The Pirate Party – invading this Tuesday

Hope to see you there. The facebook event is here.

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The Pirates are coming…

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This week’s speaker event…

Hope to see you there. For more information check out the Facebook event here.

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A condemnation of the Government’s attack on freedom of speech

Dear All,

You may have heard the news of the Government’s decision to ban the radical Islamist group Islam4UK. This ban will make it a criminal offence to be a member of the group, punishable by up to 10 years in prison. The group, which wishes to impose Shariah Law across the UK and recently attracted controversy for wishing to march through Wooton Bassett has committed no greater crime than holding and expressing extremely offensive views.

I’m sure I speak for the entire exec when I echo the words attributed to Voltaire that “I may disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it.” This radical group holds some incredibly repugnant views, but it is their right to express them within a democracy.

The Labour Government has taken many of our freedoms away through legislation it has used in the alleged fight against domestic “terrorism”, but this is a clear case, one of many, in which terrorist legislation is not being used against terrorists at all. The Terrorism Act 2000, used to perpetrate this attack on freedom is one of many acts that erodes our basic right to free expression and association.

We cannot defeat groups that publicly announce that “Freedom can go to hell” by destroying the basic freedoms that the British people have fought so hard to defend. That is the very essence of hypocrisy. The society will keep its eye on the issue in the coming weeks and will look at ways that it can oppose the Government’s anti-democratic move. In the meantime, it would be great to hear the views of members of this group on the topic.

Tom Wales
President, Warwick Libertarians

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What we needs is a healthy dose of optimism!

By Laveen Ladharam

I’m going to go slightly off the grim dreary blog entries that you will see on these pages and try and look at things in a more positive light.

There’s not a lot to be happy about these days, anyone can admit that – people being laid off work, the government seems to be falling apart into a 1970s bout of disaster, taxes are rising and most depressing of all, Tony Blair may well be our overlord once again those are things that would depress every man jack of us. But we as a country should not remain so negative.

I myself am an immigrant – moved here from Hong Kong in 2001 – and whilst I love the British stiff upper lip (with the exception of the reaction of Princess Diana’s death) as it is often a sign of people buggering on with life and it works well and I admire the British love being told how bad things are with the ability to stare reality in the face. But there is one problem that I notice with our society in Britain (that I too am guilty of) and it is that we are very negative as people and it evolves into a bout of negativity which can play on peoples’ minds and hamper individual success.

One of the most telling things of this is the standard British response of ‘not bad,’ which according to James Clavell in King Rat is the best British compliment. Exaggeration this may be, but it is a very telling point. Look out for it. When someone is asked how something is how many times have you heard, or said, ‘not bad.’ Often the response to that is ‘not bad at all.’ Now just think how many times that has been a standard snippet of conversation either meeting an acquaintance when you have been out and about, in Leamington or at university and I guarantee that this has is very much the case. What we need is a good dose of Yankee optimism.

I mean I myself do love a good Hefferite rant and I am a religious reader of his columns, or a complaint from Bryony Gordon, but we need to start feeling good about ourselves. No hard luck story is going to change your situation and creation of pathos about yourself will turn you into another Roman Abramovic, only you can because ‘the gods help those that help themselves.’ Actually one of Mr Heffer’s columns a few years ago was about helping what he terms the ‘underclass’ to help themselves. With that, what we need to overcome is self-pity as it gets you nowhere.

One of my favourite leaders in history is Ronald Reagan, partially because of Reaganomics but more importantly it was his charisma and his encouragement of individual enterprise and improvement but in a positive light (not the ‘get on your bike’ of Lord Tebbit or the flawed belief in the benevolent state of Tony Blair or Barack Obama) with his unfortunate personal background and hard work to become President of the United States. There is one story that is sometimes attributed (it may be misattributed, but it is a great story to get my point across!) to him about the optimistic boy:

There was a boy whose outlook on life was incredibly optimistic and his parents felt that his attitude was too optimistic for anyone to have. To see how optimistic he was, they took him to a stable filled with horse manure and locked the door. An hour or so later, they returned to the stable, to check up on their son and when they returned, they saw him on his hands and knees digging through the muck. The parents were utterly dismayed and asked him ‘what are you doing son?’ The boy simply said ‘with this much manure, there’s got to be a pony here somewhere.’

We may laugh at the delusion of the boy, but if we take that attitude with us and keep digging, we will find that pony somewhere and have shown the world that our independent and individual efforts really have freed us from the problems that we see today. And, to paraphrase Reagan, why shouldn’t we believe that? We are British.

