Kiddie Cards

Meg Hillier, an under secretary at the Home Office, is quite cheery about the idea of ID cards for 14-year olds and children as young as six surrendering their biometrics as part of a scheme that the Conservatives will find "impossible to pick apart".

Some people are dismayed by this whole ID card thing, but I'm confident that it's only a temporary measure.

Unlike the Collars of Obedience that come next.

Newspeak Update

Kids: Join the Spies!

From The Telegraph:

Children as young as eight have been recruited by councils to "snoop" on neighbours and report petty offences such as littering.

Somewhere the shade of Churchill is weeping.

Missing the Point

This story from ThisIsLondon.co.uk on local councils' using armies of snitches, stoolies, informants, and grasses to spy on ordinary citizens contains this magic sentence:

Critics said the latest scheme could easily be abused and encourage a culture of bin spies and curtain twitchers.

"Could easily be abused"? Would someone be kind enough to point out that the entire idea is an abuse in and of itself?

Bill of Wrongs

A cross-party committee of MPs has endorsed the idea of introducing a Bill of Rights to Great Britain.

This is one of those ideas which seems attractive on first sight, but on the second makes any sane person run a mile and then hunt around for a shovel to beat the thing to death with. In abstract, an American style Bill of Rights is a great thing. It's a document that was brilliantly conceived and has stood the test of time as one of the great works of human freedom. However, Britain is not America and this is not 1791.

For one thing, a Bill of Rights as the Americans have is impossible to have in Britain because under the parliamentary system no act of Parliament is binding on any future Parliament, which can rescind previous legislation at will. For a Bill of Rights to be effective, a constitutional convention would have to be convened and the whole of British law, tradition and precedent would have to be reduced to a single document. And I can't see that happening anytime soon in any honest fashion.

The second reason is that this is not a true Bill of Rights. The American Bill of Rights and its English precursor from 1688 were essentially records of negative rights that enumerated limits on state power. They regarded the rights of the people to be granted by God and all powers not specifically surrendered by mandate to the state remain with the people. This is clearly shown by not saying things like "The people have free speech" or a free press or the right to bear arms, but rather that the state does not have the power to infringe upon these rights. Period.

The proposed Bill does not wipe away the hated EU Human Rights Act, but rather sets it in stone and elaborates upon it with all sorts of other "rights", such as "health, housing, education and an adequate standard of living". Indeed it is such a shopping list that if it went any further it would have a "right" that would be an insult to all womankind. This is a socialist manifesto written by men who regard rights as a grant of the state, not the Almighty, looking to be implemented in such a way that it would be no more questioned or repealed than the Ten Commandments –by the people, opposition or Monarch, that is, since the provisions of the Bill allow the Party to run roughshod over these so-called rights as it sees fit.

If this is a "Bill of Rights," then it is of the sort I'd write for my dog rather than for free men. No, I take that back. My dog doesn't deserve to be treated with such disrespect. This Bill is nothing more or less than a promise made to a bullock without guarantee to be treated well as it's fattened and then slaughtered humanely come Michaelmas.

Against this I will happily settle for Magna Carta et al any day.

Backfire in Progress

Basking in the glow of how well 24 opening laws eradicated public drunkenness, the British government now wants to charge people for driving into town in order to "encourage local businesses" and to treat people who put enough rubbish in their bins to leave the lid ajar worse than drunks and shoplifters.

Standby for town centres turning into wastelands, fly tipping reaching epic proportions, and the government acting all surprised about it.

Social engineering: Where goals trump results every time.

Climate Cops

Join the Spies Climate Cops and help catch thought criminals fight global warming.

It's for this sort of thing that cuffs on the earhole were invented.

Ingsoc Acres

The Register has a lot of fun with this report that the EU has abolished the acre as a legal unit of measurement. The extended gag of treating anyone who is bothered by this as a paranoid Colonel Blimp living in the past while making mountains out of molehills is worth a smile until one notices that this abolition of 800 years of English history came about via an EU directive without any debate or consent by the people, their parliament or their monarch.

It involves violating something called sovereignty and subverting an institution called democracy and suddenly the joke isn't so funny and that molehill isn't so small.

Nursery Nazis

What's the greatest threat facing Britain today? Jihadists? Knife-wielding thugs? A resurgent Russia?

