The original Reuters report is here. There was also a report mentioning this on an Australian news site. However nothing about it on the BBC, and no mention in any of the British papers as far as I can tell.
Perhaps this site is aiming for its own fatwa, by lampooning two prophets in a daily cartoon! (Hat Tip: the Pub Philosopher again).
Recent polls in the UK suggest the public supported publication of the cartoons, with the decision to publish and reprint the cartoons elsewhere backed by 56% and opposed by 29% of respondents.

Cartoon wars roundup

2006-02-17T20:25:00.001Z

The row over the Danish cartoons continues to run and run, albeit at a somewhat lower level of intensity:

There have been riots in Pakistan, after weeks of protests.
A Pakistani cleric has announced a bounty of $1 million to whoever kills the cartoonist who depicted Mohammed. He appears unaware that there were several cartoonists! This is in addition to the Taleban's bounty of 100kg of gold.
There have been denial of service attacks and other attempts to hack/disrupt Danish websites and other websites that supported the cartoons. The hosters of Michelle Malkin's blog have also been under this sort of electronic attack, and she has received threatening emails:
From: naser jianpour (n_jianpour@yahoo.com)
To: writemalkin@gmail.com
Mailed-By: yahoo.com
Date: Feb 10, 2006 12:04 PM
Subject: we will kill you

I am Iranian I am a mosleme .
We will kill you( every )
down with you( Crectian & jowe.)
world is mine.

***

From: monalisa monalisa (monalisa23h@hotmail.com)
To: writemalkin@gmail.com
Mailed-By: hotmail.com
Date: Feb 4, 2006 5:55 PM
Subject: you are filth

the dishonourable the mean the prostitute I'am a müslim and turkish I kill
you devil you are goto the hell shit the whore

***

From: greatmastafa@web.de (greatmastafa@web.de)
Mailed-By: web.de
To: writemalkin@gmail.com
Date: Feb 11, 2006 9:41 PM
Subject: mohammed

you have one day to delete all pictures of mohammed from your server, or i hack this site and delete all files on this server. ok

mohammed have never a face. dou you now.

for ever islam
Bill Clinton has condemned the cartoons (twice). The reports do not indicate that he has said anything about those issuing death threats, rioting and burning embassies or the climate of fear and intimidation that has been created by Islamists who try to suppress any perceived insult or criticism of Islam.
A female journalist covering an anti-cartoons protest in Turkey was stoned by the protestors who say they provoked her by not wearing a head scarf! Hat Tip: Michelle Malkin.
Some interesting comments have been made on a BBC web page featuring a selection of commentators:

Dr Yunes Teinaz of the London Mosque and Islamic Cultural Centre states "Freedom of expression is not a licence to attack a culture or religion". If we take this seriously, then he is suggesting that two huge areas of human behaviour and beliefs should be off-limits to criticism or ridicule. It seems to me that for freedom of speech to be worthwhile and to mean something, no area of human behaviour of beliefs should be held to be immune from criticism. I see no reason for privileging cultural and religious beliefs by holding them to be immune from criticism or even ridicule. I also disagree that the cartoons were in any way racist as he also suggests.
Munira Mirza, a journalist, makes an important point:
British newspapers should publish the images. Muslims should be able to see them and judge them for themselves, that's why we have freedom of speech.
Many Muslims want the same freedoms as everyone else to debate, criticise and challenge their religion.
They want to be able to say: "Hey we're not children, we can handle criticism, we don't need special protection - we're equal."
Karen Armstrong, an author of a biography of Mohammed, claims that the cartoons were "criminally irresponsible", yet fails to make any mention of the responsibility, criminal or otherwise, of those who have sent death threats to anyone who dares to criticise or insult Islam or Islamists, those who have been rioting, those who have toured the middle east stirring up anger with extra pictures that Jyllands-Posten had not solicited or published, those who have been torching embassies or those who have been offering bounties for the heads of the cartoonists concerned. These cartoons are no worse then those that appear regularly about world leaders and politicians or figures from other religions in Western media. I don't see why lampooning Mohammed should be held to be criminally irresponsible when these other cartoons are not.

