Vox Polis

At work we would often have a bet on what newspapers would have on their front covers. Nine times out of ten you could tell what was going to be on the Daily Express’ front cover - a story on Princess Diana. For nearly 10 years the Daily Express has relentlessly pushed the Diana story. It is now time this stopped.

If the Daily Express was a person, we’d probably say they have more than an unhealthy obsession with Diana. More likely we’d get them professional help for their obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Now that there has been an official inquiry, I would like to believe that they would finally accept the outcome. But like all obsessive-compulsives, it will never be enough. It is time to move on.

A YouGov poll commissioned by The Telegraph has revealed that a significant proportion of the population would refuse to accept an ID card even when faced with a fine or prison term. The government have claimed in the past that there was widespread support for the scheme (although it’s not hard to imagine a survey that would generate a favourable result: Q - “Would you accept an ID card if it would stop terrorism and prevent identity fraud”; A - “Yes”. That both those claims are widely discredited won’t cause an unscrupulous and well funded statistician to lose much sleep).

39% of respondents to the YouGov poll said that they were opposed to ID cards, of those opposed 21% would be prepared to face a fine. Given the UKs current population of approximately 60 million that means that the government could be forced to take action against 4.8 million people. Of course it’s very easy to be bullish when filling out a questionnaire so the reality will no doubt be a rather smaller revolt but even a million people refusing to take a card could be enough to turn this into Labour’s Poll Tax. No politician wants to be associated with a policy that leads to rioting but so far Mr Brown seems to be as keen on ID cards as his soon to be predecessor.

Blair has given into criticism and decided to reduce the Trident warheads by 20%. Now we can only destroy the world 5 times over.

According to the new white paper, the replacement for Trident is only going to cost £25bn - the Government’s going to save us £2bn by only having 3 subs instead of 4.

Great. We can all sleep sound at night knowing that we have a deterrent against all those Communist states. Urmm I mean terrorists France rogue states.

Only 212 days to go until our pubs become empty and our streets are littered with fag butts.

In Scotland the bars may now be smoke free, but they’re also usually free of people as everyone loiters outside. In fact you almost need to smoke to talk to your friends.

Looks like Blair’s “rights with responsibilities” agenda is going to take physical form with a real social contract. We saw some of these ideas floated back in September in Miliband’s doomed wiki experiment, where Dave showed us his environmental contract. But this social contract will extend the idea to health, policing and education. One example given by the Guardian is that you will only have a hip operation if you lose weight.

This idea is different from what a social contract, in the philosophical sense, is meant to achieve. Nosemonkey’s got a good article on this so I won’t repeat it here. Although I do think that Nosemonkey’s wrong in seeing this as a Hobbesian contract. I think it is closer to the Rousseauian idea that Nosemonkey seems to support. Don’t forget that Blair is a big supporter of positive liberty (in the Berlin sense; he even wrote a letter to Berlin explaining his ideas). This social contract seems to be based on self-government, but is the application of the Government’s will instead of the general will. We need to realise what is good for us. Only then can we be free. We will be “forced to be free”.

Although the uses of the social contract to explain how we developed out of the state of nature is interesting (although only as a thought experiment), what worries me about these proposals is that it forces the citizen to do the things that the government believes are good for the citizen to be doing. This is paternalism at its worst. Although you can argue that there is a choice - a person who needs a hip operation can refuse to lose weight and live in pain. This is not a choice that a rational person would choose. Questions arise such as do we have a moral responsibility to treat that person? Or in education, do we have a moral responsibility to teach all children at school? What about policing - shouldn’t we have a right to protection?

I’m sure it won’t be too long before the contract is extended to everything from security to voting. You serve in Iraq and we’ll protect you from terrorists. You vote for Labour and we’ll give you a peerage. - Brown might need the last one to win the next election with policy plans such as these.

I’ve been reading with some interests the recent coverage by the media of the souring relations in some Universities between the Students’ Union (SU) and the Christian Union (CU). It all boils down to whether CU members can be asked to sign a declaration of their belief in God before they can join. In the SUs eyes, this breaks equal opportunity policies, which states that membership has to be open to all.

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Speculation continues as to what John Reid is plotting. Why go to such lengths for self-promotion if you’re not after something?

Reid’s not in a position to challenge Brown and he knows it. The Labour party voting rules means that Brown’s got it pretty much sown up. If it’s the Deputy position he wants, I’m not convinced that the Labour party will allow Scots to dominate both top jobs - it clearly wouldn’t be a vote winner.

Could he be after a seat at the table under a Brown government? Clearly he would like one, but would Gordon really be that accommodating to the Blairites? I’m not convinced.

Then what is it? Perhaps he’s preparing for a future leadership contest. If Gordon loses the next election, which is quite possible, then perhaps he wants to be there to take the reins. He may be a few years older than Brown, but that won’t necessarily stop him.

The government’s latest venture into citizen interaction and the crazy world of teh Interwebs has just been bought to my attention.  With the assistance of mySociety.org (the folks responsible for PledgeBank and many other worthy projects) Downing Street have launched an online petitioning system.  The site’s currently in beta but seems to be working well (although at the time of writing it’s down for maintenance) and is attracting a lot of interest.  There are several worthwhile petitions already active; I’ve signed up to scrapping ID cards and fair-use copying rights so far.  As you might expect, the Internet’s lunatic fringe have also been busy - if you’re so inclined you can back the castration of paedophiles and ask the government to intervene to keep the manufacture of HP Sauce in the UK.  Whether all this interacting with the proles will actually have any effect on government policy is, of course, highly debatable but at least it’s an opportunity to bask in the warm glow of not being complete apathetic.

“We all suffer crime, the poorest and vulnerable most of all, it is the duty of government to protect them. But we can make choices in spending too. And instead of wasting hundreds of millions of pounds on compulsory ID cards…let that money provide thousands of extra police officers on the beat in our local communities. But the truth is that the best two crime prevention policies are a job and a stable family.”

Who said this?  Who else but Tony Blair in 1995.  Thanks to Peter Black for the insight.

After the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) last week the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) are the latest organisation to jump on what’s fast becoming a bandwagon of support for fair use copying rights. Taking a slightly different tack the BPI have suggested that fair use could be allowed via an authorization granted by rights holders rather than through a change in the law. The BPI have already announced that they won’t prosecute anyone for copying music from e.g. a CD to an MP3 player.

Whilst authorization would in a practical sense get rid of the problem there are a number of issues that it doesn’t solve. The first issue is constitutional, as Kay Withers of the IPPR put it “It’s good that the BPI have said they’re not going to prosecute but it should be the government deciding what the consumers and citizens rights are, rather than citizens.” The second issue is the question of whether and how this authorization can be granted retrospectively, I don’t see how changes to the licensing of CDs that have already been sold can be enacted without contacting all rights holders involved which would clearly be a mammoth task. The third issue is ‘future-proofing’, the BPI only speak on issues concerning music but the legality of personal copies of DVDs (and who knows what else in the long term) is also in question. All these problems can be solved by the government enshrining in law the right of UK citizens to make reasonable use of works protected by copyright.

As a bleak side-note - whilst I was writing this post it occurred to me that after the changes brought about by the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 which made all offences arrestable you could, presumably, be arrested, DNA sampled etc. for carrying an iPod that had music stored on that you’d ripped from your own CDs. Just something to think about.

Via Out-Law.com.