Nope; racist toddlers.

And oh, yes: Eat your peas!

Update: A neat riposte from Classical Values:

Wow. Does this mean that the next time a Muslim child says "yuck" to ham (or, say, to shrimp and shellfish) that he'll be condemned as "racist"?

James Hansen: Ecocommissar

A Bigger Haystack

Over at the Guardian Cory Doctorow looks at the bumper crop of CCTV cameras that infests Britain and concludes that not only are they a gross imposition on freeborn Englishmen, but that they are self-defeating because beyond a certain point additional information actually confuses more than it clarifies.

I understand what he means. Every time I add another channel to my RSS feeds I feel like I'll never get through that fire hose of news.

War is Peace, Etc.

Headline from The Telegraph:

Tougher terror laws and ID cards actually enhance freedoms, claims Gordon Brown

And the chocoration has been raised ten grammes

Motoring in Airstrip One

Welcome to Mr. Gordon Brown ectopian towns. All Outer Party members are informed that all (temporarily) private motor cars must be parked on the periphery of the town, that a fee will be charged for this space, driving during peak hours will result in further charges, and that if you drive out of town you will be fined.

Remember, Freedom is Slavery.

Ingsoc Canada

One of the tropes of science fiction involves fugitives from a future fascist American police state fleeing over the border to a free Canada. Now, thanks to a Canadian Human Rights Commission that operates like a star chamber, it looks as though the flow is more likely to be in reverse.

Mind you, if The New York Times has its way, there might not be any place to go.

Death Throes

From The Telegraph:

The notion that Big Government (whether in the central or the local form) could solve all social problems, and through its interventions achieve absolute justice and harmony, is collapsing. And in its last moments, in its disbelief and agony at its own failure, it is lashing out in every direction: if the earlier measures haven't dealt with crime/public disorder/anti-social behaviour/under-performing hospitals/insufficient recycling, we must add yet more layers of official interference.

If government fails to achieve its objectives, it must be because it isn't doing enough, isn't being sufficiently pro-active - so let's pass another law, bring in a further layer of intrusion, take away another dimension of personal responsibility from community life.

But somehow, everything that government does makes things worse: leads to more perverse consequences and unforeseen complications. And the panic increases and the desperation grows and we get yet more laws and rules and targets and misapplied regulations.

Seems to me that our choices are a return to sanity or run like hell when the facade collapses.

Freedom of Speech RIP

Remember that boy who was cited for calling Scientology a "cult", but then the Crown dropped the charges after the public outcry? It may not have been the "victory" some thought it was. According to Canada's National Post,

It was quickly pointed out by civil libertarians that the eventual happy outcome did nothing to reverse the consequences of the initial error. If expressive materials at a public protest can be confiscated pending two weeks of review by prosecutors, then not much is left of the right to protest, practically speaking. What few in Britain have pointed out is how vague and pathetic the text of the Public Order Act is. Objectively, one cannot say that the police officers acting as a praetorian guard for Scientology were overstepping their bounds under the act. No one ever calls a religion a "cult" without intending to insult it, and any "alarm or distress" thereby resulting must entirely be in the eye and mind of the beholder. The boy was, under the act, arguably quite guilty.

It constitutes no "victory" for freedom of expression that he was let off arbitrarily just because the public took his side against a secretive and widely ridiculed religious group. On the contrary: the police succeeded in communicating their real message to those who might wish to imitate him. Watch what you say. We have enough power to give you a hard time, whether the crown backs us up in the end or not. And make damned sure your targets are relatively unpopular, or you might not find so many columnists and activists leaping to your defence.

And so freedom of speech gives way to self-censorship.

Carbon Cards

The Environmental Audit Committee has recommended that everyone in Britain be issued with a "carbon credit card" so that that Outer Party members can be more effectively controlled the country's carbon emissions can be reduced and help Britain worship Blessed Gaia Save the Planet^tm.

Treating carbon dioxide as a pollutant is a totalitarian's dream. Since carbon dioxide is involved in every from of combustion imaginable, it is theoretically possible to ration, tax and regulate everything up to and including breathing.

The shade of Stalin must be kicking himself for not thinking of it.

Le Grand Frère Vous Observe

Planning a night on the town in Paris? Then plan to be breathalysed–even if you're not driving.

