Fake Charities

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fake-charities

I think we all know about one type of fake charity? The ones where almost every penny raised goes on either paying for those who run the charity or into more fundraising to, err, pay those who run the charity? Allow me to introduce you to a new form of fake charity, one that has risen rather large in our political discourse in recent years.

My own eye opener came when I was pointed to the accounts of Friends of the Earth Europe. Some 50% of their money comes from the European Union. That in itself isn't too appalling, but FoE Europe's work is to lobby the European Union.  You can imagine how this might go then...the taxpayer gets gouged so that a lobby group can be seen to be urging a course of action upon those who have gouged the taxpayer in order to be lobbied. Lobbied to do something that they already wanted to do but need some public lobbying to provide the fig leaf perhaps.

This is not though an isolated incident. Via the excellent and very new fakecharities.org we find that many of those "charities" which appear in our national media are in fact little better than such State funded lobbying organisations. Taxes are taken from us so that the government can pay for the government to be lobbied, providing that fig leaf of a vocal campaign telling them (and us, more importantly) that what they've already decided to do is obviously a jolly good idea indeed.

You can see how the whole idea works here (although those of nervous dispositions might want to install that special anti-swearing filtering software). Perhaps the most egregious example uncovered as yet is Alcohol Concern. Out of an income in one year of just shy of £1 million, 57% came from the Department of Health...and yes, Alcohol Concern has been and is quite vociferous in its lobbying of the Department of Health on how access to alcohol can and should be restricted. Private donations were a tad shy of £5,000 (yes, that's five thousand, not five hundred thousand nor even fifty thousand) so their income from real people actually supporting their efforts was less than 0.5% of their total income. It's extremely difficult to see that this is a charity and even more difficult to see why theiy should been given any credence whatsoever in the media.

Might I suggest that in the spirit of this new citizen journalism, this new idea that we ourselves can and should investigate those who rule us, you pop over to fakecharities.org and give them a helping hand? Crack open a set of charitable accounts and see who is the sockpuppet and who is genuinely working independently? I seem to recall that someone proved that the Work Foundation was eating its capital, a thought which would make an interesting addition, anyone got other interesting such tidbits to add to the database?

The liberal future

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the-liberal-future

A serious policy package from the Liberal Democrats has been announced that tries to counteract the erosion of our basic civil rights and freedoms. They have announced a proposal for a ‘Freedom Bill’, designed to reverse years of damage that New Labour has inflicted on our social freedoms.
 
Their draft plan contains around 20 measures with the aim to:

• Cut the maximum pre-charge detention period from 28 to 14 days.

• Abolish the veto in the Freedom of Information Act that allows ministers to keep information secret.

• Scrap the ID card scheme.

• Remove all innocent people from the DNA database, except for those tried for a violent or sexual offence.

• Stop councils and others snooping by restricting the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) to serious and terrorist offences.

• Regulate CCTV to protect privacy following a Royal Commission on the use of cameras.

There is a realistic possibility that the Liberal Democrats could gain power at the next election as part of a coalition government, or with Labour's declining fortunes, they might even fine themselves in true opposition. Perhaps then, this proposal is the first step in turning the tide of authoritarianism.

Politics and the Blog

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politics-and-the-blog

On the 1st April we will host our Annual Bloggers Bash. This has proven in the past to be a great occasion and is shaping up to be so once again. Three speakers will talk for ten minutes on specific subjects linked to the broad theme of: Politics and the Blog

Two of our speakers are already confirmed as the politician John Redwood MP and top blogger Guido Fawkes. In attendance will be other top bloggers from politics, the media and beyond. As usual, beer will be served.

If you are blogger or are interested in attending, click here to find out more.

We’ve all been made criminals

Dr Eamonn Butler explores how the long arm of the law is stretching too far in to our lives. He believes that Britain has casually slipped in to a police state in which anybody can be stopped and searched for no good reason.

