In London, England, the Greenwich council has ordered an award-winning fish and chips shop to remove a patriotic mural. The mural outside the Golden Chippy features an anthropomorphic fish holding a Union Jack flag and reaching into a bag of french fries (chips, as the Brits call them) and a slogan saying "A Great British Meal." Owner Chris Kanizi said the mural has given a boost to business, with tourists coming to snap a selfie in front of the mural and grab a bite to eat. That seems to be the problem, as the council calls it an "unauthorised advert."
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]]>Extradition decisions: Yesterday, Britain's High Court ruled that WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange—who stands accused of violating the Espionage Act due to his 2010 decision to publish classified documents leaked by whistleblower Chelsea Manning that revealed disturbing U.S. military actions—cannot be extradited to the United States until greater assurances are provided about how he will be treated in custody and at trial, including receiving First Amendment protections.
The court gave U.S. authorities three weeks to provide assurances that Assange "is permitted to rely on the First Amendment to the United States Constitution…that he is not prejudiced at trial (including sentence) by reason of his nationality, that he is afforded the same First Amendment protections as a United States citizen and that the death penalty is not imposed."
This decision had been anxiously awaited by Assange-watchers, given that he is very close to the end of the road, in terms of appeals, within the British court system.
The U.S. has until May 20 to provide these assurances to the British High Court; if they are not satisfactory, he will receive a full appeal hearing in the U.K. Concurrently, Assange's legal team is seeking an appeal with the European Court of Human Rights, which could possibly delay extradition further.
In other words, his fate remains uncertain, but this move by the British court is a decidedly good one. For more on Assange's case, watch this episode of my show, Just Asking Questions, in which Zach Weissmueller and I interviewed Julian's wife, Stella (who also happens to be an attorney who has worked on his case).
Abortion pill legality being considered: Today, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case involving the legality of mifepristone, one of the drugs used to induce abortions. The decision will most likely be announced in June, later in the term, and will have significant implications for whether the pill can be prescribed by mail or telemedicine.
"At issue is whether the [Food and Drug Administration (FDA)] acted appropriately in expanding access to the drug in 2016 and again in 2021," reports The New York Times. "The court is also expected to consider whether the plaintiffs, a group of anti-abortion doctors and organizations, can show that they will suffer concrete harm if the pill remains widely available. Lawyers call this requirement standing."
The Biden administration says, via brief, that the group of doctors has brought the lawsuit "based on speculative and attenuated injuries."
Here's a timeline of mifepristone approval, access, and lawsuits, spanning all the way back to 2000. More on how the FDA has determined mifepristone's risk/safety here.
"Two-thirds (66%) of US adults say they oppose banning the use of mifepristone, or medication abortion, nationwide, and 62% oppose making it a crime for healthcare providers to mail abortion pills to patients in states where abortion is banned," per a CNN writeup relying on KFF polling data from earlier this month. All of that is to say: abortion restrictions, particularly early-term procedures (which seemingly strike many people as less grotesque, more anodyne) have not proven to be a winning political issue for Republicans, so if the Supreme Court does move to restrict mifepristone, the political ripple effects may be major.
Scenes from New York: Another subway system crime, this one involving a man being shoved onto the tracks by a stranger, struck and killed by the oncoming train, during rush hour in East Harlem. (We discussed the rise in this particular category of crime on the JAQ episode with criminal justice professor/former Baltimore cop Peter Moskos.)
The opening scene in Netflix's #3BodyProblem is a brilliant, terrifying depiction of China's Cultural Revolution. Watch it now.
The entire series is worth watching, but this scene, moved from the middle of the original novel to the start of the English translation, provides a… pic.twitter.com/BpEjPY58Vm
— Nick Gillespie (@nickgillespie) March 25, 2024
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]]>After suffering a heart attack, Ken Jones spent 20 hours sitting in "a hard plastic chair" in
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]]>A man says he was threatened with arrest after his dog urinated on a public street in Bournemouth, England. Steve Schuurman said an "aggressive" female Dorset police officer shouted at him to "clear your fucking dog piss." Schuurman said he would have cleaned up if his dog had defecated but wasn't sure what the officer wanted him to do with urine. He said when he complained, a Bournemouth council community safety patrol officer threatened to have him arrested if he did not move on. The Dorset police department said it is looking into the incident. A Bournemouth Council spokesperson said its "community safety officers were only involved in this incident in an effort to de-escalate the situation and seek a resolution for the gentleman involved."
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]]>A student police officer in England's Thames Valley police said he was shunned by others in the department after he reported a fellow officer for watching bodycam video of a woman having a seizure and making crude remarks about her. The officer said he was later told he was not fit for police work and dismissed from the department. The woman had been arrested when officers believed she was the aggressor in an incident, though she was later found to be the victim. While she was being transported in the back of a police van, she had a seizure that left her breasts and groin exposed. The next day, four officers watched the video and made remarks about her. A Thames Valley Police spokesperson told the media those remarks were "unacceptable" and the department was grateful that the student officer had reported them. The spokesperson said the termination of the student officer's employment was an "entirely separate" issue.
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]]>In England, the Dacorum borough council has issued fines for littering to at least two men who pulled off the road in a rural area to urinate. "The council has sought legal advice on the use of littering fixed penalty notices for urination and is satisfied that urination would be covered by the relevant legislation," the council said in a statement. The Telegraph reports that at least three other councils treat public urination as littering.
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]]>Jonathan Marsh, an officer with London's Metropolitan Police, has been found guilty of assault for punching shopkeeper Rasike Attanayake. Attanayake had called emergency dispatch to report a man damaging his shop and threatening to kill people. Upon arriving, Marsh knocked Attanayake to the ground, punched him in the back of the head, handcuffed him, and placed him in the back of a patrol car before figuring out he was not the suspect.
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]]>In London, England, retired police officer Norman Brennan faces a £195 fine for his
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]]>London's Metropolitan Police has fired officer Martin Binala for an unlawful stop and search of an innocent man. The man was sitting inside his parked car when Binala and two other officers pulled up in an unmarked vehicle. Binala and another officer were in plain clothes. Binala claimed he carried out the search after detecting a strong smell of cannabis from the car. But the investigation found the car's windows had been rolled up. The other plainclothes officer was previously found guilty of misconduct and given a warning, while the third officer, a sergeant, is scheduled to face a misconduct panel.
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]]>Last week, a judge in the U.K. sentenced a teenager to an indefinite hospitalization for committing cybercrimes.
In September 2022, a user named Teapotuberhacker uploaded 90 videos onto the internet forum GTAForums. Collectively, the videos constituted more than 50 minutes of unfinished gameplay footage from Grand Theft Auto VI, a long-anticipated video game under development by Rockstar Games.
In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Rockstar Games confirmed the authenticity of the footage, blaming the leak on a "network intrusion in which an unauthorized third party illegally accessed and downloaded confidential information from our systems." At the time, video game blog Kotaku called it "one of the largest video game leaks in history."
On September 22, just days after the leak, London Police arrested a British teenager for the hack. As it happened, the suspect—later identified as 17-year-old Arion Kurtaj, a member of the cybercrime gang Lapsus$—had already been arrested for hacking tech company Nvidia and U.K. telecom BT/EE. Even though he was in police custody at a Travelodge and his laptop had been confiscated, Kurtaj managed to hack into Rockstar using only his cell phone, a hotel TV, and an Amazon Firestick.
In August, a jury determined that Kurtaj had committed the acts alleged, although this was different than a guilty verdict: "Kurtaj is autistic and psychiatrists deemed him not fit to stand trial so he did not appear in court to give evidence," the BBC reported. "The jury were asked to determine whether or not he did the acts alleged—not if he did it with criminal intent." The outlet further reported that "Kurtaj had been violent while in custody with dozens of reports of injury or property damage."
Last week, according to the BBC, Judge Patricia Lees sentenced the teen to "remain at a secure hospital for life unless doctors deem him no longer a danger," on the basis that "Kurtaj's skills and desire to commit cyber-crime meant he remained a high risk to the public."
But…what exactly is the harm that has been alleged? In fairness, Kurtaj not only hacked firms like Rockstar and BT/EE but he also blackmailed the companies, asking the latter for $4 million (which was not paid).
The Guardian noted after the Grand Theft Auto hack that "there will be financial consequences, as Rockstar investigates the leak and likely evaluates working practices," while its parent company "may well face a dip in its stock value as well as uncomfortable questions from shareholders."
No doubt, the leak was embarrassing, and Rockstar told the court that it spent $5 million to recover from the hack. But it would be difficult to make the case that Rockstar was irreparably harmed by the unauthorized disclosure: Earlier this month, when the company finally released the official first-look trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI, it accrued more than 90 million views in 24 hours—more than any other video game reveal in YouTube history, according to Guinness World Records.
Speaking of records, 2013's Grand Theft Auto V, the previous title in the franchise, has sold more than 185 million copies, more than any game in history with the exceptions of Minecraft and Tetris. After the trailer debuted, the BBC's Eric Alt wrote that the franchise's sixth installment "may not only succeed – but blow its predecessor's revenue out of the water."
