Restraining Orders Without Conviction

Yet another fence post: The telegraph calls these ‘restraining orders for violent partners’, yet the article makes it clear that no evidence, just an accusation of violence is needed:

“Judges will now be able to approve an order following any offence and if they are acquitted but the court feels there remains sufficient evidence to require restraint.” (source)

If the court feels there is evidence! Who needs facts when you have emotions?

More cynicism required: confronting labour’s creeping totalitarianism

In discussing Labour’s decade of totalitarian legislation, Adam LeBor draws the following comparison in The Times:

“The phrase Big Brother has entered common parlance. But Orwell’s book was published in 1949 as communist regimes in Eastern Europe cemented their control through “salami tactics”. These were invented by Matyas Rakosi, Hungary’s communist leader from 1948-56. He sliced away freedoms sliver by sliver, until he established one of the most feared dictatorships in Eastern Europe.

(…)

In my more cynical moments I imagine Labour ministers following a similar methodology.

The more Big brother watches us, the less he seems to see

The title of this post comes straight from Ross Clark’s book on the surveillance society: “The Road to Southend Pier”. In many ways, this is a worthwhile book, showing how the surveillance state –frighteningly omnipresent in theory- is in reality breathtakingly inefficient at takling crime in the conventional sense while creating new, spurious offences.

One passage seems ill thought through though: “For those

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 …

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.

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)

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.

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

Internet Regulation: Think of the Children!

New Labour seems to be serious about starting to regulate the net more generally rather than in specific cases where real or imagined criminal activity is an issue. The latest idea is an enforced age labelling of websites. As usual, a need to protect the children is at the forefront of justifying government interference. For once, I think the welfare of our children is a genuinely relevant issue, though not in the way that the government has in mind.

The age rating proposed may not sound much like an exercise in censorship