What is the point of Magna Carta?

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We have been regaled with the Magna Carta on its 799th birthday. And much of this has been to remind us of the document's seminal importance to England and to the English idea of liberty and the rule of law. An idea that became British, grew to be American and still sits at the heart of how that rather ugly concept "the anglosphere" sees itself.

So it is right that we understand what the Magna Carta means in practical terms and David Allen Green is on hand to remind us:

...as law, it is of little or no practical use. Nobody in modern times seems to have ever relied on it to determine the outcome of a case. It is not “live” in the way the Bill of Rights is in the United States or similar constitutional guarantees in other countries. It is ornamentation, not legislation.

Now I am not sufficient of a lawyer to explore whether or not this argument is sound. So I will take the good lawyer at his words and agree that the Magna Carta has no effective force in law. And for completeness, I will agree also that David Allen Green's conclusion - that this veneration of Magna Carta represents a problem:

What would be better than this sentimentality about a thirteenth century manuscript would be for the UK to have proper constitutional guarantees: to make it possible for a defendant to rely on his or her fundamental rights in practical case, and to make it impossible for Parliament and the executive to violate these rights. But this would mean that the UK would at last have a mature approach to constitutional rights.

However, our politicians and judges would prefer us to believe in a medieval myth which allows them to do to us what exactly they would do to us anyway. It suits them grandly that the charter is merely a “symbol”. 

Readers of the original piece from Mr Green will have noticed that I've left off the last sentence of his article - the part where he says that politicians and judges are celebrating the wool being firmly pulled over our eyes. I don't believe this is the case with those most ardent in their veneration of the Magna Carta, I believe these men - mostly politicians rather than lawyers - are absolutely sincere and that the document is extremely important and very significant.

One of the things about being a conservative is that we recognise a thread through history linking the institutions and events of times past to the truth of today's world. And, it's true that some of this is 'myth' but that doesn't change it's importance to our identity. The Magna Carta - the charter itself and its associated mystery - is such a thing, a symbol of our identity. Indeed, without that charter would we have had the Glorious Revolution? Would there have been the English Bill of Rights, the US Constitution and subsequent statements placing liberty above the power of leviathan?

It is this that we celebrate not the specific content of the Magna Carta, the idea of liberty and individual sovereignty. And it's also true, as David Allen Green reminds us, that a national myth is not enough on its own to protect our liberty. We've had the secret courts, the encroaching surveillance, the denial of free speech and much else besides. All things from which Magna Carta cannot protect us, all abuses of liberty loaded upon us by subsequent governments.

If in celebrating Magna Carta we must remind ourselves that it was a statement against arbitrary government and in support of a law that belonged to us all not to that government. The point of Magna Carta isn't to sneer, to get all lawyerly, but to point to document and to the government saying: "we want our liberties back." And when politicians say how important it is to them - and I note that here it is overwhelmingly conservative politicians doing so - we should ask 'how important'? Enough to guarantee again the rights those barons demanded of their king? Enough to reaffirm the Bill of Rights signed into law by squires and merchants in parliament?

If we take the Magna Carta and make its central idea of a law independent of government important again, point to it as the source of ideas like free thought, free speech and free assembly, and teach these myths to our children we will allow those children to claim those rights again, to challenge leviathan and to make those judges and politicians David Allen Green distrusts do the will of the people.

This is the point of celebrating Magna Carta. The point David Allen Green misses in his otherwise excellent article.

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Right-to-buy, property rights and the cause of liberty

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Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place. ~Frederic Bastiat

In the 1970s some local councils - including Bromley where my Dad was then Chair of Housing - began to explore the sale of Council houses to sitting tenants. These initial 'right to buy' ideas were tentative and limited - Councils lacked to power to incentivise the sale (beyond help with the actual process) and couldn't offer discounts or subsidies. However, these initial ideas led to what I consider - more than headline grabbing controls of trade union misbehaviour or the application of monetarist ideas to macroeconomic management - to be the defining piece of 'Thatcherite' legislation: the Housing Act 1980:

The act nationally implements a scheme of discounts against the market price of houses, to reflect the rent already paid by tenants and to encourage take-up. The scheme gives a generous minimum discount on the market price of 32 per cent for a house or 44 per cent for a flat, increasing each year to a maximum of 70 per cent.

