Two interesting developments this week have prompted some ponderings…

1) The European Court of Human Rights has ruled the UK police’s stop and search tactics illegal

This creates a serious dilemma for anti-EU libertarians, as shown by the response of anti-EU blogger 13th Spitfire in the (fascinating) comments thread on law blog Charon QC’s coverage of the ruling (via the rather good Jack of Kent). As 13th Spitfire puts it:

Though I sincerely disagree with the Stop and Search laws, it just leaves a very bad taste in the mouth that we have to be told by a foreign court that our domestic proceedings, and by extension our parliament, is illegal.

2) The EU-withdrawalist UK Independence Party has announced that it favours a ban on the burka. This despite UKIP long having portrayed itself as a more or less libertarian party.

Libertarians are a hugely over-represented breed among the political blogosphere. There’s hundreds of them, on both sides of the Atlantic – but in real world politics there’s barely a handful, and they rarely even retain their deposits in elections. They are, however, so vocal on the web that few online political discussions can pass without a libertarian of some stripe cropping up to make their case. As such, libertarian arguments increasinly need to be addressed, even while libertarianism remains decidedly fringe.

The prime unifying belief that they share is that individual liberty is paramount, and that the role of the state should be kept as minimal as feasibly possible. A libertarian, as a rule, opposes bans and restrictions – taking John Stuart Mill’s laudable harm principle as the starting point for pretty much all their approaches to the world, but taking this idea far further than Mill himself (or his fellow small-”L” liberals) ever did.

The libertarian argument against European integration in general – and the European Union specifically – is usually that it implies the imposition of a new layer of government above the national. As libertarians believe small government to be the best form, this is an understandable approach. After all, if you already have a national ministry dealing with policy area X, where’s the need for an additional European-level administration which deals with the same area?

What happens next, however, is that the majority of libertarians seem to take this entirely reasonable argument against the repetition/overlap of governmental/administrative layers, and from it extrapolate that it is the super-national, European-level layer of government/administration which is the unnecessary one.

If the smallest amount of governmental/state interference in the life of the individual – and the maximum level of individual liberty – is the key aim, then surely it is the *national* layer which is superfluous?

If we agree that there are a few basic fundamentals for individual liberty – the right to trial, to vote, to be free from persecution, to free speech, etc. etc. (read Mill and the US declaration of independence for more) – then why, in the case of the EU, have these asserted 27 times in 27 countries, when once should be enough?

If we agree, as most libertarians do, that some laws and regulations are necessary for the smooth functioning of society – agreed systems of weights and measures (to prevent fraud), some level of health and safety guarantees, product standards, environmental/pollution restrictions (all taking Mill’s dictum that as individuals we shouldn’t harm others and applying it to corporations and government bodies), etc. etc. – why have 27 different variants of these laws and regulations, when what’s good for one of us is surely good for all?

This is the fundamental reason why libertarians should be in favour of European integration (note: not necessarily the current nature of European integration or current European bodies, both EU and non-EU, but the general principle) – for an individual in country X to have to abide by different laws than an individual in country Y implies a strong likelihood that the two are experiencing different levels of individual freedom. Plus, most importantly, if individual X goes to country Y, then he/she will have to abide by country Y’s laws – a potential restriction on that individual’s liberty of movement. (Case study: In Germany and Austria, it is illegal to deny the Holocaust; it is not in the UK. When British citizen David Irving went to Austria, having denied the Holocaust, he was arrested and imprisoned.)

Of course, restricting this to a mere continent (and not even all of that) is not ideal. The true libertarian would agree that liberty is universal – for true liberty to exist, what applies to one individual should apply to us all – and therefore we should be pushing for world government, where everyone on the planet has the same rights as everyone else.

But this still doesn’t take away from the fact that if you want small government for maximum individual liberty, the higher the level at which the basic laws and regulations are imposed, the better. Universal is the ideal (hence the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights), but if that proves impossible for now then you surely go for as broad an area as you can? The best part of a continent is not a bad starting point, and is certainly better than a mere individual country. Especially when, as the European Court of Human Rights ruling demonstrates, individual countries cannot be relied upon to safeguard the liberties of their citizens.

