Whose Law Is It Anyway?

Anyone who followed the recent Camp for Climate Action at Kingsnorth could have a range of views of the policing of that event. It could be anything from: “The police successfully prevented an extreme element from injuring protesters, police and horses” to “a legitimate and necessary protest went ahead despite an extreme element within the police force, who were committed to suppress it”.

For me, my experience of the policing of the camp is something I'm having some difficulty accepting. As a councillor in Cambridge, I work closely with the police and know the intentions of officers are overwhelmingly genuine.

My experience at the camp was therefore rather unexpected. In many areas, the police stopped even bothering to obey the law or justify their actions. They resorted to psychological measures, on most mornings at 5 a.m., assembling van loads of riot police at the gate as if ready to invade the camp. The most bizarre of these actions was to send a number of police vans down the road at 3 a.m. on Wednesday morning, sirens blazing. When the got to the gate, they stopped and played “The Ride of the Valkyries” (theme from Apocalypse Now) over their loudspeaker before silently disappearing back to their temporary tent city (complete with stables and a swimming pool).

Have I been asleep while law after law has given the police so much power and so little responsibility? Are our police so conditioned to obey from above that they'll willfully break the law themselves to carry out an order? I'm dumbstruck!

There is something that now seems more fate than mere coincidence. I went to the camp was to run a workshop. Titled “You call this democracy!”, it looked at how party funding, the voting system, and centralised government give so few people any real voice or influence over climate and social issues.

Looking back now, I didn't realise just how important a topic this is.

We Liberal Democrats, it seems, have a very big fight on our hands. That fight is to wrestle back real accountability and influence for the voters. If we fail, the likely prognosis is that we continue to slide into a scary police state. A state serving, not the interests of the citizens, but instead those of a self-serving few.

Not in my name...

I hope you'll take a few minutes to declare that this isn't in your name either.

Let's all unsubscribe.

Economic suicide: How to sink into the bog

Economists, like Vince Cable, and their imitators (think Mr G Brown and Mr A Darling ;), sometimes talk about "economic drag", or the economy getting "bogged down" and Tories have for years fought for low taxes on the basis of economic efficiency, but what is this "drag" they speak of?

Well, coming up, I'll talk about:

• What it's not
• What it is, and it's impact on our lives, our finances and our environment
• Why lower taxes are what we should aim for, but not the starting point
• Where we can start: Swapping the TV license to being either an income tax or a fixed component of local taxes (like the police); replacing council tax with something efficient to collect and administer
• The stupidity factor: The 'drag' of thousands of tonnes of letters that cost more to send than the amount of money they relate to
  

Liberal benefits? What!

Perhaps this is a bizarre subject to attempt the liberty test on, but it really is one worth putting the 'angry tax payer' hat on for.

Depending on the state of what we rather inaccurately call our 'economy', there will typically be a number of people earning, and paying taxes, and other people who are not earning, or earning less, and are receiving benefits.

This is one of those great sources of resentment, and a bit of a political hot potato. Those that are working and giving up some of their income in taxes, do so begrudgingly and usually with the complaint that it is too much. Those taxes get justified on the grounds of social welfare, compassion and ultimately, need.

If we consider unemployment, our welfare system aims, to a greater or lesser degree, to cover for the needs of the unemployed person and their dependents - needs such as: food; clothing; shelter and assistance in finding new work such as travel and training.

As Mr Angry Taxpayer, I'd want to ensure that my money is not being wasted - that my money is being spent on needs, and not on luxuries and excesses.

"No!", I hear the protesters shout, "You can't control how someone spends their money. They are free, not criminals" (criminals, ooh... there's another topic for another day).

Well let's look at this. Can I as a tax payer dictate that someone cannot buy, say beer, or cigarettes, if they are unemployed, and receiving benefits? Of course not. Our liberal society protects people's freedom of choice. They can do as they please within the law. They can spend their money how they please.