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Final talk of the term & end of term social tomorrow

ChrisMounseyNEW2

Facebook event page here.

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Talk tomorrow…

NigelAshfordFB

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Poker night

Pokerwebsite

Celebrating our freedom to gamble, we will be having a poker night this coming Friday at 7pm (Venue TBC – probably in the Ramphal Building).

All Warwick students are welcome to attend. No membership or prior skill in poker is required. Its just £2 for a buy-in so I hope to see you there!

Click here for the Facebook event.

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The Illusion of Freedom

This is my article as published in the Boar of week 1 term 1 2009.

Two weeks ago Rowan Lax­ton, the head of the South Asia desk at the FCO, was found guilty of racial­ly ag­gra­vat­ed ha­rass­ment. He was in a Lon­don gym watch­ing a tele­vi­sion re­port about the death of a farmer killed by Is­raeli bombs dur­ing the Gaza con­flict when he ex­claimed: “Fuck­ing Is­raelis, fuck­ing Jews.” It is also al­leged that he said “If I had my way, the fuck­ing in­ter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty should be sent in and if the Is­raelis got in the way, they’d be blown off the fuck­ing earth.”

What he did was in­ap­pro­pri­ate and this is ag­gra­vat­ed by the fact he is a diplo­mat. One would hope that Her Majesty’s rep­re­sen­ta­tives be able to ex­press them­selves in a more diplo­mat­ic man­ner. He should re­sign.

What Mr Lax­ton said is of ab­so­lute­ly no use to the de­bate about what Is­rael did in Gaza and it was not meant to be. As the judge said “it was an emo­tion­al re­ac­tion”.

He was con­vict­ed under the Crim­i­nal and Dis­or­der Act 1998, one of the many Acts passed by New Labour re­lat­ing to crim­i­nal jus­tice. Here is how the Home Of­fice sum­maris­es the law: “A crime will count as “racial­ly ag­gra­vat­ed” if it can be shown that it was mo­ti­vat­ed ei­ther whol­ly or part­ly by racism. A crime will also count as “racial­ly ag­gra­vat­ed” if it can be shown that – even though the mo­ti­va­tion for the at­tack was not racist – racist hos­til­i­ty was demon­strat­ed dur­ing the course of the of­fence or im­me­di­ate­ly be­fore or after it.” A “racial group” is, for the pur­pos­es of the new of­fences, “a group of per­sons de­fined by ref­er­ence to race, colour, na­tion­al­i­ty (in­clud­ing cit­i­zen­ship) or eth­nic or na­tion­al ori­gins”. The Act does not cover re­li­gion but it “makes it clear that even where there is a re­li­gious el­e­ment to a crime, so long as some part of the mo­ti­va­tion is racial, the of­fence will count as a racial­ly ag­gra­vat­ed of­fence.” So shout­ing “fuck­ing French” at me (I am French) even if your mo­ti­va­tion is not “racist” (say­ing that French is a race would cause an out­cry in France) counts as racial­ly ag­gra­vat­ed.

If your racial­ly ag­gra­vat­ed ac­tion hap­pens to be con­sid­ered ha­rass­ment or “putting peo­ple in fear of vi­o­lence” with­in the mean­ing of the Pro­tec­tion of Ha­rass­ment Act 1997 (a New Labour law which has very often been used against peace­ful protesters) then you would be, like Mr Lax­ton, guilty of “racial­ly ag­gra­vat­ed ha­rass­ment”. In any event should the rea­sons why some­one does some­thing be rel­e­vant in con­vict­ing him?

I men­tioned above that re­li­gious ha­tred was not cov­ered by the Act. This is now the case thanks to Racial and Re­li­gious Ha­tred Act 2006. That act goes even fur­ther than the pre­vi­ous laws by its ref­er­ences to “threat­en­ing” words, be­haviour, writ­ten ma­te­ri­al and pub­lic per­for­mance of a play.

In any event these laws will not de­feat racism: the law can­not con­trol what peo­ple think. They could even be counter pro­duc­tive.

These new laws re­flect a very wor­ry­ing de­vel­op­ment, the cre­ation of a right not to be of­fend­ed. This of course goes against free speech, which after all means not the right to ex­press views you agree with but also views you whole­heart­ed­ly dis­agree with. It is es­sen­tial that in a demo­crat­ic so­ci­ety one should be able to of­fend.

