Manual Cant, Part II

The Indifferent isn't showing any signs of loosening its grip on my Manual Cant Award for Masturbatory Self-righteousness.

"It is a fact of considerable importance that ... in more and more fields of policy nearly all the recognised 'experts' are, almost by definition, persons who are in favour of the principles underlying the policy. This is indeed one of the factors which tend to make so many contemporary developments self-accelerating. The politician who, in recommending some further development of current policies, claims that 'all the experts favour it,' is often perfectly honest, because only those who favour the development have become experts[;] the uncommitted ... are not counted as experts." - F.A. Hayek

In other words, anyone who has troubled to acquaint himself, insofar as that is possible, with the tremendous complexity of the science of climate change (such as it is), had probably decided, long before studying so much as a single graph or satellite image, exactly what the problem was and how to go about solving it; the science (such as it is) of climate change merely provides the excuse.

Brown vs Rule of Law

So Gordon wasted no time in promising a change in the law following the acquittal of that deeply unpleasant pair, Nick Griffin and Mark Collett. Gosh. I am, in the words of Die Hard 2's Carmine Lorenzo, stunned. I gotta lie down. If there is insufficient evidence to convict, or if a jury can't be persuaded to convict under the existing law, why, just change the law! Surely there can be no doubt that these two are criminals? The law must surely be at fault if we can't make people like them prisoners of conscience? No, ridiculing them and exposing their arguments for the thinly-disguised bigotry and ignorant proto-supremacy that they clearly are will simply not do! They must be made examples of, so that people will learn that it's only OK to believe what you believe if you exist in sufficient numbers to make it politically convenient to support you.

They will, as someone, somewhere, quite rightly said, keep trying to put this guy in prison even if they have to make it a crime to be called Nick and Griffin at the same time. Which puts me in the awkward position of having to support this cockroach.

Like, actually, Saddam untied Iraq, man....

The Manual Cant Award for Masturbatory Self-righteousness, had I not just invented it this moment, would be won consistently by the Indifferent for the increasingly implausible exercises in shrill hysteria that it appears to believe constitute headlines these days. Clearly believing that function should follow form, the Indy has, since its reincarnation as a tabloid (or fraudsheet, as I like to call them), steadily lost all the characteristics of a quality newspaper in favour of nuance-free war ranting and the continued employment of Robert Fisk.

All that headline means, after all, is that yesterday was Remembrance Sunday and there happens to be an extant combat situation in which British troops are participating and in which the enemy chose not to observe Remembrance Sunday. Apparently this proves the Indy right about the Iraq war. Go Indy! By "futile", can we infer that in your desperate anti-American zeal you've managed to convince yourself that Iraq would be a better, nicer, fluffier place with the bloodthirsty tyrant still at the wheel and that your strident moralising serves any other purpose than providing your editorial staff with the sub-erotic thrill of "righteous" dissent?

Nothing to hide. Everything to fear

An illuminating conversation with a friend yesterday.

The fast encroaching surveillance society has worried and infuriated me for some time now, the explosive proliferation of CCTV cameras - now one for every 14 people - being only the most obvious example on a list that includes the terrifyingly imminent National Identity Register; the NHS database to which one appears to need at best only a nodding acquaintance with the practice of medicine to qualify for access and which will by law contain the entirety of an individual's medical records; the stated policy of the Serious Organised Crime Agency (which doesn't require its agents to swear the standard British Policeman's oath but does empower them to work in secret, unmarked and nonuniformed, with the power of arrest explicitly denied the similarly-attired intelligence servcices: in this respect SOCA is indistinguishable from a secret police) of reviewing public- and private-sector databases to find data-matching opportunities that could highlight suspicious behaviour by individuals that implies that they are involved in organised or financial crime; the use of individually-registered data cards as transport tickets enabling the tracking of individual movements and travel patterns and the accompanying fiscal punishment in the form of higher prices meted out to those that prefer untrackable paper tickets; the imminent passing of the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Bill which would prevent "listed" individuals (don't ask me what the criteria are for being listed, or why there is no oversight of such listing, or why there appears to be no legal recourse for those accidentally or maliciously listed for no good reason) from engaging in regulated activities, among the practical effects of which would be to enable the state to elbow its way into every personal transaction such as the paying of a trusted party to look after a relative without both parties involved having first gained offical sanction - I could go on. Well, I have, rather.

The most worrying aspect of this is not these transparent attempts by the state to control every aspect of everyone's lives in the most minute detail, although that is, in the scheme of things, a cause for grave concern; the most worrying aspect is the ignorant, incurious, blindly trusting acquiescence with which the majority of the populace greets each fresh assault on its self-ownership. The mantra is, of course, "if you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear" - the motto of fascists everywhere. It is, needless to say, only true if a) the thousands of individuals involved in the day-to-day running of the state's institutions are, to a man, utterly incorruptible; and b) the systems and technologies behind all these means of surveillance work perfectly, all the time. These are, I don't think I'm being unfair in suggesting, two monstrous unlikelihoods, even if you believe that there are people with nothing to hide - which there aren't. Everyone has something to hide. It might not entail blowing up rush-hour trains or sneaking back into a foreign country to ride its benefits gravy-train, but everyone has things that they'd rather not be made known to anyone else, particularly officialdom. The seemingly inexorable rise of the surveillance state will increasingly make such harmless secrecy (read: dignity) impossible.

Neither do people seem overly concerned about the rapidly-changing relationship between the individual and the state. The proliferation of surveillance on this level suggests nothing so much as an abandonment of the presumption of innocence: if in a free society only suspects are surveilled, then we are all becoming suspects - moreover of crimes we have not yet committed. Not so free.

