We know how this is going to turn out, don’t we? The freedom of commerce is going to be crushed under the tanks of political power?

Amazingly, no:

Loma Linda had, until now, managed to avoid the global tentacles of the fast-food giant, primarily because of the number of Adventists. Despite this, the city council – all are Adventist – has voted three-to-two to allow the new drive-thru. Those in favour say that it isn’t the job of local officials to stop people if they choose to indulge.

Fancy that! You only get politicians who believe in freedom if they’re religious nutters perhaps?

Man’s a loon of course.

His various forays into the world of economics have been laughably ignorant.

Certain of his campaigns have been based upon very, very, odd readings of the world.

Yet, as Sellars and Yeatman didn’t put it, he’s not been wrong but wromatic, nor even right but repulsive.

On balance, he’s been a Good Thing.

On which note Happy Birthday to Mr. Tatchell, someone who probably wouldn’t accept one but most certainly should be offered a peerage.

For we should cherish, promote, reward and acknowledge the loons that we are privileged to have among us.

Writing in today’s Observer, Baroness Warnock, a leading expert in medical ethics, backs a change to the law, which currently leaves someone who assists in the suicide of a friend or loved one liable to up to 14 years in prison.

Yes, this is true, it does.

Although the current law is clear that assisting someone to die is illegal, the director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer, has produced guidelines to clarify when an individual might not face prosecution. These suggest that relatives acting on compassionate grounds are unlikely to go to jail, but those acting in a professional capacity, such as doctors or nurses, are much more likely to face charges.

Quite, and we have a system that deals with this problem.

For we do in fact want a system that sorts through the various cases. At one end of the spectrum there’s someone topping Granny for the house and the inheritance. At the other end there’s that bolus of morphine that shortens a horribly painful life by a day or two.

We’d like then first to go to jail and the second to face an investigation and then to let it lie.

After his death his parents contacted police to admit that they had helped him achieve his wish to end “a second-class existence” by taking him abroad – despite praying to the last, and urging him to change his mind. The police had to investigate and the Jameses underwent three hour-long interviews each by officers days after their son’s funeral. The case against them was eventually dropped.

Quite. Talking to coppers for three hours isn’t everyone’s cup of tea but it seems a fair enough price to pay having taken that momentous decision to aid another in taking their life.

You know, so that we can sort through the Type A cases and the Type B?

Another way of putting this is that we’ve a system in place already. Police investigation, decision of DPP on whether to prosecute or not, trial by a jury of peers.

Why do we need to change the law?

The home secretary, Theresa May, has ordered Muslims Against Crusades, an Islamist group which is planning to disrupt Friday’s Armistice Day ceremonies, be banned from midnight.

Sigh.

Freedom of speech means that people are indeed allowed to burn poppies if they want to be idiot enough to do so. Freedom of association also means that people who want to burn poppies are allowed to join together with other people who want to burn poppies.

No, of course I don’t like people who burn poppies: but that’s got fuck all to do with it, has it? My dislike of the shitty little creatures is not a sufficient reason to invoke the law of the land to salve my affronted opinions.

Yes, the Illinois Nazi Party really does have the right to march: and we to protest against it.

So, how do we go about getting shitty little fascist cockweasels like Theresa May out of public life?

It is incumbent on the advertising industry to demonstrate that the cultural impacts of advertising are benign.

No mateys, that isn’t how it works.

It could be of course, it’s possible to have a system where you’re only allowed to do what you can prove is benign. Or even a system where you can only do what the law says you can do, or a self-appointed committee of experts says you can do or even, it we were to take things to the level of true absurdity, what self-appointed guardians of Gaia say it’s OK for you to do.

But we don’t live in such a system. We live in one where we value certain very odd concepts like “freedom”, “liberty” and even “free speech”. And in order to protect these very odd ideas we have a system of law which says that you can go and do absolutely anything you like as long as the law does not expressly forbid it.

There is no law against advertising Uncle Joe’s Mint Balls and therefore you can advertise Uncle Joe’s Mint Balls.

There is a further implication of this too. If you think that a particular activity is not benign then we have a route that you can travel so as to get that not benign activity made into one of those things which the law expressly forbids. Stand for election, get into Parliament, introduce a bill to outlaw advertising Uncle Joe’s Mint Balls and advertising Uncle Joe’s Mint Balls becomes something you cannot do.