British Muslim group calls for ban on depicting Mohammed

2006-02-11T15:10:00.001Z

As I've reported at Magna Carta Plus, a group of British Muslims have called for a ban on depicting Mohammed. Thus this group wants us to observe a tenet of their religion. That's both an attack on freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

Cartoon wars: Murial Gray gets it.

2006-02-11T14:51:00.001Z

Muriel Gray writing in last week's Sunday Herald shows she understands the cartoon wars:

One of the biggest misunderstandings of the crisis caused by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten printing cartoons of Muhammed is that the paper was merely satirising Islam and hadn’t realised that any image of the prophet, insulting or respectful, is utterly taboo to Muslims. This is quite wrong.
The incident arose from the fact that an author of a children’s book about the life of Muhammed wanted it illustrated but couldn’t find any artist brave enough to risk offending those who currently express their offence by murdering the offender. Hence in a deliberate test of freedom of speech, the newspaper, not Muslim and therefore not bound by this taboo, sought artists willing to draw Muhammed. The mild satire on the state of Islamic jihad was incidental.
So yes, it was a deliberate provocation, a massive shove in the playground, but they didn’t start the fight. The initial provocation came from Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 when he pronounced a death sentence on the author Salman Rushdie for having a written a novel that contained another Islamic taboo, that of disrespecting the Koran. This was a stroke of genius. Whereas critics of repugnant ideologies were only in peril when they acted openly in the country guilty of the tyranny, and were free to express their disgust from the safety of a civilised country, Khomeini came up with the brilliant Mafia-like scheme of recruiting his foot soldiers everywhere.
Knowing that there are now Muslims in almost every country in the world, he removed that safety net once offered to people such as critics of the USSR or Idi Amin, so that even in safe, tolerant Britain, nobody would ever again dare write, paint, broadcast, film or lecture on anti-Islamic views for fear of their lives. Of course most Muslims, being sane, peaceful human beings, simply ignored the psychotic Khomeini. But tragically the subsequent brutal murder of Theo Van Gogh, the deadly riots sparked by journalist Isioma Daniel’s article about Miss World in Nigeria, and the threats to people like author Irshadi Manji for writing a witty book about reforming Islam, have had such an effect that they have bought Islam immunity from criticism, not through respect, but through fear.
This was what Jyllands-Posten was testing, and the result, as we can see, is that it has proved its point spectacularly. The other European papers which published the cartoons were, with a couple of exceptions, not trying to further provoke Muslims, but were engaging in an “I am Spartacus” moment, showing solidarity for Denmark and trying to gain enough similar support throughout Europe that it would make it harder for the extremists. What if everyone publishes? Going to kill everyone? Going to boycott goods from every European country? If only the Czech Republic would publish the cartoons then Hamas would have to boycott Semtex.

Unfortunately, though at least she's honest about it, she and her paper have declined to publish the cartoons because of this very fear, as she states in her final paragraph:

This paper’s belief in freedom of speech is paramount. The decision not to reprint the cartoons, not to declare ourselves another Spartacus in support of our European colleagues, was taken, at least partly, out of consideration for the safety of the staff, and the safety of Scottish people here and abroad, and I fully support it. But the extremists, who created the fear that made that decision a foregone conclusion, must understand that if they think the UK press have done this out of respect, they are so very wrong. They have undoubtedly won this battle hands down. Well done. We are afraid. But do they think people neutered and silenced by fear are going to work at embracing their culture, their religion or their values? Clearly, they don’t care. The danger of this backlashing on to our innocent Muslim fellow citizens is a distinct possibility and the thought makes me sick to the stomach. It looks as though those of us aching for the misery of all this hatred to end are in for a long wait.

It is depressing that so many of our politicians have chosen to attack and condemn the people standing up to this intimidation rather than give them support. These actions will only encourage the extremists who carry the intimidation to continue.

Is the rage over the Mohammed cartoons manufactured?

2006-02-11T00:39:00.001Z

Consider the following:

The Mohammed cartoons were originally published in September 2005 in Jyllands-Posten, but it took 5 months for the issue to flare up internationally, during which the following things all happened.
Apparently the Mohammed cartoons were published in Egypt (a Muslim country) in October 2005 without a peep of dissent. And this was during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
Some Danish Muslims toured the middle east, showing the original 12 cartoons, but added three pictures of their own, one depicting Mohammed as a pedophile demon, one a photo of him with a pig's snout and one showing him being sodomized by a dog!
One of the three extra pictures, the pig snout one, was originally a picture of a contestant at a French pig squealing contest!