I have long stated this to be one of my prime motivations for supporting European integration: the ability of super-national bodies to restrict the power that nation states can hold over the individual. Case in point: if you are British, you have obligations but few rights – we remain, technically, subjects, not citizens. As I have argued before (in some detail), it was only with the introduction of EU citizenship that

“for the first time in Britain’s history, British citizens/subjects have the right to vote, to free movement, and so on, rather than just the privilege – we are no longer dependant upon the whim of parliament.”

And yet still we find self-professed libertarians clinging to the old, liberty-restricting national apparatus, rather than the new, liberty-granting super-national bodies of the EU and Council of Europe. Supposedly state-hating libertarians who cling to the state.

It genuinely baffles me. Can any libertarian provide me with a libertarian case for this apparent nationalism? Because the way I see it, nationalism and libertarianism are mutually exclusive – one being a collective idea focussed around the concept of a geographically and legally-restrictive state, the other focussed around the ideas of individualism and freedom.

If you haven’t, read the liveblog from the day, have a look at the one year on post, much of which still stands (though, thankfully, this country seems to be rather less hysterical about terrorism these days), and flick through the London Terror Attacks archive.

It’s important not to forget those that died. But although a memorial is being unveiled later today, the thing about terrorism remains that it exists to terrorise.

Four years on, the level of fear in London is back to what it was on 6th July 2005. People carry on their lives quite happily. The underground is packed with people not even giving a thought to the possibility of being blown up on the way to work. The majority of commuters this morning will not even remember that today is the anniversary of those deeply unpleasant events.

This is the best memorial.

Despite the best efforts of the terrorists – and the tabloid-whipped politicians scrabbling around in their wake with plans for detention without trial, stifling protest, DNA databases and countless other pointless draconian measures – our way of life has not been changed.

We, the people of London, were attacked – not the politicians, and not the innumerable armchair warmongers from around the world. The politicians and sabre-rattlers could do well to learn from our response – we dusted ourselves down, had a quick look around, and carried on with our lives.

The terrorists, hoping to have a major impact on the lives of everyone in this country, managed merely to kill and maim a few score innocents. They hoped to become heroes – they ended up little better than animals. And, four years on, they have been all but forgotten.

This is how it should be. If terrorists attack us to scare us and make us change our way of life, what better response is there than to carry on as if nothing has happened?

Via the Convention on Modern Liberty‘s Twitter feed and following yesterday’s post on German concerns about the EU being used as a democratic bypass comes news of a worrying development for the freedom of every EU citizen:

People may be aware of the debate in the UK over access to communications data… but are less familiar with the role the UK government has played in the EU, where it first proposed mandatory data retention, backed by France, Ireland and Sweden, in April 2004. The final stages of its passage through the EU came under the UK presidency of the council, and their officials crawled all over the European parliament to get it passed. Despite widespread opposition from more than 200 civil society groups, the EU data protection commissioners and many in the parliament organised an alliance of the PSE (Socialist group, of which they are part) and the centre-right PPE (Conservative group) to steamroller it through in December 2005…

We have good reason to be very critical of the authoritarian direction the government has taken at home, but we should be equally vigilant of what the UK government gets up to in the EU – and at the same time wake up to the fact that many of the threats to our freedoms and liberties now originate from the EU. Indeed, the surveillance society, which makes suspects of us all, is to be the centrepiece of the next five-year plan for EU justice and home affairs to be adopted later this year (pdf).

As the Convention on Modern Liberty tweet noted, “EU law is now a major threat to privacy… And it’s not eurosceptic to say that”.

But, of course, this in nothing new. I noted the Blair government’s attempts to use the EU to force through unpopular changes a few years back, and was disgusted [on ID cards] and outraged [over internet regulation proposals - the first hints of this current unpleasant legislation] at the time. The real problem is, as ever, the governments of the member states and their ability to wrap up such deals behind closed doors at meetings of the Council – combined with a lack of reporting on the EU in the mainstream press that allows major national newspapers like the Guardian to fail to notice such distasteful legislation until it has already been passed, challenged in court, and passed again.