What’s frustrating about our slide into a police state is that most people haven’t even noticed it, while the rest have actually welcomed it. Sure, 9/11 and the London bombings leave no doubt that terrorism is a real threat. But then the sweeping powers we’ve given our police and politicians to deal with it are an even bigger one.

Ordinary, upright citizens are now spied on, stopped and searched, arrested at gunpoint, DNA-swabbed and criminalised, for no good reason other than that some officer of the state has the power to do it, and is incentivised to do it.

The ink was hardly dry on the Terrorism Act 2000 before it was used to arrest Dundonian Sally Cameron, 34. Her crime wasn’t some conspiracy to blow up Dundee; it was daring to walk along a cycle path. Two squad cars roared up on her and she was carted off to the cells.

Then octogenarian Walter Wolfgang, who had escaped the Nazis and become a Labour activist in Britain, was arrested under the same law for merely heckling Jack Straw at a Labour party conference. That’s the Jack Straw who wrote last week that his party had extended freedoms, not curtailed them.

Really? The Terrorism Act allowed the government to designate areas where the police could stop and search suspects at will. Fine, you might think, if they see people acting suspiciously outside nuclear power stations. But no. Ministers instantly declared the whole of London a stop-and-search area. Now thousands of law-abiding folk are stopped and questioned each year – even a cricketer who was asked to explain why he was carrying a bat, and an 11-year-old girl, stopped and told to empty her pockets.

Another octogenarian, John Catt, was picked up by the cameras that monitor every car going through the City. He was on police files because they’d nabbed him once before – outside the same Labour conference – for wearing a T-shirt saying George W Bush and Tony Blair were war criminals. Could be offensive, they said.

Charlotte Denis, 20, was arrested at a game fair on the same charge. Her “crime” was to wear a “Bollocks to Blair” T-shirt. She refused to remove it, having only a bra underneath, so was nicked.

Researching a book, The Rotten State of Britain, I struggled to work out how we had got into a state that makes criminals of us all. It’s not that politicians want to control our every move. Rather, they demand wide powers to deal with crime, believing they will use these appropriately. But give people power and they use it.

Particularly when they are incentivised to use it. Police commanders can get up to £15,000 in performance bonuses, depending partly on how many people they spot-fine, charge or caution. Officers have monthly targets; they do not want to prevent crime but to make criminals of us.

It’s much easier to pin a criminal record on someone like bus driver Gareth Corkhill for overfilling his wheelie bin, than it is to catch terrorists. And yes, local councils use antiterrorist powers to snoop on us, even for overfilling our bin.

A decade ago the police could arrest us only for serious crimes. Now they can arrest us for anything. Swinton man Keith Hirst, 54, was accused of dropping an apple core, refused to pay a spot fine – you can be fined by police and 1,400 other officials without any legal process – and got cuffed and held for 18 hours in the cells.

You’re not even safe in your home. In the past 12 years, officials have been given 550 powers to enter your house: to check if your pot plants have pests, your hedge is too high, confiscate your fridge if it doesn’t have the right energy rating, and yes, photograph and seize your rubbish. Resist, and it’s a £5,000 fine. Your name, address, and even your DNA will be put on the police database. Even if you’re cleared, you’ll have a fight to get it off. That’s why our DNA database is the world’s biggest.

We’ve done the terrorists’ work for them and surrendered our freedoms. But at least there’s now a debate, like this weekend’s Convention on Modern Liberty. The former MI5 chief Dame Stella Rimington says we now have more to fear from our police state than from terrorism. The information commissioner Richard Thomas complained that the surveillance state was making suspects of us all.

What’s to be done? We need leaders farsighted enough to place limits on their own power. They must revive the independence of parliament, the civil service, the courts, the press and local government as constitutional safeguards against central control.