I also find it suspicious that embassies in the middle east, such as Syria and Iran, were torched. Many of the countries concerned are dictatorships with high degrees of social control being exercised by the state. I find it hard to believe the riots would have been allowed to get so far out of hand had they not had some tacit support from the authorities.

Has Jyllands-Posten been hypocritical?

2006-02-10T20:31:00.001Z

It turns out that Jyllands-Posten, the paper which published the cartoons of Mohammed in Denmark back in September, had previously, in 2003, refused to publish a cartoon of Jesus, on the grounds that it might cause offence.

Some have suggested that the argument that Jyllands-Posten published the cartoons of Mohammed as a test of Danish freedom of speech and as part of a debate on freedom of speech is a hypocritical one in the light of this.

I don't think this does necessarily show they've been hypocritical, though of course it's not unknown for newspapers -- or any other human organisation -- to do so. There are several reasons:

according to the article linked above, the editor who rejected the Jesus cartoon is a different editor from the one who commissioned the Mohammed cartoons. Thus we have different people judging the suitability of the cartoons in each case.
the Jesus cartoon was submitted for publication, not commissioned by the paper.
the paper's ostensible reason for commissioning the Mohammed cartoons was that, in the light of the difficulties Kare Bluitgen had finding an artist to illustrate a children's book on Mohammed, difficulties based on fear of death threats from militant Muslims at a perceive insult to Islam if they did, they wanted to test Danish freedom of speech and spark a debate about the issue. The fear of intimidation for depicting Mohammed simply did not exist with regards to Jesus. Thus the need to stand up for freedom of speech did not exist in that case and the possible causation of offence over an unsolicited cartoon would not be countered by the imperative to stand up to intimidation from some militant Muslims.

It is worth nothing that since publication the offices of Jyllands-Posten have been subjected to bomb-scares and that the cartoonists have faced death threats and have gone into hiding. Also, the remnants of the Taleban have put a bounty on the cartoonist's heads, namely 100kg of gold.

As with Salman Rushdie, Theo Van Gogh, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Geert Wilders, the response of some Islamists to a perceived insult of Islam is to intimidate and threaten the death of those responsible. Indeed, where Salman Rushdie was famously the subject of a fatwa calling for this death, Theo Van Goh was murdered and a note pinned to his body threatened Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Their crime? To have made a film, Submission, highlighting the mistreatment of women in Muslim families.

It is this intimidation that threatens freedom of speech and it seems to me that Jyllands-Posten were trying to stand up for freedom of speech against such intimidation when they asked for the cartoons.

Now maybe JP aren't perfect, maybe they've not always been so good at standing up for freedom of speech, maybe they were even trying to get some publicity, but that does not alter the fact that such intimidation occurs, they are now the recipients of such intimidation - along with anyone else who has published the cartoons and that there is a need to counter this intimidation of people who dare to criticise Muslims or Islamic culture.

If Islam is a religion of peace...

2006-02-05T23:45:00.000Z

...then:

those who send death threats to the cartoonists of Jyllends-Posten are betraying Islam.
those who are torching embassies in the middle east are betraying Islam.
those who marched in London calling for those who depicted Mohammed to be exterminated, annihilated or beheaded are betraying Islam.
those who murdered Theo Van Gogh and drove Dutch MPs Geert Wilders and Ayaan Hirsi Ali into hiding are betraying Islam.
those who called for the death of Salman Rushdie, including issuing the famous fatwa, are betraying Islam.
those who carried out 9/11, 7/7, the Madrid bombings and the Bali bombings are betraying Islam.

I didn't know Norwich had an embassy in Syria

2006-02-05T23:37:00.000Z

From this news report:

Denmark and Norwich have begun to urge their citizens to leave Syria after their embassies were set on fire in the country...

Some questions

2006-02-05T21:50:00.000Z

If the Labour party said that cartoons caricaturing or mocking their MPs and leaders deeply offended them, should the media stop producing such cartoons?

If the Royal family said they found cartoons that mock the Royals offensive and hurtful, should the media stop producing those?

