The eighth circle of Hell

Soviet propaganda encouraged collective education of even the youngest children, and family ties were often represented as a bourgeois survival.
Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism

I often fail to see the point of the mainstream media, except that sometimes it lets its mask slip enough to provide a useful glimpse of the il-liberal ideology which now dominates Western societies.

Occasionally however, the MSM manages, against type, to be a force for (genuinely) liberal good. While one may quibble with her proposed solution, Camilla Cavendish’s report last week on so-called child protection is essential reading (see parts 1, 2, 3 and 4). Cavendish rightly points out that what is done to children in cases where they are removed against their wishes from their parents itself amounts to abuse.

The whole nightmarish situation is sadly predictable. Take the following ingredients:
• a healthcare system in which access to most medical goods and services, even if privately paid for, depends entirely on obtaining the approval of a doctor;
• a profession which has become hugely powerful, monopolised and immune to competitive forces;
• a ludicrously over-idealised image of medical and social work professionals, according to which they are akin to benevolent priests, rather than ordinary people with normal motives for money and power;
• an ideology which criticises the family, but praises the welfare state;
• a social work system in which clients are answerable to professionals, rather than vice versa.

The result should be no surprise: a situation where, if a group of social workers and/or doctors get it into their heads that a parent is guilty of ‘abuse’ (which now apparently includes categories that have nothing to do with physical harm) it is fairly safe to assume an outcome in which the child never resides with its parents again. Cavendish describes a world

where courts need no criminal conviction to remove your child, only the word of a psychiatrist or doctor, and can deny you the chance to call any expert in your defence. A world that uses the “welfare of the child” to gag you from discussing your case. Where even if you prove yourself innocent on appeal, your children may already have been adopted: in which case you will never be allowed to contact them again.

A world where many children “were treated far worse in care ... some with a new bruise almost every time they came for supervised contact”. A world where “judges rely on reports by experts, social workers and guardians, many of whom are used to working together” and where “any expert, social worker or judge who makes mistakes, goes beyond their brief or is on a crusade against parents is virtually immune from scrutiny.”

The problem is that it has become taboo to suggest that the ‘caring’ professions are driven by motives other than the desire to do good. They are brilliant at trumpeting the claim that they have the true welfare of clients in mind, while arguing that clients themselves may well be acting on dubious motives. Plus we now have the fashionable ideology that individuals are often judged to be irrational by experts. So in a contest between clients and professionals, everyone — particularly, of course, other professionals — will tend to side with the professionals.

I made this point (in 1995) in The Power of Life or Death.

Merely suggesting that a doctor might have been acting malevolently appears to be regarded by the legal profession as dubious ... In the Cleveland Inquiry, the heavy-handed tactics of the two paediatricians at the centre of the controversy were criticised by a police surgeon, Dr Roberts, who argued that a child

“cannot distinguish between an assault carried out in a hospital room by a stranger (a doctor) and a similar experience elsewhere. I am concerned that some children will suffer lasting harm as a result of being subjected to examinations involving the use of force.”

Dr Roberts criticised paediatricians for being “prepared to countenance, or even commit, outrageous sexual assault of children in the hospital which has occurred in some cases in Cleveland.” The fact that she made clear her strong feelings on the subject was, interestingly, used to invalidate her criticisms. Counsel for the Inquiry advised the Chairman Lord Justice Butler-Sloss that the evidence of Dr Roberts was

“extremely and unnecessarily critical and contentious ... far from passing to planes of increasing authority and moderation it became more and more passionate in character and thus perhaps of less value ... We will not be urging you for a moment to adopt or accept her views, because we seek to stress throughout the vital importance of striving for middle ground, and obviously Dr Roberts does not stand on middle ground in regard to this issue.”

The result: Butler-Sloss ruled in favour of the professionals, asserting that they had “acted properly”.

In other words, if you get heated when expressing your outrage that child abuse by professionals is being legally sanctioned, your views will be ignored. (You will note I am trying to keep the tone of this post moderate, though I am sorely tempted to use the word atrocities. If reports from the press are true, what is happening here is as bad as anything that occurs in authoritarian societies.)

At the time, my book was ignored by the broadsheets — though ironically, the British Medical Journal reviewed it sympathetically — probably because it was regarded as too extreme, and out of step with the prevailing ‘bioethical’ consensus. How dare I criticise the respected and beloved medical profession, etc. Is it possible they are finally coming round to a similar perspective, thirteen years later?

