FREE LIFE
A Journal of Classical Liberal and Libertarian Thought
Issue 40, September 2002

Free Life ISSN: 0260 5112 Published on the Internet by Sean Gabb for the Libertarian Alliance
25 Chapter Chambers, Esterbrooke Street, London SW1P 4NN, Tel: 07956 472 199
E-mail: sean@libertarian.co.uk, Web: http://www.seangabb.co.uk/freelife/ , LA Web: http://www.libertarian.co.uk/
Free Life Editor: Dr Sean Gabb, LA Director: Dr Chris R. Tame
All material © the Libertarian Alliance and the respective authors. All rights reserved.
The views expressed in articles in Free Life are not necessarily those of the Editor, the Libertarian Alliance, its Directors, Committee, Advisory Council, subscribers, or other authors.

Contents

Editorial - Mea Maxima Culpa - Sean Gabb
Late Published Thoughts on the American Bombings - Sean Gabb
To Fight International Terrorism, We Must Decriminalise Drugs   - J. Neil Schulman
Home of the Brave, Land of the Free   - Norman Barry
Charles Moore, The Daily Telegraph, and the "Free Country" Campaign: The Quisling Right Still Rides   - Sean Gabb
More on The Daily Telegraph and the "Free Country" Campaign: An Open Letter to Charles Moore   - Torquil Dick-Erikson
The "Metric Martyrs" and the Constitution   - Sean Gab
Big Brother Plans Compulsory ID Cards   - Stuart Smith
Diary Entry Covering Dennis O'Keeffe's Inaugural Lecture at Buckingham University - Sean Gabb
Letters  to the Editor
Review of Sean Gabb's New Book - Nicholas Dykes
Final Jottings   - Brian Micklethwait

Editorial - Mea Maxima Culpa
Sean Gabb

I should devote this Editorial to arguing against war with Iraq, or to denouncing some domestic horror. However, I have written about these things at greater length in various recent issues of Free Life Commentary, and I imagine that many of my readers will have seen these already. And I feel that it is at least as important to make one of my periodic apologies to all those hopeful souls who have paid a subscription to a journal that almost never appears.

It is now almost a year since the last issue of Free Life. I am not sure that I have ever allowed so long to pass without bringing out something, even if just a few pages. Six months without an issue would be a disgrace. Eleven months simply will not do. Free Life is an important part of the Libertarian Alliance project. Issues are taken to various international conferences and sold or given away. They help reinforce the general perception that the Libertarian Alliance is a force in British politics. The Salisbury Review appears regularly. So does Right Now!. So why not Free Life? That it has not appeared for so long justifies all the self-flagellation that I can fit into the space available on this page. I am a bad, worthless Editor. If I were Japanese, I should by now be looking round my office for something large and sharp. As it is, I am publishing Nicholas Dykes' cruel review of my book.

All this being said, I have not been idle. I have written about 30,000 words on libertarian and conservative issues over the past year; and these have been sent out on the Internet to be read by tens of thousands of people. I have attended two biggish international conferences. I have appeared on radio and television up and down the country. And I have been working with fair industry on getting the Libertarian Alliance website into shape.

This leaves the question worth asking - why bother with Free Life at all? I can surprise no one if I confess that the circulation figures I give to various interested parties are based more on hope than on present achievement. Even granting these figures to be true, Free Life a very small fraction of the audience that I find for my semi-regular articles for Free Life Commentary. And there is nothing like the same speed of response and debate that these articles always enjoy.

When I took over Free Life eleven years ago, I was thrilled to have my very own soap box, and I put more than my usual application into producing it - though not even then did it appear the promised four times a year. But there has been a revolution in technology; and I have taken pretty full advantage of this to become a person of moderate consequence via the Internet. If Free Life had not been revived in 1991, I doubt if it would ever have been revived. Certainly, had we left it until now, any proposed revival would have been laughed at in any meeting of the Libertarian Alliance Executive Committee. We should all have agreed that the cost, in terms of money and time, of publishing a hard copy journal was not justified.

Now, it may seem that self-flagellation is veering towards resignation. Rest assured, my dear and honoured readers, I have no such intention in mind. Just because I might not be willing to start this project today does not mean that I will walk away from it after eleven years of considerable, if intermittent, application. Free Life will continue to appear with more or less regularity. It is, after all, still useful for those subscribers who are not yet on the Internet. It also still impresses those people who still think of electronic publication as a secondary activity. It still makes me and the Libertarian Alliance look good at those international conferences - and we shall have one in London very shortly.