"In sentencing hearings, Kurtaj's defence team argued that the success of the game's trailer indicated that Kurtaj's hack had not caused serious harm to the game developer and asked that this be factored into the sentencing," the BBC reported last week. But the judge "said that there were real victims and real harm caused from his other multiple hacks on individuals and the companies he attacked with Lapsus$."
Perhaps so. But it's worth asking if Kurtaj's crimes are worth potentially spending the rest of his life in custody, especially when the jury that condemned him was not even asked to consider whether he possessed criminal intent.
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]]>A deputy U.S. marshal traveling to London to extradite a prisoner has been charged by British police with being drunk and disruptive on the flight. A woman on the plane accused the marshal of touching her inappropriately, but the police said "no further action" will be taken on that allegation.
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]]>In England, Metropolitan Police Detective Constable Zainab Hussain has been given a written warning for trying to remove her fiancé's nephew from a list of men suspected of violence against women and girls. But Akbar Khan, who chaired her disciplinary panel, said he believed she had made an "honest" mistake and learned a "salutary lesson." The panel allowed her to keep her job.
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]]>In England, former Metropolitan Police Officer Mohammed Rahman was sentenced to 12 months in prison, suspended for two years, after he pleaded guilty to seven counts of
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]]>Police in Birmingham, England, have charged two 17-year-old boys, who weren't named by the media, with a public order offense after a soccer game between Birmingham City and Sheffield. The boys are accused of directing
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]]>In the United Kingdom, the Labour Party has promised to place a value-added tax on private school tuition if it takes power after the next election, which is scheduled to take place before the end of 2024. The tax is forecast to bring in some £1.7 billion ($2.06 billion) and could raise private school fees up to 20 percent. Labour Party officials said they would use the money to help fund government schools.
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]]>In the United Kingdom, the Society of Editors, which represents newspaper and magazine editors, has criticized Attorney General Victoria Prentis for warning media outlets that their coverage of sexual misconduct claims against actor Russell Brand could amount to contempt of court. Under British law, it is illegal to publish material that could affect a criminal trial once a suspect has been arrested or a warrant has been issued. But Brand has not been charged with any crimes. "At the moment there are no active proceedings when there have been no arrests – so it is a very unusual warning," said Dawn Alford, executive director of the Society of Editors. "I'd say it is worrying and also unnecessary."
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]]>People in England born on or after January 1, 2009, will be banned from ever buying cigarettes under plans announced Wednesday by British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
Speaking at the Conservative Party conference, Sunak declared England's smoking age would be raised annually, so a 14-year-old today will never be allowed to buy cigarettes legally.
The prime minister claimed smokers put "huge pressures" on the country's National Health Service despite the fact smokers in the U.K. pay far more in taxes than they cost in terms of health care.
Critics expressed alarm that a notionally "conservative" prime minister is cheerleading such a radical restriction of consumer choice. "Not only is this prohibitionist wheeze hideously illiberal and unconservative, it is full of holes," says Christopher Snowdon, head of lifestyle economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs, a U.K.-based free market think tank. "It will create a two tier society in which adults buy cigarettes informally from slightly older adults and will inflate the black market in general."
"This is now a conservative government in name only because the prime minister has just taken a wrecking ball to the principles of choice and personal responsibility," said Simon Clark, director of the smokers' rights group Forest.
But cigarettes aren't alone in Sunak's war on nicotine—disposable e-cigarettes, which have been blamed for an uptick in youth vaping, could also be banned. The number of British youth who have tried vaping rose from 7.7 percent in 2022 to 11.3 percent in 2023. However, the same survey data shows no significant change in the proportion of youth vaping regularly. Laws banning vape sales to children are already on the books, and tobacco harm reduction advocates argue enforcing the law would be a better bet than playing prohibition whack-a-mole. "A ban on disposable vapes is a dangerous strategy," said Mark Oates of the campaign group We Vape when the policy was floated in September. "Children will find products on the black market and adults will go back to smoking."
The U.K. already has some of the world's strictest tobacco policies, with prices averaging $15 per pack, graphic health warnings, plain packaging, tobacco display bans, and comprehensive smoke-free legislation. But it's also, up to this point, been a champion of safer nicotine alternatives to cigarettes, such as vaping, with 9.1 percent of Brits using e-cigarettes, most of whom are ex-smokers.
Britain's public health authorities are eager to inform smokers that vaping is substantially safer than smoking and plan to hand out a million free e-cigarettes to encourage smokers to quit. Thanks in part to the popularity of e-cigarettes, Britain has one of the lowest smoking rates in Europe at 13 percent, yet the government seems determined to pursue a prohibition policy with all attendant risks of black markets and criminal activity.
Bhutan became the first country to ban tobacco in 2004 and suffered a boom in smuggling. The prohibition was repealed in 2020 and was recognized as a failure. South Africa banned tobacco during COVID-19 with similar results, entrenching the illicit trade. However, New Zealand became the first country to adopt a generational smoking ban under the leadership of then-Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in 2022, along with a mandatory reduction of nicotine in cigarettes.
Britain's embrace of incremental cigarette prohibition will likely encourage those across the Atlantic who want to see America follow a similar path. A California legislator proposed a generational smoking ban earlier this year, but it failed to gain traction. America's biggest anti-tobacco group, the Truth Initiative, recently called for a ban on all commercial nicotine, ending the legal sale of cigarettes, cigars, vapes, snus, nicotine pouches, hookah, and heated tobacco.
It's been 35 years since Britain banned smoking on airplanes, 16 years since all pubs and restaurants were forced to go smoke-free, and six years since all branding was removed from cigarette packs. At every stage, warnings that such coercive policies were a stepping stone to prohibition were ignored as hysterical overreactions by excitable libertarians. As the now-illegal cigarette ads used to say, "You've come a long way, baby."
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]]>In England, Northumbria Police has fired Police Constable Philip Aiston after a panel found he failed to notify a couple of the death of their son, as he was told to do, then lied about it for two years. Aiston reported going to deliver the news and finding no one home, but GPS data from his patrol car placed him five miles away from the couple's residence. The panel found that not notifying the parents didn't warrant disciplinary action but the multiple lies he told his superiors did.
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]]>Anthony Stevens, a British Conservative Party member of the Wellingborough council, is facing charges of distributing material to stir up hatred for several tweets he posted. Stevens retweeted a video critical of police for arresting street preacher Oluwole Ilisanmi, who was accused of being Islamophobic. Ilisanmi was later awarded £2,500 ($3,143) for wrongful arrest. Stevens was also questioned by police for tweeting his support of King Lawal, a fellow conservative council member who was suspended by the party after he responded to images of Pride parades by tweeting, "When did pride become a thing to celebrate. Because of pride, Satan fell as an archangel. Pride is not a virtue but a sin. Those who have pride should repent of their sins and return to Jesus Christ. He can save you."
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]]>Drivers in London will now face financial penalties if their cars don't meet emissions standards. While the proposal isn't without merit, it's unlikely to make a difference even as it penalizes motorists.
In April 2019, the British capital instituted an Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) in central London. The rule required all vehicles to meet certain emissions standards. Certain vehicles, including taxis or certain historic vehicles, were exempt; for most noncompliant vehicles, drivers would face a fine of 12.50 pounds ($15.56 USD) per day. The rule is enforced by cameras that capture license plates.
Mayor Sadiq Khan's office touted the rule as "the world's toughest vehicle emissions standard." Khan referred to the city's air quality as an "invisible killer" that is "one of the biggest national health emergencies of our generation." At the time, Silviya Barrett, research manager at the Centre for London think tank, told the BBC, "The ULEZ is really needed especially to help poorer Londoners who live in urban areas with high pollution," though its effect was "limited at the moment due to its small area." It was later expanded in 2021 to cover about one-fourth of the city.
Transport for London (TfL), the city's transportation authority, expanded the ULEZ to the entire city on August 29, 2023. All noncompliant vehicles traveling within the city—including those not registered in the U.K.—will now have to pay the daily fine. Notably, the city already assesses a 15-pound ($18.69 USD) daily Congestion Charge to all motorists who drive in central London during peak hours.
The city is bullish on the proposal: In 2020, Khan's office released a report showing that at the end of the ULEZ's first 10 months, measured concentrations of nitrogen dioxide were 44 percent lower than was projected without the ULEZ, with an average compliance rate of 79 percent.
In February 2023, the office released another report, showing the results since the ULEZ expanded to cover 44 percent of the city's population. It estimated that nitrogen dioxide levels were 46 percent lower in central London, and 21 percent lower in the other covered areas, than if the ULEZ had never been implemented.
But not everyone agrees. A 2021 study by the Centre for Transport Studies at the Imperial College of London found that the reduction in nitrogen dioxide was considerably smaller, perhaps less than 3 percent. "As other cities consider implementing similar schemes," its authors concluded, "this study implies that the ULEZ on its own is not an effective strategy in the sense that the marginal causal effects were small."
In a 2022 impact assessment, the mayor's office claimed that expanding the ULEZ citywide would result in an annual savings of 214 "life years." But Channel 4, the state-owned but privately funded network, noted that spread out across London's population of 8.8 million, 214 life years means that the ULEZ adds about 13 minutes to each Londoner's life per year.