Good to see that the French police have so much spare time now that the "youths" torching cars problem is under control.

Orwellian Logic

According to the head of Scotland Yard's Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office (Viido), CCTV is utterly useless in detecting or preventing crime or for convicting criminals.

The solution (All together now!): More cameras and a national database!

Somewhere the shade of Stalin smiles as if upon a little child.

It's All In The Database

I love this nasty little bit of tyranny courtesy of the BBC. It even has the infamous knock on the door.

Just goes to show what they think of Outer Party members down Broadcasting House.

Wikipedia's Memory Hole

Lawrence Solomon over at the National Post relates his problems in writing a page for Wikipedia relating to global warming and how the "consensus" is anything but, yet all of his changes kept getting deleted by one "Tabletop" so that it conformed to the apocalyptic orthodoxy:

Tabletop, it turns out, has another name: Kim Dabelstein Petersen. She (or he?) is an editor at Wikipedia. What does she edit? Reams and reams of global warming pages. I started checking them. In every instance I checked, she defended those warning of catastrophe and deprecated those who believe the science is not settled. I investigated further. Others had tried to correct her interpretations and had the same experience as I -- no sooner did they make their corrections than she pounced, preventing Wikipedia readers from reading anyone's views but her own. When they protested plaintively, she wore them down and snuffed them out.

By patrolling Wikipedia pages and ensuring that her spin reigns supreme over all climate change pages, she has made of Wikipedia a propaganda vehicle for global warming alarmists. But unlike government propaganda, its source is not self-evident. We don't suspend belief when we read Wikipedia, as we do when we read literature from an organization with an agenda, because Wikipedia benefits from the Internet's cachet of making information free and democratic. This Big Brother enforces its views with a mouse.

This illustrates one of the reasons why Wikipedia, though a valuable research tool, has to be taken with a dose of salt the size of the Bonneville Flats. I admire Wikipedia's directed democracy ideal for producing an online encyclopedia, but I also have doubts about how well it works in practice.

Generally, I've found it about as reliable as any other encyclopedia (which isn't much), but only for topics that are either completely non-controversial or benignly trivial. Even then, entries face the danger of either falling to a mob consensus that is nothing but a shared falsehood or of a wrong-headed "expert" bleating rubbish about a topic so obscure that no one else bothers to contradict him. Then, of course, there's the annoyance of hacking and other vandalism. Now we find that there is the added danger of bullying "editors" who act as self-appointed officers of the Ministry of Truth.

Doubleplus ungood.

Compulsory Volunteerism

I thought that this story about a new code making sure that beach donkeys in Britain are treated properly was innocuous up to this paragraph (emphasis added):

The code, drawn up by the British Equine Veterinary Association (Beva) and the Donkey Sanctuary, is voluntary.

Fair enough. Private regulation, especially when voluntary, is always preferable to government regulation backed by legal prosecution. But look at the very next paragraph:

However, owners who break it risk an improvement notice and subsequent prosecution under the Animal Welfare Act if action is not taken.

So, it's "voluntary" as in follow the code or face government prosecution.

Someone send Beva a dictionary, please.

Terminal Condition

CCTV cameras on every street corner and (probably) half the loos in Britain not oppressive enough for you? Then nip over to Terminal 5 at Heathrow, where you can experience having your fingerprints compulsorily taken in the name of "security". For added enjoyment, ask the courteous staff how any of this pointless invasion of privacy is going to keep a Jihadist from climbing the fence and watch how fast you're subjected to a cavity search.

Just goes to show what happens when you approach a problem by having the cart jammed hard in front of the horse, strip off the wheels, and then shoot the horse.

A Modest Proposal

Lamperd of Canada has a modest idea for improving airline safety in these troubled time: Force all passengers to wear bracelets that allow the stewardesses to taser them by remote control.

I suspect that the owners of Lamperd have a great deal of stock in railway companies.

Big Brother in a Box

I think I'll stick with satellite.

This Pot is Getting Warm

John Lettice over at The Register has the perfect summing up of Labour's plans to incrementally introduce identity cards:

Boil a frog.

The Proms Are Double-Plus Ungood

Margaret Hodge, the "culture" minister, claims that the Proms are inappropriate as they are thoughtcrime do not promote "new British values."

