Warwick Libertarians

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

Jan 13

Posted by tom in Libertarian blog, Society News | No Comments

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!

Dec 11

Posted by admin in Libertarian blog | No Comments

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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The Illusion of Freedom

Oct 8

Posted by rajiv in Libertarian blog | No Comments

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

Oct 4

Posted by admin in Libertarian blog | No Comments

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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In Defence of Mavericks

Aug 29

Posted by admin in Libertarian blog | No Comments

By Laveen Ladharam

Many of us will remember the comments that Daniel Hannan made about the National Health Service, being said to be ‘unpatriotic’ and ‘insulting’ to the doctors and nurses of the NHS who work quite heroically to do their jobs. Similarly, through the critical eye of various political parties, Mr Hannan has been picked up by stating that Enoch Powell was one of his political influences, due to the free market ideals and belief in small government, ignoring of course the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. Known in the world of the media as the ‘gaffe’ that he amongst others are famous for, this is the crime that the media accuses politicians of when deviating from the party line.

I of course talk about the most interesting type of politician, the maverick, and include the likes of Hannan, Boris Johnson, Lembit Öpik, Kenneth Clarke, David Davis, Frank Field, Senator John McCain in the USA and even Tony Benn in his day. The politicians who are famous for divulging from the party line often do attract the attention of the media and the straight and narrow tribal politicians like Gordon Brown and Ed Balls who hark on at the basics of party politics and the vulgar notions of class warfare. Yet people do not seem to care about them but these storms in teacups will tend to put politicians off speaking their minds in public.

Other than the Hannan furore, recent ‘gaffes’ such as the Mayor of London claiming that attempts to curb the city bonuses were ‘crackers’ were quite reasonable if unpopular. Similarly, John McCain’s staunch support for the Surge in the Iraq war against the popular opinion actually worked; Ronald Reagan’s opposition to the Keynesian consensus and the desire to look for a more liberal economic order was seen as wrong in 1964 with his support for Barry Goldwater. More famously, the likes of Winston Churchill and Leo Amery were seen as cranks during the 1930s when they called for rearmament and a hawkish policy towards Germany. But the press dub these ‘splits.’

Yet the maverick can only occur in a party setting and I cannot see how this could occur otherwise. To have your own opinion, the best way to alter that is within a political party and within many parties, you do get groups: the Tories’ Cornerstone Group, Thatcherites and One Nationists; Labour’s Blairites and Brownites; the old Liberals’ Squiffites and Lloyd George Liberals; that will oppose things within their parties. Thus the old idea from in the 2008 Presidential Election that John McCain and George W Bush were the same – when McCain had voted with Bush 95% of the time for the previous year – is invalid. Chances are that if you are a member of a political party, you will agree with the vast majority of its views but you need to disagree with things. The difference is whether you officially oppose your own party, and thus a 95% voting record (if we take the statistic at face value) is reasonable when compared to the President Obama’s nearly 100% Democratic record in his year and a half in the senate – and it is actually pretty interesting how he is turning into a quasi-dictator – and you see how Senator McCain was seen as an independent person until the election.

The role of the maverick is definitely the most important in politics and it underpins the fundamental principle of liberty that, which George Orwell said (and is among many peoples’ Facebook “quotes” pages) ‘is telling people what they do not want to hear.’

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My Case against Identity Cards.

Aug 3

Posted by admin in Libertarian blog | No Comments

By Laveen Ladharam

Originally, I must admit, I was in favour of introducing Identity Cards in the United Kingdom. Being a holder of a Hong Kong Permanent Identity Card, like many other students at the university, I could see a situation where they came into practical use.

I realise now how wrong I was, as you shall see.

One of the main arguments used for ID cards is that it will prevent illegal immigration. However this is something that only works if the carrying of ID cards is made compulsory. In Hong Kong, we had a very bad case of illegal immigration ever since the rise of communism in Asia especially in China and Vietnam. To cut a long story short, the Hong Kong government made the holding of ID cards compulsory, but it was in conjunction with other factors, such as patrolling Hong Kong waters and having more vigilant land borders. This was done under the British and it was the British Army who secured the Chinese Border. Introducing such an intrusive system in the UK would not attract popular support and the alternative chosen by the Government, ID cards with no compulsion has no deterrent effect against illegal immigrants.

The other main argument for ID cards brought forward by the government is that they can prevent terrorism. In reality, ID cards would be irrelevant as the perpetrators of the most recent terrorist attacks in the western world were entitled for ID cards anyway. Such was the case with the Madrid bombings and the Bali bombings. The 7/7 terrorists had British passports and thus by extension would have been issued ID cards. Similarly, the IRA campaigns would have held either British or Irish passports. ID cards preventing terrorism is a non-argument. The only way to prevent terrorism is through hearts and minds and through intelligence which is, by and large very good in the UK.