This being said, I do not think that Free Life will continue for very much longer in exactly its present form. I have made no firm decisions yet - and I welcome suggestions from anyone who cares to make them - but electronic publication has now reached the point where it is most decidedly not a secondary activity; nor is it even equal to hard copy publication. For a group as small and bare of time and money as the Libertarian Alliance, it is our primary activity. Many more people read our pamphlets on-line than receive them through the post. What I have vaguely in mind is a shorter, more regular Internet version of Free Life, which will be printed and sent out as a less regular digest to the hard copy subscribers.

I welcome any comments on this proposal.

Late Published Thoughts on the American Bombings
Sean Gabb

Introductory

On the 11^th September 2001, I started out on holiday with Mrs Gabb to Greece. I was disembarking in a small airport when the bombings happened in America. We then drove off immediately to a small cottage in the hills above Chania, and did not go into town until we had eaten and drunk everything in the rather generous welcome pack left for us. When I did eventually hear about the bombings, I went back to the cottage and, looking out over the ba far beneath, wrote the following article in a lined exercise book I had bought for the purpose.

On getting back to England, I decided not to publish the article. The media was still flooded with report and speculation, and my own thoughts on the matter seemed too stale and lacking positive information to justify the effort of transcribing. Now, almost a year later, I have moved house, and I have found the exercise book in a box that I hoped contained something else. It is not quite so unpublishable as I thought last year, and so I am sending out. I publish it exactly as I wrote it, complete with repetitions and digressions.

I am presently on holiday half way up a Greek mountain with Mrs Gabb. As we have neither a radio nor a television set, and have made sure to keep the mobile telephones mostly turned off, It was several days before we heard about the terrorist raids in America. What little I do know about them now I had from an American I met outside a Roman church in Chania, from a hurried telephone conversation with Dr Tame, and from a Greek newspaper that I read haltingly and with much skipping of demotic words. I am therefore almost uniquely qualified to comment on the matter.

I am not basically ignorant of the facts. I know what was bombed. I also think it reasonable to assume an Islamic connection. What I am missing is the endless television coverage - the politicians variously sobbing over the widows and orphans, and threatening some vague but terrible revenge; the journalists interviewing each other when no one else is saying anything they think worth covering; and coordinating the whole show in all its limited diversity, the Washington lie machine, now working a pitch that makes the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait nothing by comparison. Sorting through that lot for the occasional nugget of truth and relevancy must surely prevent anyone in the short term from clearly seeing the underlying reality of what has happened. And so, while I have no grasp of detail, and while what I do say will lack all immediacy when I do eventually send it out on the Internet, I think I have something that is worth saying.

First, to the legitimacy of the attacks. The Greeks I have spoken to seem mostly rather pleased by the attacks. The common response goes something like: "It was a terrible thing, and I feel for all those ordinary Americans - but they did have it coming". I can understand this response. The Greeks have never much liked Westerners. They despised us long after their own days of greatness had passed. More recently, they have resented our superior wealth and civilisation. They only sided with us in the Cold War because of the bribes given to their politicians, and because they hated Soviet atheism more than our Enlightenment virtues. But while I understand the Greek response, I do not agree with it. Undeniably, the American establishment and its British glove puppets have spent the past generation recklessly provoking what has just happened. But I am not at all pleased that it has happened. I have friends in both New York and Washington, and I do not know as I sit here writing if they were not among the victims. I am also strongly aware that what has been done in America could just as easily be done in England. I do not like it that our rulers have killed or helped to kill many times more Moslems than Americans died this week. But neither am I prepared to welcome a retaliation that threatens the whole of western civilisation. If our rulers now propose to carpet bomb whatever Islamic country may be harbouring the directors of the attacks, I cannot find it in me to raise a word of protest.

Ths being said, our longer term response cannot be purely violent. Just as the shootings in Sarajevo started the 20^th century, so these aeroplane bombings have started the 21^st. And the basic fact of this new century is the death of the American Empire.

