I love politicans

Yes, I do. Who else, apart from drunken conservative bloggers, would mangle language, sense, thought and integrity, like this:

And Labour's former Europe minister Denis MacShane accused the Conservatives of having "the most rejectionist, isolationist position on partnership in Europe ever seen by any party in the history of this country".

Despite the almost palpable hysteria, it nearly sounds rational, and then you think: "What, you mean, apart from the many years when Labour wanted Britain out of the EEC altogether and was pretty open about it?" I just love the way we get two "ist" adjectives in the same phrase, which makes the poor thing sound less like a responsible member of the world's somthing biggest economy's government and more like a furious academic having just seen someone with a copy of The Daily Mail.

We also get this in the same article:

But Edward Davey, for the Liberal Democrats, said his party broadly welcomed the provisions.

He added: "Despite the hysteria being whipped up by some, the changes wrought by the treaty involve no new powers for Brussels but a simple and sensible reallocation of powers between those responsible for this area of policy.

"Foreign and security policy remains, as it always has been, in the control of member states. Britain controls its veto on all key decisions."

I have not read the Treaty but I do know a little bit about the meaning of the word "reallocation", and it usually involves moving something from somewhere to somewhere else. If it meant merely, reallocating powers within the UK government (ie from everyone else to Gordon Brown) there'd be no need for a treaty on it (duh!). So where are the powers being reallocated to, if not Brussels? And the "simple and sensible" is just great, lovely use of alliteration there to make it quite clear that anyone who doesn't agree is really an idiot. Despite all of this, there is very little actual content to this quotation, despite the final paragraph asserting something quite boldly. You would have thought that if the LibDems loved the EU that much they wouldn't try to be reassuring like that. Oh well.

you could call me a reactionary and a hypocrite for not slagging off the Tories here but, well, I didn't fancy it.

Oh bloody hell, then, alright I'll say something really positive

It's Saturday tomorrow, bringing with it the infinite possibility of getting pissed. Yes! Get the fuck in!

Er...it's getting a bit lighter, sort of, day by day, sort of thing?

um...I might do a bit of reading or some maths...


ah...the EU might _not_ announce a new law, to be implemented across Europe, without possibility of repeal or lengthy debate in national "parliaments".

That's it, that's the one. Let's paaaartaaaaay! No new laws tomorrow! Get in!!!! wooooow!!! No new criminals, no additional regulation, no further control of day-to-day dealings between intelligent consenting adults (whatever progressives think of humans), no law which encourages the bastard British government to be even more assiduous watching us or for Guardian columnists to call all dissenters xenophobes (which happened around 1988 - about when Jacques Delors addressed the Labour Conference - before that the Common Market was the refuge of capitalist bastards and cunts of all kinds ) and accuse them of falsely claiming victimhood, ably supported by Viz (now a NuLab inhouse journal I am deeply and eternally sorry to say); no new excuse for the BBC to lament the currently "too-lightly regulated" x-sector(insert as applicable); no new excuse for socialists to crow about how the population are really cunts so this new law is utterly and totally essential and won't affect reasonable people at all and when it comes in scream that of course it affects x, how could it not?; no further opportunity for Lord "fuckwitted twat" Falconer to appear on all radio and tv channels, blocking the reception with his fat arrogant bastard fucking smug face - fuck me this really is cause for celebration. Break out the Stella and fast.

Or perhaps there is a new law tomorrow. I haven't checked.

Come on, TD, be positive.

The Origin of Laws

Interesting 5 Live debate on the Eu Constitution/Treaty today, the usual Eu-philes calling everyone else "bigoted/xenophobes/little Englanders" and Mark Mardell intervening only to make pro-EU points, but what interested me was this. One caller pointed out that EU law is framed by the Commission,after secret or hidden negotiations and reviewed by the parliament, but ultimate authority rests with the commission, unelected. Recently of course an EU commissioner graciously decided to allow Britain to continue to use imperial units without threat of crminial prosecution. I'm not commenting on the truth of all this, by the way.

Victoria Derbyshire challenged the caller by saying: "If it's a good law, does it matter where it comes from?" and the caller did answer her, but it struck me that for the first time to my knowledge someone openly questioned whether or not law makers should be elected, accountable, removable, and their laws open to repeal. Her argument rested on the philosophy of a given law - is it right? Do I agree with it? Does it satisfy my sense of justice or ethics - and the concept of a lawmaker deriving their legitimacy from the consent of the governed was not mentioned.

It's seemed clear to me for a while that we're moving towards a kind of technocracy, where "experts" really do know better than everyone else because the modern world is so complex; but it's rare for someone so openly to challenge the basic tenet of democracy and then to replace it with something resembling this: If the modern world really is unfathomably complex, and if some people really do understand it better than us, then they do have a greater right to frame it than we do. Our view, or vote, is largely irrelevant. Moreover, if a principle is right, or "good", then it should be enacted, regardless of the wishes of the people.