Free market purists quail at this use of public subsidy and the progressive left bewail their loss of control over working-class tenure but this single act signalled a shift from the idea of collective ownership to the liberation that is private, personal ownership. Some 2 million properties transferred from state ownership to the ownership of the people who lived in them. It was the biggest ever transfer of wealth in the history of modern Britain.

The criticisms - leaving aside bien pensant nonsense - always boil down to a view that some people simply can't be trusted with owning things. The truth, however, is that - as even the Joseph Rowntree Foundation have shown:

Eighteen years on, there can be no doubting the impact of the Right to Buy. Some 30 per cent of tenants have exercised the Right to Buy. The majority of these have benefited considerably from the process. The volume of sales and capital receipts has far exceeded expectations.

The residual nature of council housing means that the rate of sale under right to buy has declined  - there were just 3,700 sales of this sort in 2011. However that was still 3,700 families who have moved from the dulling embrace of the council to private ownership. And we know from experience just what this means - new doors are put in, gardens are better kept, the walls are fixed, leaky gutters mended and a sense of difference stamped on the place. All because ownership implies a desire - perhaps even a duty - of care for the property, a care that simply doesn't exist in circumstances of so-called common- or state- ownership.

Those who attack the government for promoting home ownership - all that chatter about bubbles and so forth - miss this point entirely. And to suggest that having a mortgage isn't ownership is to misunderstand the reality. Ask that man with a mortgage whether it's his house? He'll tell you it is and will behave as such - making sure it's looked after, sorting out its problems and defending the value of the property in whatever way he can.

Those who take the problems faced by a minority of homeowners - negative equity, mortgages stretching beyond retirement, foreclosure due to loss of earnings - and use them to condemn the idea of a property-owning democracy are peddling an extremely dangerous myth. The myth that the alternative - renting (I assume from the state out of preference) - is somehow preferable. Or rather preferable for that group of people most likely to get into trouble with mortgages - the people our bien pensants like to patronise.

If we are to have government fund the development of housing - and so long as the planning system remains as it is now this is the only way we will meet housing need - let it be on the basis that those moving into those homes will in the fullness of time get the chance to own those new homes. Instead of subsidised rents being simply a way to reduce housing benefit costs, let's use them to build up the funds to support people on the road to property ownership. And if that means deposit subsidy, tax reliefs and mortgage support so be it.

In the end property ownership makes democracy stronger, promotes independence and takes us another step nearer to a free society. To deny property rights, to claim government knows better or, worse, to assert that rights are created by man is to do the opposite - to take us back towards tyranny.

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Human rights and the curse of laws

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The debate over the Human Rights Act and its parents - the European Court of Human Rights and the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" - is a strange one. Not because the matter of 'rights' is unimportant or even that these laws are without value but because the presumption in all of this is that rights exist only because of our masters' benevolence. The debate seems to treat 'rights' in a way little changed from the rights granted by feudal lords to their most loyal servants - somehow our rights will disappear, melt like snow in Summer, were the Human Rights Acts to be scrapped.

The state constrains rights and then allows, in its benevolence, some of those rights to be freed. The state is not the source of rights but exists - or should exist - to protect those rights. The debate shouldn't be about the existence or otherwise of rights but about the best way to ensure those rights are guarded.

Let it be known that the British liberties are not the grants of princes of parliaments, but original rights, conditions of original contracts, coequal with prerogative, and coeval with government. That many of our rights are inherent and essential, agreed on as maxims and established as preliminaries even before a parliament existed.

