Still smoking in New York

Great video from Reason about one of the smoker-friendly bars in New York City—yes, a few still exist and they're legal. A little sliver of free choice and liberty in Mike Bloomberg's nanny city.

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Smoking ban will not be reviewed

From the BBC :

'No plans' for smoking ban review

The government has dropped a planned review of the smoking ban in England.

The previous Labour administration had promised it would be looked at again in autumn 2010, but the coalition says it has "no plans" to do so.

Publicans - who feared a review would extend the ban into beer gardens and doorways, damaging trade - backed a campaign to partially lift the ban.

What can we make of this? A three year review was promised on several occasions but earlier this year it became crystal clear that the Department of Health was in no mood to carry out a genuine review (ie. with the possibility of the law being relaxed in the light of ASH's broken promises).

On the contrary, the review seemed set to open the door to even greater restrictions. (It was always absurd the have the DoH review it anyway since it was DoH-funded groups like ASH who campaigned for a total ban in the first place.)

In that context, The Publican is taking the cancellation as a sign that even if things do not get better for the pub trade, at least they will not get significantly worse.

As the BBC points out (in a fairly balanced article, albeit buried deep in their website):

The issue remains controversial with the public - with calls for the ban to be reversed among the most popular suggestions on a new government website, Your Freedom, asking the public for ideas on which existing laws and regulations should be repealed.

Ah, the Your Freedom website! Now up and running, it has already fallen victim to the ignorant, the illiterate and the mentally deranged, as well as the large chunk of the British public who don't take these things entirely seriously. Various people seem unable to come to terms with the idea of a UK government repealing laws and instead have suggested yet more stupid pieces of legislation to bring in. No doubt David Miliband has been taking notes.

It's worryingly difficult to tell the spoof suggestions from the sincere. Amongst the gems so far...

I think that all Baked Beans served in Europe should be made by Heinz.

Cyclists should be insured and carry a registration plate

Why should criminals be incarcerated in prisons in this country. We could buy land in Africa and put the offenders there.

Impose a 100% 'environmental' tax on all fireworks sold

Ban drinking in pubs. This will cut down on anti social behaviour. Make them all drink tea instead.

Smokers & Obese Pay For Respatory [sic] Related Illnesses on NHS. I take care of my body and its hard work. I don’t see why I should pay for people who don’t do the same.

dont ell [sic] me how to disipline my kids. iwas [sic] smacked it has not hurt me any.

Invade France. Lets face it, it will be easy enough won't it? Lets just send half a dozen troops over on EuroTunnel and watch the french try to surrender to them as soon as they arrive.

Abolish unemployment.

Get rid of all landlords. Everyone should own their home.

Maximum 20 mins work then a break at school. Students only expected to work for 20mins before having a 5 min break at school

Finally, and inevitably...

Removal of pointless government websites

To better use taxpayers' money, the government should close down all of its websites that function merely as talking shops, since they are a waste of server space and everyone's time. Asking people what laws they want changed is an open invitation to waffle at length about things of which we have little understanding. All that happens is that people are conned into thinking they have a stake in the decision-making process. They don't. This is a waste of everyone's time.

Wouldn't it be better if - instead of participating here - people went back to work and did something to help the economy?

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RIPA to shreds

Last night I spoke at the Institute of Economic Affairs in one the Voices of Freedom debates that are running from now until the end of the month (see the banner at the top of this blog). 

The subject was 'which law should be repealed or amended'? I picked the Regulatory of Investigatory Powers Act. It really is a bloody awful piece of legislation. I almost felt like I was cheating by picking a law that no reasonable person could defend. Talk about low hanging fruit. Anyway, this is what I said...

I’m here to advocate the abolition of the Regulatory of Investigatory Powers Act, also known as RIPA, also known as the snoopers’ charter. You may know it as the law that allowed Dorset county council to spy on a family who wanted to send their child to their local school or as the law that allowed Cambridgeshire county council to carry out covert surveillance on paperboys suspected of working without a license. There are thousands of other such cases.

