A Message From Britain

[R. Richard]

I do indeed live in the Isle of Man. You live in the USA. However, you thought that it was reasonable to raise and discuss the apparent iniquity of a sentence and a judges comments in an English court. I am pleased that you have exercised your right to have your say from your place in the world but equally if Americans like you want to pass judgements on other peoples it is surely reasonable to accept that the foreignor has some entitlement to respond in kind.

Finally, as research of an argument doesn't seem to appeal to you I'll tell you that I was born in the UK and have lived about 10% of my life here, 40% in the USA and the remainder equally split between Australia, Italy and Japan . Now, what are your qualifications as an internationally experienced commenter.??

I have never been to Antarctica. I have also never been to the Arctic polar cap. Other than that, I been. I have imported opals from Alice Springs/Lightning Ridge area. I have been to India, from the Himalayas to the southern tip. [The Indian government gave me an honor guard escort on my way South. The honor guard had orders to shoot me if I tried to leave the train, but that is a mere detail.] I spent a little time in Saudi Arabia. I spent some time in Africa. I also got into places in central Asia where I wasn't even aware in which country I was.

If they prosecuted drunkeness in Oz like they do in the US, half the male population would be in jail. I never really saw Indian justice at work, other than the 'shoot him if he tries to get off the train' bit [no trial.] In Saudi Arabia, they normally don't have 'savage, midaeval jail sentences.' Cut hands and even heads off, they got. If you think that US authorities are rough on prisoners, you aint never been to Africa. You obviously aint never been to the tribal areas of central Asia. I don't know how they dela with their own people, but they are willing to hire foreigners to off their neighbors, including women and children. [However, never, never, never shoot a sheep!] Oh yeah, I also spent some time in Spain. I had a room in a Spanish facility. It was carved from solid rock and there was an air pipe and a bucket for amenities. You know, the Spanish don't like Basques at all. I don't know if it was the Spanish justice system or not, but they wanted certain Basques terminated with extreme prejudice. What the hell, it's a living.

 

[BlackShanglan]

I suspect that you are responding more to the coloufulness of my expression rather than the substance of my comment which may be summarised in the question "Does Severe Punishment work for our societies"?

No. I'm pointing out that in the areas of assault, theft, and burglary, at least, a lack of incarcertion appears decidedly not to work. Hence the ornamental use of statistics.

Don't mistake me; I don't mean that draconian sentences should be meted out for minor crimes. But I do believe that each crime would ideally be met with some substantial punishment. As I understand the theory of "zero tolerance policing," I think it an excellent one; that is, not that one hands out very severe punishments for every crime, but that each crime is given a clear punishment. Otherwise, one simply teaches people to ignore the law. Hence, I think that a large prison population is not necessarily a problem; if it means that we're gradually teaching people that infractions against the law are consistently punished and that behaving in legally allowable ways is the better course, it's effort well spent.

As far as what I'm responding to in your posts, I believe that the problem we're running into here is that you're addressing a number of different things, not a single connected issue. You took a single specific case (that of the sentence given to two adult men for raping a ten year old), looked at comments indicating that people thought the sentence lenient, and in response asked, "Well, why does your system as a whole have so many people in prison?" You moved from a specific case in one country to an unrelated systemic issue in another, and then muddied the waters further by changing your tack to "severity of punishment," which is not automatically correlated with numbers of people incarcerated. The number of laws being enforced and the consistency of enforcement tends to have at least as strong an impact. I'm happy to try to address your central point, but it's not entirely clear what connects the different portions of it.

Shanglan

 

[R. Richard]

No. I'm pointing out that in the areas of assault, theft, and burglary, at least, a lack of incarcertion appears decidedly not to work. Hence the ornamental use of statistics.

