Violence and Class

I’m returning once again to the difficult question of whether Britain is more violent, more unpleasant than it used to be.

In the yes corner is Theodore Dalrymple, writing about public drunkenness.

On the no side, older acquaintances who talk of much more casual violence in the past than there is now, and just as much drunkenness.

I think the key to understanding what has changed is the change in class structure. Taking the 50s or 60s as a comparison, there was still a clear distinction between the professional class (“middle class” we would say, but that seems to mean something completely different in America, so I’ll avoid the term), and the larger working class. Over the last half century, the two have merged into one (with arguably a non-working underclass forming or growing underneath, but that’s another question altogether. Also the upper class has always been a law unto itself). That is not to say that professionals have ceased to be wealthier than manual workers, but they no longer have separate cultures.

That would explain the discrepancy – the previously staid professional class has lost its inhibitions, while the working class has the habits of the old working class but the aspirations of the professional class. They all mix without distinction, but those that remember the old middle class are now exposed, by the new mixing, to the activities of the working class that decades ago they would have never heard about, or at least ignored. Add to that the increased purchasing power of today’s revellers, and there’s no need to posit any fundamental change in attitudes.

I’m not sure I’ve got the right explanation (I wasn’t there), but it is important. A lot is riding, policy-wise, on whether we are facing a major increase in violence and drunkenness, or whether it is all just business as usual, blown out of proportion by the press and the nanny state.

Even if I’m right, it doesn’t mean there’s nothing to worry about. It means there used to be a powerful section of the population which believed it was above punch-ups in clubs and drinking to unconsciousness on the street, and now there isn’t. If something useful could be done, then something ought to be done. I have no useful suggestions, however – the bansturbation approach towards special offers in supermarkets, opening hours, drinks on trains etc. is as useless as it is offensive to liberty, and it’s not possible for a democratic state to clamp down on behaviour most people think of as normal.

There’s no route back to the past, of course. Dividing people back into professional and non-professional classes with different mores would cut off the economy from too many potential skilled resources, quite apart from the question of justice and equality of opportunity.

If there’s any dynamic that could drive up standards, it’s age. People do tend to grow out of destructive behaviour. If the authority of older people could somehow be increased, that might create some restraint on the young.

It will be interesting over the next few years to see how things change in a recession. The long boom may be partly to blame for irrational exuberance in the streets.

See also this earlier post where I suggested a less developed version of this idea

Using encryption

Dan Goodin at The Register has a very timely article recommending that everyone encrypt their email.

If you think that at any point in the next ten years you might want to send or receive an email message that can’t be read by your ISP, your government, the US government, or a lawyer, then the time to start using PGP-compatible encryption is now.

The reasons for this are:

  • If you suddenly start using encryption just when you need it, the fact will be obvious to whoever you are trying to hide things from.
  • Setting up encryption is a fiddly business, you should get it done when you have time, not when you need it.
  • You are helping everyone – the more people are set up to use encryption, the more useful and normal it becomes for everyone else.

I came to the conclusion a few days ago, dusted off all my old keys, found that they’d all expired (fortunately, since I’d forgotten passphrases), and created some new ones. I posted a key for sending to this blog, and if you have my personal email address, there is a key for that on the MIT keyserver.

So, if you’re using Windows, read the Register article; if you’re on Linux, install gnupg and enigmail (I’m on Debian and the packaged Thunderbird comes automatically with Enigmail to integrate with gnupg – just turn it on), even if you use webmail, there is now a firefox extension FireGPG to make it easy to send and receive encrypted messages.

So invest a couple of hours now in being ready.

Uncontroversial Measures

The Landsbanki affair exposed the fact that the government can, under the anti-terrorism, crime, and security act 2001, seize the assets of any foreigner or foreign government, if it reasonably believes them to be likely to take action to the detriment of the United Kingdom’s economy.

Since I found this very startling, I’ve been digging around to see what was said about it at the time the bill was debated and passed.

This won’t be a long post…

While debating an amendment to add a sunset clause to the bill, Douglas Hogg said:

The plain truth is that, because of time constraints, we are not going to discuss the substance of any of the clauses in the group whose consideration terminates at 6 o’clock. We have reached only the first line in the marshalled list. At least new clause 6 would apply a sunset provision to all the other measures that feature in the marshalled list, but which will not be discussed at all. Some of them, such as the power of the Treasury to freeze people’s cash, the power of Customs to go to the magistrates to get a seizure order in respect of “terrorist cash” and the extension of disclosure obligations are of great importance.

