EU Referendum

Showing posts with label liberty. Show all posts

Geert_Wilders+01[i-Geert_Wilders+01]It is no longer just the Dutch; we, too, have a problem. Actually, there is nothing new about lack of freedom of speech in this country. What do you think those draconian libel laws are for? The latest development is going a little further as well as, we suspect, breaking EU rules.

This afternoon I was told that the meeting with Geert Wilders, the Dutch parliamentarian and general trouble-maker, in the House of Lords was going ahead. It was to be a private meeting at which Mr Wilders was given an opportunity to explain his point of view to invited MPs and Peers, despite the threats made by Lord Ahmed of bringing many thousands of rage-filled Islamists along.

(Lord Ahmed is, incidentally, awaiting sentencing for dangerous driving, to wit causing the death of another motorist as he was texting and receiving messages while speeding along the motorway. If Jack Straw's new rules are brought in, he may lose his peerage, if imprisoned as at least one other driver in similar circumstances has been. Then again, pigs might fly.)

It seems, however, that the Secretary of State for Home Affairs (yes, the wretched Straw Jacqui Smith again) or his minions do not think that members of the House of Lords should have the right to invite people to give them presentations.

As Reuters reports:

A Dutch member of parliament facing prosecution because of his anti-Islam remarks said on Tuesday that Britain had refused him entry to the country as a threat to public security.

Geert Wilders had wanted to show a short film, "Fitna," which accuses the Koran of inciting violence, in the British parliament, but said the British authorities had told him he was excluded from the country.

"The secretary of state (minister) is satisfied that your statements about Muslims and their beliefs, as expressed in your film "Fitna" and elsewhere, would threaten community harmony and therefore public security in the United Kingdom," Wilders told Dutch television a letter he had received from the British government said.

Wilders faces prosecution by an Amsterdam court for inciting hatred and discrimination.

Britain's Home Office (interior ministry) declined to comment on Wilders' exclusion, but a spokeswoman said the government opposed all forms of extremism.

"It will stop those who want to spread extremism, hatred and violent messages in our communities from coming to our country," she said.

Uh-huh! What's the state of play on Abu Hamza a.k.a. Captain Hook? And what of Lord Ahmed who not only goes around causing death of innocent motorists through dangerous driving but threatens to disrupt meetings in the House of Lords through violence? That, of course, is not extremism.

However, the situation can become quite awkward. Mr Wilders has not been found guilty of anything (unlike Lord Ahmed) and is a parliamentarian in another EU member state. Does the Home Office have the right to exclude him from the country?

It seems that the Dutch government is not happy.

Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen said the Dutch government would press Britain to reverse the ban and said he "deeply regretted" that a Dutch lawmaker had been barred access.

By the way, the second invitation to Mr Wilders came from Lord Pearson of Rannoch, whom this blog admires unreservedly for all his work.

Lord Pearson, who invited Wilders to show "Fitna" at the House of Lords on Thursday, said he was "very surprised that the British government should ban a European citizen — and an elected Dutch MP at that — from coming to this country."

He called his government's decision "weak and unacceptable in the extreme."

Pearson said he took exception to some of Wilders' statements but wanted to show his film "precisely to uphold his right to freedom of speech, even if we disagree with what he's saying."

He added that he would do his best to help Wilders to show his film in the UK, despite the ban.

I am putting my money on Lord Pearson. Faites vos jeux, mesdames et messieurs. Rien ne va plus.

UPDATE: Mr Wilders has announced that he will travel to Britain despite the ban. Will he be arrested and deported? Dutch politicians of all stripes remain unhappy, as well they might be.

COMMENT THREAD

Bill_of_Rights_coin[i-Bill_of_Rights_coin]This posting will be slightly different from the first part. I am, in a way, declaring my interests on this blog in that I do not think human rights to be a negligible or peripheral issue. I fully accept my colleague’s argument that the issues in Tibet and China are more complicated than they might appear from the slogans. Most political developments are more complicated than slogans carried by demonstrators.

The real trick is to produce slogans that encompass at least some of the complications and appeal to the hunger for simplicity at the same time. Whether the ones that demand freedom for Tibet and for the many Chinese dissidents have managed that trick is not quite as important as it may seem.

There was not going to be a revolution or political change in China as a result of these demonstrations. But it is always good to remind tyrants that even if they have the support of all the tranzis and the left liberals are afraid to criticize them too much, there is such a thing as public opinion.