In New York City of some years back, a Mayor named Dinkins decided to stop enforcing laws against minor crimes, mainly because too many minorities were being put into prison. NYC quickly began to descend into chaos! The situation led to the ouster of Dinkins and the election of Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani immediately adopted a policy of enforcement of the written laws. There was an outcry that there would be so many arrests that there would be no place to put the prisoners. Strangely enough, people stopped committing a lot of minor crimes, because they didn't want to be jailed out in Riker's Island [not a fun place.] Also strangely, the number of major crimes also decreased. perhaps because the 'minor leagues' had been more or less shut down.

People such as the ACLU tried to find some sort of pattern of discrimination against minorities under Giuliani's regime. The resulting conclusion was that poor people commit a disproportionate number of crimes. Many minorities are poor people. Thus, many minorities wind up in jail.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

A medium-long article that puts this into a broader context:

The New English Review

The Virtue of Freedom
by Theodore Dalrymple (April 2007)

Some years ago, before Anthony Blair became Prime Minister of the benighted islands from which I write this, a newspaper got wind of the fact that I had not had a television for nearly thirty years. Would I, it asked, watch television for a week and report to readers what I thought of it. The newspaper said it would provide me with the television.

I agreed, but on one condition: that at the end of the week, the newspaper took the television away again. The editor thought this an odd condition, but accepted it.

The television duly arrived and I plugged it in. The first programme I saw after a gap of thirty years was one of those American shows in which individuals and families expose their social pathology to the idle gaze of millions. A middle-aged, lower middle-class woman was complaining about the conduct of her three daughters, aged (if I remember right) 12, 13 and 14. They had left home, and were now - if the mother was to be believed - drug-taking prostitutes.

At this point in the narration, the presenter of the show intervened and announced that the daughters were in the studio, and asked the live audience to give them a warm welcome. The three drug-taking prostitutes aged 12, 13 and 14 duly came trippingly down the stairway of the studio set, to a storm of applause as if they were conquering heroines.

I confess that I was transfixed by this. It was both terrible and fascinating, rather like a rattlesnake. And I was soon to realise that these ‘reality’ shows (do they reflect reality or mould it?) have scouts - I cannot in all conscience call them talent scouts - everywhere, even in remote regions of the globe such as the one in which I happened to be practising medicine.

Just around the corner from my hospital lived a man notorious for his drinking, which led to various medical crises. On a bed, he resembled nothing so much as a beached whale. One day I was called to his house because he was reported to be dying. I rushed round as fast as I could, only to be told by one of his daughters that I could f… off, I wasn’t needed any more. In the meantime, apparently, he had revived.

He had three daughters, who were as cetacean in their body habitus as he. A reality show in the United States somehow got hold of the fact that all three daughters had had children, the apparent physical impossibility of it notwithstanding, by the same man. For this tremendous achievement, mothers and father were paid a considerable sum to exhibit themselves, like freaks, on the show: encouraging some, no doubt, to go and do likewise.

A short while later, my wife and I happened to watch an interview by a minor and singularly silly comedian of a man who called himself Tony Blair. We had never seen him before, and what he said was so trivial and facile, and his appearance on such a show was so completely undignified, that we assumed that it was someone imitating the well-known politician of that name rather than the man himself. It was only later that we discovered that it was indeed the future leader of our country, and no mere impersonator of him; we were not reassured.

It might be argued that, in a demotic age, politicians have to consent to indignities if they are to be elected; if so, it is hardly surprising that we repeatedly elect nonentities distinguished only for their ambition and relentless pursuit of office. Unfortunately, mediocrity and ambition often combine with vast self-regard; and there is no better example of it than Anthony Blair.

It is not appreciated in America just how ferocious and inveterate an enemy of freedom Mr Blair is. Perhaps the most dangerous thing about him is that he doesn’t know it: he thinks of himself, on the contrary, as a guardian of freedom, perhaps the greatest such guardian in the world. But his government has created 3,000 new criminal offences in ten years, that is to say more than one per working day, when all along the problem in Britain was not a insufficiency of laws, but a lack of will to enforce those that we had. The law is now so needlessly complex, and so many laws and regulations are promulgated weekly, daily, hourly, without any parliamentary oversight, that is to say by administrative decree appropriate to a dictatorship, that lawyers themselves are overwhelmed by them and do not understand them. There could be no better recipe for the development of a police state.