It does not matter at all whether we have signed some declaration, taken part in some international court or passed laws within parliament. All that matters is that our rights are protected, that we can have confidence that authorities charged with upholping those rights will do so and that this will be done without fear or favour.

This is not the case. Take Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that document that we cherish:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Does this say anything about being arrested for being rude about a diver? Or stopped from photographing a police station or an airport? Or the entire edifice now being built around 'hate crime' and 'equalities' - an edifice designed to bully people into accepting the left's newspeak rather than to deal with hate?

Perhaps there is a case for declaring some beliefs so dreadful and to merit their expression a crime - but where do we stop with defining those dreadful beliefs? And if it is right to prevent racism by making its expression a crime despite this being contrary to Article 19, surely it is also right to allow the deportation of criminals who constitute a threat to wider society despite their claim of a "right to a private and family life" under Article 8 of the UK's Human Rights Act?

In all the discussion around 'rights', there is an assumption that the Human Rights Act is intended to protect rights and not to contain fundamental rights within a body of law - to bring those rights back under the definition and purview of the state. So free speech is qualified - to such an extent that any protection of our 'right' to speak is nullified by the tools available to agents of government. The protection of "health or morals" seems so broad as to allow almost any statement ot be proscribed. And if this is not enough the Act allows the limiting of free speech to protect 'national security' and to prevent 'disorder'.

The Human Rights Act isn't a universal, sacrosanct declaration but, as with all laws, a flawed, controlling interpretation of the idea of 'rights'. The idea that changing it - even scrapping it - represents a backward step and that somehow our rights would vanish is nonsense. The most important rights - speech, movement, assembly, protest, exchange - these rights are more honoured in the breech by the Human Rights Act. The state is granted so many controls and the 'rights' are so curtailed that it's hard to see that the loss of the Act would make much difference.

In discussing 'rights' we should be talking first about what are the things that make us free and then what are the justifications for limiting somebodies freedom. Instead we indulge in an ever more occult discussion - guarded closely by lawyers - where the parsing of particular sentences and the dissecting of judges' opinions casts a thick mist over any understanding of 'rights'.

Finally, just as 'equalities' rules run the risk of being used to secure advantage, so it the case with the Human Rights Act. And because our judges care more about words than intention - such in the curse of laws - the result is decision-making that does not promote rights but that brings the protection of rights into question. To the ordinary man such inconsistencies, such egregious interpretation of 'rights' means that we run the risk of destroying protection on the altar of lawyerly pedantry.

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Selling girls to old men - it's a shocking world

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And at times I want to scream:

Olympic Swimmer, Ayouba-Ali Sihame, competed in the 2012 games as one of seven Olympians representing her home country, Comoros. Before Sihame came to London she had been told by her mother that she had been sold to a 60-year-old man who was already married to two women. She was told that if she didn’t cooperate with the marriage she would be subjected to violence or killed.

This is why we have an asylum system - let's never forget it.

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Bradford Council should pay for photographs...

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Rock snapper and occasional civil liberties campaigner Nick Pickles explains that Bradford Council is using 'licensing' to get top photography for free:

The issue of ‘rights grab’ contracts is one I’ve blogged about before, and the issue doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon.

In essence they are contracts that you sign to photograph a band and as a condition of that contract you transfer your copyright to the artist, often without limitation. A milder version is where the contract requires you to license your work for free, while you retain the copyright. Not a huge difference in practice - the root of it is they get to use your work for free.

This is wrong. These photographers are not filthy rich paparazzi but mostly semi-professional and self-employed folk. And Bradford Council is ripping them off by requiring:

 7. I agree to forward to the Bingley Music Live organisers a copy of all photographs taken by my organisation at Bingley Music Live 2012. Images to be supplied in JPEG format and at not less than 300 dpi
 

Bradford Council should pay for photographs and respect the livelihoods of hard-working photographers.