Despite all Chinese efforts the 2008 Olympics will not be an enhanced propaganda coup for Communist China. More than that, the mess and violence of the demos, the presence of the obviously highly trained Chinese military or special police who appeared to take over the policing of London’s streets from Plod Blair’s finest, all of this will reflect on the image of the Olympics in general. And not a moment too soon.

link[i-link]The latest news is that French officials, having twice extinguished the torch and relit it from the sacred flame that is carried round with the torch, otherwise known as the nearest gendarme’s lighter, have now abandoned the last lap of the relay in Paris. Then again, according to this report by Associated Press, it is the Chinese officials who did all the extinguishing (five times, it appears) and deciding to abandon the last lap.

Next stop San Francisco where certain excrementary material really will hit the fan.

This is not, however, a posting about the Olympics but about the importance of human rights as a political concept.

So, let me declare my interests. I am a blogger, a journalist, a writer. I prefer to have the freedom to write as I see fit (tempered by the need to earn money) and I think all those in my position should have that right, no matter where they are or what their government says.

Anyone courageous enough to stand up to tyranny in the name of freedom of speech has my support. This, naturally enough, does not apply to people who stand up to one form of tyranny, say the Egyptian government, in the name of another and possibly worse form, Islamism. But it applies to such people as Kareem in Egypt or Hu Jia in China.

Experience of working with dissidents in the Soviet Union tells one that people in countries where they cannot express their views freely need and want support from their more fortunate colleagues. Ah yes, I had better declare an interest here, as well. I helped, not as much as many people but a little, Soviet and East European dissidents before 1989.

Let me declare another interest. Being female I am deeply offended by societies and those wonderful “nation” states, which treat women as chattels, cover them in black from top to toe, throw acid in the faces of those who try to disobey, consider family and marital violence that includes, if necessary, murder, against women to be just fine and dandy and think nothing of stoning them to death.

Then again, without any interest in the matter I am deeply offended by societies that hang boys accused of homosexual behaviour from cranes.

And I loathe and despise all westerners, no matter which side of the political spectrum they affirm themselves to be, who support such systems. I have no time for people who pounce on every thing that goes wrong in our societies to prove that we are no better, perhaps even worse.

Naturally, things that are wrong in our societies need to be noted and changed if possible. I think this blog has a reasonable track record of, at least noting what may be wrong with us, our politicians, our media and our establishment in general. But that does not make us as bad as, or worse than China, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia or, even, Russia. Not nohow.

That’s enough declared interests. I appreciate that as far as the very sensible and commonsensical readers of this blog are concerned, such matters are piffling. What does matter is economic factors. All else is unconsidered trifles.

Well, I have a surprise for these commonsensical individuals. Human rights are essential to economic factors.

In the first place, societies that have a sizeable measure of freedom is much more likely to solve economic difficulties. Of course, the market is the best way of doing so and even a highly imperfect one is better than an oppressive planning system in which people who complain or criticize find themselves behind barbed wire.

Secondly, information is vital to understand what is going on in any country and it is hard to have any dealings with those we know next to nothing about. Not nobody not nohow knows what is really going on in China because there is no real information. Which means, all predictions and assumptions are fantasies.

In the last few years while journalists, analysts and writers of potboiler books of politics fell over themselves to predict a fantastic future for China, telling us all that the country will take over in a decade or so from everybody, all I could ask was “how do you know”. Answer came there none. My own very cautious predictions of likely tensions and troubles are beginning to look considerably more correct than all those whoops of triumphalism. And still we do not know.

Remember how wrong Sovietologists, economists, political scientists were about the Communist states of Europe because they accepted official figures with some adjustment? East Germany would have been easier to understand than China but the mess its economy was in reality came as a complete shock to all but a few hardened “cold warriors”. Certainly, it was a shock to Chancellor Kohl and the West German government.

Germany and the rest of Western Europe are still paying for that ignorance, caused entirely by a lack of human rights, which meant no reliable information. We may pay even more heavily for our assumptions based on highly limited information about China.

More immediately, lack of human rights translated into lack of free information means that we have no understanding of what is happening in Iran and why have the Mad Mullahs with President Ahmadinejad at the head abandon Moqtada al-Sadr, as they seem to have done.

Not peripheral by any stretch of imagination.

While various parts of the British blogosphere and clogosphere are getting all worked up about some non-story about possible adultery among journalists who are showing themselves to be ... ahem ... hypocritical, other parts of the world are facing greater problems to do with lack of freedom, specifically lack of freedom of speech.