And the proposal is not universally popular with the citizenry, either: Last week, Sky News reported that Londoners had stolen or damaged ULEZ cameras more than 500 times in the last few months. In the days immediately after ULEZ went citywide, activists smashed cameras, clipped their power cables, and spray-painted the lenses.
The Imperial College study did note that while air quality did improve overall since the ULEZ was introduced, "the ULEZ is one of many policies implemented to tackle air pollution in London….Thus, reducing air pollution requires a multi-faceted set of policies that aim to reduce emissions across sectors with coordination among local, regional and national government."
Mitigating emissions that cause climate change is a noble and essential goal. Ironically, the ULEZ is one of the less intrusive solutions: Earlier this year, the European Parliament banned the sale of vehicles with internal combustion engines by 2035. The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed that two-thirds of all cars sold in the U.S. by 2032 should be electric.
A more effective and less proscriptive solution would be a more narrowly tailored system where users pay in direct proportion to their output. In a 2013 Cato Institute report, Bob Litterman wrote, "Relying on prices to allocate scarce resources is vastly superior to the command‐and‐control approaches of current policies, which rely on public subsidies and mandates to use particular alternatives to fossil fuels."
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]]>The U.K. government finally acknowledges that a component of the Online Safety Bill that would force tech companies to scan data and messages for child porn images can't be implemented without violating the privacy rights of all internet users and undermining the data encryption tools that keep our information safe.
And so the government is backing down—for now—on what's been called the "spy clause." Using the justification of fighting the spread of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), part of the Online Safety Bill would have required online platforms to create "backdoors" that the British government could use to scan messages between social media users. The law also would've allowed the government to punish platforms or sites that implement end-to-end encryption and prevent the government from accessing messages and data.
While British officials have insisted that this intrusive surveillance power would be used only to track down CSAM, tech and privacy experts have warned repeatedly that there's no way to implement a surveillance system that could be used only for this particular purpose. Encryption backdoors allow criminals and oppressive governments to snoop on people for dangerous and predatory purposes. Firms like Signal and WhatsApp threatened to pull their services from the U.K. entirely if this bill component moved forward.
Today, The Financial Times broke the news that the House of Lords will announce that tech companies do not have to implement these backdoors until a technology exists that can scan messages only for child porn.
According to Wired, Signal Foundation President Meredith Whittaker sees this announcement as a win for them: "It commits to not using broken tech or broken techniques to undermine end-to-end encryption."
But unfortunately, it's not as much of a win as Whittaker wishes it were. Wired notes that the problematic "spy clause" actually remains in the legislation. The government is just promising not to enforce it right now. In reality, all the powers will remain intact. Wired reports:
"Nothing has changed," says Matthew Hodgson, CEO of UK-based Element, which supplies end-to-end encrypted messaging to militaries and governments. "It's only what's actually written in the bill that matters. Scanning is fundamentally incompatible with end-to-end encrypted messaging apps. Scanning bypasses the encryption in order to scan, exposing your messages to attackers. So all 'until it's technically feasible' means is opening the door to scanning in future rather than scanning today. It's not a change, it's kicking the can down the road."
Ultimately, this is a victory only in the sense that the U.K. government is now finally publicly admitting that encryption backdoors inevitably violate the privacy rights of innocent people and compromise their safety. The government had, up until now, been focusing on a campaign that stoked fears of child sex-trafficking as a way of deflecting criticism and attempting to steamroll over those who warned about the dangers of this surveillance.
The acknowledgment is a cheap consolation prize given that U.K. lawmakers are about to pass a privacy-violating, speech-suppressing, authoritarian bill. Yes, they are promising not to enforce the broken parts of the law, but only after vehemently insisting that the law was perfectly good and necessary. Social media users trust them at their peril.
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]]>West Yorkshire, England, police say they will take no further action against a 16-year-old autistic girl they arrested and held for suspicion of a homophobic offense. Officers had picked up the girl in Leeds for reportedly being intoxicated and returned her home. When she arrived home, the girl apparently said one of the officers "looked like her nana, who is a lesbian," according to the girl's mother. The officer took that as a homophobic remark and several officers entered the home and arrested the girl. The police department said its professional standards division is investigating the matter and that the girl would face no further actions from police.
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]]>Several schools in London, England, are offering summer literacy lessons that are open only to black students to "accelerate progress in reading and writing whilst also developing the children's knowledge of black history and culture." They are not offering a similar program for white students even though educational achievement is lower for whites from a disadvantaged background than for students from other ethnic groups from a disadvantaged background.
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]]>John Robins, head of England's West Yorkshire Police, said police departments should be able to practice "positive discrimination" in favor of black and Asian applicants in order to increase the number of nonwhite officers in their ranks. Robins insists this would not result in lower standards for officers. Such discrimination is illegal in England and Wales. "I think the time has now come that legislation should change so that we should [use] positive discrimination," he said.
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]]>By the time Adam Smith's An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations appeared on March 9, 1776, the American colonies were in a state of revolt and the British authorities were furiously debating what was to be done. Smith's Wealth of Nations presented two options.
The first option was to let the colonies go. The second was to unify the American colonies with Britain the way Scotland had been united with England. Smith himself was Scottish and, looking back, was very glad of the 1707 Acts of Union, whereby Scotland quit its parliament in Edinburgh and henceforth sent parliamentarians to Westminster. In Wealth of Nations, Smith suggested the same course for the American colonies. He proposed that Americans send parliamentarians to sit as equals in Westminster. Just as Scotland belonged to Great Britain, so now would those erstwhile American colonies which opted in. Smith's proposal did not specify a new name for the enlarged constitutional state, but Smith foresaw with remarkable accuracy that a new name would, in time, be in order.
But did Smith propose such a union in earnest?
There was an outpouring of ironic writing in mid–18th century Britain, as Wayne C. Booth notes in his 1974 study, A Rhetoric of Irony. Likewise, as Arthur M. Melzer explains in 2014's Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing, writing between the lines was pervasive up to the end of the 18th century.
Smith was no stranger to irony. His first publications in 1755 in the Edinburgh Review contained sly digs and satire. Such devices abounded in his 1759 book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Wealth of Nations is more straightforward, but it still has its sly moments and undercurrents.
A close examination of Smith's two proposals for how the British might deal with the American colonies suggests, to me, that Smith employed his deep understanding of rhetoric and artful indirection to advance his point of view more successfully than a direct approach would have.
What should Britain's rulers do about the American colonies? Smith's first-best answer was: Let 'em go. Here, Smith was direct and unequivocal. He wrote at length about the colonies as a fiscal sink for the British state, and he summed his case up in a characteristic one-sentence paragraph: "Under the present system of management, therefore, Great Britain derives nothing but loss from the dominion which she assumes over her colonies."
Smith likened letting go of the colonies to an act of proper parenting. It was the same as granting independence to a child who had come of age, which Smith said was the Greek approach, as opposed to the Roman. "The same sort of parental affection on the one side, and filial respect on the other," Smith wrote, "might revive between Great Britain and her colonies, which used to subsist between those of ancient Greece and the mother city from which they descended."
In Wealth of Nations' final chapter, Smith returned to the benefits of the let-'em-go approach. "If any of the provinces of the British empire cannot be made to contribute towards the support of the whole empire," he wrote, "it is surely time that Great Britain should free herself from the expence of defending those provinces in time of war, and of supporting any part of their civil or military establishments in time of peace, and endeavour to accommodate her future views and designs to the real mediocrity of her circumstances."
Alas, proud rulers routinely deny the real mediocrity of their circumstances. Letting go of colonies is "always mortifying to the pride of every nation," Smith observed. Moreover, letting go is "always contrary to the private interest of the governing part of it, who would thereby be deprived of the disposal of many places of trust and profit, of many opportunities of acquiring wealth and distinction." Corrupt elites refuse the first-best answer.
Therefore, Smith suggested a second-best option.
Smith's second-best option was a trans-Atlantic union between Britain and the American colonies. But was this course offered in earnest? In my view, Smith acted like union was more possible and more desirable than he really thought it would be.
Why would Smith put on an act? Because his talk about forming a union was really aimed at helping opponents of American independence see the folly of their ways. As Smith explained in his lectures on rhetoric, some situations call for indirection; thus, we "are to conceal our design." Smith understood that nobody likes to be in the position of an inferior corrected by a superior. Readers want to identify themselves with the superiority of insight. So it was often best to put the reader in a position to put it all together for himself. Smith associated this indirect method with Socrates.
Smith conceded that a trans-Atlantic union between Britain and the American colonies would face great difficulties. "I have yet heard of none, however," he wrote, "which appear insurmountable."
There are good reasons to doubt his earnestness here. A big one is that Smith explicitly wrote elsewhere that he doubted the political feasibility of any such union. In a document on American affairs, dated February 1778, Smith wrote: "The plan of a union with our colonies and of an American representation seems not to be agreeable to any considerable party of men in Great Britain." Indeed, it "seems scarce to have a single advocate." To be sure, Smith's assessment of political possibility might have declined between 1776 and 1778. But if Smith's ostensible second-best option (union) was really just a ploy to overcome resistance to the first-best option (let 'em go), then we may doubt that Smith ever saw any political possibility in the first place.
