How Free is Britain?

Social Affairs Unit ^ | Feb 22 05 | Anthony Daniels

[ijcr]

A former colleague of mine was involved as an expert witness for the defendant in a civil case not long ago. A short time thereafter, he bumped into the judge at a golf clubhouse, who half recognised him.

"Are you a doctor?", he said.

"Yes", replied my colleague.

"And weren't you a witness in a case recently?"

"Yes".

The judge then asked him what he thought of the outcome. My colleague replied: "I think that the defendant would have received a fairer hearing in a kangaroo court run by generals in a South American military dictatorship".

I need hardly say that this remark brought the conversation to a close. But as reported, it set me thinking about the nature of our own freedom: how much freer are we than the citizens of a South American dictatorship (in the old days, where there were such things)? How free, exactly, are we?

I don't want to indulge in any self-pitying false comparisons. We have neither Gestapo nor Gulag, and it is an insult to all those who have experienced such things in their own flesh and blood (or bone, as they say in Spanish, perhaps more accurately) to compare our small tribulations with theirs. Irritations are not tragedies.

Nevertheless, I think we are less free than we used to be. The weight of the state is making itself everywhere felt. In my former professional life as a doctor, for example, I was obliged more and more to obey the dictates of ministers, rather than those of my medical beliefs.

Whereas when I started out on my career all that was necessary to continue in practice was that I should be qualified and that I should refrain from behaving in an egregious or outrageous manner, by the time I retired this year I had to fulfil all sorts of requirements, all of which (in this age of evidence-based medicine) were quite without evidence of use or efficacy. But that is not the real point of such requirements: they are not there to improve the quality of medical practice; they are there to let us all know who is boss. And even if they were effective, which is intrinsically very difficult to prove, they would still represent a loss of liberty.

The fact is that the requirements laid down by ministers and their bureaucrats now take up fully half the time of senior doctors, when they could be doing clinical work, and this at a time of shortage of medical manpower. Most doctors, except for the apparatchiks among them, are profoundly unhappy about this, and are taking retirement as soon as possible.

An increasing proportion of medical graduates never practice medicine, because the career is now so deeply unattractive to them, and they can do better elsewhere. Having brought this situation about, the government has launched its Improving Working Lives initiative, still failing to realise that it is the sinner, not the saviour.

There are other ways in which the state (by which I mean all agencies vested with public power) weighs increasingly heavily upon us, quite apart from the fact that we spend nearly a half of our working life paying for it. Here are a few random indicators:

1. The other day, at dawn, a large council vehicle parked outside my house with a very tall crane-like attachment, from the top of which photographs were taken of the neighbourhood, including my house. No one had felt obliged explain why, or for what purpose the photographs were to be used. The city is the council's and the fullness thereof.

2. Once a year, I receive through the post a letter marked with the exhortatory words, "Don't lose your right to vote – register now". Added to this is the warning, in case I don't feel like exercising my right, "Failure to comply could lead to a £1000 fine". This is like being accosted by a beggar in the street who simultaneously appeals to your charity and menaces you if you don't cough up.

3. Every few months, I receive a letter from the TV licensing agency, who do not believe that I do not have a television. Once again I am threatened with a £1000 fine, and also warned that my house will soon be spied upon unless I buy a licence.

4. When I drive out in my car, I am immediately in the presence, every few hundred yards, of cameras. (The British are now the most heavily surveyed people by CCTV in the world. There were more than fifty CCTV cameras in the hospital in which I worked, most of them hidden.) I don't want to drive like a lunatic, and in fact conduct on the road is the one aspect of British behaviour that is still superior to that of most foreigners, and was so even before the cameras were emplaced. Even if they are effective, and reduce accidents, they add to the pervasive feeling of being spied upon by the state.

5. Our police now look more like an occupying military force than citizenry in uniform. They are both menacing and ineffectual (quite an achievement), and even law-abiding citizens are now afraid of them. If you want to ask the time, don't bother a policeman. I know from medico-legal experience that the police are far more interested in preserving themselves from the public than from preventing or investigating crimes, up to and including attempted murder. This is not because, as individuals, they are bad men and women; it is because of the same kind of bureaucratic regulation imposed on them as it has been imposed on doctors and other professions.

6. I own a flat in London and have recently learned that I must replace a boiler, not because it does not work or because it is dangerous, but because the regulations have changed, for reasons that it would be impossible to discover, except that they obey the rule of Keynesian economics to stimulate demand and keep it stimulated. And this in practice would mean that, if I still want gas heating, I have to put a new boiler in my living room.

And so it goes on – and on. Very rarely nowadays do I feel myself free of the state. Its power has increased, is increasing and ought to be decreased. But I am not the man to do it. By retiring, I have withdrawn myself from it as far as possible. Il faut cultiver notre jardin.

[Michael81Dus]

Right. It´s currently happening in Germany, the people develop a form of hate against those "know-it-all-politicians". 65% of Germans would throw tomatoes on Greens, if they were allowed to.

[dhuffman@awod.com]

In my original post, to which you respond, I specified the dictionary W7NCD.

"subject: one that is placed under authority or control" Disarmed, you subjects have no means with which to resist the tyranny of the state.

"citizen: an inhabitant of a city or town; [i]esp[/i] one entitled to the rights and privileges of a freeman."

In each case the definition is the first, hence preferred, of the listed alternatives.

The state collects taxes at the point of a gun with our, your's and mine, permissions. I may die a freeman in a disagreeable confrontation with the state. You have no arms (goes beyond mere guns) with which to resist your state. Indeed, it'll likely be a recent immigrant at your doorstep begging, as agent of the state, to be killed.

See my tag line.

[pau1f0rd]

dhuffman@awod.com, you cannot possibly resist your state's military and police power. As an individual you have pretty much zero chance of resisting them, no matter what legal firepower you may have. You are restricted by your (U.S.) government (and probably by your wallet) from buying weapons that may guve you a chance of defeating your own government. So by your (not my) definition you are a subject.

As for arms, there's no doubt that the situation in the UK is dire. But there isn't a 100% prohibition on guns in the UK. Some guns are still permitted and a smart person can still be armed (albeit to a much lesser degree than you're used to). If it ever came to the government exercising intolerable tyrrany over the British people, the British Army would be on the side of the British people. I have no doubt at all about that.

what do you mean by "You have no arms (goes beyond mere guns) with which to resist your state. "?

Please understand, I'm not hostile to your position. In fact, I'm very sympathetic to it. I hope your people can make America a beacon to which we can point.

[deaconjim]

Yes, we have the freedom to make idiodic and racist remarks, but we also have the freedom to denounce those who make them. The important thing to remember, though, is that we have the freedom to tell the truth, even when the government, or anyone else for that matter, doesn't like it.

We also have the freedom to have the means to take the life of an innocent person, but we don't have the freedom to take that life. We do have the freedom to use weapons to defend ourselves against those not so innocent people who would take our lives. Most importantly, however, we have the right to arm ourselves to defend this nation against those who would try to deny us our God given rights.

I'm O.K. with Britain having the edge over us on the ability to see the genitals of other people on your "terrestrial TV channels". I value my freedom to tell the truth and to worship God more than my freedom to see naked people that I don't know. If that was important to me, however, I have satellite TV, so I can see all of the genitals I want. I haven't watched the "terrestrial TV" stations in years.