Cameron on Personal Freedom

“We’ll start by putting back in place the protections of personal freedom that Labour have taken away.

…

So we will make some important changes. The next Conservative government will revoke the unjustified and unreasonable powers that let people enter your home without your permission.

We will change the law that allows councils to snoop on people for trivial matters.

We will review the use of the Terrorism Act’s Section 44, and the stop and search powers contained within it.

We will change the Criminal Justice Act 2003 to strengthen the right to trial by jury.

And we will review the operation of the Extradition Act – and the US/UK extradition treaty – to make sure it is even-handed and works both ways.” (Source)

Let’s remember that and remind him when the time comes …

R.I.P. Ralf Dahrendorf

“If revolutionaries exist outside a revolutionary situation, they easily become comical figures.” Ralf Dahrendorf, who died yesterday, addressing Rudi Dutschke.

Tasers in Britain

When Tasers were introduced in Britain they were only for self defence. The vice chairman of the police federation said at the time “It’s not fair to compare us with US-style policing. … Officers will use it responsibly.” (source) Judge this claim for yourself.

The Great Depression that didn’t happen

From David Friedman:

“We can learn a little more by looking at a different Great Depression—the one that didn’t happen. From 1920 to 1921, the consumer price index fell by 10.8%, more than in any year of the Great Depression; it fell another 2.3% in the next year. Unemployment rose to about its 1931 level. Looking just at that data, it’s obviously the start of a depression.” (Source)

Communitarianism, Obama and The Economist

The Economist’s Lexington column  discusses ‘Obama hatred‘ and turns out to be summarily dismissive of Obama’s critics (see also here). Obama is arguably the USA’s first outspokenly communitarian president, so concern over this new brand of collectivism hardly belongs on the lunatic fringe.
One of the articles The Economist shruggs off is Quin Hillyer’s essay in the American Spectator titled “Il Duce, Redux?“. It makes some points similar to the ones this blog made about New Labour a while ago. Some arguments in this piece are indeed debatable: Obama’s economic interventionism, for example, can just as plausibly be attributed to a desparate attempt at fighting off depression as to an ideologically driven desire to rule the economy. Other points are harder to dismiss:
“Again and again, Obama has called not just for a change of policies, but to “change America” or

Freedom is slavery: brown is looking for compulsory volunteers

Brown looks set to adopt a bad idea from Obama. He is also doing his worst to underperform Cameron in matters of individual liberty:

“Prime Minister Gordon Brown has pledged to ensure every young person has done 50 hours of voluntary work by the time they are 19-years-old.” (source)

Boris Talks Sense on Trade and the G20

“… the near-collapse of the banking system, and the shortage of credit, has encouraged the big Western financial institutions to turn their backs on the developing world. Money is being sluiced back home, to Europe and America, with catastrophic consequences for anyone who wants to get a loan in, say, Nigeria. In these circumstances, it is doubly immoral and disgusting that we continue to restrict the access of the developing world to our markets, and that we continue to use huge sums of taxpayers’ money to dump our products on the Third World.” (source)

Political correctness doesn’t go mad, it is mad

To realise how intellectually inconsistent PC politicians really are, consider this from Hazel Blairs:
„Although warning that people should not set out to “deliberately offend people” or make racist jokes, she believes that there should be more scope for people to express themselves.
“What I don’t want to see happen is because people are frightened of an over-reaction they don’t raise the issue,” she said. “What I don’t want people to say is that Muslims will be offended by Christmas, because they are not. There is this presumption that we don’t do things because people will be offended.““ (Source)
So she doesn’t want people to offend but then doesn’t want the fall-out which a consistent and forced avoidance of offence necessarily entails.

From now on, it will be illegal to keep an eye on the police!

“Whereas in the past the police have not had the power to prevent photographs being taken of them, from today they have. Under the new Counter-Terrorism Act it is an offence to take pictures of officers “likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism”. This is such a catch-all measure that it can be used – and, in view of recent trends, will be used – to prevent photographs to which the police object merely by invoking counter-terrorist requirements.”

(Source)

New Labour and the End of Innocence

Philip Johnston has some fitting comments on Labour’s decade of legislative diarrhoea:

“We know there has been a tidal wave of legislation, but it is mind-boggling to discover the size of the tsunami. It is estimated that more than 3,600 new offences have been created. But even more astonishing, as Baroness Stern, a crossbench peer, discovered when she asked, is the number of these that can result in a prison sentence. Believe it or not, there are 1,036 that the official could identify. There may well be more.

It is now an imprisonable offence to allow an unlicensed concert to take place in a church hall. You can go to prison