I shall not seek to debate the merits of those issues as you, Sir Michael, would call me to order if I did so. I point out only that, from any viewpoint, they are extremely important obligations and powers that are backed by penal sanctions. Furthermore, they apply to people’s property and may also affect the property of innocent third parties. However, we are not going to discuss them at all. That is one of the arguments in favour of sunset clauses, which are a very imperfect way of dealing with the problem that we face. We should not be in this position, but as we are, we must do something to provide a remedy. A sunset clause is one way of at least expressing our dismay about the position.

That’s it. That’s the only mention that was made of the power that the government later used against Landsbanki.

Ah, but what about the committee stage. Surely the Home Affairs Select Committee at least discussed it?

Have a look

Why did they debate detention of suspected international terrorists, Asylum, Judicial Review, Religious Hatred, hoaxes involving noxious substances, and the EU third pillar, but not the abolition of property rights for foreigners? Chris Mullin explained:

it is not our intention to trawl through every detail of this Bill, much of which is uncontroversial, but to home in, in the limited time we have, on the three or four obvious issues that are likely to be more controversial

There we have it. It was an uncontroversial measure.

Legislation – the details

I was planning, in relation to the previous post’s subject, to mention the government’s classification of an Icelandic bank as a terrorist organisation in order to freeze its assets.

As is so often the case, as I researched to fill in the details of exactly what happened, I found it wasn’t what I thought. As is occasionally the case, the truth is more interesting than the falsehood.

The order freezing the assets of Landsbanki, and section 4 of the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 under which the said order was made, make no reference to terrorism, except in that the section is part of that act.

The government is not “misusing” anti-terrorism law to grab the money, they are doing precisely what they were empowered to do in 2001.

4. Power to make order

(1) The Treasury may make a freezing order if the following two conditions are satisfied.

(2) The first condition is that the Treasury reasonably believe that—

(a) action to the detriment of the United Kingdom’s economy (or part of it) has been or is likely to be taken by a person or persons, or

(b) action constituting a threat to the life or property of one or more nationals of the United Kingdom or residents of the United Kingdom has been or is likely to be taken by a person or persons.

(3) If one person is believed to have taken or to be likely to take the action the second condition is that the person is—

(a) the government of a country or territory outside the United Kingdom, or

(b) a resident of a country or territory outside the United Kingdom.

4.(2)(b) is not relevant since the order cited 4.(2)(a) instead, so no allegation of terrorism of any kind needed to be made. The government has the clear legal power to seize the assets of any foreigner who it believes is likely to take action detrimental to the economy of the United Kingdom.

Holy shit.

How did it get that? Well, the clue is in the act. This was the act that was passed in December of 2001, against the votes of many Labour MPs who objected to the detention-without-trial provisions. The “seizing the assets of foreigners for any economic reason” bit escaped any public debate.

This is the lesson that we have to take from the Landsbanki saga. The anti-liberty measures that get argued about on the 9 o’clock news are the tip of an iceberg of literally unbelievable powers being accumulated by the government, that will be unveiled in a few years when the fuss has died down, and used against people who you would least expect to be the target.

What are police?

The orthodox view these days is that police are the arm of the state responsible for fulfilling the state’s function of preventing crime (to the extent possible).

I think that is a catastrophic error. Preventing crime, as I’ve written before, is not a separate activity, but is an aspect of almost everything we do – something so inherent in the human condition that we aren’t really aware of the extent that it drives our behaviour.

What this means is that there’s no way to draw a line around “preventing crime” and thereby delimit the scope of the police. Every issue becomes a police issue. I think that is the real meaning of a “police state” – not one where the state uses the police, but one where the police take control of the state.

If the police are not agents of the state, what are they? I think it is healthier to see them as state-funded helpers of private citizens. We all work to prevent crime, but there are some jobs that come up which we are not able to do because they take to much time or special expertise. Detection of crime is the most obvious of these.