Remember: experts are not neutral. They have their own agenda. If they are employed by the state, as most doctors effectively are, they will reflect the interests of the state, and/or those of their own profession. An organisation with power will act to expand that power. Assertions about doing things for people's ‘own good’ should be treated with as much scepticism as the claims of dictators that they are acting ‘for the people’. As O'Brien says in Orwell's 1984, “power is not a means, it is an end”. (More about the motivations of state agents here and here.)



In other news:
• Celia Green is giving a seminar on the 31st.
• Ian Grey has updated the campaign blog against full-time adult coercion (here is why it matters).
• Just spotted on Maggie's Farm: an interesting piece on the concept of ‘progressive’.

Highly anomalous

Former MP and Shadow Home Secretary David Davis has resigned his parliamentary seat, in protest at the recent vote to extend the period of possible detention without charge from 28 to 42 days, as well as at the larger issue of declining British civil liberties. In doing so, he is more or less the first politician to highlight this issue in a way that actually garners attention, at least since Labour came to power.

Come to that, I cannot remember the last time a politician resigned over a matter of principle, or on any other basis that reflected political beliefs rather than peer pressure.

Davis's behaviour is highly anomalous and anachronistic. 'Principles' are no longer regarded as relevant to twenty-first century politics, and certainly not principles as individualistic as 'liberty'. Public image and brand is what matters on the outside, and muddling through is what is done on the inside. Drawing attention to weaknesses or deficiencies is considered treacherous, and may be severely punished. Mr Davis is fortunate that his party has not (yet) totally abandoned him.

Some members of the il-liberal elite are of course in favour of reducing liberties, even if they take care to avoid saying so openly. As for the rest, Davis's act highlights their spinelessness and evasiveness. They are hardly likely to be grateful for the unflattering contrast it generates, and insults are only to be expected.

“An act of reckless egotism” - The Independent

“Has he gone mad?”; “A massive distraction” - Conservative Party *

“Mr Davis has never been a team player” - The Times

“Don David Quixote Davis ... skin as thin as a teenage ballerina's” - Daily Telegraph

The response of Dr. Brown, and those who think like him, is that Britain cannot use "a head-in-the-sand approach that ignores the fact that the world has changed". But ask yourself this: what is the primary underlying motivation of those who purport to believe this? Is it that they are genuinely concerned for the security of this country? Or is it that they think the bourgeoisie still has too much freedom, from the viewpoint of the collective?

Mr Davis's campaign website is here.

* * * * *

Mediocracy dislikes principles, with the possible exception of 'equality', i.e. that people should be regarded as identical. A principle is too much like a statement about objective reality. The idea that something might be important independently of current fashionable thinking — for example, sanctity of life, or lawyer-client confidentiality — conflicts with the consensus model of reality. A principle implies something which might need to be fought for, and this is inconsistent with mediocratic indifference.

People may of course find it easier to stick to something (e.g. punctuality) if they believe in it as a principle than if they are pointed towards its utilitarian benefits — ‘makes life better for others’, ‘helps to avoid train crashes’, etc. However, to criticise mediocracy for weaknesses in its anti-principle approach is to miss the point. Mediocracy is not trying to maintain the same benefits but without the principles. Mediocracy is primarily concerned with only one thing: the assertion of mediocracy.

* via Rachel Sylvester

Decline and Fall

Stage 5

First they came for the loons. And I didn't speak up because I was not a loon.

Time to monitor progress on the slow path towards authoritarianism. The steps, it will be recalled, are as follows.

1) Introduce new, spurious liberties, such as the right not to be deported if you are an illegal immigrant, or the right of thieves to sue homeowners who injure them. Leave to simmer.

2) Discover that these 'liberties' make it impossible to protect people from crime.

3) Announce that liberty has got out of hand, and will have to be restricted in the interests of the community.

4) Exploit the new anti-libertarian climate to abolish the original liberties that existed before the introduction of the new ones.

5) Begin by targeting those at the fringes of society. Few people will care about them. To the extent the cases are even publicised, comments will be of the type "well, I didn't really like him/her/them anyway".

6) Once the marginal cases have been successfully tried, use them as precedents. By then it will be too late to complain.

Two marginal cases already that I am aware of. More likely than not there are others, unreported.

A) Blogger Lionheart is apparently about to be arrested on suspicion of "inciting racial hatred". Commentary on the case is available from Pub Philosopher and Fulham Reactionary. The law in question has been around for some time, but I find it ominous that bloggers are starting to be targeted.

B) Poetess Samina Malik was found guilty in November of possessing “information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism.” Yes, she sounds a little potty, but then the same could be said about some of our mainstream artists — the ones who enjoy confronting us with vomit or faeces.