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Some thoughts on toll bridges and copyright

Driving home from City Hall this afternoon I listened to a sweet little interview with a woman who had bought a toll bridge.

Grahame Penny and Maggie Taylor paid £403,000 for the Whitney-on-Wye bridge between Hereford and Hay-on-Wye. The crossing, which comes with a two-bedroom cottage and 1.1 acres, was built in 1779 and was granted exemption from tax by an Act of Parliament as it was privately funded.  It brings in around £2,000 per week but the couple will have to pay for annual maintenance and any staff costs.

It seemed to me that this little property might help us to understand the debate that carries on about copyright and intellectual property. But more of that in a minute – firstly we need to understand that ‘property’ is not a thing but a ‘right’. The access to my house is across land in the ownership of others but that access is my property – I do not own the land but own the right to cross that land so as to reach my house. I cannot parcel up that right but I can, should I wish, sell it -  which is what Bradford Council does with the right to fish in Chellow Dene reservoirs.

Mr Penny & Mrs Taylor own a bridge across the Wye and are permitted by law to charge you for the use of that bridge. When you drive up and hand over the necessary 80 pence, you are permitted – you have bought the right – to cross the bridge. Just once – if you come along tomorrow, you will have to pay again to have the right to cross the bridge.

Similarly, when I go to the cinema I buy a ticket allowing me to watch a particular film once and once only. If I want to watch that film again, I have to pay again just as I do with the toll bridge. And the same applies to a host of other rights to make use of another’s property – railway tickets, amusement parks, football matches and theatrical performances all spring to mind in this regard. Indeed, we even have to pay to use the lavatory.

All of these are examples where the right to use a particular “resource” is granted to the purchaser on a limited basis – most usually one use but it could be unlimited uses for a given period of time or a pre-determined number of uses. Copyright operates under the same principle – when you buy something ‘created’ by someone else it could be for your exclusive use or more typically for your use alone. Just as your 80p gets you one trip across Mr Penny & Mrs Taylor’s bridge, the money you hand over for an e-book to go on your kindle give you the use of that work and no-one else.

Without this protection, how are we to prevent you taking that e-book and selling it yourself? Not just to Mrs Smith next door but to thousands of others – all of whom might have bought the book. Even worse, you may choose to simply give the e-book away to anyone who wants it completely destroying the opportunity for the creator to benefit from his efforts. And it doesn’t really matter whether the creator is a multi-billion dollar film studio or a penniless writer in a damp flat.

If the creator chooses to let you use his work on this basis that is his right. But to suggest that he should have his right curtailed because “information wants to be free” is to create a circumstance where a man cannot profit from his own creativity. There is a case for debating what is covered by copyright – is a musical performance copyright or merely the music itself, for example – but the concept is absolutely central to the success of service economies.

The problem is not one of principle – copyright remains important – but of enforcement. Put simply, the on-line world makes it more and more difficult to police copyright effectively. And, as we have seen with the music industry, this pressure results in a dramatic change in business model. It is safe to bet that the same problem will be faced by the book publishing industry (the journal publishing business started its change and began its debate some twenty years ago) and the film industry.

And the main impact of this will be to make the published, copyright-compliant product much cheaper. Which is as it should be – instead of paying several thousand pounds for a subscription to the Journal of Consumer Marketing, the library now pays the same price for access to over 100 journals in that publishers portfolio. And the same will apply with music, books and films.

But this is not about getting rid of copyright, it is about the business models needed in an environment where the comprehensive policing of copyright simply isn’t an option.

However, we still have to remember that the more free riders, the less likely people are to create. To return to our toll bridge, Mr Penny & Mrs Taylor face competition from free bridges elsewhere on the river but that isn’t an argument for removing their rights.  So why should that fact that the web has led to an increase in free riders mean that copyright owners should lose their rights?

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It's not democratic to stop other people going about their business...