But wait! Their money? Who's money is it? The conventional story would be that originally, it's mine, the tax payer, and then, it's the government's, and then it belongs to our unemployed beneficiary.

Another way of looking at it is that it is never the government's (it remains the property of the tax-payer and they are being entrusted with using it for the purpose for which it was taken), and arguably, they should ensure that it is used for the prescribed purpose and nothing else.

Nick Robinson - Missing the point yet again!

"Cash for what?" says the BBC's Nick Robinson.

It's simple: "cash for status quo Thatcherism", that's what!

How can someone ask that question over a £600k donation? Yes, as one comment points out, it's the "you owe me" for some point in the future, but really it's more about someone maintaining the party spending race that is becoming like the US primaries.

Whatever party large donations are given to, it's:

• cash for low tax for the wealthy
• cash for giving the wealthy and large companies more control over planning and economic policy than local people
• cash for keeping the poor enslaved by the rich

It's no surprise that the Liberal Democrat's are now the most socially progressive party, prepared to reign in the rich.

Why? Not only because the members of the party form the policy instead of some elite cabinet, but also, it has to be said, because they'd lose out far less than Labour and the Tories, who'd lose their huge donations from Lord "how did I get a peerage" Sainsbury and Lord "I'm not a tax exile, really!" Ashcroft.

It's time we ended this farce of a a supposed democracy and took back our control from these wealthy donors!

At the moment, it's only the Liberal Democrats that can be trusted on real reform:

• reform of party funding to place limits on individual donations
• reform of our voting system to make sure that every vote counts, not just the swing voters in marginal seats
• reform of local government, putting funding and control back with the people instead of where it currently is: Whitehall.
  
• abolition of the Dti (or whatever Prime Minister Bean renamed it to)
  

BBC comment on policy copying but fail to notice LibDem policies!

Perhaps Liberal Democrats are getting used to the BBC ignoring 23% of those who voted in 2005 and defaulting to two-party coverage in their analysis.

In yet another example, Nick Robinson comments in his piece, Battle of Ideas, how the Chancellor has copied Tory policies, without a mention of the Lib Dems.

How very strange, considering that it was the Lib Dems who, over a year ago, adopted a policy to replace Air Passenger Duty with one based on the aircraft emissions, hence ensuring that empty and low occupancy planes pay for their emissions.

How can someone call them self the Political Editor, when he appears to not know the policies of all three main parties. Perhaps he also failed to notice that the Lib Dems gained more than 16 seats at the last election, having won an equal number of seats for the Tories - taking votes off Labour where the Tories failed to increase their vote.


Nick,

You seem to have missed a rather notable fact, perhaps in the now common goal of getting stuff out quick rather than getting thorough journalism out.

It is not just the Tories, whose policies have been plagiarised. It has been Liberal Democrat policy for over a year to "tax pollution, not people". Replacing the Air Passenger Duty with a tax on the plane has now been copied, first by the Tories, and now by their successors.

I do find it quite strange that as political editor, you didn't comment on just how "old hat" the APD change is... such that Easyjet have been running adverts calling for the change.

Perhaps you might at some point find time to look at how a policy like this comes to be copied. I'd say that it's because it was from a party that still involves it's grass roots in policy making, and has the sense to debate these things at conference...

In Search of Freedom

In recent years, the word "freedom" has been used... liberally. We could even say that to talk about freedom or liberty has now become as frequent and meaningless as making passing comments about the weather at a bus stop. In fact, saying as much, would be to unfairly demean those conversations about the weather that have become so much more relevant than we've been used to.

In his speech to congress on 20th Sept 2001, George W Bush used the word freedom in the following phrases: "Tonight, we are a country awakened to danger and called to defend freedom."; "On September the 11th, enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country."; "a world where freedom itself is under attack"; "They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other."; "what is at stake is not just America's freedom"; "This is the fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom"; "Freedom and fear are at war"; "The advance of human freedom, the great achievement of our time and the great hope of every time, now depends on us."; "I will not relent in waging this struggle for freedom and security for the American people."; " Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them." (1)

Stop and read those again. Read them aloud. Read them confidently. Take a few breaths between each, and notice what effect saying those aloud has on you. Notice the effect on you to hear those words spoken aloud, and spoken resolutely.