Her sentence was a suspended 9 months of jail. The next crazy bedsit-dweller with an above-average taste for fictional violence — but not the kind endorsed by the mediocratic elite — may not be so lucky. Detailed commentary on the legalities is available from Marc Randazza.

I think it's unfortunate, incidentally, that Tony Bennett, who appears to be acting as Lionheart's lawyer, says this about the Malik case:

LionHeart should not be compared with Samina Malik ... Of course [her poetry] is incitement to violence — a criminal offence. Of course it is glorifying terrorism — another criminal offence. She was rightly punished.

Bennett's primary concern should, I suppose, be towards his client, and perhaps he thinks that dissociating Lionheart from Malik is in his client's best interests. However, when those who stand in the position of defending liberties say, "of course, that type of persecution is perfectly acceptable", it does not have the best sort of effect.

Update
See here.

Full-time adult coercion

In spite of efforts to make a noise about this, by myself and a number of other people, I still feel liberty-lovers out there are not taking the proposal to compel seventeen-year-olds to undergo ‘education/training’ (as defined by the government) seriously enough.

This is about more than the liberty of young people; there is a matter of principle involved. I have already written about this here so I won’t bother repeating myself. Suffice it to say, if this one is passed through, or doesn’t at least receive a lot of opposition, we are in for more of the same: coercion will come to be regarded as an acceptable policy response to various ills (real or imagined).

I usually try hard to be scrupulous about not oversimplifying issues or leaving out complexities. However, in this case I am going to make an exception for publicity purposes. Most people in politics seem to do it habitually, so I'm going to allow myself to do it for once.

It seems to me this wholly unacceptable policy is exploiting the grey area surrounding the concept of ‘adult’. If the government were proposing to coerce nineteen-year-olds or thirty-year-olds, one would hope for a lot more opposition. (Wouldn’t one?)

While it’s true that a seventeen-year-old isn’t an adult on some definitions (e.g. voting), it is clear that he or she is an adult for many practical purposes. Seventeen-year-olds can drive, have jobs, start families, and so forth. I am therefore going to start calling such persons “adults”.

What we have, then, is a proposal to coerce adults into full-time education/training, and I shall be referring to it from now on as 'full-time adult coercion'.

If the concept of full-time coercion of adults doesn’t make your blood boil there is, frankly, something wrong with you. Please go away and check your moral compass.

If it does make your blood boil, please help to support the campaign, by linking to it or otherwise publicising it. Pay-off? A link from it to your blog, raising your Technorati authority level by +1. And, perhaps, helping to stop this appalling stupidity from happening. If you don’t have a blog, write to your MP.

If you do publicise the campaign, please don’t bother to mention my name: (a) because I am shy and modest, (b) because it is a collective effort, and more of the credit for setting it up goes to Surreptitious Evil.

PS
Thanks to the Englishman for regularly linking to the campaign.
PPS
If you have an article on this issue, or on education or coercion generally, which you would allow us to cross-post, please contact the campaign administrators via Educational Conscription.

Wake up and smell the jungle

From the comments.

Simon Clark ("The Cynical Libertarian"):

I like your post on bans and intervention, though I see them more as an arms race or a competition between two firms than an addiction.

On the one hand there are politicians who compete on quality, they say "I can do x better than the other guy". If we imagine a society that begins in a state of relative liberty with a very small government with limited responsibility, this would be the most obvious form of competition between politicians. If government is in charge of defence and nothing else, they will compete on who will run defence best.

Some politicians, however, may engage in expansionist competition whereby they increase the size of the battlefield. Perhaps they can't compete on an existing role of government, so they must create new roles with which to gain support. Even if they can win on an existing issue, it never hurts to put distance between yourself and your opponents.

It seems that expanding authoritarianism is an almost inevitable part of unlimited (and even weakly limited) government due to the incentives we have created for politicians to compete and the lack of incentives for voters to get it right.

Formerly Cynical Libertarian, there is something in the model you propose, but I fear you aren't being nearly cynical enough. Nor are many other sceptics of intervention.

Most people seem to think that greed is the only dangerous motive in human psychology. If that were true, we would have a lot less to worry about. There is desire for power over other people, which many appear to find gratifying in its own right. Worse, there is the desire to stop other people getting what they want, or simply a desire to harm them. It's all perfectly consistent with evolutionary biology, but perhaps a little too awkward and ideologically incorrect to discuss.

I would have thought that competition between parties provides one of the few restraints on authoritarianism, though not perhaps on the drive to provide free 'goodies' out of taxpayers' money.

