By way of Carl Minns up in Hull and Dick Puddlecote, comes revived comment that the police during the Olympics will have powers to enter homes and business premises near the venues to remove displays and posters they don't like - mostly advertising for products not belonging to the various official sponsors of the games.  This did surface last year some time when some Olympics enabling legislation was being introduced from memory.

Aside from the obvious civil liberties connotations - and, for example, will it be restricted to non-sponsor advertising or would, say, protest posters be the subject of these "raids" - there is the simple question of who are our police supposed to serve?  Are they there to protect the commercial interests of MacDonalds, Coca-Cola, Cadbury (Kraft of course now) Samsung and so on or the security of the venues, participants, spectators and local residents?

On whose planet is it a valid part of a commercial sponsorship agreement that people in their own private property who are not parties to the contract outside the park itself not be permitted to do what the hell they like in their property?  

Presumably no competitors will be allowed to participate or spectators visit the games either who have not arrived by British Airways planes (and then only ones powered by General Electric engines), paid by Visa cards from Lloyds Bank accounts (which can hardly now be counted as part of the private sector sponsorship anyway) and arranged by Thomas Cook, or been driven in BMWs fuelled by BP petrol?  Woe betide if you are spotted with a mobile phone other than a Samsung, a laptop other than an Acer or a watch by anyone other than Omega and no doubt those police who like stopping people taking photographs will now have an added excuse if you are not using a Panasonic camera.  And don't even try getting into a venue if you are not wearing Adidas clothing and have receipts for all of this from John Lewis.  

Given that MacDonalds are providing the food, Cadbury the snacks and Coca-Cola the drinks, perhaps we shouldn't even expect that much of the athletes anyway - and that's assuming that there's nothing in these two companies' products that would cause a doping test to fail - certainly I've heard that horses can fail a doping test after a Mars bar so presumably feeding them Whispa bars is out.  Those bicycles don't look capable of carrying someone who has pigged out on a Macky D and Coke, and I wouldn't go near the diving pool without full waterproof coverings (by Adidas again of course).

Oh, they say, but these companies are "paying" for the Games with their sponsorship and should expect exclusivity.  Bollocks are they.  The private sector contribution to the now £9,000,000,000 plus budget is only just over 20% of that.  Most of the rest is coming from taxpayers directly, with some coming from the people of London in added council tax and a large chunk from Lottery players everywhere.  Add to that the fact that almost any business in the country that has tried to get construction work done over the past few years has had to pay over the odds because the Olympic developments have been sucking up as much construction activity and materials as it could get (at one point the construction inflation caused by the Olympics was running at 30% over "normal" costs) and the contribution of the people of Britain dwarves that of the "official sponsors".

No, this is all an appalling invasion of peoples' privacy and property that can only be applied arbitrarily at best in favour of a group of companies that are barely covering a fifth of the costs of the Games.  I wonder what the charge sheets will say if people refuse to comply - "aggravated poster displaying", or "grievously flaunting an iPhone" perhaps?  Utter hogwash.

 Oh dear!  Two Lib Dem peers, Tim Clement-Jones and Tim Razzall, have caused an almighty ruccus across the internet over an amendment they have tabled to the Digital Economy Bill that could, according to various opinions, end up seeing ISPs effectively told to block access to major "user contributed" web services, such as YouTube or FlickR if a copyright holder accuses those sites of hosting "substantial" amounts of copyrighted material.  

There's lots more to it, in particular that their amendment is itself almost certainly far better than what was originally in the bill giving the Secretary of State god-like powers over the internet and for changing copyright law without legislation, but this adds to an awful bill that would allow "collective punishment" by cutting off an ISP's account holder for sharing or downloading copyrighted material even if it was not them doing so but someone else using their account, and potentially put the blockers on open access Wi-Fi such as you find when you are getting your coffee in Starbucks or wherever.