The ever estimable Sandmonkey reports that Google is up to its tricks again, suppressing information on the internet if it is unhelpful to some tyrannical government or other.

The Fantastic people at google seem to have it for the egyptian opposition to the Mubarak regime. It's not bad enough that they had disabled Wael Abbas' youtube account with all the egyptian police human rights abuses and torture videos (only to have it restored again when the outrage became too big), now they have made the website for Kefaya (the egyptian movement for change), which has been around for 3 years and very active, disappear completely off of their search engine. You can't find it anywhere.

The tale of Wael Abbas and his anti-torture videos were reported last year by the Big Pharaoh, an excellent site when the hard-working writer has time to post. It seems that, for once, Google paid attention to the outrage its actions caused.

Will they restore Kefaya? And will the British blogosphere get its head out of its own fundamentum for long enough to pay attention to some of these stories? Oh never mind, forget I asked.

kareem[i-kareem]Abdek Kareem Nabil has been sentenced to four years in prison.

Judge Ayman al-Akazi sentenced Nabil to three years in prison for insulting Islam and the Prophet Muhammad and inciting sectarian strife and another year for insulting President Hosni Mubarak.

Nabil, sitting in the defendant's pen, did not react as the verdict was read and made no comments as he was led to a prison truck outside. Seconds after the door was closed, an Associated Press reporter heard a slap from inside the truck and a scream.

As I recall, Hosni Mubarak was one of the political leaders who had made tut-tutting and shocked comments about Saddam Hussein's execution.

Nabil's lawyer, Ahmed Seif el-Islam, said he would appeal the verdict, adding it will "terrify other bloggers and have a negative impact on freedom of expression in Egypt." Nabil had faced a possible maximum sentence of nine years in prison.

His conviction brought a flood of condemnations from international and Egyptian human rights groups, as well as fellow government critics on the Internet.

"I am shocked," said Wael Abbas, a blogger who writes frequently about police abuses and other human rights violations in Egypt. "This is a terrible message to anyone who intends to express his opinion and to bloggers in particular."

Indeed.

The State Department has made it clear it has no specific comments to make on the case though "the U.S. is always concerned when freedom of expression is infringed". Gee, thanks.

Then again, our own Foreign Office probably has not even noticed that this trial was going on or that bloggers are being arrested in various parts of the world, particularly in Egypt. It has been pointed out that other bloggers were freed after what must have been a distinctly unpleasant stay in prison but Kareem is being punished because he has attacked Islam.

Perhaps, international outcry will help him and others who must be very frightened. Here is the site through which everyone can help.

COMMENT THREAD

lord_harris[i-lord_harris]I have just returned from the Memorial to Ralph Harris, aka Lord Harris of High Cross. I wrote an obituary of the great man at the time of his death, so I need not do so again, except to say that neither I nor anyone else who knew him has really come to terms with the fact that the world no longer has him in it.

It was, as readers can imagine, a gathering of the clans with many friends and acquaintances, all good allies in the fight.

Twelve people from different backgrounds and different countries gave brief talks about Ralph and their memories of him. In the middle about ten minutes of a Liberty Fund film, “Conversation with Harris and Seldon”, was shown. As the meeting was dedicated to Ralph Harris, it was almost entirely his words that we could hear.

The DVD of that discussion is available from the Institute of Economic Affairs and the text has been published together with comments by other eminent economists and writers.

What struck me was Ralph waving about his “bible”, Hayek’s “Constitution of Liberty” and quoting from its last chapter, “Why I am not a conservative?”. That was the book, incidentally, Margaret Thatcher is supposed to have pulled out of her bag when, as a newly elected leader of the Conservative Party, she met her policy wonks at Central Office. Dissatisfied with their waffling, she reached into her bag, took out the book and slammed it on the table with the words: “This is what we believe in”. I am surprised nobody asked her what she meant by “we”.

Hayek[i-Hayek]Anyway, Hayek’s words explain perfectly why a free society is preferable to the alternative and why looking for utopian solutions with super-intelligent and super-moral philosopher-kings is not the answer.

The main merit of the individualism which Adam Smith and his contemporaries advocated is that it is a system under which bad men can do least harm. It is a social system which does not depend for its functioning on our finding good men for running it, or all men becoming better than they are, but which makes use of men in all their given variety and complexities, sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes intelligent, more often stupid.

There you have the answer to all that wailing and gnashing of teeth. No, politicians are no better than we are; they were never better; and they never will be better. They reflect society as it is. Therefore, we must have a political system in which they can do as little harm as possible. All else is a mirage.

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