Give the people of Europe more say in how the EU is run, give the European Parliament more power to halt such unpleasantness, then press reporting on EU affairs would become more attentive, such moves by member state governments to abuse both the EU and its citizens would be spotted sooner, and effective pan-European opposition could be mobilised. As it is, everyone only finds out after it’s too late – no amount of attempts to highlight dodgy legislation from a mere small blog such as this one will ever reach enough people in time.

Meanwhile, let’s just sit back and marvel at how it is the UK – that last European bastion against the forces of totalitarian repression during the 1940s – that has been the driving force behind EU legislation that would not look out of place in Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Mussolini’s Italy, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal or Vichy France.

Come on, EU – you’re meant to be better than this.

Update: Oh, the irony – the European Commission’s now complaining about people trying to steal its confidential data. What out OUR confidential data, Commission types?

Good news for fascists today – according to the EU, it’s no longer racist to target a particular ethnic group based on folklore that suggests they’re all criminals.

Up next from Italy and the EU, fresh policies to deal with the threat of witchcraft from little old ladies with pet cats (mostly involving rivers, rocks and bonfires), special breeding programmes to provide more hunchbacks so we can rub their humps for luck to get out of the credit crunch, and a new drive to round up all Jews into ghettoes to prevent them from using their vast wealth and international network of spies and accomplices to secretly rule the world.

El Pais has more (in Spanish – or automatically translated)

Three thoughts on all the Westminster excitement (for non-UK readers, the short version – the Shadow Home Secretary has resigned his seat as MP to force a by-election, which he has announced that he intends to fight on the single issue of the erosion of civil liberties in Britain, following the contentious and close vote to extend the legal period of detention without trial to 42 days):

1) No one (outside of blogland) really cares about a bunch of muslims being locked up (and no one outside of blogland thinks the risk of anyone other than terrorist suspects being affected is a serious one). Nor do they care much about ID cards and a national ID database, or about there being loads of CCTV cameras invading our privacy every second of the day with no discernible impact on crime rates (the “if you’ve done nothing wrong you’ve got nothing to hide” mentality still being massively dominant) when their house price is plummeting and/or it’s costing more to fill up at the pumps and do the weekly shop. The next election will almost certainly be fought over the economy, with Gordon Brown’s ten years as Chancellor being painted as ten years of luck that set us up for a crash by the Tories, and as ten years of stability showing Gordon Brown to be the best man to weather the economic storm by Labour. Civil Liberties are simply not an election-winning issue.

2) This is aimed at Cameron far more than Labour, and smacks of sour grapes that Davis hasn’t got the influence within the party to make this a central plank of the Tory attack strategy. He’s throwing his toys out of the pram, because two-time leadership loser Davis can’t hack that he’s not the boss. He almost certainly does believe (pretty much) everything he says on the civil liberties front – he’s got a decent enough track record, (though his support of 28 days does raise a few questions and contradictory positions on gay rights do cause some concern) – but it’s hard not to see this as anything more than another internal Tory party spat.

3) It is, however, moderately interesting that one of the most senior opposition frontbenchers sees parliament’s influence as so diminished that it’s easier to spread his message (pretty much literally) from a soapbox. Maybe someone should get the man a blog…

(Far more interesting, of course, is the result of the Irish Lisbon Treaty referendum – expected later today, and expected to be very close indeed. But will there be any irregularities that may allow a legal challenge from the losing side?)

So says Home Secretary Jacqui Smith on The Andrew Marr Show just now.

I’m confused, Ms. Smith. How can the terrorist threat be growing? We’ve been fighting the terrorists constantly for the last six and a half years. How come the threat they pose is increasing?

Surely you can’t be tacitly admitting that government policy in Iraq and Afghanistan has been making Britain more of a target? Surely you can’t be suggesting that the huge loss of life and massive expenditure fighting two wars in two far-off countries (not to mention the increased counter-terrorism measures at home and collusion with other powers around the world) has been a waste of time?

Nah – surely not. After all, we’ve repeatedly been told by the government that the Iraq war had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks in London on 7th July 2005. The terrorist threat must simply be growing organically, independent of government policy, like a particularly virulent form of Japanese knotweed.