It would be almost correct to call Mr Blair a fascist, were it not for the fact that he is completely unaware of it, and the notion of an unconscious fascist seems ridiculous. His emphasis on youth as the source of all wisdom and strength is reminiscent of Mussolini (he is slightly less emphatic about it these days, now that he has aged so considerably); his notion of the Third Way (something that is neither capitalism nor communism) has distinctly fascistic overtones, and reminds one of that very great political philosopher, Juan Domingo Peron; and he once claimed the Labour Party, of which he is the leader, is ‘the political wing of the British people,’ which is less than reassuring for the 75 per cent of the British adult population who did not vote for him at the last election. (This cardinal fact, incidentally, has never really obtruded very much on his consciousness, or given him pause to wonder whether, on the basis of such slender support, he has the moral authority to change society in whatever way he thinks best.)

I don’t mean that Britain is just like Mussolini’s Italy, of course; history does not repeat itself in this simple way. But the surveillance of the British population is now among the most complete of any population that has ever existed. The average Briton, for example, is photographed 300 times per day as he goes about his normal, humdrum existence. Britain has an astonishing percentage of the world’s CCTV cameras in operation - something like a third of them. We now live in a security state. The wards of public hospitals are locked, and in the hospital in which I worked it was impossible even to get into the lavatories without knowing a secret code. The government has spent tens of billions on mad schemes to collate information electronically about us all, allegedly for our own good, whether we like it or not. None of these schemes has worked, thank goodness, or was ever going to, and the expenditure looks more and more like a giant malversation of funds in favour of the government’s favourite IT companies; but the very proposals, irrespective of whether they were ever workable or not, told us a lot about the government’s attitude to liberty.

The latest mad - and extremely bad, vicious, totalitarian - proposal by Mr Blair is that every British child should be screened for criminal tendencies before they have developed. Once the statistical stigmata have been discovered, the child will be handed over to the experts who will carry out their ‘interventions’ to prevent further criminalisation. The state, in short, will repair the damage that the social structure that it has so assiduously fostered and encouraged over the last few decades has done. This would all be beyond satire if it were not for the fact that Mr Blair and his government takes it seriously. Mr Blair is always on the lookout, not for new worlds to conquer, but for new worlds to poke his nose into and to ruin, or ruin further.

How are we to explain the obvious assault on liberty in Britain? I don’t think any overall plan has been formed; there is no conspiracy of evil men around a table in the dead of night.

It is far worse than that, and more sinister because more difficult to oppose. A little coterie of evil men could, at least in principle, be opposed and defeated. But Mr Blair and his acolytes are not evil men in the sense that they perform acts which they know to be bad: they are much too accomplished at self-deception for that. They are able to present themselves, not entirely untruthfully, as motivated by a desire to do good, and thus they muddy the waters until the waters are not even translucent, let alone transparent.

Nevertheless, Mr Blair and his acolytes understand viscerally if not consciously that serious social problems are their locus standi in their drive to achieve complete control of the population. Social problems, when they are on a sufficiently large scale, create two large classes of dependents: those who are dependent on the government because of their own behaviour, and those who are employed by the government to alleviate the inevitable consequences of that behaviour. In other words, a very large vested interest is created in the continuance of the very behaviour that causes social problems.

That is why a government such as Mr Blair’s appears to be so very active in trying to solve problems, for example that of the educational failure which is prevalent in Britain, but so seldom seems to achieve anything. Never in the field of human history, in fact, has so little been achieved by so many at such great expense. The solutions that are always proposed are little more than work-creation schemes for the ever-increasing numbers of graduates in useless subjects. If, in the meantime, those solutions have destructive effects upon our liberties, well, so be it.