RIPA is often described as an anti-terrorism law, but that isn’t how it was sold to us when it was passed in the year 2000. This being before 9/11, the government’s excuse for this huge expansion of surveillance powers was the need to monitor those two reliable old favourites: paedophiles and drug-dealers.

In practice, that meant bugging, phone tapping, intercepting communications, directed surveillance, covert surveillance, intrusive surveillance and monitoring which websites people visit and who they e-mail. All this was to be done, said the Act, “in the interests of national security” and “for the purpose of preventing or detecting serious crime.”

RIPA was subject to almost universal media criticism in 2000, mainly because it gave the government access to e-mail, internet and telephone records. This, in itself, is probably reason enough to scrap it. What was not anticipated was the extent to which local government would exploit the legislation in the years that followed.

Post 9/11, RIPA powers were extended to virtually every branch of government, despite the fact that MI5, MI6, the police and anybody else legitimately involved in counter-terrorism already had these powers. In the name of fighting Al Qaeda, RIPA was extended to the likes of the Charity Commission, the Environment Agency, the Food Standards Agency, Ofcom, DEFRA and, as it turned out, most significantly, to every local council.

This has never really been about terrorism. What the government was saying with RIPA was that it had absolute faith that the authorities wouldn’t abuse their power, and absolutely no faith that the public would behave themselves. This unwavering confidence in the infallibility of the state combined with total mistrust of the public is the last Labour government in a microcosm. To say that RIPA has been abused is perhaps misleading. It has just been used. It is quite conceivable that Charles Clarke always intended these powers to be employed against people walking their dogs, trimming their hedges or smoking cigarettes. Whatever the original intention, that is certainly what has happened.

Last week, Big Brother Watch revealed that local authorities have used the RIPA laws 8,500 times in the last two years, including to spy on their own employees to make sure they turn up on time and are parking correctly.

Only 5% of these investigations ever resulted in a prosecution, let alone a conviction. That is an extraordinary statistic. Even with power to secretly film and follow people, they were unable to gather enough evidence to prosecute. We must presume, then, that the vast majority of the people being investigated were innocent. The whole premise of the government’s approach was wrong. By and large, the public have been behaving and by and large, the authorities have been misbehaving.

It’s time for this to stop. RIPA was an experiment in handing over the apparatus of the police state to bureaucrats, quangos and petty officials. And sure enough, it resulted in law-abiding people being put under surveillance on the whim of minor functionaries on the basis of anonymous tip offs and personal vendettas. It hasn’t worked, it was never going to work and the only thing to do now is rip up the RIPA laws and start again.

Investigating trivial criminal offences should go back to being the work of the police. Covert surveillance operations should go back to being the preserve of MI6, and any organisation that wishes to spy on people should be made to go to the same lengths as they would if they wanted to get a search warrant.

Preferably that would mean waking the home secretary up with a phone call in the middle of the night, at which point they would be told in no uncertain terms whether what they’re doing is really in the interests of national security.

This is not to argue that there is no place for video cameras in law enforcement, nor that any use of surveillance represents an Orwellian nightmare. On the other hand, just because we have the technology does not mean we should use it indiscriminately. The question is where we draw the line and I say we draw the line at RIPA, a law which could confound only the most stupid terrorist and which has instead been turned on the general population gleefully and arbitrarily by people who should never have been entrusted with such power in the first place.

The full line-up at this well-attended event was:

Professor Philip Booth (IEA) on the Financial Services and Markets Act

Guy Herbert (general secretary, NO2ID) on the Identity Documents Bill

Chris Snowdon (author, Velvet Glove Iron Fist and The Spirit Level Delusion) on the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000)

Rob Lyons (assistant editor, Spiked) on the Sex Offenders Register

Simon Clark (director, Forest) on the Health Act 2006

Tim Cox (Liberal Vision) on the International Development Assistance Target Bill

A great night was had by all. I can't make the next one (I'm off to a wedding) but hope to see some of you at some of the other events.