What is more, Wealth of Nations elaborated on the impracticality of governing across the expanse of the Atlantic, which is what union would have entailed. "The distance of the colony assemblies from the eye of the sovereign, their number, their dispersed situation, and their various constitutions, would render it very difficult to manage them," he wrote. "The unavoidable ignorance of administration…the offences which must frequently be given, the blunders which must constantly be committed in attempting to manage them in this manner, seems to render such a system of management altogether impracticable with regard to them."
Such points had been made by others. Referring to the American colonies in 1775, for example, Edmund Burke noted that, "three thousand miles of ocean lie between you and them." Trans-Atlantic republicanism would be absurd enough in our Zoom age; in 1776, when each single piece of a dialogue between someone here and someone there meant a written document traveling for months at enormous expense, meaningful representation—a hot slogan in America at the time—would obviously be a farce. The following exchange, for example, would take more than six months to complete:
"William, has winter been harsh?"
"This is William's widow. Yes, winter was harsh. Can you come and help me raise the children?"
"I set sail in May."
Shared experience, understanding, and negotiation would all be lacking; trust would break down; suspicion would be rampant. People would demonize distant elites, just as many did at the time in rallying for a clean break with Britain. Union, in short, was a complete nonstarter, and for good reason. Smith's proposal was a put-on.
When Smith talked up the desirability of union, what he meant was union as opposed to war between Britain and the American colonies. He was not saying that union was more desirable than letting the colonies go. He made his ranking perfectly plain.
Smith's ranking of three options:
1. Let 'em go
2. Union
3. War
In elaborating how union was preferable to war, he made points that would also work for letting 'em go over war. In talking up union, he indirectly talked up letting 'em go.
It is in arguing for union over war that Smith made some of his most colorful remarks about American affairs. Offering union was better than vanquishing the Americans, he wrote, because "the blood which must be shed…is, every drop of it, the blood either of those who are, or of those whom we wish to have for our fellow-citizens." The American War for Independence was a civil war, British versus British. Was it also a revolution? It was not like the English Revolution or the French Revolution, which saw kings beheaded. American patriots had no plan to sail to England to decapitate anyone. They sought to extricate themselves from rule by King George III and the rest—to secede, like a grown son going his own way.
Second, union was preferable to war because the Americans would be so hard to vanquish. He wrote:
The persons who now govern the resolutions of what they call their continental congress, feel in themselves at this moment a degree of importance which, perhaps, the greatest subjects in Europe scarce feel. From shopkeepers, tradesmen, and attornies, they are become statesmen and legislators, and are employed in contriving a new form of government for an extensive empire, which, they flatter themselves, will become, and which, indeed, seems very likely to become, one of the greatest and most formidable that ever was in the world. Five hundred different people, perhaps, who in different ways act immediately under the continental congress; and five hundred thousand, perhaps, who act under those five hundred, all feel in the same manner a proportionable rise in their own importance. Almost every individual of the governing party in America, fills, at present in his own fancy, a station superior, not only to what he had ever filled before, but to what he had ever expected to fill; and unless some new object of ambition is presented either to him or to his leaders, if he has the ordinary spirit of a man, he will die in defence of that station.
The self-importance swelling in the erstwhile shopkeepers and attorneys in America could, Smith pretended, be tempted in another direction: by offering union. "Instead of piddling for the little prizes which are to be found in what may be called the paltry raffle of colony faction," he wrote, "they might then hope, from the presumption which men naturally have in their own ability and good fortune, to draw some of the great prizes which sometimes come from the wheel of the great state lottery of British politics." In sum, Smith's argument-by-misdirection made union sound more attractive than war, after having already made letting 'em go sound more attractive than union. The whole thing boiled down to Smith making the case for letting the colonies go.
Smith gave his British readers something else to ponder. "Such has been the rapid progress" of the American colonies "in wealth, population and improvement," he observed, "that in the course of little more than a century, perhaps, the produce of American might exceed that of British taxation. The seat of the empire would then naturally remove itself to that part of the empire which contributed most to the general defence and support of the whole."
In other words, a trans-Atlantic union might easily result in America eclipsing England within the British state. English parliamentarians would then find themselves on the periphery, enjoying the sea air during long voyages to a new parliamentary building in a place like Philadelphia. Furthermore, with England now at such a distance from the power center, what should the empire be called? Under the union plan, Smith suggested, Britons might look forward to calling themselves citizens of the American empire.
Smith probably designed this uproarious argument to turn the tables on his British readers and awaken them to the absurdities of both union and war, leaving letting 'em go as the only viable option for dealing with the American colonies. Readers of another famous work published in 1776, the first volume of Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, would also surely have grasped the parallels that Smith was subtly drawing. Thanks to rising industry elsewhere, the Roman capital moved from Rome to Ravenna to, finally, Constantinople. Once again, Smith advised the British to emulate the Greeks, not the Romans.
When your sons and daughters are grown and demand independence, accord them that independence.
The post Adam Smith Said Colonists Should Join the British Union. Was He Serious? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Telegraph reports that police in the United Kingdom have failed to solve any burglaries in almost half of the neighborhoods in England and Wales in the past three years. Last October, all of the chief constables in England and Wales promised to have an officer respond to every reported burglary. But it turns out most departments exclude burglaries in garages, sheds, and other outbuildings from that promise. Rick Muir, director of the British think tank Police Foundation, told the newspaper that in some areas burglary has effectively been decriminalized because there are no penalties for it.
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]]>British retailers are warning the government that a proposed "green" tax on packaging could increase consumers' grocery bills by a total of up to £4 billion ($5.003 billion) a year. The tax, which is slated to take effect next April, would tax manufacturers and retailers for the packaging they use. The funds would pay to improve local recycling efforts. The tax is also aimed at encouraging businesses to use less packaging. But business groups say the costs will be passed on to consumers.
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]]>In London, the Metropolitan Police said it is investigating after officers handcuffed a 91-year-old woman, put a spit hood over her head, and
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]]>When it comes to the political class, bad ideas can be contagious. That appears to be the case with censorship during the pandemic, which became a popular pastime among functionaries convinced they are the embodiment of science—or, at least, the arbiters of truth. As it turns out, that led to the collaboration between the state and social media companies to muzzle voices not just in the U.S., but also across the Atlantic in the U.K.
"A secretive government unit worked with social media companies in an attempt to curtail discussion of controversial lockdown policies during the pandemic," The Telegraph reported June 2. "The Counter-Disinformation Unit (CDU) was set up by ministers to tackle supposed domestic 'threats', and was used to target those critical of lockdown and questioning the mass vaccination of children."
The report added that "critics of lockdown had posts removed from social media. There is growing suspicion that social media firms used technology to stop the posts being promoted, circulated or widely shared after being flagged by the CDU or its counterpart in the Cabinet Office."
Among those monitored and penalized were prominent epidemiologists and medical researchers who challenged official data and restrictive policies. Activists who opposed lockdowns were also targeted. The Telegraph, a prominent newspaper which has run articles skeptical of pandemic authoritarianism, was itself singled out.
Implicated in monitoring content and penalizing dissent at the behest of government officials were companies including Facebook, Google, Twitter (under the old management), and the BBC, the U.K.'s high-profile state broadcaster.
The story follows an earlier report (credited by The Telegraph) published in January 2023 by civil liberties group Big Brother Watch. That report, Ministry of Truth: the secretive government units spying on your speech, called out the Cabinet Office's Rapid Response Unit, the Counter Disinformation Unit, the Foreign Office's Government Information Cell, the Home Office's Research, Intelligence and Communications Unit, and the British Army's 77th Brigade. Together, they targeted what officials considered "disinformation" during the pandemic and then following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
"The government has created opaque agencies which increasingly use social media companies as an extension of the state, using these online intermediaries to police online speech on their behalf," the report says. "Though the speech in question may violate these online intermediaries' terms of use, this itself is not a legitimate cause for state interference with free expression."
If that sounds familiar to you, it should. It's essentially identical to what we've seen revealed in the United States. The Telegraph makes that point in its story, noting that "In America, Twitter has released similar information showing how the US government also introduced a secretive programme to curtail discussion of Covid lockdowns."
As in Britain, U.S. officials leaned on multiple private firms to suppress messages the government didn't like.
"The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) played a direct role in policing permissible speech on social media throughout the COVID-19 pandemic," Reason's Robby Soave reported in January. "Confidential emails obtained by Reason show that Facebook moderators were in constant contact with the CDC, and routinely asked government health officials to vet claims relating to the virus, mitigation efforts such as masks, and vaccines."
Not only did government officials seek to muzzle people—often intelligent, well-informed people—who dared to disagree with them, they often did so to advance serious policy errors that might have been avoided if open and healthy debate had been allowed. Just this week, the UK's Institute of Economic Affairs published a peer-reviewed analysis showing that during the COVID-19 pandemic, "harsher restrictions, like stay-at-home rules and school closures, generated very high costs but produced only negligible health benefits."