Since 1945, the Americans have believed empire to be a fairly cheap business. It is not. The Romans discovered this more than 2000 years ago. They acquired their eastern provinces almost without trying - in one case, they were left a province in the will of the last local ruler. But when the Greeks of Asia Minor rose in support of Mithradates, they murdered 40,000 Roman citizens in one go; and it was only after years of hard fighting that the revolt was crushed. We learnt the cost of our own empire in the blood and humiliations of the South African War. The Americans are now learning the cost of their own empire. It is not a theoretical risk of nuclear annihilation, or a few colourful defeats in south east Asia that can be forgotten or ignored at home. It is the real and ever-present threat of mass terrorism within the United States. And unlike the Romans, but rather like us, the Americans do not have the firmness of mind to live with the costs of empire.

For the moment, I have no doubt, the Americans are breathing fire and vengeance; and they will cheer on anything their government does. But that is only for the moment. It can no longer be assumed that those people who hate America and are not afraid to die are also too stupid to throw away their lives to any great effect. Aeroplanes could be made more secure against a repeat of what has just been done by letting crew and passengers carry weapons - though I doubt if that will be considered, bearing in mind our rulers' dislike of an armed citizenry. But there are other cheap and easy means of killing civilians on a large scale. Deadly chemicals or germs can be dropped into reservoirs. Otherwise, there are people able to pray themselves into a frenzy, then wiling to infect themselves with something deadly to spread as they walk though crowded railway trains. Whoever it was thought of taking over aeroplanes and crashing them into big buildings is a genius. But no genius is need to vary or improve on that flash of insight. If the Americans carry on as they have, they will be hit again and again. Before long, public opinion will sicken of imperial adventures. Even before then, the monied interests will demand an end to policies that plainly endanger them.

This, after all, is how the Americans usually behave in the face of violent resistance. 20 years ago, they went into Lebanon, telling themselves what a fine job they could do of restoring peace there. A single truck load f high explosive had them straight back out. Much the same happened in Somalia ten years ago.

I do not blame the Americans for such behaviour. Theirs is an individualistic, commercial civilisation. It is not capable of accepting death on a large scale unless there is no easy alternative. That is both the excellence and the weakness of their civilisation. They are not like the Romans. They are not even like the British and French.

And so, whatever the Americans may do in the short term, their empire has collapsed. It should never have been established. It was maintained with endless cruelty and lies. But its passing will leave the same chaotic void as follows the end of every other great empire. Throughout the world, nations and classes raised to power by American support will now be left to find their natural level. The new equilibrium will take years to emerge, will involve unimaginable suffering, and may not be favourable to western civilisation.

The most obvious victim of these changes will be the State of Israel. Since it was founded, it has relied on American support. It has been able to count on American money and weapons and diplomatic support and military intelligence. Though there has always been much quiet grumbling in America at the scale of support, a reasonably united Jewish lobby, plus the fact that the costs of support have never been unbearable, has always kept the Congressional votes favourable. Ths will now change, even if not at first. No bribes or threats of character assassination will keep the votes favourable when the cost is more domestic terrorism. For all they disagree on other matters, Jews and anti-semites agree that the Jewish lobby rules America. I do not think it does. Whatever influence it has enjoyed in Washington has been on the understanding of a limited liability to America. Every perceived increase in that liability will bring a proportionate decline of influence.

For the moment, of course, Israel is a great power in its own right. Its wealth and general civilisation make it unbeatable in any standard war. But the demographic trends in the Middle East are against it.; and I am not sure how long a mostly western and liberal Israeli élite will remain willing all by itself to maintain Jewish supremacy even in Israel, let alone in Israel and the occupied territories. The men with beards who talk endlessly about God's promise to the Chosen Race would rejoice at ethnic cleansing and wars to establish regional hegemony. But they are not on the whole the people who rule that country. Those are visibly beset by very western moral qualms, and may not have the nerve to begin - let alone continue - the course of terror by which alone their country can be saved. Any Israeli with dual citizenship is well-advised, therefore, to start looking seriously into what right of abode his children can expect to have elsewhere.

But I digress. That America will not remain an imperial power strikes me as not worth doubting. How the retreat will be managed is in doubt. The best option seems to be that the Americans should send the next year in putting on a tremendous show of power - to seek out and punish those responsible for the bombings - and then should quietly scale down their activities in every place that does not involve some obviously vital national interest. And that means abandoning Israel and all the corrupt and inherently weak ruling classes they have been supporting throughout the Islamic world. The object should be to deter future terrorism by a combination of ruthless force and the avoidance of further provocation.