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Apparently Anne Minton thinks this is terrible (although I’m not sure the ordinary member of the public would think so):

A defining characteristic of privately owned "public" squares and spaces is conditional access. Members of the public are only allowed in if the company controlling the place is agreeable. This is private property in the same way that someone's house is private property, which means that the owner can decide who is or is not allowed to enter and what they are allowed to do there.

These are not democratic spaces. Instead rules and regulations are enforced by uniformed private security and round-the-clock surveillance. A host of seemingly innocuous activities such as cycling, rollerblading and even eating in some places are forbidden. So is filming, taking photographs and political protest.

I struggle to see how this differs markedly from those “democratic” spaces?

Conditional access? Most public spaces these days are subject to conditional access – think of the parks locked after 7 pm, the ‘keep off the grass’ signs, the strictures on busking, begging and drinking. And yes the banning of those “seemingly innocuous activities such as cycling, rollerblading and even eating”. All these are features of the most public of public spaces. Places now policed by a bewildering variety of uniformed officials – street wardens, parking enforcement officers, PCSOs and the occasional really copper all with powers to move you on, fine you and stop you from doing ordinary everyday things like taking photos, having a fag or resting tired feet.

The truth about all this is that privately owned “public” spaces are not a new invention, nor are they the “privatisation” of previously public land – it suits the owner to ensure that the place is managed in the interests of users and, if that means stopping people from “occupying” the space with a load of mostly empty tents then so be it.

The truth is that these “occupations” are intended to prevent other people from engaging in lawful activity, from going about their daily business. It seems reasonable that private owners should seek to prevent this infringement of the liberty of those who wish to use the spaces they own.

Ms Minton says this is undemocratic but does not ask how those people who wish, for example, to attend St Pauls Cathedral can exercise this right when the “occupiers” prevent them from doing so. Indeed, it is profoundly undemocratic for protesters – a few in number – to try and prevent thousands from going about their daily business simply for the sake of a political “protest”.

Of course people have the right to protest, to march and to gather (although I’m willing to bet that Ms Minton will be near the front of the crowd calling for the EDL, BNP or other unpleasant fascist group to be prevented from protesting). But those protesters, marchers and occupiers have no right to prevent others from doing their business or to “occupy” private places without the agreement of the owners.

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A note on property rights

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One of those things about rights is that they don't come about because a kindly king granted them to us. This was the whole point about the Glorious Revolution and subsequently the US Constitution. and this includes property rights:

By the "absolute rights" of individuals is meant those which are so in their primary and strictest sense, such as would belong to their persons merely in a state of nature, and which every man is entitled to enjoy, whether out of society or in it. The rights of personal security, of personal liberty, and private property do not depend upon the Constitution for their existence. They existed before the Constitution was made, or the government was organized. These are what are termed the "absolute rights" of individuals, which belong to them independently of all government, and which all governments which derive their power from the consent of the governed were instituted to protect.

Ownership of property is an inalienable right - unless of course you're Richard Murphy:

"...tax is a legitimate property right created by law like any other but which happens to belong to the gov't."

To the socialist - and others who believe tyranny is the sole way to order society - property rights are granted by a benign government. And therefore the act of taxation is a right granted to itself by government rather than a fee paid for that government's protection.

This is why socialists like Richard are so very wrong. And so very dangerous.

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To say "property-owning democracy" is tautology - there is no other kind

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OK, I know that the term "property-owning democracy" refers mostly to houses. And this allows people to write utter nonsense about property:

Yet even though the property-owning democracy idea has achieved neither its social nor its financial goals (the housing market has manifestly not developed in an orderly fashion that seamlessly matches supply and demand), there remains a truculent insistence from the right that somehow it is still interference from the state that is the problem, rather than the lack of it.

Now setting aside that the housing market is so constrained by regulation - be it financial, planning or legal - that to describe it as free is utter claptrap, we need to stop with this critique, catch a breath and ask what exactly is the problem?