If the leaders of Christian, Jewish, Sikh or Hindu institutions or communities said they found cartoons mocking their prophets or leaders insulting, should the media obey?

If representatives of the USA said the Americans found cartoons caricaturing them or their president or their army or their people deeply offensive, should the media stop producing such cartoons to mollify their feelings?

If this line of reasoning doesn't convince you that the media should stop producing cartoons caricaturing (members of) the above groups should they claim to feel that way, why should it convince you in the case of Muslims?

The cartoons produced in Arab newspapers and Muslim depictions of Mohammed

2006-02-04T01:17:00.001Z

See this link, for examples of cartoons from Arab papers portraying Jews, Israel and America with provocative cartoons.

And they apparently don't mind producing cartoons that might offend Christians either.

Why should we listen when they complain about cartoons caricaturing Mohammed?

Furthermore, despite the edict against depicting Mohammed, apparently Mohammed has been depicted for hundreds of years, not only without a peep from Muslims, but also he has been depicted by Muslims.

So why all the anger and fuss now?

Protestors in London call for beheading of those who depict Mohammed

2006-02-04T01:03:00.002Z

Channel 4's special report in the Danish cartoon row features a protest outside Regents Park Mosque. The protestors can be clearly heard chanting "Denmark, USA, 7/7 on its way", the placards features slogans such as "Behead the one who insults the Prophet", "Annihilate those who insult Islam" and "Freedom of expression can go to hell". Click on the video link on this page to see the report.

Here are some photos of the placards. One reads "Be prepared for the real Holocaust". Another reads "Freedom go to Hell".

If anyone wants to know who some of the enemies of the open society are, look no further.

Is this a remotely sane or reasonable response to the publication of these cartoons?

What we have here is a group of militant religious fundamentalists trying to dictate what we can and cannot print in our newspapers, on the basis that if we violate a particular tenet of their religion, they will feel offended and insulted. They are trying to make us obey a tenet of their religion whether we subscribe to that religion or not. They are also calling for the death of those who dare to depict Mohammed, and some seem to be calling for a holocaust.

If we decide to give in on this, what will the religious zealots claim insult for next? The drinking of alcohol? The eating of non Halal food? Women who dare to dress in anything more revealing than a burqa?

I sincerely hope most Muslims have nothing to do with people like the protestors above. It is worth noting that some Muslims are bravely standing up for free speech. We should give them our support and stand up for free speech ourselves.

Why freedom of speech must include the right to offend

2006-02-02T01:07:00.001Z

There is a lot of controversy surrounding the publication, last year, by Danish newspaper Jyllends-Posten of some cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed (in Islam, depicting the Prophet is apparently forbidden). See for example coverage at Samizdata and The Pub Philosopher. The reaction of Muslims has ranged from street protests and boycotts of Danish products, through to death threats, threats of terrorist attacks in Denmark, warnings to Scandinavians not to enter Palestine, withdrawal of diplomatic relations from Denmark by Arab states, and Islamic countries lobbying the UN to pass a resolution banning attacks on religious beliefs. See my usenet article on uk.politics.misc for details.

One of the criticisms I've seen levelled at those who have published the cartoons is that by publishing the cartoons they were offending/insulting Muslims. I have, for example, seen (via a comment at Samizdata -- a comment robustly responded to by other commenters and the editors of Samizadata, e.g. see the link above) the newspapers' actions compared with shouting insults at someone in the street and freedom of speech described as the freedom to insult.

It is worth considering why freedom of speech is important, including considering why even the right to cause offence should be protected. Fundamentally, in a society where you have freedom of speech, it means that you can say what you believe to be true without reprisal.

It is no good to say, "you are allowed to express yourself so long as you do not offend or insult anyone" for one simple reason: those who would feel (or claim to feel) insulted or offended by the truth would be able to suppress the truth if mere offence or insult was a sufficient reason to prosecute someone. A society which prohibits mere offence, stifles freedom of expression.

Of course this is not an excuse, e.g. to harangue people in the street. However freedom of speech is not the right to force people to listen to you, but rather the right to express your views to anyone willing to listen. Thus when a newspaper publishes a cartoon, only those who chose to read the paper will view the cartoon and they'd be choosing to do so. Many of those who are angry at these cartoons may never have read the paper and may not even have viewed the cartoons themselves. Certainly they won't have been forced to view them, and they are entirely free to ignore the issue if they so wish.