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Small mercies

Labour stormed to power in 1997 with the slogan 'Things can only get better'. Now that Dave 'n' Nick have limped into power, an apt slogan might be 'Things could be worse'. So before we get the knives out for the dynamic duo, let's celebrate some of things that have been prevented by Labour's demise. 

Over at The Free Society, I give credit where credit's due for Dave 'n' Nick's commitment to rolling back the big brother state and ask whether this will translate into support for social liberties.

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Brendan O'Neil on freedom

My word, Brendan O'Neil has been on fine form of late. His article in a recent issue of The Spectator deserves to be cut out and kept to remind us about the scale of Labour's 13 year legislative frenzy. He lists just 50 of the 4,3000 laws that have been passed in Britain since 1997, from the trivial to the outrageous. It's more than enough.

We can’t buy more than two packets of painkillers at a time, lest we use them to try to top ourselves. We can’t hunt foxes with dogs. If you’re under 16, you can no longer win goldfishes at funfairs... We can’t smoke in restaurants. We can’t smoke at bus stops if they are more than 50 per cent covered, in which case they count as a ‘public indoor space’ in which, of course, smoking is forbidden... We can’t organise an unlicensed concert in a church hall or community centre, and if we do we could be banged up for six months... We can no longer expect to have the right to silence if arrested. We can no longer expect a right to trial by jury... ASBOs have been used to prevent people from wearing hats or hoods in public. From using a mop too loudly. From buying eggs with the intention of throwing them at people’s properties on Halloween. From dressing up as a werewolf and howling. From going into the garden dressed only in bra and knickers. From drunkenly arguing with one’s wife. From buying matches. From playing football at bus stops. And from having sex too loudly...

And so on, and so on. It's as relentless as the government's law-making machinery.

O'Neil followed this with a beautifully expressed piece for Spiked, in which he makes the case for liberal values (in the uncorrupted sense of the word) in the modern age. He argues that Tony Blair's emphasis on 'rights and responsibilities' was undermined by Labour's refusal to allow people to make the 'wrong' choices. The 'narrow individualism' which Blair so despised came to mean doing anything his government disapproved of.

There is some evidence that Blair genuinely sought to balance rights and responsibilities. Shortly after coming to power, he wrote to Isaiah Berlin to discuss his notions of positive and negative liberty. He wrote:

As you say, the origins of the Left lie in opposition to arbitrary authority, intolerance and hierarchy. The values remain as strong as ever, but no longer have a ready made vehicle to take them forward. That seems to me to be today’s challenge.

Unfortunately, Berlin was on his deathbed and was unable to reply. Blair often seemed to think that the mere existence of a Labour government would be enough to make people change their behaviour. As the years went on, with this proving to be a false hope (and with targets going unmet), he became more illiberal. Labour buzzwords like 'making healthy choices' and 'libertarian paternalism' dressed up authoritarianism in the robes of freedom. In the end, only the language of liberty remained.

As O'Neil writes:

The curtailment of our rights through the idea of ‘social responsibilities’ is really a new form of state denigration of liberty, and one which is well suited to our times. In earlier eras, when there was often a clearer dividing line between sections of the public demanding freedom and a confident state determined to defend its power, the denigration of liberty tended to be executed in a more explicit fashion: through a police state, brute censorship, or new laws restricting movement and association. 

Today, when there is neither a widespread demand for freedom nor an elite possessed of the wherewithal or even the need to dismantle liberty root and branch, our freedoms can be bargained off in a more informal fashion. The balancing of rights with responsibilities really represents the exploitation of the fear of social instability, of a widespread perception that we are living through, in Tony Blair’s words, a period of ‘social disintegration’, as a way of blackmailing people into self-policing their speech, behaviour and lifestyles in the name of preserving the status quo. It is the atomisation of the public, and the elite’s instinct for social control as a way of offsetting ‘social disintegration’, which has given rise to this tyranny of ‘balanced rights and responsibilities’.

