The State Of Civil Liberties In Modern Britain

After only a tiny bit of begging, I was invited up to the HQ of Big Brother Watch on Wednesday evening for the official launch of their new book, The state of civil liberties in modern Britain. Having now finished all 300 pages, I can report that it's a right scary read.

Consisting of 27 essays from an impressive line-up of authors - including MPs, respected journalists and barristers - the book is an eminently readable catalogue of the destruction of our freedoms and liberties in all spheres of life which, when put together in one tome like this, paints an appallingly oppressive picture of Britain today.

Readers of this blog will be most interested in the contributions of Brian Monteith, author of The Bully State featured in the right sidebar (which is where the BBW book is headed once I can remember how to do it), along with those of Philip Johnston, Josie Appleton, and Mark Littlewood. All chapters, however, are illuminating in their description of runaway state control and incessant interference in our everyday lives by local, national, and supra-national politicians.

Depressing though this publication is, departing BBW co-founder Alex Deane (left) should be congratulated for compiling a comprehensive account of how the state has shamefully abused its authority and systematically derogated the lives of all UK citizens by way of legislation, opprobium, surveillance, denormalisation and a total destruction of personal responsibility and self-reliance. The book lays down a marker by which to measure the future progress - or lack thereof - towards a respect for personal liberties previously believed to be enshrined in seminal laws passed by historic politicians who - unlike the current hideous crop - cared for the public's freedom over and above their own self-importance.

This contrast between a state which takes our civil liberties into account and the hideous mutation of governance we now suffer on a daily basis is starkly illustrated in the culmination of Leo McKinstry's chapter. In articulating the abject nature of authoritarian modern government, he points to a sadly prophetic quotation by Liberal PM, Lord Rosebery, delivered in 1908.

The modern cry is, 'Let the Government have a finger in every pie, probing, propping, disturbing. Every day the area of initiative is being narrowed, every day the standing ground for self-reliance is being undermined; every day the public infringes - with the best intentions no doubt - on the individual. The nation is being taken into custody by the state.'

We are, indeed, now presumed to need guarding and cocooning from our own self-determination - whether we like it or not - by those we elect to serve, rather than master, us. It's high time such an invasive condescending attitude was challenged, so all credit to Alex and BBW for doing exactly that.

The book is available here for less than the price of a couple of pints of Guinness. I can heartily recommend its bite-sized format for the train, bath, bog, or wherever else you choose to do your reading.

Link Tank 05/02

Is it Saturday already?

There's an environmentalist in your dishwasher

Cheating the tax man, in a good cause, for £1.15 a day

Man's life saved by being hideously drunk

How the Irish play the tobacco game

Ogling women makes them worse at maths?

Denmark government approves an 18 mile underwater road tunnel to Germany

Hawaii moving to ban kids from buying toy guns

Americans are more stressed now than the average psychiatric patient in the 1950s

Economic theory as you've never seen (or heard) it before

The ten craziest plane landings caught on video

A Tale Of Two Wittys

Hmmm.

The BBC has apologised for remarks made on the television programme, Top Gear, that caused outrage in Mexico.

In a letter to Mexico's ambassador in London, the BBC said it was sorry if it had offended some people, but said jokes based on national stereotyping were part of British national humour.

Now, I wonder why the Beeb didn't use the personal description defence? You know, this one.

The comments made by David Baddiel were quite clearly his personal description of Mr McWhirter’s political allegiances.

The Alan Davies Show is a live, light hearted, entertainment programme and in this context we are satisfied that no broadcasting guidelines were broken.

So let's get this straight. A non-PC, middle class, right of centre TV presenter makes what is clearly a joke, about a Mexican car, on a programme well-known for its ribald sense of humour - and the BBC rush to apologise.

Whereas a right-on, lefty comedian makes a bald assertion, not intended as a joke, inaccurately defaming the late Norris McWhirter, and by association the libertarian Freedom Association, as a "posher version of the BNP" - and the BBC refuse to apologise or even admit that the claim was wholly incorrect.

Yes. Yes, I think that's about the sum of it.

They Will Not Control Us

There's a new* blogger on the block, and he's rather talented. Top choon, well treated.

* Or perhaps not so new, really

Bring On More Thirdhand Smoke Studies

I'd like you to meet Simon Chapman (left). He's a world class anti-smoker of the upside down variety, plying his vindictive trade as Professor of Public Nannying at the University of Sydney. Chapman has been writing anti-smoking fiction studies since the very beginning of the hysterical crusade against tobacco enjoyment, so is a fully paid up member of the tobacco control irritentsia.