The reason this critique is wrong - and verging on immoral - is that you cannot have a liberal democracy without property rights. Whether those rights apply to land, housing, paintings or that old pair of boots in the bottom of the cupboard. What is worse is that we are now telling people that owning property is just something for the rich:

We are, arguably, at another point of potential momentous change: the centre-ground voter is increasingly well-knowing about the foolishness and falsity of the home-owning democracy myth; the actual facts reveal that new home ownership, especially among the young, was steadily declining even before the 2008 credit crunch; and the gradual, tentative, dismantling of the previously cherished RTB has not led to any popular revolt.

The liberalisation of property finance and the "Right to Buy" brought about perhaps the biggest redistribution of wealth in England's history - shifting valuable property from the state and from big landlords into the ownership of ordinary men and women.  There are over 6 million homes in the UK that do not have a mortgage and, for those with a mortgage, there are plenty where it is neither a financial burden nor a significant proportion of spending.

The real question is how we allowed the vested interests within the housing system - landowners, existing householders, finance companies and the government - to fix the system so as to make it ever more expensive to 'get onto the housing ladder'.

What these critiques are telling us is that owning things is for the wealthy - ordinary people should not have such aspirations, should satisfy themselves with the outlook of the serf. Indeed the criticism includes - shock-horror - that some folk don't understand (and by implication shouldn't be allowed to play):

A Shelter UK survey indicates that one in four mortgage holders have no idea what the UK base rate is. These mortgage holders are playing with significant financial risks while being unaware of their exposure. Data from Legal & General indicated that maybe 90% of UK mortgages are on variable rather than fixed rate of interest. That's up from 60% from 2007. In something of an understatement, Shelter UK said that when the Bank of England does raise rates, this could push risk-ignorant owner-occupiers and those assuming permanently low interest rates, into a 'spiral of debt and repossession';

I bet those mortgage holders know what rate they are paying, how much they pay out each month and what their limit is in terms of payment. And - since Shelter are stupid - let's point out that all those poor fools on variable rate mortgages got the full advantage of the lowest interest rates ever, unlike the clever chaps with fixed rate mortgages.
 
Ownership is a good thing. It gives us a real stake, a commitment that renting or living for daily consumption doesn't bring. Ownership allows us to pass things along to our children should we so wish. And ownership stores up value - even if house prices aren't rising I still end up with a valuable property having had the benefit of living in it all the while!
 
Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with renting (although the housing subsidy implicit in social housing is a massive distortion to this market) but we shouldn't go around telling less well off people not to aspire to such wealth. That owning things is not for you working class folk.
 
Yet that is precisely what the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Shelter and a plethora of left-wing commenters are doing. And not only are they wrong but their arguments erode the central element of a free society - property rights. It really scares me that some see the constraint of property rights as essential to a liberal democracy:
 
Yet, still there remains in place an obstinate refusal to see that, without a determinedly redistributive infrastructure, liberal democracy simply cannot exist
 
The left believe that Government must have the right to confiscate property so as to allow for a liberal democracy?
 
Herein lies the fundamental reason why the left are illiberal. Such arbitrary powers - we cannot predict precisely which property the government plans on seizing so as to "redistribute" - are the short road to autocracy. Whatever the pain of owning property it is preferable to a ghastly socialist world of confiscation, rationing and centrally-planned chaos.
 
For me such a position is immoral, it patronises ordinary people and it maintains the myth that if it all goes wrong it's someone else's fault. And the government will bail us out.
 
this is the myth that got us into this mess. For heaven's sake let's not do it again.
 
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Abortion: why it's not a simple as it seems to some folk....

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I used to think things were simple. You remove barriers to people’s rights and they behave like grown ups. And for most of us this is true, most of the time, under most circumstances. But let’s paint a little picture, tell a story – one that’s only too real for many young women.


A 17 year-old girl gets pregnant. She know who the Dad is but isn’t in a relationship with him any more, she’s going out with a different bloke who isn’t all than keen on his woman carrying some other man’s child – especially when that man is the spotty Darren from Eccles Street.