On the other hand, and perhaps this fits with your model, I think it's true that once there is a certain level of intervention, it is easier for a party seeking office to propose additions than reductions. It's what Thatcher called the 'ratchet effect'.

Let me quote myself some more on this topic, as it is important.

One needs to think realistically about what the motivations of those ostensibly providing services to individuals — but employed by and answerable to the state — actually are. Intervention is often predicated on the unexamined assumption that the motivations are no different than if the providers were remunerated directly by the customers. ... Incentives are relevant because I don't think one should have to rely on the goodwill of teachers or doctors. One wouldn't want to have to rely on the goodwill of a solicitor or an accountant, and I don't really see why different principles should apply to education or medicine.

Of course interventionists try to legitimise their desire to interfere by reference to goals which sound unobjectionable (enhancing the welfare of the less fortunate; making our society 'fairer'; improving European cooperation, etc.). They are not going to say "I just enjoy having power over other people, and preventing them from getting what they want". It is the uncritical acceptance of their claimed motives which is, in my opinion, largely to blame for the huge strides in prohibition legislation which have been made in the last twenty years. Those who doubt the wisdom of increased intervention do not protest, or protest hard enough, because they feel the interventionists have morality on their side.

Until the majority of libertarians realise that interventionistas aren’t necessarily just well-meaning and misguided, they will likely continue to be the political losers they have always been, because their opponents will have the advantage. Even if they did so realise, they would probably continue to be a marginalised minority. But at least they would be living in a condition of realism, as Nietzsche and Celia Green have advocated. (Note that ‘realism’ in this context means ‘awareness that other people may be hostile and badly motivated’, not ‘belief that other people are hostile etc.’)

Simon responds:

I don't disagree that the motives of at least the vast majority of politicians are far from benevolent. Whilst I can see the logic and plausibility of your idea, I think past evidence suggests something a little different.

What you seem to suggest is that politicians are rather like the rapist who snatches some young girl and keeps her locked up in his basement and tortures her and makes her do his bidding. As attractive (unattractive?) as this is, I'm not sure how true it is.

I might submit, as evidence, various dictatorial regimes around the world: Nazi Germany, the USSR, Cuba, China, North Korea and so on. In these countries we have not seen the kind of sweeping nanny-statism that has taken place in Britain, Europe and, to a lesser extent, the United States. The only exception I can think of might be Nazi Germany where they encouraged people not to smoke and so on, but I don't think they ever banned anything like that. The regimes in these countries have secured (or did secure) their grip on power by prohibiting a few important things: guns, free speech, free democracy, free enterprise and so on.

If they had been addicted to banning things in and of itself, this would not have happened. Certainly they had the ability to ban whatever they liked. I would suggest that they were in fact addicted to power and status, rather than to prohibition per se.

Now, that's not to say that today in Britain we simply have a different sort of politicians with different motives, but it makes it at least a little less likely.
What I think has happened is that the 20th century has been so full of overt authoritarianism of the German and Russian style, that has been so universally branded has evil, that it is, at least in the west, no longer effective. Shutting down democracy is not an option because it has become valued above all else. In this way, politicians cannot guarantee themselves power they must actually get elected and, once elected, gain the maximum power to satisfy their wants, which are the same as previous dictators: power and status. To do this they must engage in expansionist politics and inexorably fatten government.

So what I am trying to say is simply that I think they are addicted more to power than to prohibition, which is really not much of a difference.

My response:

Thanks for your interesting comments. As I’m sure you realised, the post about intervention-addiction was a parody of an article in the Guardian. I didn’t intend the addiction idea to be a serious explanation of interventionism. On the other hand, there is probably something in it, in the sense that any pleasure (in this case, the pleasure of interfering in other people’s lives) is liable to be mildly addictive.

I’m not sure about your torture/rape analogy, although there may be some similarity in motivation, in the sense that both types of agent are deriving part of their gratification from being able to exercise power over others.

My suggestion is that there is a motive in human psychology to have power over other people (different from the motive to get ‘power’ in the usual sense, i.e. political or organisational power or status) and that this is what drives much interventionist policy. Because this motive is not considered admirable in itself, it attempts to legitimise itself by reference to whatever ideology is available at the time.

The excuse for intervention under both communism and Nazism was “good of the people”. (Communism perhaps had a little more emphasis on ‘equality’, and Nazism on ‘progress’.) Excuses in our society invoke concepts like ‘fairness’, ‘protection’ and people’s supposed ‘needs’. Perhaps this is, as you say, because more overt heavy-handed authoritarianism of the kind seen in the countries you mention is no longer considered ideologically acceptable in the West.