So off you go and have fun. In the meantime we’ll all be enjoying this freedom and liberty lark plus the free speech bit which allows us to call you puritan fuckwits.

For, as the UK supreme court made clear in July, the right to know the case against you remains a fundamental common law principle – as Lord Kerr described it, “an elementary and essential prerequisite of fairness”.

Ken Clarke and the security services can bugger off then, can’t they?

Under the government’s plans, all “sensitive” information held by MI5 and MI6 would be discussed in secret court hearings. “Special advocates”, security vetted and approved by the government, would see the information on behalf of individual defendants or claimants but not would not be able to reveal it to them.

Such procedures, or alternatively vetted jurors, could also be used in coroners’ inquests, the government has said.

Nope.

You want to try and convict me, jail me, you have to do it with information legally collected and do so in public. And I get to use the lawyer of my choice, I even get to be my own lawyer if that’s what I wish to do.

Any other suggestions, ideas, possibilities, no, you get to fuck right off back into that oppressive hell these suggestions come from.

Go back and read a little bit about Soviet “jurisprudence” why don’t you? Poor sorry wretch protesting his innocence and his lawyer stands up and says “well, clearly he’s guilty, I’ve seen the evidence. Best you can do is shoot him quickly to reduce the agony.”

Remember people, all these laws about evidence, about procedure, representation, juries, lawyers, presumption of innocence and all. They’re not to protect criminals from righteous justice. They’re to protect us, the citizenry, from the politicians and their secret police. Yes, that really does mean MI5 and MI6, we do need to be protected from them just as we need them to protect us also.

Complete cuntybollocks of an idea being floated here.

There is, however, one great benefit from this decision: perhaps for the first time, the judges’ way of thinking has been made absolutely clear. They think it is for the Supreme Court to decide when the elected government doesn’t know what it’s doing, and then to correct its legislative blunders. Lord Brown does not spell out the dangerous implications for democracy of that outlook, but they are there for all to see in his blistering dissent.

Let us imagine, go on, just pretend for a moment, that government is made up of slime ridden panderers to the lowest common denominator who will do absolutely anything to remain ensconced on the throne of power.

I know, tough to imagine, isn’t it?

In such a system it’s possible to posit that there will be, over here say, lofty declarations about what are the rights of man. Might be the right to healthcare or a job, might be to free speech or a fair trial, depends on which constituency the slimeballs were reaching out to when they spouted the nonsense.

We can also imagine the mob, that democracy, desiring to over rise these rules in certain circumstances. Perhaps, as was roughly true at one time, a policeman has been murdered on duty so someone will swing for it: doesn’t matter so much who but someone must. Perhaps the mob has become inflamed about paeophiles so anyone with a stolen credit card on a server that hosts kiddie porn must be hounded into suicide.

Maybe we’ve promised that people who are Brits have a right to a family life, then the mob asserts that darkies shouldn’t have that right: onor should Brits who marry darkies.

The Supreme Court, however much it might fail in such things as protecting the rights of not policeman murderers to not be hanged, is at least there for the purpose of making sure that new laws do not over ride those rights promised in other earlier laws. And even, if we were to do such a thing as ssingle out certain laws as being more important than others, make sure that more minor laws do not over ride rights granted in those more major.

That’s actually what a Supreme Court is for.

The Human Rights Act, passed in 1998, greatly increased their powers – and their confidence – to strike down laws passed by the elected government. Judges and their supporters hotly deny that they now regularly usurp powers that properly belong to Parliament – but last week, a decision by the Supreme Court indicated that, in fact, that’s exactly what they do.

Complaining about a Supreme Court doing what a Supreme Court is supposed to do is very odd indeed.

Via.

Among the approximately 3,250 prisoners on death row in the US, the vast majority will serve years in solitary and crippling conditions, awaiting execution. Of the 34 states that still kill people, at least 25 hold death row inmates in solitary confinement for 23 hours or more a day. Sensory deprivation is prevalent. On death row in Texas, hundreds of condemned men are isolated in 60-square-foot, single-person, solid-front cells for 23 hours a day. The prisoners exercise alone for one hour each day in a metal cage. Meals are served through a locking metal flap in the cell door. There are no work or group recreation programs; nor can the prisoners speak to each other through the solid cell walls and door.

The problem is, the Supreme Court doesn’t agree.

Even though it should.

Note that this is nothing to do with the death penalty itself (although regular readers will know I’m vehemently opposed to it). But the treatment of those actually on Death Row is, objectively, torture.