Is it a misguided and probably quite naive attempt to clean up an even more nasty in intention piece of the bill, or have they been nobbled by the rights "industry" like Mandelson has before them?  Time will tell.  

But what it highlights, to my mind are several things...

The Lib Dems, despite many IT savvy members crying out for it, have not really got a policy on IT as a whole and the internet specifically.  For all the bluster over the years about being the most internet enabled party (a claim which is undoubtedly untrue), many of us have called for a proper policy debate on intellectual property, policy supporting open source software, and internet policy.  It has never happened.

The "Establishment" are shit scared of the internet.  Either they have not actually for the most part grasped its potential as an epoch changing medium of global interpersonal communications that has huge ramifications for democracy, government, blurring the often arbitrary lines drawn on maps to designate "countries" and potentially heralding an era of much heightened innovation and collaboration between people all over the planet and have fallen for the siren calls of rights owners without realising the other consequences, or they have realised it and, like the Ancien Regime, are determined to maintain control of it.

The real debate we should be having is about the very nature of and justification for intellectual property at all.  Let's face it, rights holders know the potential for the internet having to change the way they work, the way they, we make a living out of ideas, creations and innovations, and both here, with the Digital Economy Bill, earlier in the US with things like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and in Europe over the issue of software patents, have rallied their troops and arguments to capture our legislators.  This entire Bill needs to be thrown out and a proper debate framed around what are the legitimate, if any, bounds to intellectual property before you can create legislation, if any is needed, to support innovators and creators.

The one solace I take is that the internet works like a self-healing organism in many ways.  Whatever obstacles states try to put in its way, clever brains will eventually find a way around, I am sure.  But at what risk?  We already have grown used the notion that sharing songs is the linguistic equivalent of Blue Beard and his army of killer ocean going pirates.  How long before people who try to break such controls are branded "electronic terrorists" or some such?

The protectionism of intellectual property laws is an artificial intervention in the free market caused and maintained by the state.  It creates artificial scarcity that costs us billions as consumers and most of the time does very little for the actual creatives it ostensibly tries to protect, and these rich pickings are greedily snapped up by "IP farming" by giant corporations, some of whom now make more money out of enforcing IP rights against little people than they do out of the "innovations" they are supposed to be manufacturing and selling.

Intellectual Property was one of the four great evil state created monopolies that the Individualist Anarchists and Mutualists railed against as one of the ways in which the state assisted in the exploitation of labour by capital owners.  It is thoroughly illiberal in principle and it is illiberal to be supporting this bill in any shape or form until we have had this Brave New World debate about IP itself and the role of the internet more generally.  It needs killing off and starting again.

Here's a duplicate of my post on my BrookesBlog:

Rumour reaches me that our big planning application for the new library and teaching building has been, as it is termed, "called in" so that the decision will be made once again by all 48 city councillors. So the decision of the Strategic Development Control Committee, whom council elect to make large planning decision on their behalf, is for the second time being challenged and could yet be overturned and the application refused permission.

I have to admit that my own record on this sort of thing is hardly blemish-free - it was I who arranged for the decision in 2000 to allow the Oxford International Centre for Islamic Studies the go ahead to build on Marston Road reopened in full council after even full council had approved it narrowly on the very tenuous grounds that because we had had council elections in between and the composition of the council had changed it was potentially a material difference since the decision had been made! My argument was rejected, thankfully, and although I would probably still have preferred for the Islamic Centre not to have marked the start of development encroaching down the green spaces on the Marston Rd that divide the city from the suburb, given the often rather bleak look of what we have built opposite, I do rather find the Islamic Centre architecture a welcome break from 21st century halls of residence!

However, having been involved in the other side of planning now, i.e. from the applicant's point of view, both with Oxfordshire Community Land Trusts and more recently obviously with this Brookes application, I am a reformed character in that respect. As a memorandum put out by the city council's head of planning Michael Crofton-Briggs a couple of years later stated (at the time trying to remind councillors that appeals could be expensive and losing an appeal even more so) the principle of British planning law is that by default property owners should be allowed to do what they want on their property, unless there are well grounded public policy reasons why not.