The point about those other regimes is that if you can get away with the more serious stuff (e.g. political prisoners, abolishing private property, etc) you don’t need to bother with the milder ‘nanny state’ stuff. It doesn’t mean the same motive isn’t at work, i.e. desire for power over other people.

The desire for political power (getting to the top of whatever the political structure happens to be) is commonly recognised, the desire for power over individuals less so.

“Politicians cannot guarantee themselves power, they must actually get elected.”
People in Parliament, yes, but the people implementing the detailed interventions are usually not elected at all: doctors deciding who shall be allowed to live, social workers deciding whether families should be broken up, educationalists deciding what shall be taught in schools, and so on.

With a sufficiently large state machinery, the part of the process that involves elections becomes increasingly irrelevant. I'm sure you can think of regimes where there have been notional elections, but where one has little confidence that they signify much.

Suboptimal parenting: full stop

Monday's Daily Mail:

Three children have been removed from their parents and taken into care because they are too fat, it has emerged. The youngsters were separated from their families because of fears that their weight was getting out of control. ...

Doctors and health professionals argue that obesity — which can cause heart disease, liver conditions, diabetes and respiratory illness — is as much a threat to children's health as malnutrition.

Dr Colin Waine, chairman of the National Obesity Forum, said: "What we should be doing is monitoring children from birth so we can detect any deviations from the norm at an early stage and action can be taken. ... But if the parents refuse to collaborate and the child becomes obese, I consider that a form of child abuse ..."

At the British Medical Association's conference in June, doctors put forward a motion calling for the parents of obese children under 12 to be targeted under child protection laws. Dr Matthew Capehorn, a GP from Rotherham, said: "If you are faced with a child who is severely undernourished alarm bells would be ringing. But the same approach is not taken when faced by a child who is obese."

Moral
What is likely to happen if agents of the collective are given discretionary powers to decide who is 'at risk' and what constitutes 'abuse'? Answer: expansion of those powers to the point where no one is safe from intervention.

Educational Conscription

In March, I wrote a post entitled What is wrong with you people?! in which I sounded indignant about the proposal to raise the compulsory school leaving age to 18. I used lots of bold and colour, and a yellow warning image, to ram my point home. I’m glad I made some noise, because it resulted in the creation of a collective blog, Educational Conscription, which now sits out there as an expression of disapproval and resistance. It makes me feel I did something, even if it's only a gesture, so that if my future grandchildren ever ask me “what did you do when the seriously authoritarian stuff began to be floated?” I will be able to reply without embarrassment.

Much of the credit for setting up the blog goes to Surreptitious Evil. Additional technical support was provided by mediocracy-blog-reader Paul. Many libertarians, and some non-libertarians, have supported the blog, witness its long list of “blogs that link here”.

Now that we have a new premier, who appears to be at least as committed to the proposal as his predecessor, it may be a good time to reiterate why I feel so strongly about this issue, and why I think it is more significant than (e.g.) ID cards or habeas corpus. It isn’t because I think compulsory education is wrong (though I do), or because I think state education is usually pretty awful (I do), or because I think the so-called “skills gap” — beyond the basic numeracy/literacy problem — is a fiction (I do), or because I think the whole idea of “education” has been massively overhyped (I do).

Even if I thought that compulsory state education was fine, and that this country had a skills gap which reflected an inappropriate lack of enthusiasm for institutional education, I would still regard the government’s proposal as totally unacceptable and extremely sinister. That is because I see it as breaking a key principle.

Let us imagine for a moment that the proposed extension was to the age of 19, not 18. You would then have the extraordinary situation that the government insisted on determining precisely how an adult individual spends his or her life. Other than by authoritarian regimes, this has only ever been done for military purposes or under conditions of national emergency. It would clearly be wholly unjustifiable, unless you wanted to ditch the entire basis of modern non-authoritarian society. We are not talking about intruding on lives by means of banning or inspecting. We are talking about directing a person’s entire waking life.

I think some people have difficulty grasping the key issue here. They somehow manage to confuse the proposal with totally unrelated ideas, e.g. that it involves more opportunities for seventeen-year-olds, or that welfare benefits for teenagers will be made conditional on continuing with education. The proposals have nothing to do with opportunities or benefits. They are about coercion.

Now the one shade of grey in this otherwise black-and-white unacceptability revolves around the fact that the individuals whose lives are to be directed are not eighteen but seventeen. Therefore on some definitions, they are not adults. Legal thresholds for majority vary from country to country, and from situation to situation. In Scotland, as far as I'm aware, you have full rights at 16. In England, you can certainly do a lot of things after 16, though you can’t vote, sit on a jury or make a will.