"The science of lockdowns is clear; the data are in: the lives saved were a drop in the bucket compared to the staggering collateral costs imposed," comments Johns Hopkins University's Steve Hanke, who co-authored the analysis with Jonas Herby of Denmark's Center for Political Studies and Lars Jonung of Sweden's Lund University.
Among other costs, researchers find that restrictive pandemic policies took an enormous toll on people's mental health.
"My colleagues and I conducted a review of all of the studies on mental health conducted during the first year of the pandemic," social psychology professor Gery Karantzas of Australia's Deakin University wrote last year. "We found that overall, social restrictions doubled people's odds of experiencing mental health symptoms…. Those who experienced lockdowns were twice as likely to experience mental ill health than those who didn't."
Children took a particular hit from lockdowns implemented with no viable plan for keeping them educated and engaged.
"Children lost an average of one-third of a year of school during the coronavirus pandemic," Reason's Emma Camp pointed out in February. "Researchers say the loss is largely due to the disruption and damage school closures—and the subsequent shift to distance learning—brought on children's physical and mental health."
Suppressing opposing opinions from physicians, journalists, activists, and anybody else who might have seen downsides to the policies preferred by those in power turns out to have been not just a violation of free speech rights (a big deal itself), but an excellent way of greasing the path to disaster. What officialdom called "disinformation" was actually the sort of healthy debate that raises valid concerns, differing values, and important considerations overlooked by thin-skinned authoritarians who prefer censorship over challenges to their egos.
The Telegraph quoted criticism from civil liberties advocates as well as lawmakers from the ruling Conservative Party that implemented Britain's lockdowns and speech controls.
"It is becoming increasingly clear that many of the foundations of our democracy – such as free speech and parliamentary scrutiny – were completely disregarded during the pandemic," commented Miriam Cates, a Conservative member of Parliament.
We could say much of the same here in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world. Unfortunately, despite their annoyance at being exposed, there's little evidence that authoritarian officials have learned any lessons.
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]]>The United Kingdom is courting an automaker to build a new factory within its borders, and it's willing to spare no expense to do so. In a new report, a British think tank suggests letting the market have a say.
Tata Motors, an Indian conglomerate that owns Jaguar Land Rover, plans to build an electric vehicle (E.V.) battery cell factory somewhere in Europe. Reuters reported in February that the company was deciding between Spain and Great Britain. At that time, the company leaned toward Spain, partly on the basis that the country was spending billions of euros in European Union pandemic relief funds to attract developments by E.V. manufacturers.
Last month, the BBC reported that Tata had since tilted toward the U.K. as the country offered up generous incentives of its own. In "the form of cash grants, energy subsidies and other training and research funding," plus extra cash to "subsidise, upgrade, and decarbonise" Tata's existing steel industry, the British government's largesse is expected to "bring the total incentive package to Tata close to £800m" or $994 million USD.
The U.K. is desperate to build out its own E.V. supply chain: It produces relatively few electric vehicles and components compared to neighboring countries, and in a post-Brexit world, it faces 10-percent tariffs on any batteries it ships to E.U. nations. In a March report, the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, the U.K. automotive industry's trade association, warned that "Britain's ability to compete as an electric vehicle (EV) production leader is at risk unless government responds urgently to increasingly fierce international competition." Darren Jones, chair of the House of Commons Business and Trade Committee, told Bloomberg, "We have no capacity for battery manufacturing, which is essentially the entire future of car production."
Part of the pressure comes from the United States. The Inflation Reduction Act established tax credits for purchasing E.V.s but required that a certain percent of the vehicles be built domestically from parts sourced in North America. That bit of protectionism, intended to exclude China, also left out the European Union. French President Emmanuel Macron complained in October 2022, "We need a Buy European Act like the Americans, we need to reserve [our subsidies] for our European manufacturers."
In a report last week, the conservative U.K. think tank Policy Exchange had a plain message for the government: Let the market decide.
Geoffrey Owen, Policy Exchange's head of industrial policy, wrote in the report that "virtually the whole of the industry is foreign owned" and "run by multinational companies" that "are not necessarily committed to the UK." Multiple prime ministers over the past 15 years introduced and implemented government programs designed to shore up the country's E.V. industry. But there was little lasting effect, at least in terms of new factory investment.
"The UK should not engage in a subsidy race with the EU and the US," Owen cautioned. Instead, he recommends a lighter approach: "Where there are obstacles which discourage investment, such as high energy costs, the government should seek to remove or mitigate them." More important than targeted subsidies, he argued, is "a greater degree of stability in government policy."
The U.S. should take the same advice. States continue to shell out billions of dollars each year to attract investment, with little to show in return. And yet, research shows that while government incentives do contribute to a company's decision on where to put a new development, they're often not the primary motivating factor. As Owen noted about investment by Asian automakers in countries like Germany, "the principal reason why they went to the EU and not the UK was not the size of the subsidy but the size of the market. Germany had a far bigger auto industry than the UK and was the home to three of the largest European manufacturers – Volkswagen, Daimler Benz and BMW."
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]]>An English soccer fan faces up to six months in jail for
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]]>Transport London, the
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]]>For any intelligent outsider watching this weekend's coronation in London, it almost certainly raises one question: Just how does an institution as unashamedly archaic as the British monarchy survive some 200 years of parliamentary democracy? The answer comes down to one word: neutrality.
Scratch beneath the surface and most Britons—even those proudly hanging the Union Jack bunting for the coronation—realize deep down how illogical it is to structure our entire constitution around one ruling family. Yet they also believe (perhaps correctly) that keeping our monarchy completely neutral is a foolproof system to eliminate any threat.
Of course, when it comes to party politics, that's easy enough. But in the age of the all-consuming culture wars, true neutrality can be hard to maintain. The modern-day risk isn't necessarily that the king expresses political views, it's that his views or actions end up becoming politicized.
We saw an example of this last November when the monarchy became dangerously close to being embroiled in a full-blown race quarrel (a row, incidentally, that did not involve Meghan Markle). It began when a long-term palace aide (a personal friend of the late queen) stepped down from her duties following her tactless questioning of a black British guest. Within hours, the story had exploded.
On television channels like GB News, right-wing blowhards thundered their predictable outrage that an 83-year-old aristocrat could be forced out for a supposedly innocent faux pas. In response, progressive newspapers ran equally template op-eds about how seriously we should all take so-called microaggressions in the workplace.
You may well have a view on the rights and wrongs of the Lady Susan Hussey saga. But that isn't the point. The real question is how an institution like Buckingham Palace—inevitably seen as an extension of its inhabitant—is meant to handle such a predicament when any response risks fanning the flames of the culture war.
In the end, the palace got it exactly right: with an unambiguous factual statement that stayed well clear of any wider "debate" around racism. Once the story had disappeared from the front pages, it quietly reinstated Hussey.
In the run-up to the coronation, the potential for a crisis has been even bigger. Take this week's surprise announcement from Buckingham Palace that the ceremony will break with tradition by inviting members of the public—yes, we mere mortals—to join in the traditional swearing of allegiance to the newly crowned king. This slightly clumsy gesture soon became the subject of a tedious online debate between pledgers and refuseniks.
What made the situation worse was the fact that England had just entered the final stretch of its local election campaigns. All of a sudden, any senior politician appearing on the broadcast rounds was being quizzed as to whether he personally would be pledging. Cue this rather cringeworthy clip of Foreign Secretary James Cleverly waxing obsequiously about the king's "very generous invitation."
Of course, some of the biggest bear traps were much closer to home for King Charles. Since he took the crown in September, the British media have been ablaze with speculation as to whether Prince Harry would attend the coronation. Perhaps inevitably, the Harry feud has become "coded" by the culture wars, with the estranged prince caricatured as an entitled "woke" brat whose values run contrary to British traditions.
At times, it seemed like an almighty storm might be blowing. Yet here we are at coronation and the bomb has been defused. Will there be difficult conversations this weekend between Harry and his father and brother? Almost certainly. But they will take place in private, and they won't stop the family from putting on a united front for the coronation.
Perhaps it sounds like simple public relations, but it runs much deeper than that. For the British monarchy, these kinds of controversies aren't just a potential image problem—they're an existential threat. A monarchy that divides opinion, particularly along existing cultural fault lines, risks undermining its own legitimacy.
That Charles has skillfully navigated the minefield so far means that Britain can actually come together to celebrate the coronation, albeit in the typical understated and semi-ironic way that we approach these occasions. By joining a street party or meeting a toast, you're not making any kind of statement—which is just the way it should be.
Underneath all the pageantry, it's quite simple: A Britain with a politicized monarchy is no longer a proper democracy. One of those matters more than the other.
The post How Does the British Monarchy Survive? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Under a law proposed by the British government, social media executives could face up to two years in prison if they repeatedly fail to remove content that could encourage suicide or self-harm. The bill would also force social media companies to actively search for controlling and coercive content and remove it, to counter disinformation from a foreign government, and to search encrypted messages for child sexual abuse.