Now the girl – let’s call her Carol – tells her Mum and her best friend Shazza that she’s going to keep the baby. They’re happy with this, just as they’d have been happy if Carol had chosen to have an abortion. Happy in her choice and supported by friends and family, Carol trogs off to tell her boyfriend – we’ll call him Karl. Who hits the roof. And Carol.

 The police are called. And, because Carol’s pregnant, unmarried and under 18, social services get involved – after all Carol has decided to keep the baby and that is the proper concern of social services.

Social services tell Carol that, because of her circumstances and her boyfriend’s violence, it’s very likely that the baby will be taken into care straight after birth. Understandably Carol’s pretty distraught and confused. She thought she was going to have a lovely baby to care for but instead she’s become just breeder – having a baby for somebody else.

 And Karl’s on the phone, on Facebook. Begging forgiveness saying he’ll not hit her again. So she goes to meet him. And he says again that she should get rid of the baby.

So she goes to the doctor…

I’m making no moral judgments here about abortion merely pointing out how ignorant it is to say abortion is as simple as this:

…if a woman seeks an abortion within the first 24 weeks of her pregnancy, it is surely then a matter for her alone, subject only to medical advice and approval.

That may be a stripped down description of the law. It may be the case for some women – even for many women. But the reality out there is that plenty of ‘unwanted’ pregnancies are simply not that simple. Young women don’t arrive at the decision to terminate on their own (with their doctors) but do so after speaking with mum, with friends and with others involved in their life. This may not fit that simple picture but it is the real world - and we should deal with the real world rather than one stripped of social interaction where decisions are taken in isolation.

Is it really such a bad thing to say that the NHS should make impartial counselling and advice available to young women in such circumstances? Is it such a bad thing that women contemplating termination should receive the information about their options allowing that “informed choice” the law speaks of?

Personally I don’t think so.

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"Are there any vacancies here at the moment?"

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My wife and I were in Burtons yesterday looking (unsuccessfully) for a t-shirt. While we were perusing the clothes on offer a young woman walked into the shop and approached the floorwalker:

"Are there any vacancies here at the moment?"

The woman was looking for a job*. Now there weren't any on offer at Burton but I was cheered that this young woman saw that the way to get a job was to go out to the places that employ people and ask them whether they had need of her services.

I hope this particular young woman is successful - she shows the initiative that employers like, she was prepared to invest some shoe leather and make the effort. She probably recognises that we have no 'right' to a job - it is work done in exchange for payment received - and that jobs are pretty scarce now. And that plenty never get near to the Job Centre.

*Update - came across this while reading the Policy Exchange report on 'Fairness' (pdf):

At present, Jobseekers Allowance claimants are required to search for work but there is no fixed amount of time they are mandated to spend doing this. In fact, a recent survey conducted by two Princeton economists for the Institute for the Study of Labor, found that jobseekers in the UK spend an average of eight minutes per day looking for jobs.

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Muslim leader calls for ethnic profiling.

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You read that right - in today's Telegraph it is reported the Iqbal Wahhab a "leading Muslim businessman" and Government advisor...

"...urged the Government to introduce the controversial policy of 'passenger profiling' - singling out particular groups for security checks at airports or other transport hubs - in order to combat the threat posed from Islamist extremists.

"The stakes are too high to worry about my individual rights," he said. "What about the right not to be bombed?"

Now isn't that a good idea?

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Second thoughts on a limited understanding of "the progressive"

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It is clear that, when the left use the term “progressive” it has a different meaning from the meaning most people attach to the idea of “progress” – for the left “progressive” is another way of describing the idea that man can be improved. Clearly this idea of “progress” differs from the orthodox socialist concept of “progress”. In a paraphrase of Trotsky here:

“The greater the expansion of the productive forces, the nearer do men approach the kingdom of freedom, and the looser become the chains of necessity. The Marxist, therefore, always supports that society whose productive forces are expanding.”