So, flag-waving; patriotism; singing "Jerusalem", "Land of Hope and Glory", or "Rule Britannia"; or even innocent enjoyment will no longer be allowed in New Labour's glorious utopia.

No doubt this sort of thing is more what she has in mind.

Plastic PM

Having found Islamofascism, drunken hooliganism, violent crime, illegal immigration, decaying public services, a starved military and the British public's loathing of the EU too much to handle, Mr. Gordon Brown has found an issue he can bring the iron fist down on: plastic bags.

I want to make it clear that if government compulsion is needed to make the change, we will take the necessary steps.

Good Lord. Less than a year in office and Mr. Brown has revealed himself in one sentence as a cross between Vladimir Putin and Jimmy Carter.

Water on the Brain

Having established that it has absolute control over the Outer Party members and proles by making tobacco, fatty foods and God knows what else double-plus ungood, the British government will now extends its dead hand over the counterrevolutionary evil of bottled water-- at least, if the Thoughtpoliceman natural resource commissioner has his way:

We have to make people think that it's unfashionable just as we have with smoking. We need a similar campaign to convince people that this is wrong.

And the environment minister chimes in his support, saying that the bourgeois menace of bottled water:

(B)orders on being morally unacceptable.

Expect to soon see Emmanuel Goldstein holding up a bottle Evian at the Two Minute Hate.

Lights Out

In a brilliant piece of counterproductive thinking, the Ministry of Plenty British government plans to turn off street lamps in suburban areas to placate the wrath of Blessed Gaia save energy and reduce carbon emissions. Stumbling about in the dark will be something that Outer Party members and proles will just have to learn to live with.

Welcome to the 17^th century.

Strings? There Were Strings?

If you're in Britain and unemployed, the new housing minister wants to bar you from council housing. This would be a nice idea if it were a more a matter of going back to the concept of personal responsibility rather than a government demonstrating that its largess is conditional on obedience.

The Party giveth and the Party taketh away-- if you don't toe the line. Just don't act all surprised about it.

A Chilling Effect

British publicans stand to lose £250 million a year in the face of the European Union's proposed ban on outdoor heaters.

I'm beginning to suspect that not only is the EU an anti-democratic, totalitarian regime, but that it's also stocked with crypto-temperance crusaders.

Newspeak Update

"Mum" and "dad" have been removed from the latest edition of the Dictionary of Newspeak because it is wildly improbable that children are not being raised by homosexuals.

The Love That Is Required to Speak Its Name

A government survey has revealed that only one percent of the population is homosexual, though this result has been received with scepticism, as three percent of the population responded by giggling.

Be that as it may, what I find interesting is this quote from the Telegraph article:

Ministers intend to introduce an annual count once the survey method has been improved. They say they need the information to plan public service provision more accurately.

What sort of "public service provision" requires this sort of information does not bear thinking about. But it is ironic that a political movement that was ostensibly based on the idea that a what a person does in private is private is now the cause of the government prying into our bedrooms on an annual basis.

War is Peace, Ignorance is Strength, Freedom is Slavery

Daily Mail headline:

Government renames Islamic terrorism as 'anti-Islamic activity' to woo Muslims

In addition, water is dry, fire is cold, and up is down.

I was going to do this as an update to this morning's previous post on New Labour covering its eyes and hoping the Jihadists will go away, but this Orwellian touch deserves a post of its own.

Banged Up

It was Chekhov who said,

If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be registered with the police even if it's a pantomine "bang" gun.

Prisoners and Chips

Faced with overcrowded prisons and security issues for electronic tagging, New Labour, having decided that things like building more prisons or meting out proper punishment are too much like hard work, is now considering implanting prisoners with microchips as if they were so many dogs.

"Dog" is the proper metaphor here, because it is only by taking such an attitude that a government would consider doing such a thing to anyone who is other than an animal or slave. And given the way New Labour has approached an organ donor shortage by introducing organ confiscation, it won't be long before the "advantages" of such a system will be offered to the public in a Hobson's choice of "volunteer or we'll force you."

Just remember as you roll up your sleeve: It's for your own good.

Levant Update

More on the Ezra Levant interrogation as he comments on the insane logic of what traffics in Canada under the Orwellian label of human rights: A murder cannot be compelled to apologise for his actions, but a publisher can.