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]]>The British government has proposed giving police the power to
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]]>In Essex, England, a half dozen police officers raided a pub and seized 15 golly dolls. The golly, also known as golliwog, is a cartoon character created in the 19th century based on blackface minstrel characters. The character was once widely used in advertising, and the dolls were popular children's toys but are now seen as racially offensive. The police department said a customer had complained about the dolls and they are investigating a possible hate crime.
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]]>A report by the British Children's Commissioner found that police in England and Wales strip-searched almost 3,000 children between 2018 and mid 2022. More than half of those searches took place without a legally required appropriate adult present. And the searches did not always take place in police stations but in patrol vehicles, private businesses and amusement parks, among other locations. The report noted that attention is being paid to the issue not because of a whistle blower but because a 15-year-old girl spoke up after she was strip-searched by police in school. The officers were looking for drugs but did not find any.
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]]>The British government has proposed a bill that would make it illegal for men to whistle or make a pass at women on the street. The Protection from Sex-Based Harassment in Public Bill will make it illegal to cause "intentional harassment, alarm or distress" to a person in public based on their sex. Those found guilty of violating the law face up to two years in prison.
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]]>When cornered, some politicians grudgingly admit COVID-19 restrictions went too far and made little sense. But that still leaves us wondering as to their thinking when they locked playgrounds, mandated masks, restricted travel, shuttered businesses, closed schools, confined people to their homes, sent cops after paddle-boarders floating on the lonely sea, ignored their own rules, and otherwise inflicted harms worse than a virus could ever manage. Now an important disclosure of communications among British officials reveals just how government officials' minds work when exercising extraordinary power. It's not a pretty sight.
"We had to make some decisions, that in retrospect, don't make a lot of sense," Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer recently conceded with regard to lockdown orders issued after COVID-19 appeared. "Some of those policies, I look back and think: that was maybe a little more than we needed to do."
Those policies arbitrarily parsed between "essential" and "nonessential" businesses for the imposition of draconian rules, even banning the sale of gardening supplies to people stranded at home. They were notoriously ill-considered and intrusive, making an admission of error necessary, if consequence-free. It was also belated, since the state Supreme Court ruled Whitmer's use of emergency powers unconstitutional in 2020, and lawmakers repealed them in 2021 in response to a citizen initiative.
But, if they're sorry-ish now, what in the hell were Whitmer and her ilk thinking when they cooked up restrictive policies? For a peek behind the dank and musty curtain we turn to Britain, where The Telegraph this month published The Lockdown Files drawn from 100,000 messages exchanged among government officials. They reveal powerful people warned that restrictive policies would cause more harm than the disease, decisions made for public relations reasons, media enlisted to suppress dissent, and officials gloating over inconveniences to the public.
"WhatsApp conversations contained in The Telegraph's Lockdown Files show that those running the country privately acknowledged the 'terrible' price of lockdowns and twice reimposed the national shutdowns, even as they discussed the damage they were causing to physical and mental health, children's prospects and mental health," the newspaper's team noted. Among the consequences of which they were directly warned were interrupted medical treatments and ill effects on children.
"A civil servant [in then-Health Secretary Matt] Hancock's private office sent him a WhatsApp message alerting him to a child respiratory virus that was expected to surge in the summer months as a result of the virus being suppressed during lockdown—known in Whitehall as an NPI, or non-pharmaceutical intervention," The Telegraph reports. In fact, cases of the virus, RSV, subsequently soared in 2021 among children shielded from the bug by social distancing orders, trading one infection for another.
In addition, officials were "worried about the Government being sued by the families of those who had died because of the backlog on cancer care and elective treatments."
When the British public became resistant to damaging restrictions on business, gatherings, and movement, Hancock openly embraced plans to "deploy" news of COVID-19 variants to "frighten the pants off everyone" to encourage compliance with lockdown rules. The idea was sufficiently well accepted that officials referred to their efforts as "Project Fear."
Fomenting panic was in keeping with the seat-of-the-pants decision-making driving much pandemic policy. Then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson boasted of making decisions based on "science," but was more driven by polling—and sometimes by what he himself feared was bad data that overstated risks.
Johnson "appeared to express a desire to lift the country out of lockdown earlier than planned, but said his media advisers – Lee Cain and James Slack – warned him that such a move was 'too far ahead of public opinion'," reports The Telegraph. "When Mr Johnson broached the subject of opening schools before the summer, his health secretary argued against doing so, saying that 'everyone's accepted there won't be more on schools until September'."
"The exchanges call into question the prime minister's insistence that lockdown decisions were made on the basis of the best scientific evidence," adds The Telegraph. "They also raise the prospect that Britain spent many weeks living under restrictions that could have been avoided."
And at least a few officials gained pleasure from the pain they imposed on others, openly applauding harsh enforcement of rules that were open to interpretation.
"Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, said it was 'hilarious' that 149 people had been told to stay in government-approved hotels on their return from Red List countries in 2021," the newspaper summarized. "He also joked about passengers being 'locked up' in 'shoe box' rooms. Those on the receiving end of the quarantine policy at the time said it was like being 'in Guantanamo Bay'."
For his part, Hancock "was an advocate of using the police to crack down on anyone deemed to have broken quarantine or lockdown rules, even though the regulations were often open to interpretation. He expressed satisfaction when the 'plod' were given their 'marching orders'."
It wouldn't be 2023 if we didn't talk about policymakers compiling enemies lists of lockdown opponents and "threatening to withdraw funding for projects" in the districts of dissident legislators. Or of the media's role in promoting establishment talking points and suppressing dissent.
"What was most alarming was the alacrity with which the broadcast news media fell into line – with boundless enthusiasm – as they were given a key role in the day to day dissemination of government authority," observed The Telegraph's Janet Daly. "As the medium through which the official information was conveyed – with, as we now know, often misleading modelling projections and outdated death figures – they went from being public service news media to what the BBC notably has always insisted it is not: state broadcasters. From disinterested journalism to Pravda in a single bound."
That should sound familiar to Americans who have had a similarly revelatory peek through the Twitter Files and similar leaks into government efforts to suppress inconvenient (to the powerful) viewpoints. We've also seen politicians demonize critical journalists such as Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger.
The correspondence in the "Lockdown Files" was leaked to The Telegraph by journalist Isabel Oakeshott, who was collaborating with Matt Hancock on his memoir and was disturbed by what she saw.
"We were all let down by the response to the pandemic and repeated unnecessary lockdowns," she commented earlier this month. "Children, in particular, paid a terrible price. Anyone who questioned an approach we now know was fatally flawed was utterly vilified; including highly respected and eminent public health experts, doctors and scientists."
We may never know exactly what members of America's own pandemic-exploiting political class were thinking when they turned the screws on people's liberties. But thanks to the Lockdown Files, we can make a good guess.
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]]>Parents of students at Christopher Whitehead Language College, a secondary school in England, are upset that the school replaced the mirrors in the girls' restrooms with posters with messages such as "beauty is nothing without brains" and "make-up is a harmful drug." School officials insist the move is temporary and was done only because some girls were congregating in front of the mirrors and blocking access to the toilets.
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]]>During questioning by members of the British Parliament, Air Chief Marshal Sir Mike Wigston apologized to Royal Air Force Group Capt. Lizzy Nicholl, who resigned as head of recruitment after
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]]>Not so long ago, Great Britain was deemed "the sick man of Europe." The 1970s were plagued by inflation, labor union strikes, and a rise in government spending as a percent of GDP. Now, a new photography exhibition at the National Gallery of Art (NGA) invites an American audience to consider snapshots of life as it was for everyday Britons from the 1970s to the 1980s and how the nation transformed from an ailing, deindustrializing country to greater economic prosperity starting in the 1980s. It's a hard story to tell, because to this day people have feelings about the upheaval that came with that change.
The exhibition, "This Is Britain: Photographs from the 1970s and 1980s," features 45 images taken by a diverse set of around 19 documentary photographers who wanted to convey the circumstances and/or hardships of a particular community. The late photographer Chris Killip (1946–2020), for example, lived in a caravan (trailer park) in northeast England for more than a year, photographing a community of people who subsisted off unemployment benefits and selling waste coal that washed up on the beach (see: Margaret, Rosie, and Val, Seacoal Camp, Lynemouth, Northumberland).
Photographer Vanley Burke, raised in Jamaica until he moved to Birmingham as a teenager in 1965, chronicled black British life, such as a smiling boy posing in 1970 with his bicycle, flying the British flag in a way that conveys the significance of immigrants' self-identification as British (see: Boy with Flag). Graham Smith photographed his economically depressed community in northeast England. His 1981 poignant image Clay Lane Furnaces, South Bank, Middlesbrough seems to tell a story of a receding industry.
An American curator, Kara Felt, spurred this NGA exhibition. Her photo selections and accompanying text make this, in a real sense, a British story told by an American to an American audience. Felt was initially inspired by a similar 2015 exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. The 1970s and '80s represented a "real renaissance in British photography," Felt said in an interview. It was an era in which museums began supporting photography, and schools for the profession grew less vocational and more focused on the medium's artistic aspects, she explained. She also discovered it had been 30-some years since the last major presentation of such photographs to an American audience, a 1991 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York called "British Photography from the Thatcher Years."