Freedom of speech, including the freedom to ridicule beliefs we disagree with, is crucial to both scientific inquiry, open debate and a functioning democracy. If I cannot express my political beliefs without fear of reprisal, then democracy is thereby diminished as one view of how society should be run has thereby been cut off from the debate. It seems to me that this freedom has been a major factor in the advance of Western society over the last few centuries.

We should value freedom of speech and defend it against those who'd rather we all submitted to The Truth they believe they've had handed down to them from ancient prophets.

Many European newspapers have, in solidarity, published the cartoons, or even published their own cartoons of Mohammed. However not one British newspaper is amongst them, so far, though various British blogs have provided links or published them as well.

To see what all the fuss is about, you can view the cartoons here.

The consequences of a nuclear armed Iran

2006-01-24T20:33:00.001Z

Iran's continuing defiance of the International Atomic Energy Authority, the US and the EU over its nuclear power program, their President's claims that the Holocaust did not happen and his suggestion that Israel should be wiped off the map are all naturally making people nervous that some sort of military clash with Iran is brewing.

The fear behind this conflict, on the part of the West at least, is the fear that Iran may be trying to develop nuclear weapons for themselves. One must hope that this conflict can be resolved peacefully, but Iran's actions seem to suggest a willingness to test the will of the international community to prevent them acquiring these weapons, if not to actually acquire them. Of course they deny trying to do so, but their lack of cooperation with the IAEA over the matter and their secrecy naturally lead to suspicion. They would not be the first state to develop nuclear weapons clandestinely, e.g. consider India, Pakistan and Israel. So the possibility they are trying to develop nuclear weapons must be taken seriously.

Why is there so much concern over Iran obtaining nukes, when we already have a nuclear armed US, Britain, France, Russia, China, Israel, Pakistan and India? It seems to me there are a number of reasons (in no particular order):

The more countries who have nuclear weapons, the more likely they'll end up being used, with devastating consequences. Containment combined with the deterrence of Mutually Assured Destruction(MAD) may have worked in the cold war (even then we nearly ended up in a global nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis) between two large evenly matched power blocks, but we may not be able to rely on MAD working if nuclear weapons proliferate amongst religious fundamentalists in an unstable area of the world.
The Iranian regime is a sworn enemy of the US, Israel and indeed the West generally and is ruled by a president who seems to see himself as some sort of messianic/prophetic figure.
The Iranian regime is a Islamist fundamentalist theocracy, sitting on a large chunk of the oil that fuels the world's economy, and sitting in one of the more unstable regions of planet.
A nuclear armed Iran would thus be far more powerful, and would likely try to use that influence to spread Islamist fundamentalism around the world (note they are known to support Islamist terrorist groups), whilst undermining the West.
Iran's neighbours would naturally be nervous and would either ally themselves or seek to acquire their own nuclear weapons or both.

Allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons and I'd thus expect a nuclear exchange in the region within a decade, if not less, alongside a serious boost to a totalitarian religious ideology. It must not happen. Hopefully this scenario can be averted peacefully and there is still some way to go before the diplomatic road runs out. However, it seems Israel will attempt other options if she deems it necessary. It would be far better if the international community united to stop Iran on this and far more likely to end peacefully too.

Is Scotland's First Minister considering more nuclear power?

2006-01-15T20:55:00.001Z

The prospect of the world's oil supplies running out is clearly having an impact on our politicians, as they begin to question the moratorium in building new nuclear power stations.

Tony Blair has dropped hints about this over the last year or so and today, the Sunday Herald reports that Jack McConnell, the First Minister of the Scottish Executive, is considering allowing more nuclear power stations to be built in Scotland:

First Minister Jack McConnell is paving the way for a Scottish Labour U-turn which would remove its opposition to new nuclear power stations being built in Scotland. McConnell has launched an internal party consultation on whether Scotland can afford to turn its back on the controversial energy source.

His colleagues are being asked to decide whether a commitment to another generation of nuclear reactors should become official party policy.