Furthermore, the introduction of ID cards requires something that our government and many governments before it are incapable of doing – seeing a project through correctly. For instance, the government has tried to improve the efficiency of the NHS without trying to make it spend money more efficiently and Lord Adonis successfully implemented the (Tory) City Academies scheme only for it to be obliterated by Ed Balls through bringing them under government control. With ID cards, the cock-up resulting from the creation of an enormous database overloaded with information would be even greater. One only needs to remember the case of the loss of data about members of the RAF in 2008 to fear the consequences should our biometric information find its way onto discs or memory sticks in public. And those are great risks that I do not wish to take.

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I want to break free. Do you?

Jun 27

Posted by tom in Libertarian blog | No Comments

Tom Wales introduces the society, in an article originally published in The Warwick Boar on the 23rd of June 2009


You may be excused for assuming that the pursuit of liberty is old hat.

Global intervention to save fal­ter­ing banks, mas­sive Gov­ern­ment debt and a na­tion­al ID card sys­tem cost­ing more than five bil­lion pounds all seem to sig­ni­fy a shift of power from peo­ple and busi­ness to Gov­ern­ment.Why should stu­dents seek to chal­lenge such paradigms? What is in it for us in our cosy lit­tle bub­ble of War­wick?

As stu­dents, we are af­fect­ed by the con­trol­ling grasp of Gov­ern­ment in many more ways than oth­ers. From next term, all in­ter­na­tion­al stu­dents will be forced to hold ID cards. On this issue, NUS Pres­i­dent Wes Street­ing hits the prover­bial nail on its head: “By sin­gling out in­ter­na­tion­al stu­dents from their peers with bio­met­ric iden­ti­ty cards, a group al­ready at risk of stig­ma­ti­sa­tion will be in­deli­bly marked as dif­fer­ent.”

The issue is even scari­er if we as­sume that Gor­don Brown gets his way and they start to roll out amongst the gen­er­al pub­lic from 2012. The im­pli­ca­tions of de­nial of rights to those who refuse to take them out and a na­tion­al ID reg­is­ter con­tain­ing fingerprint, bio­met­ric and over fifty other forms of personal in­for­ma­tion gives the power to Gov­ern­ment to fol­low every as­pect of our lives.

“Func­tion creep”, the in­evitable use of the sys­tem for more than just iden­ti­ty check­ing, and the de­mands of the se­cu­ri­ty ser­vices in the “War on Ter­ror” would no doubt en­cour­age any weak-​willed Gov­ern­ment to cur­tail the civil lib­er­ties of card-​car­ry­ing cit­i­zens even fur­ther. It is the start of a slip­pery slope for the fu­ture of Britain.

A poll last year by the Joseph Rown­tree Re­form Trust mea­sured that a ma­jor­i­ty of cit­i­zens are against the cards and a quar­ter strong­ly against them.

In ad­di­tion to this, mas­sive spend­ing and bor­row­ing under Gor­don Brown’s gov­ern­ment has par­tic­u­lar rel­e­vance to every stu­dent that wish­es to stay and work in the UK. We will be ser­vic­ing the debt for years to come, just as the gen­er­a­tions be­fore did so to pay for the Sec­ond World War.

Labour has amassed debts equal to £23,000 for each man, woman and child in the coun­try. Gov­ern­ment debt re­pay­ments alone equal the amount cur­rent­ly spent on the Po­lice Force. Whilst Labour and Con­ser­va­tives argue about how many pub­lic ser­vants have to be sacked in order to re­duce the bud­get deficit, bet­ter fi­nan­cial man­age­ment in the past means that we could af­ford to em­ploy even more if we so wished.

In order for this sit­u­a­tion to change we don’t just need a change be­tween the two par­ties in Gov­ern­ment, we need a greater cross-​par­ty clam­our for change. The for­ma­tion of a lib­er­tar­i­an so­ci­ety here at War­wick will give us the chance to broad­en our un­der­stand­ing of Gov­ern­ment and its many fail­ings.

In ad­di­tion to the ques­tions of civil lib­er­ties and mas­sive Gov­ern­ment spend­ing, lib­er­tar­i­an pol­i­tics ques­tion the very as­sump­tions that exist in so­ci­ety. Why should cer­tain drugs be con­trolled? Is in­ter­net pira­cy a bad thing? Should Gov­ern­ment be in­volved in cur­tail­ing pros­ti­tu­tion?

Con­se­quent­ly, in order to shape the fu­ture of British pol­i­tics we shouldn’t be scared to think out­side the box. Rather than act­ing as a fringe party, War­wick Lib­er­tar­i­ans will be open to mem­bers of all par­ties as well as peo­ple who hold just a pass­ing in­ter­est on the issue.

The root of the many branch­es of lib­er­tar­i­an­ism is a be­lief in free­dom. How­ev­er, as the ac­tions of Gov­ern­ment be­come more and more au­thor­i­tar­i­an that basis is be­com­ing in­creas­ing­ly frag­ile.

I hope you can join us in sup­port­ing that the metaphor­i­cal tree of lib­er­tar­i­an­ism, and hav­ing a damn good time in the pro­cess.

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