However, despite Chapman's longstanding dedication to making up stuff evidentiary tobacco control, it seems that the laughable nature of the current drive to bedevil thirdhand smoke is just too ridiculous even for him. And that's really saying something.

Responding at the British Medical Journal to a study conducted by the arguably insane Georg E Matt, Chapman has this to say on the idea that moving into a home once owned by smokers is a health hazard.

[...] the soup of gases, fine and ultra-fine particles in tobacco smoke that include irritants, toxins and carcinogens has much in common with smoke emitted as pyrolisis products from the combustion of other organic matter: when you breath wood smoke, cooking smoke or petroleum smoke, you are exposed to many of the very same irritants and carcinogens that are also in tobacco smoke.

So why did Matt et al consider only nicotine? There is not a house anywhere that is not finely carpeted with many of the very same pyrolysis compounds "that go along with" nicotine but which originate from everyday activities like heating, cooking, candles, electrical appliances, and leaving windows and doors open to allow household exposure to motor transport fumes. Had they done so, equally "alarming" information about all our houses would have emerged to give their findings some important perspective.

Just to translate: that's academic-speak for "you're talking crap, mate". But then, all but the most gullible will have worked that one out already.

For someone so wedded to demonising smokers and smoking (Chapman once warned that Muslims would be inhaling pig's blood if they smoked) to speak out, though, would suggest that there is considerable unease in tobacco control circles at some of the execrable nonsense being spewed about thirdhand smoke. In fact, his denouement makes exactly this point.

It is important that research documents residuals from tobacco smoke. But it is equally important that consumers and policy makers are not led to believe that the chemical compounds thus located are somehow unique to tobacco smoke.

No. That would be lying and tobacco control organisations wouldn't dream of such a thing, now would they?

The omission of this information in such reports risks harming the credibility of tobacco control.

OK, funny though that is, calm down and stop giggling please, you're putting me off.

That Chapman is speaking out should be evidence enough that the thirdhand smoke scam is, well, a scam. But in doing so, he kinda puts some much-belated perspective on the hysteria surrounding passive smoke as well.

He points out that wood smoke is twice as dangerous as that emitted by cigars and cigarettes; that diesel emissions dwarf the dangers of smoke in a casino which allows it; that passive smoke exposure is on a par with emissions from clothes dryers, popcorn poppers, candles, irons and toasters; and that nicotine itself is a benign concern.

If thirdhand smoke studies - which are so far-fetched that rubbishing them is like shooting fish in a barrel - elicit such responses from anti-smokers worried about their reputations and funding ... perhaps we need a lot more of them.

Bring 'em on!

H/T Dave Atherton

Re-arranging Furniture For The Sake Of The Planet

As some of you may know, Puddlecote Inc is heavily affected by transport regulations, most recently those concerned with emissions. Today we finalised disposal of the last of five recently-sold vehicles.

The sales were forced upon us by emissions legislation which means we are no longer able to run them, despite their being perfectly roadworthy and capable of carrying on for at least another 5 years or so (similar to rules concerning London Taxis). However, they are considered too inefficient for our apocalypse-bound planet and so they had to go.

We imagined that it would be difficult to sell them. After all, who wants to buy specialised business transport vehicles when no business is allowed to use them?

We were very wrong.

Immediately on placing them on eBay Motors, we were inundated with enquiries and could pick and choose which buyers were offering the most cash. They were all sold in no time at all with just the matter of collection to arrange.

The last two exited our premises today ... bound for Ukraine. Two others have been taken to Ireland, with the last of the five now somewhere on its way to Zimbabwe!

It would appear that although the UK has very strict emissions regulations to save the impending environmental catastrophe, they don't seem to be as harsh elsewhere. I'm not too sure how this helps protect the polar bears, myself, unless the countries mentioned are somehow using a different atmosphere to us. Nope, I simply can't work out how re-arranging the planet's vehicular furniture is going to stop global warming.

Naturally, accompanying the loss of those vehicles is the necessity to buy brand new (or very recent) replacements in order to get the most out of them before they too are declared obsolete by the state, and that, of course, increases our overheads.

Now, while the companies who will be using our vehicles don't compete with us, I'm sure there are many companies in the UK who are at a disadvantage to foreign competitors who can run their vehicle fleets for a lot longer, thereby providing economies not available to British firms.

I've also mentioned before the fact that newer vehicles are taxed a lot higher, which is yet more business costs self-imposed by the UK government in the name of safeguarding the environment.