Planning officers - the professionals whom the council appoints to be the "expert witness" if you like applying the local plan and local development framework to test each application and to recommend decisions to councillors - have twice now recommended approval for the building. The Strategic Development Control Committee has twice now followed the officers' recommendations and approved the application - the last time by the narrowest possible majority in a 12 person committee - 7 votes to 5 - and this time somewhat more convincingly at 9 votes to 3. And both applications it seems will now end up being decided by the whole council.

It seems to me that the way this process works actually turns on its head that fundamental planning principle of allowing property owners to do what they want with their property by default, and implies what is the reality, that councillors feel that they have a right to hold something up until the applicant satisfies them. But I know only too well now what this sort of politicking costs. We are strong enough to be able to bear such costs, but when the applicant is someone, say a small developer, engaged on his main business activity, putting everything on hold, sometimes for years if a protracted appeals process ensues, can be enough to break such a business, which is an appalling price to pay for lay-councillors deciding to play a little politics with that developer's property.

Development control is supposed to be a "quasi-judicial" process. Whilst justice demands rightly that objectors have their opportunity to comment and campaign against something, I do wonder whether ultimately the correct people to make the end decision, to balance, for example, the essentially non-voting applicant - "Oxford Brookes University" per se, does not have a vote in local elections and a very large proportion of our students do not vote (as students tend not to anywhere) - whereas the objectors are people who do have a vote and whose votes councillors must gain or retain when they are up for election.

So the incentives, I'll say no more than that, are for councillors to side with the voters, and the most vocal of them at that, and not with applicants. It should be borne in mind too that their obligation is to all their constituents and not just the most vocal and erudite and some of these councillors have a lot of students in their ward who may not have voted for anyone but are still entitled to their councillors' consideration.

Maybe it's time that all planning decisions were handled by some kind of dispassionate professional service rigourously applying law and policy in a properly judicial setting.

Let us just hope that this time, sense will win out, and those who understand the contribution that Brookes makes to the local economy (which our city council has endorsed previously as part of the South East Plan which is where they should have raised objections if they wanted to I'd suggest) and that jeopardising the redevelopment of our physical facilities to better reflect our academic reputation, will have a majority in full council and that we do not need to go through the tortuous process of an appeal.

Constructions costs are now back on the rise. The longer gaining permission takes the more expensive, potentially, the development becomes, and the more of a diversion of resources that will mean from front line teaching, learning, research and student experience activities.

Excellent stuff from Ben Goldacre about how relatively few medical treatments and the like really can back up the claims in their adverts, aimed at medical professionals, with high quality research and evidence.

And for this sort of stuff we pay for state-monopoly drugs regulators, "clinical excellence" panels and similar, whose effect is to push up the costs of medical developments whilst holding back potential miracle cures and now also, it seems, letting through an awful lot of potential quackery dressed up as science.

Surely a competing market in certification could only do better.  After all, that is really just what the numerous studies highlighted by Goldacre are really doing, except that they have no real way of "monetizing" their findings as, say, competing medical insurance companies would do.  Just publishing their findings in just as obscure publications and hoping, beyond hope it seems, that someone will bother to notice.  

All the vested interests are against them - from the regulators themselves whose shoddiness is exposed, to the doctors who may now be embarrassed at having fallen for false claims, and the pharmaceutical companies who have thus far managed to get away with who knows, perhaps, murder.  This unholy alignment could so easily all be changed by real competition, and the biggest beneficiaries would be...the patients and the people who pay for their care.

I see over on LDV that Mmes Swinson and Featherstone are getting quite excited about the prospects of some action on "airbrushing" images and the "sexualisation of children" since the psychologist they were working with, Ms (one assumes) Linda Papadopoulos has been called on by the Home Office to do some research that largely confirms their previous claim that airbrushed images should have warning labels on them and the like.  