Ho hum. It seems there’s nothing we can do to stop the terrorists. A strange admission for a Home Secretary to make…

This post is from Dan Hardie:

Do you like reading fine words? Here is the Prime Minister on the subject of Iraqi ex-employees of the British Government, speaking in the House of Commons on October 9th, 2007: ‘I would also like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the work of our civilian and locally employed staff in Iraq, many of whom have worked in extremely difficult circumstances, exposing themselves and their families to danger. I am pleased therefore to announce today a new policy which more fully recognises the contribution made by our local Iraqi staff, who work for our armed forces and civilian missions in what we know are uniquely difficult circumstances.’

Fine words. What about deeds? Continue Reading

Yes, that’s right. The police have asked that every single last one of us has our DNA sampled just in case we commit a heinous crime. And the government are AGAINST it.

Hang on. Was there a coup d’etat overnight or something? Where’s the REAL government?

The Home Office said a mandatory database “would raise significant practical and ethical issues”

It’s a veritable Damascene conversion! I eagerly await the now surely inevitable announcement of the abandonment of the equally impractical and ethically suspect ID database.

Home Office minister Tony McNulty told BBC that a national database was not a “silver bullet” and that it would raise practical as well as civil liberties issues.

Yes, that’s THE Tony McNulty. Him of blind loyalty to the ID scheme fame.

“How to maintain the security of a database with 4.5m people on it is one thing,” he said.

“Doing that for 60m people is another.”

Hurrah! Does this mean they’ve seen the light?

Hint: almost certainly not.

So the British government has admitted that they’ve twice been in breach of the UN Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearances over extraordinary rendition flights. And Foreign Secretary David Miliband has – bless him – said sorry for the “accidental” misinformation.

Not, of course, sorry to the people being extraordinarily rendered, whoever they might be – nor for breaking international law…

And our dear Prime Minister has also weighed in, eloquence personified (is he getting lessons from Donald Rumsfeld?)

It is unfortunate that this was not known and it was unfortunate it happened without us knowing that it had happened but it’s important to put in procedures [to ensure] this will not happen again… We share the disappointment that everybody has about what’s actually happened

But admitting a couple of flights landing in transit on the remote UK territory of Diego Garcia is somewhat different to the main accusation – that the UK itself was used as a stop-off point. What about the 73 to 200 other flights that our current beleaguered Chancellor – as Transport Secretary – and the National Air Traffic Service noted had been identified by campaigners as having potentially been used for rendition back in March 2006?

The question asked two years ago by Lib Dem MP Michael Moore (no relation), and quoted in that last linked piece, remains entirely pertinent:

A fundamental question remains unanswered. Has the UK government actually asked the United States how many individuals have been rendered through Britain? If this hasn’t been asked, then why on earth not?

Saying sorry for a couple of accidental (honest, m’lud) breaches of international law is all very well and good. But what about the other 200 potential rendition flights via the UK itself?

As I noted a year and a bit back, the UN regulations on “enforced disappearances” (aka state kidnappings), explicitly state that:

Acts constituting enforced disappearance shall be considered a continuing offence as long as the perpetrators continue to conceal the fate and the whereabouts of persons who have disappeared and these facts remain unclarified [emphasis mine]

Now that the British government has admitted that it hasn’t got a clue what’s going on, can we expect a full and thorough independent inquiry? Because not to investigate further having admitted incompetence on this issue would, surely, be to stick two fingers up at the UN by refusing to clarify the issue, and thus to deliberately stay in breach of international law.

Plus, as the EU’s investigation into extraordinary renditionnoted:

It is implausible, on the basis of the testimonies and documents received, that certain European governments were not aware of the activities linked to extraordinary rendition on their territory

Yet this appears to be precisely what David Miliband is claiming to be the case.

And so another question must be asked: if a foreign power can land an illegal cargo on British territory without the British government’s knowledge – as appears to be the excuse here – that flagrant lapse in security is in itself surely worthy of immediate, urgent investigation? Isn’t that an indication of criminal incompetence at a time of heightened threats from foreign sources? Shouldn’t heads roll?

I await the announcement of an inquiry with baited breath… (And precisely no expectation of one coming…)

Update: This. Spot on, from the really rather good Obsolete.