We need locally elected police chiefs, paid to cut crime rather than harass innocent people; councils that decide and pay for their own priorities, rather than Whitehall’s; the scrapping of spot fines and random searches; and human rights law in favour of due process, with trial by jury, presumption of innocence, habeas corpus and the other ancient rights that protected us from the arbitrary power of our leaders.Then we’d have some hope of making the state our servant again, rather than our master.

Commissar Harman speaks

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commissar-harmon-speaks

I just heard Harriet Harman on the BBC saying Sir Fred Goodwin, a.k.a. Fred the Shred, the former Royal Bank of Scotland chief, should “not count on" keeping his pension.

Harman – Labour’s deputy leader – said: “The prime minister has said it is not acceptable and therefore it will not be accepted. And it might be enforceable in a court of law, this contract, but it’s not enforceable in the court of public opinion and that’s where the government steps in."

Translation: screw your legal rights and screw the rule of law. We’re the government and we can do whatever the hell we like.

This is getting scary.

Does that mean I think Sir Fred ‘deserves’ £650K a year for leading RBS to the edge of collapse? Of course not. Given the mess Goodwin presided over, I don’t think he ‘deserves’ anything.

But I also realize that a world where I decided what everyone did and didn’t deserve, regardless of their legal rights or my legal obligations, would be a terrible one to live in.

Harriet Harman, I suspect, would find it particularly unpleasant.

Blog Review 885

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blog-review-885

"First it is now a public policy requirement of the utmost importance that Sir Fred does not surrender any of his pension."

As Robert Bolt pointed out better to give the very Devil himself the benefit of the law for your own sake.

The confusion is a little odd to, as the truth can be found with a judicious application of the help that Mr. Google can provide.

Yet again we see that the Shock Doctrine of Ms. Klein has a problem with it. It just isn't the neo-liberals that employ it.

Once again we see that government spending plans are a day or more late and a dollar or two short.

California has become France and some suggegstions as to what you might want to do about it.

And finally, the most famous chord in rock and roll explained.

Two little things

3024

two-little-things

How do these things happen? You turn your back for 5 minutes and just because the odd bank has fallen over people decide to raise up again two of the more scabrous ideas from the horrors of human history. What is it about testing times that makes people suggest that we give up civilisation?

The first of these little things is the fuss over the pension arrangements for Sir Fred Goodwin. Yes, it's a huge pension, yes he was at the helm when the bank ran aground and no, I'm not all that chuffed with the idea that he'll get just shy of £700,000 a year for life either. But it is a contract. Perhaps it's a contract that shouldn't have been signed, that we wish hadn't been signed, that if there's a legal loophole in it we might exploit such, but as matters stand as I write it's a legal contract which was, amongst others along the way, signed off by a Government Minister.

To repudiate it because the populace, or the more populist of the votestealers in Parliament, desire such is simply the rule of the mob. The antithesis of one of the things that makes up civilisation, the rule of law, the sanctity of contract, call it what you will. We are not and should not be ruled by the whims of men but by the arrangements which we have signed up to beforehand and if we regress from that to doing whatever tricks the jeering crowd would call for inbetween their Hogarthian quaffs of gin and window breaking then we might as well give the whole thing up and go back and live in the trees.

The second is this extremely strange idea about compulsory national volunteering. Leaving aside the oxymoronic nature of the phrase I suppose we can at least use it as proof that there's none so illiberal as liberals imposing their pet schemes upon the hoi polloi. Other than that it's a nonsense, a truly horrendous idea that any civilised being should be ashamed of even considering, let alone publicly advocating.

Whether it's the melanin enhanced being shipped across oceans to pick cotton for Massa, the men of the country being impressed to die in the wars of their elders or the young being forced into servitude to the state by wiping said elders' bottoms there's a very simple reason why such things are repugnant. They're slavery. They are, in the end, the use of the power of the gun to force people to labour as you would wish rather than as they would wish, that they should spend some or all of their lives satisfying your desires rather than their own, something which has no place at all under even the farthest penumbra of a civilised society.