The Tories have been all over this as well this week with David Cameron also worried about the "sexualisation" of children via their presumably completely involuntary exposure to imagery and language that apparently encourages them to become sexually aware and sexually active at ever younger ages.  Also there is the age old worry about "body image" - that some people are traumatised by the realisation that they do not conform precisely to some idealised shape or look propagated by a million different media outlets.

Now, as someone who has always had a bad self-image, I would not want to deny that it can be a very depressing thing to have.  And I am sure that perpetuating some kind of perfect image can have such effects on people.  I'm a little more concerned about this notion of "sexualising" children.  You see we are sexual beings, from the day we are conceived.  We engage in erotic play, as all animals do, from the earliest age, quite naturally.  I mean I remember "doctors and nurses" - or, in my case, it was more like "doctors and new recruits" I suppose - aged four or five.  The last, and only, time I had a girlfriend (and I had five of them if memory serves) was at infant school, and I even kissed them.

So let's not throw the baby, if you pardon the pun, out with the bath water.  Our culture has become, if anything, unnaturally concerned about protecting our children from all sorts of things, resulting in ridiculous situations such as parents being harassed by security guards for taking pictures of their own child having fun on a shopping centre play-ride.  And all of a sudden we look to the government, apparently, to "do something".

What the fuck?

What happened to personal responsibility?  What happened to parents being able to control what their children were exposed to?  About them complaining to broadcasters, not patronising advertisers' products and so on?  In other words, social action?

And how are such bans to work?  Papadoc suggests, apparently, labelling airbrushed images.  That assumes, of course, that there was a real photo of a real human to tinker with in the first place.  I'm quite sure that life will be much easier and cheaper for these magazines, fashion houses and advertisers if they no longer have to bother with the hassle of paying any number of ego-inflated, overpaid, skeletal "models" and suffering their famous tantrums and pecadillos, and heading straight for the CGI imagery.  

These images never involved a real human being other than the one at the computer keyboard.  Are we to ban creativity now?  Shall we go through the pre-Raphaelites and put public health warnings on slightly overweight beauties?  Or cautions on Mona Lisa that too much make-up might crack your face up?  Idealised beauty has been around since the dawn of (hu-)mankind.  Get over it already!

And what is it with such political types and so on that they reach for the heavy hand of the state as an automatic reaction to things that really ought to be the province of individual and family responsibility and consumer power and anarcho-feminist campaigners torching publishing houses?  Of one thing we can be sure.  All three parties have now been making noises about this in the past few weeks.  Something is bound to happen whoever wins the election.  Everyone will take credit for it.  And another little bit of someone's freedom will have been burned on the political bonfire of insanity.

Try exercising your freedoms some day.  Stop buying shit if you don't like it!  But for god's sake stop asking the state to tell everyone else they can't have it.  If you don't, one day there will be precious few freedoms left for you to exercise before you know it.

Stop the world, I want to get off.  Liberal Democrats?  Could have phuled me.

So, taking up the idea of "rigourous liberalism" I mentioned the other day, and accepting that there is a (ever less so) difference between what Americans and British mean by "liberalism", it seems an opportunity has popped up for Obama to display some.  With the Republicans now capable of blocking his health care plan, they last night demanded he go back to the drawing board.

"Rigourous liberalism" could just about save his skin, and is a good example for what I mean by the phrase.  Instead of just accepting that health care is unaffordable for many Americans and creating some compulsory system whereby everyone has to help pay for everyone else, he could look at why health care is unaffordable.  For most of it is down to previous and current actions of government.  

It would be far more effective first to eradicate those aspects of state interference that cause the unaffordability in the first place, because this is itself an injustice on those who do lose out by it, than to allow such injustices to continue and then to impose yet more injustices - higher taxes, loss of choice, decisions made by bureaucratic number-crunchers (or "death panels") rather than patients and their medical advisers.