The type of social structure from which the majority of child delinquents in Britain emerge is by now sufficiently well-known, and would be intuitively obvious to anyone who spent a day or two walking through a British town or city. I need hardly rehearse the characteristics of that social structure, or rather lack of structure, at least on the household level: households in which the members are constantly shifting, in which there is no stability, in which the gratifications of the moment, such as drinking to excess and drug-taking, are the supreme and only good, and so forth.

Yet the government refuses to undertake the smallest step in encouraging more stable households in the most vulnerable strata of society, very much the contrary. It will not even go so far as to recognise the most obvious truths about the social structure that it has encouraged with its policies. The reason for this is that, were it to do so, and were it as a result to take the most appropriate actions to solve the problems, the size and importance of the government would have to shrink rather than increase. And that would never do for megalomaniacs.

The assault on freedom in Britain in the name of social welfare is an illustration of something that the American founding fathers understood, but that is not very congenial to the temper of our times: that in the long run, only a population that strives for virtue (with at least a degree of success) will be able to maintain its freedom. A nation whose individuals choose vice rather than virtue as the guiding principle of their lives will not long remain free, because it will need rescuing from the consequences of its own vices.

In Britain, it is not so very long ago that most - of course not all - people had an idea of virtue that was intensely focussed on their own individual conduct, irrespective of whether they were rich or poor. People did not in general believe that poverty excused very much. One of the destructive consequences of the spread of sociological modes of thought is that it has transferred the notion of virtue from individuals to social structures, and in so doing has made personal striving for virtue (as against happiness) not merely unnecessary but ridiculous and even bad, insofar as it diverted attention from the real task at hand, that of creating the perfect society: the society so perfect, as T S Eliot put it, that no one will have to be good.

It is that kind of society in which Mr Blair and his acolytes believe; by happy co-incidence, they also believe that they are the very men to bring it about. If it means that power has to be delivered up into their hands and the hands of the vast apparatus they direct, that every child must be surveyed for criminal tendencies and then handed over to psychologists, social workers, probation officers, counsellors, psychiatrists, and so forth, all at the expense of freedom - well, it is a price worth paying, both for those who pay it and those who do not.
http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=6584&sec_id=6584

 

[neonlyte]

A medium-long article that puts this into a broader context:

The New English Review

The Virtue of Freedom
by Theodore Dalrymple (April 2007)

Roxanne,
What 'this' is it that you wish to put in a broader context?

One could be suspicious about your posting this article, it is at best an unbalanced fault finding view. When was it published? And why, do you think it important to publish an article denegrating Blair by a person who's not watched television for thirty years? What are you trying to show?

You cannot believe the despair us 'lefties' felt when Major won the 93? election, Blair was seen as something of a saviour and whilst his governments have been 'centre right' for the most part, and his policies may not have pleased many on the left, great changes have occured in the UK, not least a semblance of peace in Northern Ireland.

Your article talks about presentation... what is it you are trying to present?

 

[geronimo_appleby]

At closing time, I have seen drunks mistake a woman, who looked like she been whupped with an ugly stick, for Miss Universe. That was, of course, through the beer goggles.

dammit, i've been busted again!

 

[geronimo_appleby]

BTW.

roxxy,

didn't you submit that post about 'thirty years without tv' (my god, no big brother?!) on another thread too?

 

[BlackShanglan]

The assault on freedom in Britain in the name of social welfare is an illustration of something that the American founding fathers understood, but that is not very congenial to the temper of our times: that in the long run, only a population that strives for virtue (with at least a degree of success) will be able to maintain its freedom. A nation whose individuals choose vice rather than virtue as the guiding principle of their lives will not long remain free, because it will need rescuing from the consequences of its own vices.

I like this passage very much and quite agree with him. However, there is this as well:

But his government has created 3,000 new criminal offences in ten years, that is to say more than one per working day, when all along the problem in Britain was not a insufficiency of laws, but a lack of will to enforce those that we had.