The move follows widespread speculation that Prime Minister Tony Blair will back new nuclear power stations as a solution to energy shortages and as a way of helping the government to fulfil its pledge to reduce carbon emissions.

But the energy issue is sensitive for McConnell, who along with his coalition partners at Holyrood, the Liberal Democrats, has ruled out any new nuclear power stations while the problem of radioactive waste remains unresolved.

The consultation is part of Labour’s “policy forum” process that will lay the foundations for the party’s 2007 Holyrood election manifesto.

According to today's paper edition of the Sunday Herald, between 1990 and 2002, nuclear power accounted for 35% of Scotland's electricity, gas accounted for 20%, renewables 11% and coal 33% (there appears to be 1% unaccounted for).

Does Michael Howard really believe Iran's president is democratically elected?

2006-01-14T18:52:00.001Z

This story on the BBC caused me to do a double take when I first saw it:

Quizzed on Iran in the Commons, Mr Blair said the world's security lay in spreading "freedom and democracy".

But Mr Howard later said he was talking "gibberish" given that Iran's president had been "democratically elected".

The West fears Iran is seeking to develop nuclear weapons after it broke seals on a research facility.

'Tough issue'

"To go on and on about democracy, has he forgotten that the president of Iran, the cause of all this trouble, was actually democratically elected?," Mr Howard told BBC Two's Daily Politics. (emphasis added)

What planet is the Tory party's former leader on?

In Iran, the Supreme Leader's authority overrides all other authorities. It is the same country that has a Guardian Council to vet candidates, whether for presidential or parliamentary elections, which barred 2,530 out of 8,157 candidates in recent parliamentary elections. In the Presidential elections, 1000 candidates entered, but only 8 were allowed to run. The Guardian Council can veto laws that are un Islamic and anti Constitutional. It is appointed by the Supreme Leader (6 members) and the head of the judiciary (6 members). The head of the judiciary is also appointed by the Supreme Leader. And Howard thinks this makes Ahmadinejad a democratically elected leader?!

A belated Happy New Year, plus the focus of this blog

2006-01-14T18:18:00.000Z

I wish a belated Happy New Year to the readers of this blog!

Also, I'm sorry for the long gap in posting here. I took a bit of a break from things over Xmas and whilst I managed a few posts at the Magna Carta Plus (MCP) blog, I didn't manage anything here. During this period though, I've been thinking a bit about the focus of this blog, given that my civil liberties articles will mainly go to MCP.

Essentially the focus on this blog will shift to issues such as the end of oil and its consequences (anyone wishing to understand the middle east should look into this issue), developments in international politics and the fortunes of the British political parties in what seems to be a year of transition as David Cameron gets going as Tory leader, the Liberal Democrats hold a contest to elect a new leader, and Labour prepare for life after Tony Blair (given his promise to stand down before the next election). I also intend to cast an eye on Scottish politics, after all Scotland is my home country and I do live there, plus there's an election next year to Scotland's parliament.

Given that oil is running down just as demand surges from countries such as China and India, that the British government seems intent on further trashing the rule of law, that Iran and the international community are in conflict over the former's suspected moves to acquire nuclear weapons and that Sharon's stroke has probably thrown a spanner in the works in the Israeli/Arab conflict, we may have interesting times ahead of us...

Wikablog

2005-11-27T14:30:00.000Z

As if producing 2005: Blogged whilst writing his own blog and contributing articles to other blogs wasn't enough to fill his time, Tim Worstall has banded together with some other bloggers and set up Wikablog:

Well, the point is that there are a lot of blogs out there -- a billion trillion gazillion, according to some experts -- and it's difficult to find out what they're all about without visiting every one of them and reading it. How tiresome. Here at Wikablog, you can, in just a couple of minutes, create a page about your blog or someone else's with a few words saying what it's about. Then other people can add to it. And you can add links to other similar blogs, and talk about the blog's history, and recount the tale of the great Himalayan Blog Controversy of 2002, and whatever else you like. Soon enough, any blog can have a detailed page on here, telling us all everything we could ever need to know about it short of bothering to read it.

I think I'd rewrite that paragraph to say "Wikablog is a directory of blogs maintained by its readers".

Anyway I shall soon be adding this blog to the Wikablog.