The more likely option, I fear, will involve their blundering about until there have been more and even larger terrorist attacks inside America. Hubris and Nemesis are never long separated. Right at the end of his book Give War a Chance, P.J. O'Rourke writes exultingly of his final experience while covering the 1991 Gulf War. He had hitched a lift out of Kuwait on a New Zealand war plane. Flying at 300 miles per hour, he and the crew dropped to a hundred feet over the Saudi desert and frightened a camp of bedouins. A boy of about ten looked up into the sky. For the split second of visibility, his face could be seen awestruck at the immense technical supremacy of western power. That technical supremacy, says Mr O'Rourke, is a sight the boy would never forget. Perhaps it has not been forgotten. The boy would now be a young man in his twenties. Am I the only person wondering if he ever took flying lessons?

To Fight International Terrorism,
We Must Decriminalise Drugs
J. Neil Schulman

From January 17^th, 1920 to December 5^th, 1933, the United States lived under the Prohibition of alcohol - the War on Drugs of the Roaring 20's. The roaring of the 1920's was an underground culture where alcohol was even more readily available, especially to children and teenagers, than when it was legal, but in which the distributors of that "drug of choice" were gangsters. The 20's was the era that invented the drug-related neighbourhood turf war and the drive-by shooting, and the War on Alcohol was so destructive to the domestic peace of America that the constitutional amendment that enacted it is still the only repealed constitutional amendment in American history.

Ever since President Nixon launched the War on Drugs in 1968, the history of Prohibition has repeated itself. We have seen schools overrun by drug-fuelled gangs and racked by chronic violence, inner-city neighbourhoods terrorised, prisons filled beyond capacity with drug offenders, and international drug cartels flourish. Yet, just like during alcohol Prohibition, drug prohibition has done nothing except create an underground drug culture where drugs are even more readily available, especially to children and teenagers, than when it was legal, but in which the distributors are gangsters.

Libertarians and conservatives such as Milton Friedman and William F. Buckley, Jr., have pointed out the futility of a policy which for three decades has seen no benefits and only destructive unintended consequences, but the tax-financed propaganda in the anti-drug war is so effective that their voices have been ignored and the legalisation of drugs has been a third rail of American politics.

But September 11^th has given us two new and immediately pressing reasons for the American people to consider legalising drugs.

The first reason is that the black market in illegal drugs is directly financing the terrorist networks which attacked our country on September 11th. President Bush has said so twice in the past few days.

In his November 10^th speech to the UN General Assembly, the President said, "The terrorists call their cause holy, yet they fund it with drug dealing."

And during his November 13^th press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin, President Bush said, "The new government [of Afghanistan] must export neither terror nor drugs" This was President Bush's oblique way of pointing out to the Northern Alliance, our new strategic allies in the region, that we have not forgotten that right up to September 11 ^th the United States was subsidising the Taliban in their fight against the Northern Alliance because the Northern Alliance were financing their operations by trafficking in heroin.

But aside from financing terrorists, the international black-market in drugs establishes underground trade routes which can carry not only drugs but also can carry terrorist deployed weapons of mass destruction.

Decriminalising drugs will destroy these black-market trade routes, make it possible to "follow the money," from legal drug sales, and relocate the profits from the sale of drugs away from terrorists and into the hands of the major pharmaceutical firms.

Home of the Brave, Land of the Free
Norman Barry

I didn't need to go the United States so soon after the tragedy but I wanted to take the pulse of the country and to assess the emotional and mental damage that has been done. You can read the cold figures in print if you want to know about death and destruction but you have to walk the streets, talk to guys in bars and housewives in supermarkets if you are to assess the long-term effect on the nation. Will that sunny optimism still be there? Most Americans think that today is pretty good but with just a little extra effort tomorrow will be even better. We Europeans, with history supporting us, think that tomorrow is likely to be even worse. Will Americans still think they can fix every thing, from getting to the moon to sorting out that knocking sound that's coming from your gear box? But how can they fix a gang of murderous terrorists who seem to delight in their own deaths as much as their enemies'?