The first thing to know about 1970s Britain when viewing the photographs is that things got really bad. Inflation teetered over 24 percent in 1975. The same pound bought far less than before. That is stressful to contemplate, given the U.S. experience in the 1970s era—and again recently—struggling with too-high inflation that peaked at nearly 15 percent by April 1980. Meanwhile, the British government actually owned and operated whole industries (steel, railways, airways, airports, and aerospace) along with utilities (gas, electricity, telecoms, and water). That wasn't going well. Too many industries were propped up by taxpayers rather than striving to win consumers and compete globally.
To make matters worse, labor unions staged relentless strikes throughout the 1970s to pressure lawmakers into raising their wages. "Because so many industries were nationalized, wage rises were agreed over 'beer and sandwiches' in 10 Downing Street, not in corporate offices; and if the politicians claimed to be out of money, the unions could hold the public to ransom through strike action," explains my colleague, Iain Murray, who hails from South Shields, the "industrial heart of the northeast of England," where most of the menfolk were employed in shipbuilding and coal mining.
In fact, the list of striking industries is somewhat horrific—crucial sectors of the economy like gravediggers, car makers, coal miners, train drivers, garbage collectors, nurses, sewage treatment workers. The strikes disrupted everyday life, especially during the "Winter of Discontent" between November 1978 and February 1979. This meant problems like hours or days with no electricity, the dead going unburied, piles of uncollected refuse, and even raw sewage poured into the rivers Thames and Avon.
These dire circumstances led to voters ending Labour Party rule and instead, in May 1979, giving the Conservative Party a chance to run the country. And this brings us to the political figure inexorably associated with the decade to follow: Margaret Thatcher, the "Iron Lady" elected Conservative Party leader in 1975 and then Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990. She was and is alternately despised and revered, depending on who you ask.
"Margaret Thatcher was not a conservative; she was a revolutionary," explains Marian Tupy, a scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute. "The structure of the British economy changed under Thatcher," further transitioning from heavy manufacturing to a service economy. In 1970, 30 percent of the U.K. economy was manufacturing and about 56 percent services, according to the U.K. Office for National Statistics. By 1989, it was 20 percent manufacturing and nearly 67 percent services. "Instead of being a sixth or 10th generation miner, people had to try something new," said Tupy.
In short, Thatcher was not trying to conserve a long-standing status quo. She espoused free market values, broke the power of the labor unions, junked price controls and other stifling economic regulations, and set about privatizing government-run industries. "We have stopped creating wealth," Thatcher told William F. Buckley in 1977. "To create more, you need a slightly freer society and you need an incentive society." That kind of change didn't sit well with everyone. It meant hard times.
"Looking back to the 60s and 70s, you were thinking you had a job for life, you know?" a former coal miner turned museum curator told a Welsh newspaper in 2020. "The collieries [coal mines] had always been there in one form or another. The education was quite good if you wanted it in the colliery, and the wages were reasonable. So, you thought, 'that's it.' And then all of a sudden, the place shut."
When Thatcher took office in 1979, 25 percent of unemployed people had been out of work for over a year. By 1984, it was 39.6 percent. At the end of 1973, the unemployment rate itself was a record low of 3.4 percent but had almost tripled to 11.9 percent by April of 1984. There was a real initial human cost to the Thatcher reforms. But by the mid to late 1980s, the country was enjoying an economic boom.
Over at the NGA exhibition, the 1980s room is introduced by the caption "Picturing Absurdity in the Thatcher Years" and explains that photographers "used the brash colors of advertising to poke fun at the rise of leisure activities, consumerism, and corporate greed" of that boom period and "openly satirize long-held traditions and question emerging values in British society." This includes, for example, an image from the 1989 Cambridge University Ball by Chris Steele-Perkins, in which party revelers are put under hypnosis, just for fun. The accompanying curator text explains this image "wryly comments on the excesses and zombie-like conformity of upper-class British youth." (Making fun of the "yuppies," as Tupy aptly put it.)
As a viewer, I could readily rewrite this as "capturing delight and relief that people now had more leisure time and activities, access to better and more affordable consumer goods, and all thanks to private sector companies generating real economic prosperity." That's not how the photographic journalists seem to see it. Behold, for example, photographer Paul Reas's 1987 garish image of a man shopping for pork while wearing a pig-motif jumper, Hand of Pork, Newport South Wales. Or the set of photos by Anna Fox "mock[ing] the escalating materialism associated with Margaret Thatcher" and "prob[ing] the competition, stress, and alienation of London office work."
Photojournalists may have been, on average, more cynical about consumerism than ordinary people. The trappings of industry and manufacturing can appear noble and beautiful, in a way (see: Agecroft Power Station, Salford by John Davies). But industrial-age manual labor was no joke.
In November 2021, I visited the remnants of a turn-of-the-century coffin-making factory in Birmingham, a leading city in the Industrial Revolution, the second largest city in Britain, and the hometown of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame band members of Duran Duran. The Newman Brothers factory is now the Coffin Works museum. But back in the day, workers manufactured coffins for the booming business of formal funerals. Sometimes, if they weren't careful or fast enough, they could lose a finger in the machinery, like the "drop stamp" used to press a shape into a piece of sheet metal. All day, a worker had to repeatedly drop a heavy weight or hammer onto the metal piece and then whisk it away, swiftly replacing it with a new metal piece. Windows, which many 21st-century workers in developed countries now take for granted, were needed for daylight to illuminate the factory but were made opaque to prevent workers from window gazing. There's a reason so many young people probably didn't want the jobs their parents and grandparents had.
The country's transformation to a post-industrial economy had tradeoffs, but they surely amounted to a net gain for Britons. Where photographers may seem alternately nostalgic and cynical, an American viewer of the National Gallery of Art exhibition could see a country's emergence from drudgery to opportunity, abundance, and prosperity.
It's worth mentioning that the exhibition also references violent political unrest of the era, in England and over Northern Ireland, along with two films dealing with race and sexuality, all fraught topics worthy of their own consideration and review.
"This Is Britain: Photographs from the 1970s and 1980s" is on view at the National Gallery of Art from January 29 through June 11, 2023, in the West Building.
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]]>In Britain, you can be arrested for a thought crime. No, really.
In the past few months, several people have been arrested for praying silently outside British abortion clinics. Why? They violated a protection order which effectively creates a strict censorship zone around the facility. While the protection orders were intended to curb aggressive protests or heckling of women seeking services, they stifle a much broader category of speech—and thought.
Public Spaces Protection Orders (PSPOs) were introduced as part of the 2014 Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act. Under this law, certain jurisdictions can obtain orders that limit a wide variety of speech and conduct. For example, cities have used PSPOs to ban "foul language," enact curfews for minors, and ban the homeless from sleeping in public.
In September 2022, the city of Birmingham obtained such an order for one of the city's abortion clinics. Under the order, those on the public sidewalk and roads next to the clinic are barred from "engaging in any act of approval or disapproval or attempted act of approval or disapproval, with respect to issues related to abortion services, by any means. This includes but is not limited to graphic, verbal or written means, prayer or counselling."
As a result of the rule's ridiculously broad restrictions, one woman was arrested in December for silently praying outside the Birmingham clinic—an encounter captured in a viral video. While the scale of the problem on a national level is unclear, at least one other abortion clinic in the country has obtained a similar order—leading local police to fine one man for praying silently nearby.
Following the enactment of the Birmingham order, local priest Father Sean Gough decided to take an action that, based on a reading of the order, should not have been prohibited. Last year, he stood nearby the clinic, holding a sign that read "Praying for Freedom of Speech." Because the sign had nothing to do with abortion, he says that police at first told him that he wasn't breaking the rules.
However, according to The Pillar, local police eventually charged Gough with violating the law and "intimidating service users." He also faced a second charge because his car, which was parked within the enforcement zone, had a bumper sticker reading "Unborn Lives Matter" on it.
"At no point did I ever think that I was in breach—and I still don't—of any law or regulation," Gough told The Pillar. "I was praying for freedom of speech on that occasion, which is a lawful thing to do."
According to The Pillar, while the police eventually dropped Gough's charges, they also made it clear that they could reinstate his charges at any time. For that reason, Gough has decided to mount a legal challenge to his charges. "I want my name to be cleared. And by pursuing an acquittal, I want that declaration to be stated clearly by the courts that I'm not guilty, I haven't broken any laws," he told The Pillar.
He is supported by Alliance Defending Freedom U.K., a Christian legal group also supporting the woman arrested for silent prayer outside the Birmingham abortion clinic.
"Though charges were dropped after several weeks due to 'insufficient evidence,' [Gough] has been warned that further evidence relating to the charges may soon be forthcoming, implying the entire grueling process could soon restart from the beginning," Jeremiah Igunnubole, legal counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), said in a Thursday press release. "This is a clear instance of the process becoming the punishment and creating a chilling effect on freedom of expression in the UK."