The issue here is not, however, one of where the age of majority should be drawn for different contexts. No one, to my knowledge, has presented this proposal in terms of:

“until recently, it was accepted that seventeen-year-olds were mature enough to decide for themselves about their education; now, however, in the light of new research about rates of maturation, this position needs to be reviewed.”

Indeed, what is disturbing about the proposal is how little debate about the underlying principles there has been. It has simply been a case of “too few skills, therefore additional coercion — no-brainer”.

The reason I am far more alarmed by this proposal than by (say) ID cards is that I see it as a way of surreptitiously floating a much larger and more radical notion, namely that coercion is, in principle, an acceptable way to address social problems. To some extent, I would not be particularly relieved if this proposal simply died a quiet death. It worries me that there has been so little resistance to the principle of the thing. In my view, if people don't object to this proposal on moral grounds, we could easily start to see the coercion idea applied in other areas. For example, it has been suggested that we be forced to vote.

If you find any of this persuasive, and haven’t yet written to your MP about this, please consider doing so. A pro forma letter is available here. Meanwhile, check out the collective blog. In the last couple of months there have been articles posted there by Tom Paine, Bel, Roger Thornhill, Peter Risdon, Ian Grey, ThunderDragon, Wat Tyler and Devil’s Kitchen.

And who knows? Perhaps the campaign is having some effect. We have now had one section of the establishment coming out against the proposal, though not necessarily for the best of reasons. Notionally, the teachers' trade union PAT is concerned about "disaffection" and "needless criminalisation". In practice, I suspect its members are (rightly) worried by the prospect of having to deal with stroppy seventeen-year-old blokes, not best pleased about being incarcerated for another year or two ...

Update
I make some more comments on the issue here.

How dare you say the Emperor has no clothes

One thing that is crucial in sustaining a mediocracy¹ is to protect it from criticism, and to conceal its underlying deficiencies as far as possible. Even if it isn't possible to conceal problem areas from the people who actually come into contact with them, we can make it impossible for their observations to receive a platform. The media, in particular, must preserve the myth that nothing is fundamentally wrong. (The only section of the British media which doesn't quite play according to this rule is the Daily Mail. Which is probably why it's so despised by the establishment.)

At the same time, the dissatisfaction and restlessness produced by the deceptions and repressions of a mediocracy¹ need to be directed at a suitable target, though obviously not the government or the statist machinery. What is left, then, is the commercial sector and private individuals.

So we get a kind of double standard for "whistleblowing" (insiders drawing attention to dishonesties or shortcomings). Where the private sector is concerned, it is encouraged; when it is the state that is exposed, it is punished.

Another way of looking at the issue is that it's a consequence of mediocratic phoneyness. A misplaced pseudo-egalitarianism means that things have to look as if they're more open and democratic, and as if ordinary people can make a difference vis-a-vis entrenched power groups. In practice, the 'egalitarianism' is driven by a top-down pro-state elite which cannot tolerate rival power groups or, indeed, any kind of dissent. Hence the 'paradox' that New Labour, marketed in terms of opennness and accessibility, has been one of the most dangerous British administrations to be on the wrong side of since the Cromwellites.

In Monday's Telegraph, Admiral Sir Alan West advocated snitching on your neighbours if you suspect them of being terrorists. (Funny how the problems of terrorism — arguably created by the state with its paradoxical mixture of (a) failing to stand up to authoritarian threats from certain minority communities and (b) a gung-ho approach to military intervention in other people's countries — are generally to be solved by making the lives of private citizens more uncomfortable.) This follows hot on the heels of Home Office plans² to require council workers, charity staff and doctors to tip off police about anyone who they believe could commit a violent crime.

On the other hand, consider what happens to those who blow the whistle on possible defects in the state apparatus:

the late David Kelly — thrown to the wolves by the Ministry of Defence for questioning pre-war propaganda;

Jack Lemley — rubbished by the government for daring to reveal the fiasco behind the London Olympic project;

Rita Pal — smear campaign by the General Medical Council³ for drawing attention to illegal practices in Midland hospitals⁴;

most recently, Angela Mason — suspended for filming the reality of life in inner city comprehensives⁵.

¹ Applies equally well to communist or other authoritarian regimes
² h/t Not Saussure via Shuggy
³ As the principal body behind a professional monopoly remunerated predominantly from state sources, the GMC is effectively an arm of the state.
⁴ h/t Devil's Kitchen
⁵ See also Educational Conscription

I'll thcream and thcream

From the archives:
The Observer 7 August 2005

Banging the table with a frustrated fist, as the Home Secretary and his two startled opposition counterparts looked on, [Tony Blair] was demanding to know 'why the f***' it was so impossible to rewrite human rights legislation to allow decisive action against a terrorist threat. 'He just kept saying, "Why can't we do this?" and looking at his officials for answers,' says one source from the meeting. 'And they were just shrugging their shoulders.'