If we take this approach, what really changes is the difference between police and public. The police do not have a separate role, they just have greater capabilities owing to their skills and available time. The most significant implication is that they do not need special legal powers. The only things they should be doing are things that members of the public could do, but don’t have time for.

Another way of saying that is that police should be held to the exact same standard as anyone else. Which means that, in a case like this one, if the press reports are accurate, the issue is not about whether Mr Carter gets an apology or compensation, or about administration of police disciplinary procedures, but about why the PC in question is not facing criminal charges. The idea that it might be an internal police matter is quite incompatible with the police being assistants rather than masters of the population.

But the concept goes further. If the police are assisting the public, then whatever they are doing, it should be because someone has asked them to. Management should be a matter of which requests to prioritise, not setting an agenda independent of the public. Valid reasons for not doing something might be that it is too costly for the benefit, but might also be that people are already achieving what can be done without the police.

This is not meant to be an anti-police rant. I think we do need full-time, trained police, and I think there is a better case for them to be state-funded than there is for most branches of the state. I think many of them do a good job and I have sympathy with their difficulties. But I think it would be easier for them, and better for us, if we accepted the principles above.

And what really matters here is what people believe. I have said before that the police usurpation of the right of self defense, has, in the popular mind, actually outrun what the law really says. The police were founded on the principles I have stated, and while bad laws have been passed in the last few decades, they have generally not been controversial, because they are following rather than leading the change in attitudes – for the worse – about the role of the police.

The bad attitudes go beyond this. I was going to use as an example bin men – another arm of the state notable for actually having an important function. Bin men are not The Agents with The Responsibility for disposing of rubbish, which is something the rest of us should not need to think about. On the contrary, they take everybody’s refuse to the processing centre in one go because it’s a lot more efficient than having everybody chuck black bags into the boots of their cars.

I was going to say that, but even in that state function, the same error is appearing. I remembered this piece from 2004 which mentioned a man getting into trouble for collecting litter and taking it to a dump without a license. This is the real problem – not the idea that some things should be done by the state, but the idea that some things should only be done by the state.

The FLDS

Further to my previous piece, obviously the issue of polygamy came up in the context of the raid on the FLDS community in Texas.

It’s difficult to judge who’s right or wrong when the facts are still unclear, but various difficult questions are raised. One of them was polygamy itself – based on my reasoning earlier, I would say that there’s no need to ban polygamy itself, but its existence raises a particular question of whether women in the community are being denied their right to leave their husbands.

Again, based on what I’ve already written, my attention would go first to the “first wives”, because it’s their behaviour which is the most anomalous relative to the wider society. Have any of them tried to go to court to get a divorce and an income or a share of assets, and what has been the result? Presumably they are taught that divorce is wrong, which is fine, provided they are not actually restrained if they change their mind.

Public attention has been centred on the younger women who become second “wives”. The accusation is that some of them are under legal age. This has not been substantiated, and it emerges that some of the “underage mothers” that were taken from the compound were in their twenties. If it turns out that underage girls are having sex with “husbands”, then crimes are obviously being committed. There is then a wider question of who else is guilty, beyond the men themselves. The difference between a marriage which is not legally recognised on one and and an affair on the other is that a marriage is publicly recognised. If the rest of the community has been knowingly participating in ceremonies where underage women are entering into marriages, then it would seem to me that they are complicit in the crime. In any case, I understand that Texas has laws specifically against marriage ceremonies involving minors, which strikes me as a sensible way of clarifying that question. There could be tricky questions around what is or is not a marriage ceremony, but I think they can be resolved – if the participants in the ceremony know that the couple is going to live together immediately, then it is a marriage ceremony. In the FLDS, that question is not likely to be controversial anyway.

My position so far is that if married women are being prevented from leaving or suing for divorce outside the FLDS community, or if underage women are being openly1 taken into sexual relationships, then crimes are being committed which need to be prosecuted. The next question is: what steps can justifiably be taken to investigate these factual questions? This is to my mind the most difficult questions. On the one hand, the Texas authorities seem to have undertaken very drastic action on the basis of very little evidence, which itself has turned out to be fake (the phone call). On the other hand, if the sort of crimes I have discussed are taking place, then how will they ever be exposed without barging in and questioning many members of the community privately? There may be room for disagreement about what was going on in Eldorado, but what about Khyra Ishaq who starved to death in Birmingham? What about Josef Fritzl with his daughter imprisoned in his basement? These cannot be prevented without being prepared to poke into people’s privacy to a certain degree without very much evidence. I am attracted to the idea that every man’s home is his castle, but can we really allow them to contain dungeons2?