It’s in­ter­est­ing to note the con­trast be­tween what hap­pened with Mr Lax­ton and what hap­pened in Swe­den re­cent­ly. A tabloid news­pa­per pub­lished an ar­ti­cle claim­ing that Is­raeli sol­diers had har­vest­ed the or­gans of some Pales­tini­ans whom they had shot. With­in hours, Is­rael’s deputy for­eign min­is­ter had de­nounced the ar­ti­cle for racism and de­mand­ed that it be con­demned by the Swedish gov­ern­ment. How­ev­er the Swedish for­eign min­ster wrote on his blog that Is­rael want­ed the Swedish gov­ern­ment to dis­tance it­self from the ar­ti­cle or take steps to pre­vent a repli­ca­tion, but that was not how the coun­try worked. “Free­dom of ex­pres­sion and press free­dom are very strong in our con­sti­tu­tion by tra­di­tion. And that strong pro­tec­tion has served our democ­ra­cy and our coun­try well”, he wrote. This ro­bust de­fence of free­dom of ex­pres­sion was en­dorsed by the prime min­is­ter.

It seems Britain is no longer the land of lib­er­ty it used to be.

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The freedom to say no to Lisbon

By Laveen Ladharam

So it is official. The Republic of Ireland has been harangued into voting in favour of the Lisbon Treaty by the likes of Mr Sarkozy and Ms Merkel as well as the rest throughout the EU. By those who see the belief in national self determination to be an ‘extremist’ and grossly ‘nationalist’ thing that only those love children of Hitler and Mussolini would vote against such thing where your nation would lose a great deal of its own ideals to the ‘good idea’ of a European Superstate.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Europe, and indeed I realise that Europe will have to act together in the future. And for us in the UK Europe has done things that have benefited us such as the improvement of water standards in Britain through the standards set by Brussels (and the privatisation of the water companies). But Europe needs to get that democratic legitimacy from the people of Europe. For instance the possibility that Tony Blair will be President of Europe when we finally got rid of him here is simply sickening – especially as we do not have a say. I must also say that I do agree that certain ‘undemocratic’ institutions such as the Monarchy and the House of Lords are good for us because they work well in terms of government but the fact that we have an untried and untested group of officials sapping power away from our national parliaments is fundamentally wrong.

This is especially the case where the European Parliament does not follow its own laws for instance as a freely debating chamber, cutting off Daniel Hannan in the middle of his speech about the lack of the rule of law within the chamber and a large number of delegates walking out when the Czech President Vaclav Klaus stated that the European Parliament had no opposition to the federalist idea – branding him as some kind of extremist. When it comes to the rule of law, the EU is willing to override national law and extradite someone to another part of the EU to answer for something that is not illegal in the state that someone was arrested – in the case of Gerald Toeben, an Australian citizen who although had disgusting views on the Holocaust had every right to make them in the UK and should not have been put into custody. No country in Europe has had the track record of democracy and the rule of law that Britain has had and the Eastern European countries such as the Czech Republic and Poland have suffered under Soviet influence see the same thing coming from Brussels, yet we are expected to be silent when our nations may repeat the mistakes of history. I think that is wrong. Some may say that the EU has created peace in Europe. Those who feel the need to ignore history obviously have not heard of NATO and its incredibly important role in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

The most disgusting issue of this is indeed that the European Leaders and our own Prime Minister have not told us the virtues of the Constitution but have instead stated that it is not a constitution and not a treaty – even though 90% of the text is the same. It is like a young girl trying to hide a pregnancy eight months along by simply breathing in – they are trying to treat us (and the Irish) as fools. This should make us realise that they know that the two are the same but simply fear that they will choke on their own words if they said so. Instead choose to ignore our wishes and simply bully and browbeat us into submission.

Our Prime Minister has tried to taunt those who oppose the federalism of the EU essentially as ‘loners’ – those who stand up for our freedoms. Well I tell him that this fine country has stood alone in the past, against Spain (with the help of the Dutch republics) in the late 16th Century, against Napoleon for a while in the 18th, and against the might of Hitler’s Germany in 1940. By telling us not to stand up for our principles would be like telling Churchill (as the likes of Halifax almost did) not to stand up to Hitler or even Moses not to stand up to the Pharaoh. If we do not preserve this, the greatest bastion of freedom in Europe – regardless of whether we have anyone with us doing what is right or not – then we are prepared for a master and we damn well deserve one.

John Paul II once said ‘Freedom is not the power to do what one wants. Freedom is the power to do what is right.’ For a man who had lived under Military, Nazi and Soviet Tyranny, he is one with the moral authority to allow us to stand tall in the face of injustice. Sadly the Irish have been forced to cower. It now lies in the Czech and Polish Presidents’ hands to save us from tyranny.

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