Only once they have eradicated all state created and state enforced protectionism and price gauging can they even begin to calculate whether further help is needed for people who really cannot afford even basic care.  And there is a lot of it - and most of these apply just as much here as in the US and would be usefully deployed in reforming health care here too by any liberal thinking government - not that there's much chance of getting one of those because we don't have anyone standing on such a platform!

Rather than sum them up here, I'll hand you over to the wonderful Kevin Carson, writing this time in the Foundation for Economic Education's periodical "The Freeman".

Now, I ask you, what politician would not love to find this holy grail of being able to claim credit for having arranged it for everyone to get affordable health care without vast increases in tax and bureaucracy and all the rest of it?  There can be only one conclusion: the politician who cares more about vested interests than the people who elected him.  Electoral oblivion is too good for such reprehensible scum-suckers.

The latest instalment in my tour round the libertarian/anarchist "classics" brings me to a work very appropriate for today's messed up world.  In "Mutual Banking" American Individualist Anarchist William Batchelder Greene explains clearly what is wrong with the current banking system (now, just as much as then) and proposes a non-profit mutual bank as a solution.

The bankers, he says, are the new aristocracy who, with state collusion through banking licensing and legal tender laws can buy up all the assets of a country and leave its people bankrupt and destitute.  They control access to money and credit and can pick and choose those industrious would be entrepreneurs who will win and lose by their actions.

He presents, at one point, an interesting argument for the repudiation of our current national debt - no real value would be destroyed by so doing, just an unwinding of the legal values that gives the elite few such an upper hand over the rest of us left paying for that debt.  If ever there was a time for revolution against the bankers it seems to me to be now.  

This will also be a good read/listen for those who do not understand the nature and inherent flexibility of money, such as a few of those at the "Speak Easy" last week.  Greene's solution, he says, would be inflation free, low cost, circulating currency backed by real assets that does not allow for a parasite class of bankers (or, indeed politicians) to take control.  If you ever wanted to know how a credit union worked, this will also provide much background information.

I am often finding that ideas that I develop for today's problems turn out to have been thought of many times before - Greene's model here describes with uncanny accuracy my proposal for an Oxfordshire local currency network for example.  This is not history - it is living proof that the problems we are facing now have been at the forefront of men's minds for decades and centuries - and that if we had only listened to the likes of Greene then we would be unlikely to be up this particular shit creek.  The Mutualists' message is, if anything, more important today for us having comprehensively ignored it for over a century and the problems getting a hundred times worse in the meantime.

You can get the text I have used (the 1870 publication) at the Libertarian Labyrinth website (.pdf), and attached you will find 12 files - an MP3 for each section, a .zip file of all the MP3s and an iTunes/iPod optimised .M4B file that has everything in one audiobook file with chapter bookmarks and so on.  

Enjoy.

 I don't know what I think about this.  Having only recently got over the shock of hearing my own voice on recordings, now I am challenged to see my "good face for radio" in glorious technicolour.

Anyway, I did promise that if my talk were recorded I'd point people to it.  The idea was to try to introduce "Mutualism" as an anarchist philosophy and as a mechanism for achieving a non-state society.  The discussion goes off into many other interesting issues such as money (see my frustrated post from the other day) and Ponzi welfare schemes.  I'm not sure how successful I was, but it was an interesting experience.

Jock Coats - An Introduction to Mutualism from oxford libertarian on Vimeo.

A number of policy related discussions have recently caught my eye, and my ire it has to be said, because they seem to involve people proposing state interventions in some area or another, along the lines of "something must be done" without first examining and understanding the real cause of the problem they are trying to ameliorate.  And often as not the problems can be shown to have been caused by previous state action or legislation.  And that getting rid of that previous action or legislation rather than piling on yet more legislation ought to be the first response.