Personally, it sends shivers down my spine!

To complete the picture, here is what Mr Bush has to say about liberty: "As long as the United States of America is determined and strong, this will not be an age of terror. This will be an age of liberty here and across the world.".

Now consider late July 2007. "The Freedom Fighters", of, "The Free World", are entrenched in Afghanistan and Iraq in an attempt to deliver our cherished freedoms by force, and are fighting against nothing other than a form of home-grown "freedom fighter", who in turn is attempting, in their view, to defend their own way of life.

Furthermore, back here in the free society of the UK, we have just had an attempt to impose restrictions of movement on 5 million people. In a ridiculous move to circumvent those very freedoms that we claim to have: in Bush's words "our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other", BAA, the owners of most of the UK's airport capacity, were attempting to disrupt the "Camp for Climate Action" sustainability event and protests near Heathrow.

Perhaps though it is understandable that words like freedom, liberty and democracy (that other thing that we're attempting to "give" to the world) have become tainted, and almost meaningless.

Looking back at the phrases from that speech, which some regard as a 'great' speech of history, I'd suggest that the source of our difficulties with freedom lie in history itself.

In the past, our societies have evolved and expanded with plentiful space and resources. The actions that we have taken, and the resources that we have used, have had no consequence on the lives of others. Those trees felled to build that log cabin; that oil burned to run our cars; and even that pollution that ran off our fields into the river, just didn't seem to matter.

This is what we have become used to, and we called it "freedom". We celebrated it, built monuments to it, and educated our society to aspire to unlimited lives, where whatever we can dream we can have.

Unfortunately, we built freedom on a myth: that our actions are small and inconsequential.

It's not surprising that we did, when we consider the vast expanse of just one continent that became the "new frontier" with the settlement of Jamestown as recently as 1607. Consider that only 200 years ago, the population of that continent had fewer people than live in greater London today, around 7 million. What an amazing adventure that must have been. Back in 1800, the whole world population still numbered under 1 billion. In the next 100 years it grew by 70% to under 1.7 billion, and then in the following 100 years, rocketed to 6 billion, standing a mere 7 years later (as of July 2007) at 6.6 billion.

The people of our vast global population are now falling over each other and fighting over many declining resources that once seemed so huge that we couldn't dent them. Forests, arable land, mineral resources, the fish stocks of the seas: they once seemed so huge.

And, to that list of scarce resources, we can add "freedom". Freedom has also turned out be be limited, and it is now also being fought over. What was once celebrated and theoretically available to all has become something that is declared; owned, defended and attacked.

And.. as with any limited resource, "freedom" now has a price in a global market. Those who can afford it can have it, but those who cannot, they have to fight and to take it by force. Perhaps, just perhaps, this is our ideological battle. It is not the fight of one way of life over another, but instead the fight for the space for both.

In this vein, perhaps the future for freedom, is the same as that of our other scarce resources. We must learn to share it, and to share it equally. Do we want to continue in a world where our supposed democracy is nothing of the sort, but instead something where legal fees and political donations are a greater sway of power than individuals? Do we want to continue to fight for room for unsustainable and unrestrained freedoms that give no consideration to what is left for others? I, for one, do not.

So what of the search for freedom. We found it. It was great, and let's hope that we learned from it. Freedom was that impulsive and individualistic teenager. It's now time for freedom to grow up, to fall in love with responsibility, and form a bond called liberty.

Our search now must be for the balance of freedoms and responsibilities that has us live in harmony with each other, and in harmony with the planet that sustains us. Rest in peace freedom. Hello liberty.

Only when we have mastered liberty, will we once again, like those American pioneers, be able to stand and look out over the world and say "This... this is freedom".

Neale Upstone
5th August, 2007

(1) Source: http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/gw-bush-9-11.htm