They had the phone call (presumably they reasonably believed it to be genuine to start with), they had what could be called a prejudice, but in the light of the above I think a reasonable prejudice, that a closed, polygamous group is likely to be up to no good; I think they had sufficient ground for some kind of investigation, and in the circumstances any investigation would necessarily be very intrusive. It looks a bit as if the steps they took were excessive, but I’m willing to wait and see as the facts really come out.

There are even more issues over the status of adults in the community: the first is whether they have been “brainwashed” or “conditioned” in such a way that they are not free to leave even if they are not physically prevented from doing so. I don’t think the law can recognise that. There is no government in the world that I would trust to overrule what a mentally competent adult says she wants.

The second is similar: Growing up in a community where dissenting will mean losing contact with everyone the dissenter has ever known itself makes it questionable whether members are really free to leave. Again, I would be reluctant to trust a government to go against an adult’s stated wishes “for her own good”, but that is not to deny the problem. Other ex-members can provide support – if the public wishes to make it easier for members to leave, probably the best method is to assist those groups. Googling around produces, for example, this Ex-Mormon Support Group. Presumably there are others.

Notes:
1 Obviously if minors are secretly having sex, that’s illegal too, but it’s harder to do anything about, and in any case minors are having sex all the time. What’s distinctive here is the allegation that the whole community is aware of minors being “married”.
2 Note I’m not actually opposed to dungeons per se, that was just a poetic way of saying people shouldn’t have sufficient privacy to be able to secretly imprison people.

Polygamy

Ann Althouse raises the polygamy question.

She and her commenters cover the usual issues; polygamy tends to happen when some men are much richer / more powerful than most men, and it causes friction because of the men left without women. Polygamy is not ruled out by scripture, but by Western Christian tradition. Whether or not polygamy is legal is not a big deal, provided a man can live with a woman and have children without officially marrying her.

What is missed is the real link between polygamy and societies which deny rights to women.

Look at it this way. As we know, it is possible to take a second “wife” without legally marrying her, have children by her, leave property to the children by will, etc. Why don’t I do that?

I might have trouble attracting a second “wife”, but I fancy I might manage it. It’s worth trying, anyway. What’s to stop me?

The answer is so overwhelmingly obvious it’s surprising it seems to be missed. Were I to enter into any such arrangement, my No. 1 wife would be gone in about thirty seconds.

For polygamy to actually work, there has to be some way to force wives to tolerate the introduction of new wives. If a wife can get a divorce, and a share of property, either for no cause or for the cause of the addition of a second “wife” (whether by legal polygamous marriage or in the form of “adultery”), then polygamy, legal or not, is going to be very damned rare.

Attention seems to be wrongly attached to the new wives. As commenters at Althouse said, there would be nothing strange in a billionaire or a sports star being able to attract a second or third wife. But it would be very unlikely that they could do that and hold on to their first one.

That’s why polygamy generally doesn’t happen in societies where women have rights.

Mob Violence

The BBC has quite a lot of good video of the visit to Manchester on Wednesday of a large number of Glaswegians.

The normal question to ask about these scenes is, of course, “how do we prevent it”. But maybe there are more important questions. Mostly, how bad actually was it?

OK, so a lot of damage was done, and quite a few people got hurt. But a lot of people had a lot of fun, too, both visiting Scotsmen and the Greater Manchester Police. (Watch this video and tell me the police didn’t have fun). I’ve had a lot of fun watching the video. It’s noteworthy that the BBC are showing quite a lot of video that was obviously shot by the rioters.

The entertainment is probably quite good value per pound spent on repairing the damage. Just think how many good riots we could afford for the cost of the far less entertaining 2012 Olympics.

But the entertainment value is incidental too. I think the important point is that the threat of mob violence is an important part of the balance of power. It’s the same point as I made earlier today: where do rights come from? This is where they come from.