I don't think that I wholly agree with him on this topic, and the reason I disagree is actually the passage cited from the author above. In short, a very eager embracing of freedom and a tendency to question every enforcement of law that curtails a freedom, to the point of pressing every law to be interpreted in the most absolutely limited fashion possible, might well be the root of the problem. Our fear of a totalitarian state can actually create one if we refuse to allow it to use its laws in a reasonable way. When a law is constantly questioned, attacked, limited, and fought, authorities who still need the power to control destructive behavior tend to just write a new law, because it's simpler than arguing the syntactical vagaries of the old ones. It's not always right, but then I don't think it's always wrong either - or perhaps it might be better to say, it sometimes seems the least bad option.

Personally, I liked Blair's creation of Anti-Social Behavior Orders; it was good to see legal recognition that an offense like playing one's music at window-shaking levels or pissing on the neighbor's front stoop is a very different thing on the fifty-sixth instance than it was on the first one or two. I particularly liked the fact that they allow judges to do something U.S. law is very hesitant to do - to remove specific rights only from specific people. While I recognize that there is always the possibility of bias when there is room for individual interpretation, I like that ASBO's allow just the person who keeps blasting the neighbors awake at 3 AM to be told that she can't have a stereo in her flat - not everyone in the tower or no one, neither of which is a really fair solution to a problem caused by a single person. In many ways ASBO's seem to me to be an excellent answer to preserving individual rights for the vast majority while still having an answer to the small percentage of people who really can't seem to use some specific rights appropriately.

Blair's "early intervention" model is a thorny little thing, but whether the law itself and its details are good or bad (having not seen the beast in full, I can't comment on that), I give him credit for this much: he's facing something that is perennially unpopular and yet vitally necessary. Adults, who do all of the voting, would like every freedom that they can think of, and they regard their families as the most absolutely sacrosanct and personal element of their lives. And in their way, they are right. But Blair's proposal at least attempts to drag us about to face the other reality: that the relationships and behaviors within one's family, however personal and sacrosanct, will ultimately shape how its members behave in public and in interactions with the rest of society as well. It's all very well to say that one is happy with one's family arrangements and doesn't wish to be told to change them, but if they generate citizens whose behavior prevents them from being educated, achieving gainful employment, or living peacefully with others, it really is everyone's problem. And ultimately, it's not fair to children to allow them to be taught to live one way for 18 years and then throw them in prison for continuing to do it. The problem has no cheerful and popular answer; the conflict between one's most personal and intimate rights and the very real and serious needs of society as a whole never does. But whether his actual plan is a success or not, I give Blair credit for at least attempting to face it.

Like the author of the article posted, I do believe that all of these things are much better done on a personal level, with the goodwill and self discipline of everyone involved. They really are not nearly as effectively achieved when the government does them. However, I think that he overlooks the root of government intervention: people weren't doing those things. They didn't do them for long enough that the consequences are building up, and then the government does step in. It's a poor solution, but ultimately it seems more likely to me than every man, woman, and child in the country suddenly deciding to live new lives and take more responsibility. In the long run, it's a great goal; in the short, there are some fires that need to be put out. Ironically, I think Blair's policies really suggest a government that is trying to get people to step up and do just what the author suggests: develop enough of a sense of community, duty, and civil virtues to help the government get out of the business of regulating their behavior.

Shanglan

 

[cumallday]

I wonder if the judge is somehow related to Bill O'Reilly?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBzFp7qHDcE

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

Roxanne,
What 'this' is it that you wish to put in a broader context?

One could be suspicious about your posting this article, it is at best an unbalanced fault finding view. When was it published? And why, do you think it important to publish an article denegrating Blair by a person who's not watched television for thirty years? What are you trying to show?

You cannot believe the despair us 'lefties' felt when Major won the 93? election, Blair was seen as something of a saviour and whilst his governments have been 'centre right' for the most part, and his policies may not have pleased many on the left, great changes have occured in the UK, not least a semblance of peace in Northern Ireland.

Your article talks about presentation... what is it you are trying to present?