Am I then an old reactionary in thinking that laws which affect my day to day life: which measurements I am to use; how long I can work; what I should think about certain events or people; should be enacted, if at all, by a government elected by the people with a mandate for that, and that they should be able to be repealed when they fall out of favour or outlive their usefulness and the lawmakers removed?

I'm not saying that our current system does this well, but it is at least supposed to, and we can scrutinise it and hold it to account. I don't see the EU commission held to account much at all, and it depresses me that intelligent people want less public involvement in law-making rather than more.

Then again, everything depresses me so that's largely irrelevant.

Slander of the Day

Lacking any serious argument why it should be a criminal offence to display prices in lbs and ozs, the UK Metric Association today compare buying a pound of apples with slavery:

But Roz Denny, spokeswoman for the UK Metric Association, said maintaining the current system was "a nonsense" and that Britain should not be seen as "a heritage theme park" that did not change.

"We are now going to have this crazy double measurement system forever," she said.

She went on: "We are trying to put ourselves forward as a modern country putting our imperial past in perspective, like slavery, and here we are glorifying one element of it."

Nice. Being a modern country does involve, in their eyes, as it seems to for so many people now, associating people who don't agree with you with all manner of evil, depredation and murder. There's a real tone of violence, I think, underlying our modern inability to debate with another without assuming he's something dreadful, and a sense of contempt for others in the need to make laws, laws and laws for things we personally don't like. The more we parrot the hollow slogans of diversity, the less we really believe that people with different views and ideals should exist at all.

The tin drummer is 5' 91/2" tall. Oops. I've just glorified our imperial past and the shocking legacy of slavery. Again. Oh well, off for a pint then.

Democracy Will Stagger On Nonetheless

DK has been pounding away at this for a while: it seems that EU ministers have finally agreed an anti-holocaust denial & racism law to apply, as usual, across the entire EU-belonging continent. As usual, a law is made with no public agitation or demonstrable need across the union, with no mention in national election manifestos, and, as usual, the consequences will be increased self-censorship and increased state control, together with, almost certainly, increased prison sentences for writing or saying things - and I bet that the noble Lord Philips will lose his traditional sceptism of prison sentences as well. Once the law is rubber stamped by the EU parliament after ministers have given their agreement, the UK parliament, will, as usual, have no practical choice but to wave it through - and another long standing liberty, another hard won right is signed off to the absolutist technocrats who now give their moral simplicities to all of our laws ("You can either be for discrimination or against it"*), leaving common sense and debate to string themselves up from the nearest lamposts in despair.
I am _not_ going to add the rider that "of course I'm not racist" - my readers know that by now either way. But just wait until the first prosecutions are made, and then the next wave, when things we will be told won't come under the law (immigration, say), suddenly do, and we are told "of course it comes under this law - are you racist or something?"

UPDATE: 11am
*This was a saying used during the Catholic adoption saga by some government apparatchik or other. Clearly, according to Radio 5 Live's discussion this morning on "positive discrimination" in the police (wanted by the police, incidentally), the statement is untrue.

Knowledgeable Lawmaking

Notsaussure, attempting to comment on my Lawmaking post, has sent me a txt file but it was so detailed I thought I'd be slightly cheeky and post it as a new post in its own right. Ns writes:

Tin Drummer, you be pleased to learn that these proposals for banning Holocaust Denial have, in fact,been dropped as a result of opposition from several countries, including the UK. There was never, to my mind, any serious chance of their becoming law; since the Germans must have known this, I suspect that the proposal must have had more to do with internal German politics than anything else. Minor point about sentencing; you ask 'why will fiddling with the road-pricing boxes or not cooperating with a road pricing inspector carry a 6 month jail sentence? ' The answer is that, in practice, it wouldn't -- the maximum sentence is there as an indication of what sort of sentence Parliament expects courts to hand down, not as an indication of what they should do. A better question would be why they need to create a separate offence of tampering with a road-pricing box when there's a perfectly good offence of criminal damage that carries -- assuming the damage is less that £5,000 -- similar penalties. For Criminal Damage at this level, the Magistrates Court Bench Book suggests a conditional discharge (usually accompanied with compensation) or a fine will normally be appropriate, with community penalties reserved for more extreme cases and prison for only the most aggravated ones (which I think would normally be reserved for fthe most persistent offenders). As to your point about how long someone might expect to spend in custody if he kills someone, I think we need to be specific about this. Someone might, indeed, spend as little as 18 months in custody if he kills someone, if he's found guilty of causing death by dangerous driving. At the other end of the scale, if he's convicted of murder, there are various minimum periods of imprisonment specificed in the Criminal Justice Act 2003 before he may be considered for parole -- most of them 20 or 25 years. For a murder that doesn't have the aggravating features that attract a CJA minimum, the murdered can normally expect to spend about 14 years in custody before he's released on licence. If someone's convicted of manslaughter, then he may well spend less than that in custody, but it very much depends on the circumstances of the killing and on what the parole board think of him six or seven years after the event.