By the time the meeting broke up, Blair appeared no nearer getting his answer. But those closer to him could have predicted how it would end.

Last Friday [5 August 2005] the Prime Minister decisively got his way, sweeping aside not just the caveats of his officials — plus those of his own wife, who warned last month that it was easy to respond to terror in a way that 'cheapens our right to call ourselves a civilised nation' — but the amour propre of his Home Secretary [Charles Clarke].

Hijacking at the last minute what had been planned as a much lower-key, less detailed announcement by the Home Office minister Hazel Blears, Blair last Friday unveiled a package that profoundly changed the terms of the domestic war on terror. Not only would foreign-born preachers of hate now be deported, as Clarke had already suggested, but Britain would, if necessary, rewrite the Human Rights Act to do it — a personal victory for Blair.

Other draconian measures, from closing mosques suspected of extremism, to house arrest for suspect British nationals, shattered the uneasy cross-party consensus formed after the 7 July bombings. It was the first that opposition MPs — told by Clarke they would be consulted every step of the way — had heard of much of it.

Now, once again, we are told that lawyers, judges and civil rights defenders have it wrong.

Over the past five or six years, we have decided as a country that except in the most limited of ways, the threat to our public safety does not justify changing radically the legal basis on which we confront this extremism. [The] right [of British nationals who pose a threat to us] to traditional civil liberties comes first. I believe this is a dangerous misjudgment.

Which raises the question, if the Criminal Justice Act, or the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, weren't "radical" — what on earth would be? Note that Mr Blair refers to "traditional civil liberties", not to those created by ECHR or other EU-inspired legislation. So presumably it is those which are for the chop, rather than (e.g.) the right not to be deported if you are a foreign criminal.

And it's worth considering the light that this:

It was the first that opposition MPs — told by Clarke they would be consulted every step of the way — had heard of much of it.

sheds on the contemporary meaningfulness of "consultation" or "openness".

Note to commenters: please keep it clean, coherent and on-topic. Thanks.

The Mental Health Bill

Sometimes it is worth thinking about the possible motivation underlying certain dubious developments. Try a cynical hypothesis — it probably makes no less sense than any other.

Consider. If you are the sort of person who:

loves the state, and believes in the subordination of the individual to the collective on moral grounds (there are plenty who fit that description);

thinks that we need to find a way to legitimise an increase in state authoritarianism;

believes the ends justify the means;

and you're involved in the psychiatric system, you might indulge in the following.

1) Have a bias in favour of incarcerating the pathetic and the vulnerable, while
2) selectively allowing the truly dangerous to be released and roam free, in order to
3) generate the impression that mental patients who were allowed their liberty generally became a menace, so that you would
4) provide ammunition to those who want to be able to lock up, and/or forcibly drug, anyone suspected of being "mentally ill".

You might also help to massage and spin the relevant statistics to maximise the impression that:
• a large number of murders were caused by people who could be labelled as "mentally ill", and that
• the culprits were people who had been on medication of some kind, but who had decided to discontinue it.

* * * * *

As often is the case with a policy change which is felt to be desirable by some section of the political/technocratic elite for ideological reasons, we are given 'data' in a form which is clearly designed to elicit our agreement to what is proposed.

Thus Philip Johnston writes in Monday's Telegraph that, according to the Health Department

in the eight years of argument over the Bill, there have been 400 homicides committed by mentally ill people in England and Wales. In many cases the deaths could have been averted through better compliance with medication. Almost a third of the killings were committed by people judged by mental health staff not to be a risk to the public just a few days earlier.

But to properly appraise this scare statistic, and similar ones being trotted out by the why-oh-why brigade (see e.g. Melanie Phillips), we would need more information about the individuals concerned. Had they previously committed crimes? At what stage were they diagnosed as "mentally ill"? In the case of those who had been receiving medication, has the possibility been considered that the cause for their committing murder wasn't that they were psychotic to begin with, but rather that they had been turned into out-of-control zombies by the drugs they were taking?

One of the online commenters responds to Johnston,

Having had extremely arrogant mental health professionals insist that what was very obviously post-traumatic stress disorder was actually a personality disorder, I am extremely concerned about allowing people who may or may not have their own agenda make the final decision about who is or is not a danger to whom. ... Many clinicians rely on psychological and behavioural models based on their own prejudices and stereotypes. Anyone who disagrees is labelled "scary", "treatment resistant" or "personality disordered" ...