To my mind it is crucial that a party that claims the mantle of "liberalism" get to understand this, and that the first reaction when something apparently needs "fixing" ought to be to examine the causes of the problem rather than just come up with another jolly wheeze for further state intervention.  Even if you do not take your skepticism of the state and state action as far as I do, that is to say to want to eradicate the entire edifice as soon as possible, I do not believe you can call yourself a liberal if you do not seek to reduce the state's involvement wherever possible, and most especially when it is the state's actions that are causing the problem you are looking at,

If Lib Dems all made honest and sincere attempts to do this before proposing some new intervention we could probably save many hours of argument between so called social liberals and so called economic liberals and whoever - because we might be more inclined to believe that those proposing something had ensured that it was the minimum intervention necessary to achieve the solution to some social problem.

And this is not a problem restricted to web discussions amongst various groups of "ordinary members"; it is a systemic problem in the party, indeed in politics as a whole, from the highest levels of policy making to the "man on the street" demanding that "something must be done".  Furthermore, rigorous application of this inherently liberal principle would be, quite frankly, a unique selling point at least amongst the bigger political parties in the UK and could be presented as a properly radical alternative to the more knee-jerk interventionism of the other two statist parties.

If we believe, as Nick said during his leadership campaign, that the majority of Britain are instinctively liberal, someone ought to be giving them genuinely liberal alternatives and at the moment Liberal Democrats are failing them as much as anyone else.  We will often, I suspect, find that the state created causes of many contemporary problems come down to only a few sorts of rights and privileges the state continues to uphold - because nobody dared to try to get rid of them, preferring instead to try to "legislate them away" each time a new adverse and perhaps previously unforeseen effect turned up.  That in turn should tell us something; point us to ways of solving whole rafts of issues with one major change and hundreds of repeals of the wasteful legislation that has in intervening years been used to try to ameliorate those issues.

Only when we have eradicated those parts of the state system that cause us so many problems will we truly be able to see whether what results is a "fair" and "just" society and whether there is need for a little redistributive effort here and there to ensure people's quality of life.  It was once called the "doctrine of the level playing field" and was long forgotten as the activist state decided that all it needed to do was to introduce yet more new legislation for each problem that arose.

 Last week there was a long discussion following the Lib Dem Voice "Saturday debate" slot about "equality of opportunity" versus "equality of outcome".  I don't want to rehash that all here.  I was thoroughly frustrated in trying to get a fellow in the debate, apparently from the remnant Liberal Party, who was promoting some kind of "universal inheritance" policy funded by confiscating more of the inheritance of the wealthy, to understand that real liberalism needs to look at the causes of the disparity they seek to redress, and where it is already created or protected by the state, the preference should be to repudiate whatever interference causes such inequity before compounding one injustice, the accumulation of vast wealth at the expense of others, with another, the confiscation of that and further interference in peoples' economic lives.

Anyway, that's not what this is about.  He kept nagging me about what, as an "anarchist" would I "construct" instead of the state!  Well what a silly question.  I would not "construct" anything, if by that he implies that I might have some utopian blueprint that I would impose on everyone else.  That would not be liberty.  That would be a state.  But what I did say to him was that I was confident that humanity was sufficiently advanced for institutions to "arise" naturally to meet common needs and provide solutions to social problems.

His rejoinder was that the "state has arisen" in the past.  And, by implication, "why on earth do you think it would not arise again? " And I have to admit that that stumped me for a while.

And so thanks to The UK Libertarian blog I found this video by Stefan Molyneux about the origins and ends of states:

And the answer to my soi-dissant "Liberal" correspondent became obvious.  The state only originated in an act of aggression for which there were no structures to prevent or punish.  Why is it that people who oppose the idea of not having to kow-tow to governments feel that we have not developed one iota beyond the end of subsistence farming that prompted the first expropriation by a bigger neighbour?  The entire point of a market-anarchist no state society would be built on institutions arising to uphold two particular, natural and founding laws - of self-ownership and non-aggression.  A state, in such a system, could not commit that original act of aggression, conquest and confiscation with impunity.