I am grateful to him for putting me straight. My post was really an anxious scratch, rather than a legal exposition. My fear was, and remains, that proposals are being advanced with the threat of stiff punishments as part of them, as if in the knowledge that these are unnecessary or unwanted laws. I would like to think that the authorities will be sensible, but part of me believes that the punishments, in practice rather than theory, will indeed be stiffer for this kind of damage than for ordinary criminal damage - in the sense that it would be seen as a political crime. I am interested to see what the council-smoking-inspectors are going to do, as well.

Thanks, Notsaussure. Thotsaussure.*







*=this is a Look Around You 2 joke. Buy the dvd, it's very funny.

UPDATE: 6.40pm: NS, the link you give -which hasn't come out on the copied text, I see - is to an old story from 2005. The proposal to "harmonise" the EU laws on holocaust denial is from this year

UPDATE: Friday 9.00PM: With NS's help to correct my total ignorance, I've fixed the links in his comment.

Lawmaking

As usual, *disclaimer* - I'm not a lawyer, nor do I hate them.

I am perplexed though by the current wave of lawmaking, which is happening at local, national and EU level with seemingly breakneck pace. As polluters, not as citizens, our local council has decreed fewer rubbish collections and penalties for people who leave rubbish out,put it in the wrong box, and so on. We hear repeatedly on the radio that prison is generally a *bad thing* and should be reserved only for serious crimes - in which case why will fiddling with the road-pricing boxes or not cooperating with a road pricing inspector carry a 6 month jail sentence?

I read with some consternation, and it must be said, a fair amount of ignorance, on DK yesterday that the EU have already finished their draft directive on Holocaust denial, which will need to be implemented by July 2007. A quick googling doesn't throw this up as definite, though I'm happy to be corrected. In any case, even as draft legislation it is worrying. I see why the law should exist in Germany: but it is just plain dishonest to pretend that the whole of Europe needs the law in the same way. Britain has holocaust deniers of course and one of them exposed himself to ruin and his cause to ridicule under existing laws. David Irving's demolition was far better served by his libel case than by his imprisonment in Austria, which made him a rallying point for far-rightists. Europe does not have homogeneous political and social problems or backgrounds and so blanket laws of this kind are unsubtle and are liable simply to create criminals where none are needed. No attempt has been made than I have read to show that this law is needed in Britain, simply an assumption that what is good for Germany is good for all Europe, backed up by punishments of a scale that make British sentencing look tame. 3 years? For saying something? When you can kill someone and be out in 6 or so? This law is not designed to be good for Britain, or to solve a problem which exists there. It is simply designed to impose upon Britain the problems of others. It assumes, as do so many modern laws, that the people are nasty and bigoted, and must be forced into nicer habits of mind.

Besides of which, as DK and others have pointed out, it creates far more dangers with the concept of a government decreed version of history. In the Telegraph story linked to above we read:

General Lewis MacKenzie, the former commander of UN peacekeepers in Bosnia, courted controversy two years ago by questioning the numbers killed at Srebrenica in 1995.

He took issue with the official definition of the massacre as genocide and highlighted "serious doubt" over the estimate of 8,000 Bosnian fatalities. "The math just doesn't support the scale of 8,000 killed," he wrote.

Balkans human rights activists have branded Gen MacKenzie an "outspoken Srebrenica genocide denier" and, if approved, the EU legislation could see similar comments investigated by the police or prosecuted in the courts after complaints from war crimes investigators or campaigners.

and today we learned that:The UN's highest court has cleared Serbia of direct responsibility for genocide during the 1990s Bosnian war.

It is difficult to think who the human rights activists in the first quote think might be responsible if not Serbia. Some things are held to be true by application of all the evidence, and some things open to revision. It was initially thought, from Soviet figures, that 4 million died in Auschwitz. We now know this figure cannot have been accurate: the true figure is around 1.1million. For me, as for many, the holocaust is a supreme fact of Europe, the great descent into barbarism and degeneration. But to put legitimate researchers under threat of prison sentences for trying to sharpen our understanding - as they would be, treading on eggshells and possibly needing government approval for certain lines of research, or just as bad, feeling that it is needed -is ridiculous and deadly to scholarship and enquiry.

Those Damn Auditors At It Again

The EU's auditors have caused trouble yet again by refusing to sign off the EUs accounts in their totality. My eyes were drawn to this defence of the EU's spending habits by "The European Commissioner for Administration, Audit and Anti-fraud, Siim Kallas" in the article on the BBC website, linked to above:


"You lost your wallet and you get it back with some money inside, but you still consider it a catastrophe. This is our main debate with the Court of Auditors."


Somewhere in Hitchhikers Guide Peter Jones says: "for Arthur, surprise is no longer adequate, and he is forced to resort to astonishment."

Still, at least the EU are admitting that they are stealing our wallets, illegally removing money and then handing us back somewhat less money than we had before.

Hat-Tip: Biased BBC.