Now, if I were picking rights worth establishing, the right to have major football matches shown free on working large public screens near the ground wouldn’t be high on my list. As a direct political action, this week’s riot cannot be counted a great benefit. But we have mostly forgotten about the power of the mob, and I think there’s an indirect benefit in having a little reminder, every couple of years, that a few thousand inebriated young men with a grudge, together in one place on a warm evening, constitute a force seriously to be reckoned with. And if nobody gets too seriously hurt, then we get the reminder cheap.

On Rights

In the past, I’ve argued against the concept of “rights” as basis for reasoning about policy.

I’m about to do a 180° on this. I think I’ve finally understood what rights are.

The currently popular idea is that rights are automatically attached to every human. The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights is, I suppose, the most relevant statement of this idea, though the US Declaration of Independence makes the same fundamental claim.

The obvious – and fatal – problem with this theory is that it is useless. What does it mean to say that somebody has the right to life, if they have a terminal disease? What does it mean to say someone has a right to protection against unemployment (article 23) if nobody can afford to employ him?

One can attempt to avoid this problem by restricting rights to “Negative rights”. On this system, one cannot have, as a right, anything that requires another person to actively provide anything; one can only have the right not to be prevented from some given course of action. This is less obviously silly, but not, I think, really different. Two people cannot usefully have the right to eat the same apple.

It can go as far as defining rights simply as restrictions on government, but that is not useful, for what is government but a bunch of men with guns? Restricting the government does no good if some other bunch of thugs commit the same crimes.

So much for inherent rights. There is another view, which is that rights are not inherent, but are given by government. There is no problem with rights which are awarded by government, it is just one way of expressing the government’s law. On the other hand, since the essence of government is that the strong enslave the weak, there is no particular significance to the laws insofar as they restrict government, they are just the way a government chooses to behave until it chooses differently.

Rejecting both inherent and government-awarded rights as useful concepts, then, I have rejected rights. I now see that there is a third category of rights, which is a useful basis for thinking about law and about government.

Rights are neither inherent, nor given. Rights are taken.

The early arguments based on rights appealed neither to God nor to charter as the basis of the rights. If anything, they appealed to tradition. How does tradition justify their claims, if it only pushes into the past whatever is supposed to be the origin of the rights. The answer is that the argument is saying, that for some long period of time, when the alleged rights have been infringed, the people have acted to regain them. A right is not something you are born with, or something you are given. It is something you are prepared to fight for. More pertinently, it is something a group of people are prepared to fight for. If you establish a track record of consistently fighting for some right, then the most absolute of governments will nonetheless find it advisable to make a point of respecting it.

I worked this out once before, in the case of the right to freedom of religion, but I saw that at the time as a special case, whereas I now claim that is an instance of the general principle of what rights are.

Self-defence

In an old article, I looked at self-defence in Britain.

I came to the conclusion that the law of self-defence is good and is normally applied well. There is a very widespread but false view that those defending themselves are likely to find themselves on the wrong side of the law.

I was catching up on Samizdata today, and came across the case of Tony Singh, who had “committed the crime of fighting back”, in “another of those man facing prosecution for defending himself stories”.

He had fatally wounded a man who attacked him with a knife. He had been arrested and released on bail.

Fortunately for me, I was two weeks behind on Samizdata. I had not heard of the story, but I immediately predicted that a quick search would show that he had not been charged. Indeed it did, three days after the Samizdata story, which was followed by all the usual comments about the imminent end of civilisation due to the state denying any self-defence.

Now, I’m sure it was very stressful for Mr Singh to be arrested for killing someone. But realistically, anyone can claim to have killed in self-defence, and the police do have to investigate when someone ends up with a knife in their chest. But in actual cases of self-defence, there is almost zero probability of a prosecution.

The false idea that we do not have, de jure and de facto, a solid right of self defence in this country is discouraging people from exercising it, and potentially putting extra stress and pain on those who do exercise it and then believe they might be prosecuted.

People should not be moaning about prosecutions which do not in fact happen, they need to be shouting from the rooftops that we do in fact have the right to fight back.

Once that truth is established in the popular mind, we can then approach the real problem, which is that while we are allowed to defend ourselves, we are not allowed to own or carry weapons for the purpose. That should be where the battle of ideas should be taking place.