Hell, in the UK we would prosecute someone for treating a dog in this manner, let alone a human being.

Because this is not solely about stamping out the under-represented but over-reported incidents of violent protest. Taking part in peaceful civil disobedience will become much more frightening as those arrested at protests are dragged through the courts system.

Eh?

Despite the piecemeal nature of sentencing for those convicted of violent disorder (there are currently no sentencing guidelines in the crown court), comparatively speaking Gilmour’s fate seems to be hugely disproportionate and unfair. He simply should not be imprisoned for crimes that hurt nobody.

You what?

He was convicted of violent disorder.

“Violence”, note the word? Otherwise known as doing things which might actually hurt someone?

Far from this making peaceful civil disobedience more difficult or more dangerous it makes it safer. If you’re out there shouting “No Cuts! No Cuts!” and the coppers are worried that someone’s going to throw a rubbish bin at the royals, or as has happened at other demos (in the past, not recently) bags of marbles are going to be spread so as to collapse said coppers and or their horses, concrete blocks are going to be dropped from bridges or fire extinguishers from the 6 th floor, then more heads are going to get cracked open than if the violents are safely inside Wormwood Scrubs and those on the street are indeed just shouting “No Cuts! No Cuts!”.

We’re all made safer, demonstrators, coppers and the general public, by having the violents away from the rest of us.

That’s actually the friggin’ point of distinguishing between peaceful civil disobedience and violent disorder.

And further note that if Master Gilmour had actually hurt someone he would have been charged with that, more grievous offence. And quite rightly too.

Works the other way around too: it’s absolutely right that that copper will stand trial for manslaughter over Ian Tomlinson. No one is or should be above the law. It’s actually what civil liberty means.

I’ve never understood why we allow our print media to support a particular political viewpoint.

Words fail.

Relaxing the law would help some to compete more effectively for jobs in “the real world” in which they are “by definition” less productive than those without disabilities, he claimed.

Perhaps Ed Balls, the Children’s Secretary at the time, should have given Miss Shoesmith more of a chance to put her case (although it isn’t true that she was denied a hearing altogether: she was able to put her arguments to Haringey Council, the body that fired her). But, as Mr Balls said on Friday, it wouldn’t have made any difference: the case against her was just too overwhelming. Ministers, he argued, must have the power to make decisions that they believe to be in the public interest promptly and effectively, without having the judges weigh in a couple of years later and substitute their own judgment.

What the judges did is a judgment, of course, that’s what judges issue.

But in the other sense of the word, “using their judgment”, that’s exactly what Balls did and the judges didn’t. And that’s why we have this whole law thing, courts and all.

Ministers should not be able to impose their judgment upon the rest of us: they must act within the structure of the laws that they themselves are responsible for.

This is known as “the rule of law” and is one of those things that we English pretty much invented. The man in power doesn’t get to do what he likes (or thinks in his judgment is in the public interest), but only what is already written down that he is allowed to do. He must, although he be elected and ever so high and mighty, follow the same procedures as the rest of us.

For example, they may not drive and talk on a mobile phone at the same time, may not claim more expenses than the system allows, may not speed, may not attempt to pervert the course of justice, may not perjure themselves, to give examples of what Ministers have been found guilty of/suspected of in recent decades.

In the same manner a Minister cannot fire someone in violation of the Common Law right to natural justice: just as no other employer in the country is allowed to do so. To say nothing of the web of law which entangles any employer trying to fire someone even while honouring that right.

Don’t forget, this law stuff, this civil liberties stuff, the whole set of assumptions about public hearings, assumptions of innocence, juries, double jeopardy, the rule of law. The are not quaint archaic hangovers, they are not there just to hamper the pursuit of the guilty.

They are there to protect us, the citizenry, from the politicians, the people wielding the power of the State.

N’ Balls can go off teabagging elsewhere for that’s the way it has to remain if we are to continue to be free people in a free country.

Morality and the rule of law should apply on the internet as elsewhere in human conduct.

This is absolutely true.

What needs to be acknowledged, however, is that Sarkozy is right about the principle. The internet cannot exist in some undiscussable and untouchable dimension of human activity. It is a human creation. It affects human lives in all sorts of increasing ways. Morality and the rule of law should apply on the internet as elsewhere in human conduct. As such, it is an absolutely proper subject for governments to consider, though naturally with sensitivity.