Do we really want to trust these kinds of "professional" to decide who should be locked up or forcibly medicated?

"Care in the community" may or may not have been a misplaced policy, although if anything was wrong with it, it may have had more to do with the application than with the theory. It's all rather reminiscent of child protection, and the way we seem to get, simultaneously, plenty of both (a) families unjustly broken up on little or no evidence, yet (b) "helping families stay together" in cases where it is pretty damn obvious there has been abuse, thus actually promoting further abuse. (Which is then used to justify even more state intervention into family life.)

Associated reading: Mediocracy: Inversions and Deceptions in an Egalitarian Culture, p.112.

Big Bertha

Useful new phrase from The Week's Jeremy O'Grady: not Big Brother, Big Bertha.

Frankly, we've been seduced by the wrong metaphor. ... It's not Big Brother we really need to watch out for, it's Big Bertha. Fat, loquacious and sclerotic, this impossibly overbearing maiden aunt threatens our lives not with excessive control but excessive care. She loves us to death. Pick up a paper any day of the week and see what Bertha has in store. These were her plans on Monday: to give "able" secondary school pupils a fund of their very own "to develop their talents"; to provide cheap buses (50p per trip, max) to carry pupils in poor areas to schools in rich ones; and — to help "youngsters compete in the global economy" — to make it a criminal offence to leave school before 18. Oh yes, and a helpline for lonely judges.

What's scary about this is not the encroachment on freedom — B. Bertha, unlike B. Brother, is hopelessly disorganised — it's the massive constipation of the body politic. Every one of her plans entails the birth of a new bureaucracy. ("We are not expecting practitioners to deliver this without guidance and training," as Bertha reassured us last week, introducing a scheme to have nurseries and childminders monitor the babbling of babies.) Long before the ice-caps melt ... Bertha will keel over and die from sheer flatulence. Welfare warming, that's what terrifies me. *

One rider. Yes, no doubt the new nazzy state (meme, anyone?) will be hopelessly disorganised, which doesn't quite fit with the ruthlessly efficient 1984 model. However, that doesn't prevent it playing havoc with people's liberties. In fact, it makes it more likely that it will do so. Think about the current system for "child protection", for instance — some of the miscarriages may be motivated, but there is probably a lot of simple bureaucratic ineptitude involved. Not much skin off civil servants' noses if the authoritarian system is a mess; rather more serious for people like poor Sally Clark.

* from the 31 March issue

Another 3 steps towards totalitarianism

1) Criminal trials without juries
See BBC News. Progress of Bill here.

2) Punishment without evidence of wrongdoing
Via Not Saussure. See also Telegraph.

3) Abolition of confidentiality
See Grauniad, also AC Grayling.

More on ideology

Further to the previous post, Daniel Finkelstein has made some interesting comments in The Times on the issue of ideology, and Maurice Saatchi's complaint that it's being ditched in favour of incoherent opportunism. He argues that

the political success of a given place on the political spectrum depends hugely on the positioning of the other party. A Labour Party positioned near the centre cannot be beaten by a party positioned far to its right. So it's all very well urging the return of ideology, but it won't work for any one party unless all parties do it at the same time ...

Thatcherism was a timely crusade not a timeless revolution. Moderation at all times and on all things is impossible and wrong, but so is a passionate ideological approach.

Finkelstein's representation of Labour's current position as moderate is, however, misleading. The impact of the Blair revolution has been to change the ideological landscape so that we now accept New Labour's brand of interventionism as the norm. It may not be the same as Old Labour socialism, but there's plenty of ideology in it nonetheless. Ten years ago it would have seemed extreme, and I doubt many people expected Labour to become the party of anti-liberal authoritarianism when they voted for Blair.

To appear moderate themselves, the Tories now seem to believe they need to imitate Labour's ideology. I haven't heard the Cameroons question a single principle of current government policy, only the detail. I wonder whether this approach will win over voters on a sufficiently significant scale. A lot of people are fed up with the Blair programme. An outspoken attack on New Labour's values and methods might prove more successful than trying to look inoffensive. The anti-liberal tendencies of this government may well call for another "timely crusade", if we are not to slide into passive capitulation to authoritarianism.

George W Bush and friends may have brought neo-conservative ideology into disrepute, but that says more about the potential statism latent in neo-conservatism than it does about ideology in general. In any case, we have an ideology in Britain whether we like it or not, the only question is whether we should change it.