Unfortunately, it's doubtful that this issue is likely to go away any time soon. Last week, the House of Lords joined the House of Commons in approving a law that would make it a crime to "interfere" with abortion services. While the law does not include prayer in its definition of "interference," it does ban a broad range of speech that "informs or attempts to inform about abortion services by any means, including, without limitation, graphic, physical, verbal or written means."
Through their PSPO, the Birmingham city government got what it wanted. Pretty much any pro-life protest you can imagine is illegal under the city's regulations. But in the process, they've created a restriction on speech so broad that renders it criminal to have prayers in your head while passing by a local abortion clinic—a gross violation of basic civil liberties.
"I pray wherever I go, inside my head, for the people around me," Gough said. "How can it be a crime for a priest to pray?"
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]]>Around 1.5 million English households use wood-burning heaters, stoves and fireplaces, and many of those homeowners could face fines and criminal charges under new rules adopted by the government. The government has reduced the amount of particulate matter wood-burning stoves and heaters are allowed to emit and given local governments the power to issue spot fines of up to £300 ($360 U.S.) to those whose chimneys emit too much. The new rules also allow local governments to pursue criminal charges against repeat offenders or those who do not pay their fines.
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]]>Even as the National Health Service struggles with a shortage of doctors, the British government has ordered medical schools to hold to a previously announced cap and admit no more than 7,500 medical students this year. The cap was put in place to limit the cost of educating medical students. It costs the government £160,000 (about $200,000) to educate each new physician. Medical schools face financial penalties if they admit too many students.
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]]>Have you heard? The world is about to end!
60 Minutes recently featured Paul Ehrlich, author of the bestseller, The Population Bomb. "Humanity is not sustainable," he said.
Why would 60 Minutes interview Ehrlich?
For years, Ehrlich said, "We are very close to a famine" and, "In the next 15 years, the end will come." He's been wrong again and again.
Yet, 60 Minutes takes him seriously. "Paul Ehrlich may have lived long enough to see some of his dire prophecies come true," intoned reporter Scott Pelley. Now, 60 Minutes says, "scientists say" the earth is in the midst of a "mass extinction!"
Doom sells.
Ehrlich's book sold an amazing three million copies. It claimed the Earth's rising population would lead to worldwide famine.
The opposite happened.
The world's population more than doubled. But today there is less famine!
60 Minutes did mention that Ehrlich was wrong about widespread starvation, but they ignored his many other silly predictions. One was that by the year 2000 (because of climate change), England will not exist.
Ehrlich won't talk to me now, but seven years ago, when my producer asked him about his nonsense, Ehrlich said, "When you predict the future, you get things wrong."
The media should ignore doomsayers like Ehrlich, and pay more attention to people like Marian Tupy, editor of HumanProgress.org.
In my new video, Tupy points out that "life is getting better." The modern era has brought much longer lives and the greatest decline in poverty ever.
Of course, universities, media, and politicians say capitalism is destroying the earth, so young people throw soup on famous paintings. It's the moral thing to do, they believe, because we face an apocalypse!
"If you sell the apocalypse," says Tupy, "people feel like you are deep and that you care" But "if you are selling rational optimism, you sound uncaring."
Uncaring? It's the doomsayers who are anti-people. Ehrlich once even floated the idea of sterilizing people and reducing population growth by having government poison our food.
"Ehrlich sees human beings as destroyers rather than creators," says Tupy, "no different from rabbits. When they consume all grass around us, their population explodes, but then it's going to collapse. But human beings are fundamentally different. We have the capacity to innovate."
It's counterintuitive to think that people can be good for the environment. "We use stuff," I say to Tupy.
"We use stuff, but we also grow stuff," he responds. "What matters is new knowledge. Think about something as simple as sand. When we started melting down sand to create glass, we used the first glass for glass beads. Now we create microchips."
Similar innovation in farming, transportation, and genetic engineering is why our growing population doesn't destroy nature.
"Forests have grown by 35 percent in North America and Western Europe in the last 20 years," Tupy points out.
That's because innovative humans found ways to produce more food on less land. Also, prosperous countries can afford to protect nature.
But this idea that human innovation helps nature is nowhere near as popular as the idea that humans destroy earth.
Many young people are so misled that many don't want to have kids.
But that would hurt the world! Fewer women having babies today is probably more of a threat than climate change. Not only do we need young people to take care of the growing number of us old people, we need them to invent the things that will solve the Earth's problems.
More children means more people who might grow up to cure cancer or invent a carbon-eating machine.
However, more people by itself is not enough to provide the innovation we need.
"Certainly not," says Tupy. "If the number of people was all that mattered, China would have been the richest country for centuries. What you need is people, and freedom. If you let human beings be free, they will create more value for everyone."
COPYRIGHT 2023 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.
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]]>United Kingdom leaders are pushing forward with a massive online censorship bill that, thanks to the lobbying of a group of lawmakers over the weekend, has been made significantly harsher with threats of imprisonment for tech platform managers who run afoul of the complicated regulations.
The Online Safety Bill has been under construction in the U.K. Parliament and various government committees for nearly a year. The massive bill (the current version spans 260 pages) establishes "duty of care" responsibilities for tech platforms to keep what the government deems "online harms" (which is broader than just violent or pornographic content) out of the view of children.
The bill flat-out forces platforms to serve as censors or face significant fines—£18 million ($22 million) or 10 percent of a company's global revenue, whichever is higher. The rules will be overseen by the Office of Communications (Ofcom), the U.K. government's media regulator.
Reason has warned about this bill in the past, particularly given the country's willingness to use the law to punish people who say things the government deems "offensive." Last year, Joseph Kelley, a citizen of Glasgow, Scotland, tweeted out an insult of an elderly military veteran who had become a "national inspiration" for his resilience in accepting the coronavirus lockdowns (and later died of COVID-19 complications because he was unable to be vaccinated for health reasons). Kelley was prosecuted under a British law against "grossly offensive" messages and sentenced to 150 hours of community service.
Over the weekend, a group of conservative lawmakers succeeded in forcing reforms to the Online Safety Bill to make it even more punishing, and they were willing to sink the whole bill to get their way. Brits probably would have been better off if that had been the case. Instead, the act is now in the process of being amended to add a potential two-year prison sentence to managers of platforms who ignore enforcement orders from Ofcom to remove or censor content or to otherwise make sure children don't have access to it.
To be clear, just in case what happened to Kelley doesn't spell it out, we're talking about censorship above and beyond pornography or content that would fall under unprotected speech, even under the U.K. law. Matthew Feeney, a former Reason editor and Cato scholar, now serves as head of tech and innovation for England's Centre for Policy Studies. The think tank warns that the bill would "do far more harm than good in its current form, and should either be scrapped or seriously amended," and that was before the current proposed changes to make it even harsher.
Feeney explains that while the bill has been changed to remove a contentious proposition to allow for orders to censor "legal but harmful" content online, those authorities are still present within this bill in any web space where children may have access. And that will create a massive compliance problem that will most certainly encourage platforms to censor all sorts of speech. Using examples of discussion of suicide online, Feeney writes:
It might initially seem obvious what youth suicide promotion content looks like. But a video that promotes suicide can be harmful in one context (e.g encouraging young people to end their lives) and helpful in another (e.g a mental health charity showcasing the content as part of a seminar series on youth mental health). A social media company seeking to allow the latter but not the former would likely remove both if NC2 makes its way into the final version of the legislation. The result would be fewer online resources available for children struggling with suicidal thoughts, eating disorders, harassment, abuse, and other difficult issues that require online firms to adopt nuanced and flexible content moderation practices in order to be effective.
In other words, in order to reduce the risk of earning the ire of Ofcom regulators, tech platforms under this law are likely to censor in overly broad ways even to the point that information that is genuinely helpful to minors, but about a controversial subject, is removed.
Oh, and what is harmful content? Whatever the U.K. secretary of state for digital, culture, media, and sport decides. The bill's text literally lets one government official declare content harmful to minors and, therefore, mandate social media platforms to take efforts to keep children from being exposed to it.
Who the bill may affect is not entirely clear. Wikimedia Foundation Vice President of Global Advocacy Rebecca MacKinnon said she's concerned that the bill will hamper the work of Wikipedia, which is dependent on volunteer editing. The BBC further notes that while people might think this is all about Twitter, Facebook, and social media platforms, there are many more ways for people to communicate with each other online. Would a multiplayer game have to monitor its players' speech? Would anybody operating on a private online server be held responsible for what users share with each other?
"The cure is very much worse than the disease," Feeney observes. We have already seen many examples of social media platforms broadly censoring content about various controversial subjects, often to please government regulators. The Online Safety Bill will make it government policy to tell tech platforms what they can allow people to talk about, using the excuse that children might be exposed to inappropriate content. The bill chills speech, and it should be stopped.
The post Britain Wants To Jail Social Media Managers Who Don't Censor to the Government's Liking appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, director of March for Life U.K., has been charged with four counts of failing to comply with a "Public Space Protection Order" for silently praying outside an abortion clinic in Birmingham. The city has banned all forms of protest outside abortion clinics. Vaughan-Spruce was carrying no signs or photos.
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