And when placed in its larger context, that there should indeed therefore be regulation of the internet, it becomes fascist, near totalitarian. No, not in the rhetorical sense, but in the true sense.

That morality is something to be regulated by the government.

This is something that we’ve just spent an entire century getting away from. We’ve rather changed why adultery is immoral, from a crime against God’s Order to a crime against the partner betrayed, but we do still regard it as immoral. But at the same time we’ve moved it from being something the law, government, should concern itself with to a position that what adults do with their gonads, consensually, is no concern of the law.

The same with Teh Gayers, with tipping the velvet, divorce, illegitimacy, porn, speech, religious observance and so on.

Morality has been privatised.

Thank goodness.

The law still exists of course: but in these areas we are closer to the classical liberal nirvana than we were, for even when something distinctly illiberal is suggested, it is couched in the language of liberalism. Smoking should be banned for the harm it does others, not the consenting adult. Porn should be controlled for the kiddies. Booze for the costs to society. However much these are fig leaves to cover those old Puritan desires, that people shoujld be stopped from doing what I disapprove of.

To retreat from this, to argue that government should regulate morality simply because it’s something that exists and therefore government must regulate it is truly fascist. Franco and Salazar regulated “their” populations in such a manner. Ceauscescu did so banning both contraception and abortion: shagging should produce children.

Now, it may or may not be true that aspects of the internet need regulation: that is indeed something worthy of discussion. But what isn’t is the reason you give: that the government should be regulating morality. That’s something we’ve just escaped from, not something we should be embracing.

Don’t forget, Mr. Kettle is the grotty little shit who claimed that a Cabinet Minister possibly attempting to pervert the course of justice was no biggie, something that it would be disproportionate to investigate.

“The majority of homophobic attacks are never reported,” says the gay-rights campaigner Peter Tatchell. “Low-level assaults could easily be multiplying under the radar. It can be even worse for prominent gay figures like Philip. I myself have been attacked more than 300 times in the past 20 years. As a result, I suffer from permanent brain damage.”

There may or may not be a rise in homophobic attacks: leave that to one side for a moment.

The thing is, we know you’ve got permanent brain damage. You’ve even told us how and where you got it. When you were beaten up by Mugabe’s thugs when attempting a citizen’s arrest upon him.

This is nothing to do with homophobia.

So don’t use it as evidence of such: it demeans both you and the cause you claim to be fighting for.

The law protects those we accuse but cannot prove of seeking to do us harm.

If we can prove it then we can bang them up: there’s no problem with jailing someone convicted of conspiracy to commit terrorist offences. Either in law or morality.

The law does though, rightly, protect those we think are dodgy, bad ‘uns, but who haven’t actually done anything to break any of the myriad laws we have determining what actions we may or may not take.

And this rightly is because we’re all guilty, in the eyes of one or other of our fellow countrymen, dodgy bad ‘uns who deserve to be dealt with. I can think of one retired accountant who regularly accuses me of all sorts of horrors for my support of personal and economic freedom for example.

Sure, there’re many scumbags out there who arguably shouldn’t be wandering the streets unfettered. But unless we can prove that they’re to be left at liberty to do so: for in the words of the Great Larry Flynt, if the law will protect a scumbag like me you can be sure it will protect you.

The case stated raised four questions for consideration by this court. Having analysed the issues, this court considers that the four questions in essence amount to one question: in a case of cash forfeiture does a customs officer have to show that the property seized was obtained through conduct of one of a number of kinds each of which would have been unlawful conduct or is it sufficient for the officer to point to criminal conduct of an unspecified kind?

….

Applying the provisions of section 242(2)(b) of the Act, our answer to the question is as follows: in a case of cash forfeiture, a customs officer does have to show that the property seized was obtained through conduct of one of a number of kinds each of which would have been unlawful conduct.

Of course, it still doesn’t go far enough. The idea that the State can just take your stuff because you’ve been a naughty boy, rather than levy a specific fine for a specific crime, is a foul and vile blot on a free society.

Yet at least now they’ve got to show that you’ve been a naughty boy in a specific and illegal manner rather then stealing your stuff just because the h’officer is sure you’re a bad’un.

As part of this, we condemn any politically motivated policing which provokes, intimidates or criminalises protestors.

Isn’t it?

And/or they support the right of the BNP to march?

Or is “any” restricted to those marching for what they approve of?