Neon - the slurs on Blair are not the point of this piece, and I'm sure that Dalrymple had no more use for Major or the current Tory crop. I haven't read the entire thread, but glanced at the article in the OP an it struck me as an general (not specific) example of the kind of systemic and cultural dysfunction that Dalrymple explores in this and much of his work. He is a principled "Burkeian" conservative with a classical liberal streak - an honorable viewpoint, nothing like the cynical poseurs, charlatans and neanderthals in the Conservative or Republican parties.

I regret that the article was taken as a partisan slam, although that's understandable (and certainly has that component). One could really excise Labor and Blair from the piece and replace them with "entire political establishment in Britain - Tory, Labor, Liberal, etc." Please do so.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

BTW.

roxxy,

didn't you submit that post about 'thirty years without tv' (my god, no big brother?!) on another thread too?

:Rolls eyes: Yes, Geronomo, and how many times did I talk to you during our marriage about that "listening" thing? In that other post I said that the item was also posted here. :sighs:

BTW, I think the article is about "Big Brother" in a larger sense than the one you refer to, dear.

 

[geronimo_appleby]

:Rolls eyes: Yes, Geronomo, and how many times did I talk to you during our marriage about that "listening" thing? In that other post I said that the item was also posted here. :sighs:

ah, dammit. i wuz distracted. as per.

 

[neonlyte]

Shanglan, thanks for bringing some clarity of thought the article. I'm still unsure quite what the author is driving at and why Roxanne brought it to our attention.

...
Our fear of a totalitarian state can actually create one if we refuse to allow it to use its laws in a reasonable way. When a law is constantly questioned, attacked, limited, and fought, authorities who still need the power to control destructive behavior tend to just write a new law, because it's simpler than arguing the syntactical vagaries of the old ones. It's not always right, but then I don't think it's always wrong either - or perhaps it might be better to say, it sometimes seems the least bad option.

You're referencing the '3000' new laws and are drawn to frame an answer in social constructs to match the tenor of the article, all well and good though I wonder how many of those laws were 'social' and how many dealt with taxation, business, EU regulations and a myriad of other 'business of the day' issues. Law making is generally divisive, else it wouldn't happen, some laws correct anomoly, few laws are entirely new, fewer still impinge upon the social community, it wouldn't generally stand for it, witness Thatchers debacle over the Poll Tax. ASBO's, as you mention are intended as a precise weapon of enforcement, they are not thought to be particularly effective as the police lack the man power to adequately monitor ASBO orders.

Blair's "early intervention" model is a thorny little thing, but whether the law itself and its details are good or bad (having not seen the beast in full, I can't comment on that), I give him credit for this much: he's facing something that is perennially unpopular and yet vitally necessary. Adults, who do all of the voting, would like every freedom that they can think of, and they regard their families as the most absolutely sacrosanct and personal element of their lives. And in their way, they are right. But Blair's proposal at least attempts to drag us about to face the other reality: that the relationships and behaviors within one's family, however personal and sacrosanct, will ultimately shape how its members behave in public and in interactions with the rest of society as well. It's all very well to say that one is happy with one's family arrangements and doesn't wish to be told to change them, but if they generate citizens whose behavior prevents them from being educated, achieving gainful employment, or living peacefully with others, it really is everyone's problem. And ultimately, it's not fair to children to allow them to be taught to live one way for 18 years and then throw them in prison for continuing to do it. The problem has no cheerful and popular answer; the conflict between one's most personal and intimate rights and the very real and serious needs of society as a whole never does. But whether his actual plan is a success or not, I give Blair credit for at least attempting to face it.