2005: Blogged by Tim Worstall

2005-11-27T14:14:00.000Z

Apologies for the lack of posts recently. Things got a bit busy and blogging went on the back burner for a bit. Anyway now I'm playing catchup on some items that caught my attention.

As readers might already know, Tim Worstall has waded through thousands of British blogs and selected articles from them to produce a book called 2005: Blogged, which was published on the 18th November. Tim describes this book as follows:

So one of the things we hope to do is to get people to realise quite how much good writing there is out there available to them. We, the cognoscenti, already know. Well, we do to an extent. I’ve found, while doing the research (I skimmed through 5,000 blogs and read in much more depth a 1,000 of them to make the selections), that it isn’t true that we do in fact know all of the good ones. Certainly, I found that there were whole areas of personal and music and culture and so on blogs that I knew nothing at all about. (BTW, if you have someone you think I should know about drop me a line. Final closing date for alterations is early October.)

I’d also better point out that this isn’t just me and my muckers, isn’t all right wing or economics, it’s an attempt, however limited by space, to give an idea of the huge variety out there. Yes, of course there is Pootergeek, Norm, Samizdata, Harry’s Place, there’s also Dead Men Left, Chicken Yoghurt, Green Fairy, Angry Chimp, Twenty Major.....over 100 different bloggers from all sides of every question. There’s pieces on sex, sport, music, politics, elections, bombings, piss ups, books.....there’s even a couple of pieces of the lost John B archives.

It really is an attempt to highlight the great pieces over the year. There are angry pieces, funny ones, intensely sad and ones that should, at least they do me, engender great venom and bile against their targets.

It might also serve as an explanation to people about what you do in that darkened room for so long each day. "Umm, what is this bloogger thing then dear? " and instead of tirades about the Citizen Journalist you can just point them to this selection.

I have not read the book, but knowing a bit about the blogosphere, ISTM that there is at least the potential for some great reading here. There is such a wide variety of blogs out there on all sorts of subjects that you're bound to come across some real gems. After all blogging has allowed anyone armed with a computer and a 'net connection to spew out prose. This book might help you track down some of the gems. I think that Tim writes an interesting blog (hence my link to it) so hopefully his skills as an editor will have made the book worthwhile. It might make a good Xmas present for someone...

The Terrorism Bill 2005: A threat to blogs/websites?

2005-10-31T23:21:00.001Z

Update: I got it wrong on the committee stage of the bill. The committee stage of this bill takes place over 2 days, the 2nd and 3rd of November. See this link. Sorry for the mistake.

I confess to having taken my off the ball on this one. I didn't realise the Terrorism Bill 2005 (yes another one!) was in parliament until I heard about the 2nd reading and then was slow off the mark to write about it...

Spy.org.uk have berated the British blogosphere for failing to cover/analyse the Terrorism Bill 2005, which, in addition to enabling 90 days detention of terrorist suspects without charge, they argue threatens websites, bloggers and libraries due to the:

vaguely defined offences of "inciting or glorifying" terrorism and distributing a terrorist publication, combined with
the power of a police constable, acting on his own opinion that the publication is "terrorism-related", to issue a notice to a publisher to remove or modify an article within 2 days or be deemed to have endorsed the article, thus rendering you unable to raise the defence that it was provided only in the course of providing an electronic service, you didn't know it was terrorism related AND you did not endorse it.

More detail can be found here and at the Magna Carta Plus weblog. Note that the committee stage of this bill will be over on Wednesday 2nd November. Time to make use of WriteToThem...

New "refuse" pledge setup by No2ID

2005-10-27T20:53:00.001+01:00

Following on from the earlier 'refuse' and 'resist' pledges, No2ID have set up a new 'refuse' pledge. As with the first one, pledgers pledge to refuse to register for a card/on the database and to donate £10 to a legal defence fund. This time the aim is to get 15,000 signatures by January 8th 2006. The first one achieved its target of 10,000 signatures by the 18th of July and totalled over 11,368 signatures by the time it closed on the 9th October.

British residents who oppose the cards and have not yet signed a pledge are invited to sign either the 'resist' pledge or the second 'refuse' pledge (this one aimed at those who feel unable to run the risks associated with refusing). But please do not sign more than one pledge!

(See also here).