The fatuous Charles Clarke, who clearly still hasn't either contrived to bump into a razor or found the time to grow a full beard, despite the considerable easing of his schedule in recent months, made perhaps the most ludicrous of all such claims in the middle of a Question Time of considerable vapidity last week. Casually dropping into his point the recent death of his mother (yes, Charles, our instinctive human sympathy will easily over-ride our intelligence), he asserted that the NHS database was absolutely vital because it enabled doctors as quickly as possible to access information about any drug courses a patient may be on; his mother, he said, had not had such a facility available to her ... it was coyly left hanging whether this had resulted in her passing.

What nonsense, anyway. If people are taking drugs which may cause an adverse reaction to others, or to a surgical procedure, or anything like that, why can't they simply carry a card which says so? Why can't doctors who prescribe these fabled drugs inform the patient that they are at risk if given other drugs in an emergency situation and therefore they must make this known to any other attending physician?

Because they can't be trusted to, of course - despite the fact that they'd only be putting their own life at risk.

This notion of cradle-to-grave tracking has more in common with the notion of cradle-to-grave welfare than may at first seem apparent. Just as the idea of a national health service begets the enforcement of nationalised health standards ("Why should we pay for your lifestyle?"), so the notion that the state will look after you from birth to death inculcates in people the idea that only the state can look after them, and that whatever the state wants to do in the ostensible furtherance of this aim must be not only sage but also benign.

Cradle-to-grave will keep you in the cradle until you go to your grave.

The "Speed Kills" cash cow

This is what happens when you're slack, like I am, and let slide various things up over which you can't really be bothered to get worked (as Churchill might have said): it all happens at once.

First of all, Diane Abbott. Miss Abbott is not someone for whom I ordinarily would have a great deal of time, icon of the Left and die-hard Brownite as she is. Nonetheless, seeing her every week on This Week, with never so much as a glimpse of sofa between Michael Portillo and her, has left me with a certain respect for her; muddled and misguided though she may well be, she is articulate, sharp and honest (not to mention highly amusing when appearing on This Week at least halfway in her cups).

Not all the time, unfortunately. At this point I would link to the article that has exercised me, but it was in the Evening Stranded which rather pathetically doesn't archive its opinion columns; I've looked on Diane's site but it hasn't appeared there, at least yet. It was an article about speeding, in which Miss Abbott professed herself serenely unconcerned with the habit of endlessly ripping off drivers for minor (and usually accidental) infractions of ridiculous laws, indeed claiming, in a remarkable display of straw-manning, that is was both justified and necessary.

The crux of her argument was that since the widespread introduction of speed cameras and the imposition of arbitrary speeding fines, they have had the desired effect and brought speeding down, and that therefore it is pure selfishness on the part of the anti-camera lobby to gripe about the methods employed by this government to fund its endless schemes and initiatives (she didn't mention the last bit, of course; the speed camera does exactly what it appears to do and the millions pouring into local governments' coffers are merely an embarrassing by-product of the system which - hey! - might as well be put to "good" use). She suggests that it is absurd for criminals (as she sees speeding drivers) to complain about the spread of speed cameras, and likens it to the notion of shoplifters getting upset when stores employ extra security guards.

Of course, there is a mendacious elision, as it were, at work here. Speeding is not a crime, per se. There is nothing intrinsically wrong, morally speaking, with moving across the surface of the planet above a certain speed. In that sense it is not like theft, which we hold to be fundamentally wrong, to infringe on another's rights to property: moving above a certain arbitrarily-defined speed does not automatically infringe on another's rights.

Why, then, is speeding illegal? Naturally, because it is held to be dangerous: it is held to cause accidents which cause harm and injury to others, which does infringe on others' rights, and insofar as that is true then it is perfectly proper that we should restrict speeding in order to minimise the likelihood of causing harm or injury to others through motor accidents.

But exactly how far is it true? Diane grandly informs us, as I say, that since the widespread introduction of speed cameras speeding had inexorably declined. That may well be so, but the actual objective of speed cameras is not to reduce speeding (in itself not undesireable) but to reduce accidents which, it is claimed, are caused by speeding. So you'd think Diane would rather trumpet the achievement of the intended objective than the rather obvious and inductive news that speed cameras reduce speeding. But she can't, of course, since accidents have not been reduced; only speeding.

Speed does not kill. Bad driving kills. Poor concentration kills. Lack of anticipation kills. Poor judgment of speed and distance kills. Drunkenness kills. Insufficiently stringent examination of new drivers kills. The ridiculous situation, whereby a learner is not allowed to practise on the motorway and so generally his first experience of driving on the motorway will be alone, as a newly-qualified driver, kills. Irresponsibility kills. I should far rather that the roads were filled with well-driven cars at speeds higher than are presently allowed than that the present situation be allowed to continue. But it will be, because, as usual, the government believes that as long as it noisily proclaims its committment to achieving an objective, and makes a big fuss about how it's going to do so, in the end it doesn't really matter whether it genuinely achieves it or not, as long as people think they are doing so - and in this case, of course, there is the added bonus of the constant influx of fines from speed cameras. I am incidentally willing to bet that cameras cause as many accidents as they allegedly prevent, when drivers who are proceeding at a speed entirely appropriate to the conditions which happens to be higher than the posted limit (which doesn't, of course, vary day or night, rain or shine, fog or clear, busy or quiet) notice one ahead of them and are forced to brake for no reason, or when constantly being on the look out for them, or when constantly worrying about creeping over the limit and so spending far too much time watching the speedometer and not enough watching the road.

Gosh, that took a while. Can we take my bitter tract on the surveillance state into which we have blindly wandered as read, for the moment?