Nicely summed, I'm not sure the legislation will see the daylight, the British are particularly suspect of 'mapping' at any level, including those who have absolutely no reason to fear their details being centrally stored. What is clear to me (if few others) is a point is reached where nothing else seems capable of working and drastic measures can be imposed to control a situation. To give a readily understood analogy, speed cameras work, but only at the point where the photograph of a speeding drive might be taken, between cameras drivers speed. The speeding law doesn't teach them anything other than reasonable risk in disobeying the law. (As an aside, I was astonished whilst driving in the USA how the majority of drivers obeyed the speed limit, that certainly doesn't happen in UK and even less so in Portugal.) We have the same society wide problem in the UK with pedestrian road crossings, virtually all are now controlled by traffic lights freeing the driver from ever considering the person wishing to cross the road, the driver obeys the traffic light and has divorced himself from that element of society unfortunate enough to be walking. It's extreme, but you get my point. In Portugal, hitting someone on a pedestrian crossing is a hugely serious offence, probably only a third are traffic light controlled and as a consequence some inane logic, pedestrians step off the curb at a crossing without even waiting for the traffic to stop, the only place Portugese drivers drive slowly is in urban areas. Different laws, different outcome. As you say, reducing responsibility to the personal level is nearly always better than introducing laws, more so when the outcome by law can diverge from intention.

Unfortunately, some of these outcomes are only seen in the longer term and the current social problems in the UK (if indeed they exist at all) are largely due to a long term erosion of social responsibility, cause and effect by governments of the right and the left. And this is perhaps why I took issue with the article posted by Roxanne, blaming Blair for the kind of attitudes expressed in the article is trite, it wouldn't surprise me at all if the writer was a Daily Mail reader.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

But whether his actual plan is a success or not, I give Blair credit for at least attempting to face it. Like the author of the article posted, I do believe that all of these things are much better done on a personal level, with the goodwill and self discipline of everyone involved.

Of course the "plan" will not work. It's giving government the authority and duty to act in an area in which it hasn't a clue how to do so, and is institutionally incapable of doing so effectively. In pretending that such a plan could work the entire political establishment are charlatans who only perpetuate and "enable" the rot by pretending to create solutions rather than honestly speaking up about real causes. But that would not be politic, so instead they simultaneously evade reality and destroy liberty.

In the U.S. there are "nuisance" laws, perhaps you once had the same. Traditionally they were enforced with a "reasonable person" test, and judges had some discretion in how to proceed. We too have declined a great deal in this area, but perhaps not as far: A few years ago one judge sentenced a teen who had disrpupted the neighborhood with his car sub-woofers to sit in chambers and listen to Wayne Newton for several hours on successive Saturdays. Whether that "sentence" was effective or not, the fact is room still exists for such creative solutions to particular problems, although sadly it's not the norm. In all areas of law, the only way it can really work is with that "reasonable person" standard - it is impossible to write specific rules for every situation in a complex society.

BTW, in his references to fascism Dalrymple is also referring to the "exotic illegitimate" of administrative law made by unelected bureacrats - a huge problem here and in the EU, also.

 

[BlackShanglan]

Of course the "plan" will not work. It's giving government the authority and duty to act in an area in which it hasn't a clue how to do so, and is institutionally incapable of doing so effectively. In pretending that such a plan could work the entire political establishment are charlatans who only perpetuate and "enable" the rot by pretending to create solutions rather than honestly speaking up about real causes. But that would not be politic, so instead they simultaneously evade reality and destroy liberty.

Or alternatively, and I'd suggest considerably more likely to be reality given that very few people actually adore "destroying liberty" for its own sake, the government has noticed that leaving the matter to personal responsibility hasn't worked, because people haven't been as responsible as would be necessary. Recognizing, then, that the government acting in their place is indeed a tedious and awkward muddle - but also realizing that doing nothing doesn't seem likely to help either - they're trying their best.

As for "pretending to create solutions rather than honestly speaking up about real causes," I think that's an unreasonably disparaging characterization of the act of taking a politically very unpopular stance - "You, the public, are not doing a very good job of raising your children" - and attempting to intervene at an early age to help get both the children and the families back on track toward lives of greater personal responsibility. From the little I've seen of Blair's suggestions, I think that the real resistence to them will come precisely from their focus on personal responsibility. People would be delighted to hear "the government will fix all of that for you when your kids hit school age"; they're dismayed to hear "the government will intervene and ask that you, the parent, learn to take more effective control of your own children."