If other unilateral enviro-laws are as futile at improving the Earth's environment as the one described above, aren't we just unnecessarily shooting our own businesses in the foot?

Remote Control Bigotry

Some may remember my previously mentioning Lenore Skenazy, a mother and published author on the modern day massive over-reaction to childhood perils. Her blog, Free Range Kids, regularly reports on the most egregious of paedohysteria measures and risk-terrified safety paranoia, this article - recounting a reader's experience with her doctor - being a recent example.

My husband, Hunter, is a light smoker, and does so outside of our house. At our son’s two-month appointment, the doctor spent a sizable chunk of time trying to convince us that if my honey smoked at all, even outside, the smoke would magically migrate into the house and give our baby respiratory problems. When we expressed incredulity, she gave us this look of condescension and continued to try and extract some kind of guilty admission that he was trying to quit or at least he felt really bad.

[...] She tried to tell us that the smoke on his skin would give our son a debilitating disease, even though my husband washes his hands every time he comes back inside.

Obviously, the first thing to observe is that her doctor is as gullible as the universe is wide, and perhaps should have chosen a different career path more suited to her character ... such as working in an abbatoir, for example. The advice she gives is incompetent, woefully ill-informed, and arguably harmful to the family concerned.

Yes, this is the shiny new thing in professional public health grant-chasing - thirdhand smoke. A con so big that even the great Henry Gondorff would marvel at its audacity.

It started out as a telephone poll, before eager tobacco control rent-seekers (aka liars) picked it up and ran a study which defies belief in its destruction of scientific integrity.

Nitrous acid concentrations in the average Californian home are 4.6 parts per billion. The Berkeley researchers used concentrations of 65 parts per billion. They described this dose as “high but reasonable”, a baffling description since it is 14 times higher than would be found in a normal domestic setting. Since they were already using 15 times more nicotine than would be found in a smoky truck cabin, any relevance the experiment had to real life had long-since vanished. The concentrations were fantastically high when compared to the average home.

In any case, if your house or car is full of nitrous acid then you have more to worry about than it reacting with absorbed nicotine. As the authors point out in the study:

“The main indoor sources of HONO [nitrous acid] are direct emissions from unvented combustion appliances, smoking, and surface conversion of NO2 and NO.”

NO2 and NO themselves are products of unregulated combustion. So you’ll only be exposed to high concentrations of nitrous acid if you’re exposed to the products of combustion – ie you’re a peasant in a smoke-filled hut, you live in a very polluted city like New Delhi, or you are in fact smoking a cigarette. The combustion products themselves are carcinogens, and are present in much higher concentrations than the TSNAs. Your problem would be the nitrous acid, not the chair you smoked a cigar in last Christmas.

Since then, cash is being thrown at more tobacco control rent-seekers (aka more liars) if they promise to come up with further junk science, with some even giving their conclusions at the grant application stage!

The application summary states: "Overall, our proposed work will be a critical step in a timely assessment of whether the THS exposure is genetically harmful to exposed nonsmokers, and the ensuing data will serve as the experimental evidence for framing and enforcing policies prohibiting smoking in homes, hotels, and cars in California and elsewhere in order to protect vulnerable people."

We have now sunk to a new scientific low in tobacco control. Not only are researchers reaching pre-determined conclusions before actually conducting the research but they are now openly admitting it. Moreover, they are acknowledging this in their grant applications, and still receiving funding!

We really are beyond the looking glass with respect to the thirdhand smoke fantasy and the Mad Hatters who promote such an absurd concept, yet many commenters at the Free Range Kids blog - read by parents vehemently opposed to hysterical scaremongery and mythical dangers, remember - have fallen for it hook, line and sinker.

By way of policy-led evidence-creation, spread by press release rather than rigorous debate, tobacco control have deliberately deceived normally sceptical people into believing in the existence of an entirely fictional danger.

While it would be easy to dismiss this as a few individuals being too willing to swallow untruths without question, there is a very sinister aspect to it. The tobacco control industry have intentionally taken this line of attack in order to prod the public into demonising not the act of smoking, but smokers themselves, thereby creating irrational bigotry by remote control. In the linked article, the victim of the hideous creatures who find this an acceptable tactic is a caring parent who has done nothing wrong whatsoever.

To encourage social exclusion and ostracisation on the back of lies and ideological prejudice - which is exactly what is transpiring here - is not just evil, it should also be classed as a criminal offence for the harm it inflicts on innocent people.

Incidentally, check out the Psychosis Catalogue entry I found while reading there. It's a corker!