What is it with these people? At the moment it looks like the economy might return us to the living standards of 2006 and the truly pessimistic are suggesting 1990 or even 1980. So the suggestion is that we should regress in moral and legal terms to somewhere around 1800 to compensate? Seriously, what is going on?

Lost liberties

3020

lost-liberties

“Our society is based on liberty and democracy. I do not want to see excessive surveillance hardwired into British society." So said Mr Richard Thomas the Information Commissioner for the UK in an article in The Times. His remit is to safeguard privacy and freedom of information, so he spoke out this past week by heavily criticising the fact that data the government has collected can be shared between departments and the private sector and that the communications database ‘risked turning everyone into a suspect’.

In an article on First Post, the author draws a line under the illusion that we have perhaps fallen back on over these past 12 years: that the UK is a bastion of liberty. Indeed, if we look at the past and the comments of Mr Thomas then it is clear we have done little to alter the progression New Labour has made towards a surveillance state. Thankfully though, some have remained stoic in the face of this anti-liberty agenda; Henry Porter is a fine example, and he along with many others has established the Convention on Modern Liberty that meets for the first time this weekend in London. Hopefully this will raise the profile of what we have lost and how we can regain it.

The excuse of terrorism has oft been used by those in power to extinguish our privacy, we should hold this up as short-sighted, short-termist idiocy of our elected tyrants MPs. Their own political survival is what we trade our freedoms for. If we value our freedoms highly then we should rid ourselves of the legislation and of the politicians. Until such a time the state will continue to see us all as being guilty and we can only prove our innocence by succumbing to their unquestioning will.

ISOS: Economic and Social Policy: What Next?

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isos-february-2009

Attracting Sixth form students from across the UK, on Tuesday the 24th February we held the first ISOS of 2009. Starting the day with a speech about the dangers of the predominant constructivist ideology in European institutions, Westminster City Councilor JP Floru brought strong points against how its continuation could hold back Britain’s economy. Following JP was Douglas Carswell MP, who spoke on his plan to renew Britain in twelve months. He drew excellently upon his influential book co-authored with Dan Hannan on the same subject.  After the first break, the ASI’s own Dr Eamonn Butler gave a speech on his excellent new book The Rotten State of Britain. Eamonn’s presentation considered how over the past decade New Labour has instituted by stealth a type of government more oppressive, arrogant, and authoritarian than what Margaret Thatcher was ever accused of. Following Eamonn, Kendra Okonski, Communications Director of the International Policy Network discussed with verve how a market-based approach is best suited for protecting the environment. Jeremy Browne MP spoke superbly after lunch on the recent boom years and whether they were just an illusion. He argued that although the UK’s citizens are better off now than they were, this does not excuse the fact that much of the current financial crisis was caused largely by a government induced credit boom. Steve Rolles’ from Transform was up next tackling the controversial topic of drug reform. He argued convincingly that the legalization of recreational drugs and the medicalization of harder drugs would benefit the country through a lower rate of crime and tax receipts from their sales. Dr Madsen Pirie spoke next on how to save Britain. The ideas presented were a synthesis of different necessary reforms to rebuild Britain after the recession; if only we had a government radical enough to institute them. Up last was Oxford Professor Martin Cox. He talked consummately on the bailout’s effects on the economy, considering who will pay for it in the end. Sadly the answer was of course the sixth form students listening.  The Independent Seminar on the Open Society was once again a great success, with thought-provoking speakers and excellent questions from the students for which we are grateful. We would also like to thank Total Politics, Prospect and Standpoint who kindly provided magazines for the students.

Blog Review 884

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blog-review-884

We really do need to take a closer look at what is being taught in schools. Property is theft?

Obama's making sure that it sure ain't the neo-liberals making use of the "Shock Doctrine".

Governments involve social injustice. They sure do.

Are you ready for pessimism porn?

Back in the days when Paul Krugman was an economist.

What's Greek to you?

And finally, this is what stimulus means.