I realize that you consider government intervention to be wrong in nearly every case, but when it's actually trying to help people do the key thing that they are not doing, and that you would like them to do? That seems rather dogmatic to me.

In the U.S. there are "nuisance" laws, perhaps you once had the same. Traditionally they were enforced with a "reasonable person" test, and judges had some discretion in how to proceed. We too have declined a great deal in this area, but perhaps not as far: A few years ago one judge sentenced a teen who had disrpupted the neighborhood with his car sub-woofers to sit in chambers and listen to Wayne Newton for several hours on successive Saturdays. Whether that "sentence" was effective or not, the fact is room still exists for such creative solutions to particular problems, although sadly it's not the norm. In all areas of law, the only way it can really work is with that "reasonable person" standard - it is impossible to write specific rules for every situation in a complex society.

Yes. I agree there, very much. That's what I like about the basic premise of ASBO's - they try to free up society from a burden of rules made primarily to deal with a small number of unreasonable people.

Neon, I agree that police can't always have the numbers they need to make ASBO enforcement consistent. But I do like the greater freedom it can give them. A group of teenagers who repeatedly pulled smash-and-grab raids on local shops, for instance, were told that they were not permitted to own or wear balaclavas or enter any shop for a period of time. It's true that the police still can't watch them constantly, but at least now a shopkeeper can phone for help as soon as they pass the doorway, and they can receive punishment whether or not they were caught in the act of stealing.

I like that a great deal about some of the ASBO restrictions I've seen; they allow police to intervene earlier and take some practical steps to help prevent the primary crime, like automatically confiscating sound equipment from the home of a noise nuisance offender or chucking the drunken vandal out of the pub before he's finished his first pint. It's true that they can't always be there, but at least when they are, they've got the power to take swift and useful action rather than being stuck waiting for a crime to occur. And if they can make a little headway through the ASBO's, perhaps they can free up some of the time that they're forced to waste dealing with chronically anti-social people. It's often a small number of people who generate quite a lot of a police force's work.

Shanglan

 

[kendo1]

Back to the point. I can't really see the reason for the exhaustive debate about one person's view.
Vermillion said:
It will, possibly, raise the sentencing. If it does, though, I hope it is entirely on the merits of the case and not because of media and popular pressure which is being brought to bear on the case.

I suspect the sentence will be raised, but not tremendously and not because of media pressure: the convicted would be able to apply for an appeal, which they would probably win.

 

[R. Richard]

You're referencing the '3000' new laws and are drawn to frame an answer in social constructs to match the tenor of the article, all well and good though I wonder how many of those laws were 'social' and how many dealt with taxation, business, EU regulations and a myriad of other 'business of the day' issues. Law making is generally divisive, else it wouldn't happen, some laws correct anomoly, few laws are entirely new, fewer still impinge upon the social community, it wouldn't generally stand for it, witness Thatchers debacle over the Poll Tax. ASBO's, as you mention are intended as a precise weapon of enforcement, they are not thought to be particularly effective as the police lack the man power to adequately monitor ASBO orders.

In NYC, at the time of Rudy Giuliani's orders to enforce the written law, the same excuse was offered by the fuzz, "We just don't have the manpower to enforce the misdemeanor regulations." When the fuzz were actually forced to enforce the laws as written, magically the manpower requirements began to fall. The worst of the petty offenders were enjoying a state sponsored vacation at an NYC resort called Riker's Island. Thus, the workload for the fuzz fell. When the vacationers go back from Riker's Isand, they found their jobs were gone, their apartments were gone and their wives were frequently gone. The rest of the petty offenders decided that the loss of their job and their possessions was not worth the fun of causing harm to others.

Of course, such progress was not without price. For the first weeks of the new regime, doughnut sales fell all around NYC.