But “progressives” must have rejected this approach or else how could modern Trotskyite groups and the Greens co-habit a realm of “progressive values”? If “green economics” is about anything it is about the rejection of the orthodox Marxist economics described above – and to the society implied by socialism: a society led and controlled by those engaged in production (however defined).

It seems to me that progressive values are, in fact, unconnected with economic progress but are reflections of attainable social conditions: non-discrimination, freedom of lifestyle choice and the defining of entitlements as rights.

Non-discrimination: the idea that we should not “discriminate” (in the modern sense of the word) is a core mantra for the left. Indeed accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia or other discriminatory action are central elements of the debate between left and right in both the UK and the USA. The problem is that the “progressive” conceptualisation of non-discrimination differs from what I’ll call (for the purpose of absolute distinction) the “liberal” understanding of the concept. For the left – using the collectivist group definitions they favour – non-discrimination is dealt with by the enforcement of non-prejudicial rules of behaviour: we pass laws to punish sexism, ageism, racism, homophobia and prejudice against the disabled.

A liberal says the laws should not be used to control behaviour – for sure the various group prejudices are wrong but I have a right to be racist or sexist if I wish. Saying this doesn’t make me racist or sexist and there is an argument for saying that racism or sexism represents aggression – worthy therefore of society’s intervention. But what about all the other possible prejudices and discriminations? Do they not also merit protection – must left-handers, the short-sighted, the overweight and the ginger-haired “mobilise and organise” to campaign for legislation outlawing discrimination based on these conditions?

Freedom of lifestyle choice: as with non-discrimination this “progressive” idea draws on the importance of group-think and the rejection of individualism. Social policy is formed so as to support people in their chosen alternative lifestyles rather than as a means to improve the general welfare of the population: we craft policies directed at “communities” rather than at individuals. As with non-discrimination this forms a debate between left and right – with the left accusing the right of either not “respecting” those who have made “alternative” lifestyle choices or worse of actively promoting an orthodox lifestyle through policy.

As before the liberal critique of this approach rests not in responding to the left’s stereotyping of the right as racist, sexist homophobic bigots but in understanding that it isn’t the role of the state to govern the choices of individuals. People making lifestyle choices (or having those lifestyle choices made for them by circumstance) need to be aware of the challenges and costs that choice entails. By dividing society up into groups – often into “good” groups and “bad” groups – we present again the problem of the outsider, the person who does not slot neatly into the left’s stereotypes. Because the “progressive” idea is anti-individualist there is an assumption that each person will submit to a group – and that policy will be directed at those groups communicated to them through the moderation of the selected group leadership.

Entitlements as rights: to the liberal, entitlements are not inalienable so are ipso facto not rights – not so for the “progressive”. Entitlements – to work, to education, to welfare benefits and so on – are described as “rights” even when they are self-evidently things that cannot be assured or left unchanged. Thus the minimum wage is portrayed as a “right” given to workers by a benign progressive government. Partly this remains a matter of semantics – even spin – “rights” is a far more accessible idea for the ordinary man than the more nuanced concept of being entitled to something.

Interestingly though the “progressive” view doesn’t accord the same strength to rights to property – be that land (or rights to use land) or other property. Again the liberal position relies on property rights and their absolute protection in law – the “progressive” view that property rights can be alienated to suit some specified group need runs counter to the liberal ideal of a free society. Again a debate between left and right arises – once more centred on the key difference: “progressives” focus on group needs rather than individual rights.

It seems to me that the core principle of “progressive” thinking lies in supporting group rights rather than individual rights. Good things have come from this focus – our changed and changing attitude to women, gays and those with a different skin colour, for example – but also great damage is done to property rights, economic freedoms and to freedom of speech. In the end one of the divides in politics will always be between those who promote the idea of the free individual and those who see the individual in terms of the groups into which that person falls.

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