Please do go read the whole thing. 

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Carless in Heathrow

In 1985, a taxi driver—Richard Carless—refused to pick up a passenger from Heathrow airport because the man had just lit a pipe and intended to smoke it. The taxi driver had asthma. The passenger understood this and agreed to wait for the next cab. There is no suggestion that their conversation was anything but amicable. However, a passing traffic warden reported the taxi driver to the police who prosecuted him.

According to the Daily Mail:

Mr Carless said the man was happy to wait for the next taxi but a passing traffic warden spotted what happened and called the police.

What law this man had broken, I don't know. Is there some law saying that taxi drivers have to pick up everyone who hails them? Is it a condition of having a taxi license? Perhaps so. Whatever the case, it resulted in the taxi driver going to prison.

Richard Carless, 67, was locked up for seven days in July 1986 after turning down the passenger who wanted to light up in his car because he feared it would aggravate his asthma.

He refused to pay the £120 fine on a point of principle and was put behind bars.

The former taxi driver is now taking the case to the Court of Appeal, saying it ruined his life.

Once you get over the amusing idea of a former taxi driver being called Mr Carless, this story raises several issues. The obvious observation is to say how times have changed. Today, of course, the police would have prosecuted the taxi driver if he had allowed the man to get in his cab. He would be looking at a £2,500 fine for 'permitting smoking' in an enclosed place and could face, like Nick Hogan, a 6 month prison sentence. Indeed, only last week, two taxi drivers were prosecuted and fined for smoking in their cabs when nobody else was present.

If we look at the Daily Mail's comments section—not a senate of reason, admittedly—we find contrasting views. From this:

This is ridiculous. You people don't jail criminals yet you jail a man for refusing to carry a smoker. I can't stand smokers and I would have done the same as this man. Mr. Carless was right then and now.
- Latima, FL USA, 07/4/2010 13:45

To this:

oh the good old days! a time when we were responsible for our actions and not told how to live our lives by a nanny state
- IAND, LONDON, 7/4/2010 11:20

In the course of 24 years, we have gone from a system that effectively protects people's 'right' to smoke in a cab to one that prosecutes people for smoking in a cab (I can't quite believe that taxi drivers didn't have the right to designate their cabs as non-smoking in 1985, but anyway...)

People like the American above who "can't stand smokers" (not, you will note, smoking, but smokers) are no doubt delighted that the government's guns have turned 180 degrees and are now aimed at smokers. The chap from London clearly thinks that the old ways were the best. 

Both of them, I would argue, are wrong. The law in 1985 was an ass. Far from making us "responsible for our actions" it intervened unfairly and unnecessarily in a private negotiation between a taxi driver and a potential customer. The taxi driver's terms were not to the customer's liking—he had just got off a flight and wanted to smoke—and the customer was happy to wait for a driver who would accept his terms. No one was hurt, or even upset, by this negotiation.

Today, that pipe-smoker would still be able to find a taxi driver who would take him where he wanted to go, but the law does not allow it. That's because the law is still an ass. No one would be hurt—the driver might ask him to wind the window down—and everyone involved in the transaction would be happy. As in 1985, the only people who would be unhappy will be distant bureaucrats and, perhaps, the odd interfering traffic warden.

There are no victims or villains in any of these 'crimes'. By prosecuting individuals for victimless crimes, the state itself is the villain. You do not—or rather should not—have a right to demand entry into private property. That, I'm afraid, also applies to bed and breakfasts, since bigots have property rights as well. Richard Carless took a stand against an unjust law and that should be recognised. Nick Hogan also took a stand against an unjust law. From their completely different perspectives, they have both suffered at the hands of the government despite harming no one.

Issues like the story above polarise debate. It's easy for some nonsmokers to rejoice that the state is now going after smokers. Equally, some smokers might be nostalgic for the days when the state, however inadvertently, went after nonsmokers. Upon sober reflection, we might conclude that all our interests would be better served if the state didn't 'go after' any of us. 

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