Spotted in a decent French article on Kosovo’s independence, a throwaway line that made me ponder:

L’indépendance du Kosovo se fera sous supervision internationale. Malgré ces divisions, l’Union européenne a décidé, sans l’aval de l’ONU, de déployer au Kosovo une mission de quelque 2 000 policiers et juristes pour « accompagner » les débuts de l’indépendance du Kosovo.

Or, in other words:

The independence of Kosovo will be under international supervision. Despite this, the European Union has decided, without UN approval, to deploy in Kosovo, a mission of some 2000 policemen and lawyers to “accompany” the beginnings of the independence of Kosovo. [emphasis mine]

Of course, a significant reason why the anti-war protests back in 2003 felt so justified to so many was the lack of a UN resolution supporting military action against Saddam Hussein in Iraq. There are no such protests about unilateral military action in Kosovo – nor have there really ever been during the last decade of NATO deployments there.

Is this because Kosovo is too low-profile for anyone to really care – or is there a more significant, wider-ranging reason?

Kosovo has declared independence. Many western countries – including the UK and US – are likely to declare their official recognition. Russia has explicitly stated the declaration to be illegal – and China has also made disapproving noises.

With two members of the UN Security Council opposed to Kosovo’s independence, it cannot be recognised by the UN – and so will not legally be a state, despite thinking it is. Likewise, the situation in Darfur is officially not a genocide (despite all the evidence) thanks to the UN having failed to declare it as such – partially thanks to pressure from China, keen to preserve her arms trade.

In situations such as these, is it acceptable to bypass the UN? If so, why here and not five years ago in Iraq? And, if bypassing the UN is sometimes acceptable, what useful purpose does this supposed final arbiter of international law actually serve any more? And does the lack of protests over military action in Kosovo indicate an acknowledgement of this?

For the record, I despise this regime more than words can express.

What in hell’s name are we doing assorting with such people? This kind of wanton, gleefully unjust barbarity puts them on a par with the Taleban, while the 9/11 terrorists were primarily Saudi. Yet rather than invade to overthrow the bastards, we faun in front of them with full red carpet treatment and sell them billions of pounds’ worth of high-tech (and not so high-tech) weaponry, backed up with bribery and corruption.

Yes, getting oil’s lovely. But it’s not THAT lovely, surely?

(Yet another reason why I don’t write about the middle east – it simply enrages and disgusts me too much…)

Dan Hardie has the latest, following recent (rather odd) newspaper rumours of a change in government policy on the UK’s attitude to those who have worked for the British army in Iraq, and who now face torture and death as a result.

As David Cameron has (literally) just said in the Commons, “people who have risked their lives for Britain should never be let down by Britain”. The thing to remember, however, is that it’s not just the interpreters who have risked their lives, but every Iraqi who has done any kind of job for the army out there. They should not be let down either.

Oh, and the venue for tomorrow’s meeting’s had to change at the last minute.

So, Gordon’s cunningly timed his announcement of troop withdrawals for the day of the shadow Foreign Secretary’s speech to the Conservative Party Conference – who’d have thought it?

But amidst all this playing politics over Iraq – a Blair legacy that neither Brown nor Cameron have any desire to inherit – attention has shifted from the more pressing concerns. British forces haven’t been in central Basra for a good month now, based instead at the airport on the outskirts, and now there’s going to be 1,000 less of them. What little impact they were still having, what little security they could still provide, is being further eroded.

Retreats are never pretty – but why are we leaving so many men and women behind? The Iraqi support workers who have been helping the British army, often not out of ideology but necessity, have once again been forgotten as attention has shifted to conference season and silly speculation about elections and referenda.

But they’re still there, and they and their families are still facing death and torture on a daily basis, with no help whatsoever from the British government.

So, remind your MP about the meeting at the Commons on Tuesday 9th October. Pester them. Get them to go and make a real difference to people’s lives, rather than wasting time on petty political point-scoring at the conferences.

The Iraq war was always going to be unpopular, it’s turned into a disaster – let’s salvage what little moral credibility we still can before its’ too late.

It was only a matter of time before Britain’s ridiculous libel laws led to an internet service provider shutting down a bunch of websites in the face of a writ.

But the ISP hosting Bloggerheads and Craig Murray‘s blog, which appears to have shut down one of their servers following a writ from Uzbek millionaire Alisher Usmanov, have been a bit dumb on this one.
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