So I found myself in to a little town in Alabama, in late November. I did not meet sophisticated Wall Streeters, slick political operatives from Washington, D.C. or soi-disant, and over-educated, rebels against society from San Francisco. No, it was the ordinary Joe Six Pack, and his wife Sue, with whom I chatted. Joe could not point to Afghanistan on a map, knows little of the Palestine/Israel conflict and could not name a single distinctive feature of Islam. Yet he has a sense of right and wrong, a belief in God (but with no desire to force his version on anyone else) and a deeply-held but modest patriotism. Basically, Joe is stunned by what has happened. Never very articulate, he responds to the outrage with a mixture of naive bellicosity ("let's nuke them") to mystification tinged with understandable resentment: "Whenever there is an earthquake, we send in supplies and rescue teams, if there is a famine we fly in food and if their governments overspend we write out the cheques. And this is what we get in return." But it is said with determination. As President Bush recently stressed: "We have lost our innocence but not our strength."

But there is no complete account of America's response without New York's: it was the major victim of the outrage and it has the most fluent, confident and fearless English-speakers on the planet. They don't just talk about America, they speak more for the Big Apple. Their abrasiveness is legendary, as any customer in a restaurant slow to pay his bill, or a tourist showing the slightest difficulty with quarters, dimes and nickels, will tell you. But they have been almost silenced by tragedy: chastened for a crime they did not commit and outrageously punished for merely being successful. You would never describe a New Yorker as sentimental but no outsider could fail to be moved by the tales of suffering and heroism that have emerged from the disaster: the grief is unimaginable until experienced and the bravery too real ever to be caught by Hollywood.

What about that bright girl of 21, excited on the first day of her first job in the glamorous financial district? Unfortunately she was in the twin towers and her first day at work was her last on earth. What a wonderful multicultural group of bankers worked on the 54th and 55th stories of the north tower. They were Christians, atheists, Sikhs and Muslims: different but joined by the harmless activity of making money. All 742 are now even more united in the cruel equality of death. And the New York fire fighters who were so efficient they got to the scene just after the first plane hit a tower and were soon inside saving lives. But their speed was their undoing. The building fell and 330 of them died. And there was that excessively punctual man who would never be a minute late; and shame on those who were. On September 11th he took his child to school and was very late. He is alive but now there is no one to chide for poor time keeping. There is no office.

And what about those selfish, egotistical New Yorkers? Yes, the men in city suits who went back into the deathtrap time and time again to drag unknown people out; and those greedy Wall Streeters who seemed to find helping people in wheelchairs down a perilous forty flights of stairs as easy as making a fast buck. That alcoholic who lost his job as a para-medic through drink redeemed himself by staying on till the bitter end, scrabbling through the rubble in the hope of pulling yet one more person free. He disappeared into the night without a word to anyone.

The lights on Broadway were not dimmed, they were extinguished and the comedians on the chat shows were silenced. But even the unbelievable anguish was dignified. We forgot about Mayor Giuliani's embarrassingly public marital and prostate problems as he galvanised New Yorkers, by his own personal example, to new heights of self-sacrifice and magnanimity.

But I am still haunted by the plaintive cry of the woman who asked, in disbelief: "Why do they hate us?" But apart from embittered intellectuals and fanatics who pervert religion, "they" don't. Everybody really admires Americans: for their freedom, the stability and unimportance of their politics, their good humour, their seemingly effortless creation of prosperity, their old-fashioned niceness and their love of life.

And as I caught the plane (only a third full) home I realised that it was this love of life that will ensure that America will survive these dreadful, horrific murders inflicted on a peaceful people.

Charles Moore, The Daily Telegraph,
and the "Free Country" Campaign:
The Quisling Right Still Rides
Sean Gabb

OnWednesday, the 1st May 2002, I went on BBC Radio Four's "Today" programme to debate with Charles Moore, Editor of The Daily Telegraph, over his "Free Country" campaign. I was surprised that Mr Moore had agreed to debate with me. I am fairly well-known as a scathing critic of his newspaper and of his honesty and ability as an editor. But the time of the debate approached, and no cancellation message came through. Two possible explanations ran through my mind. First, Mr Moore really was the scrupulously fair and tolerant sort of person he wanted to appear to others, and he had no grudge against me for all the damning things I had said about him and his friends over the years. Second, I was less famous than I thought, and Mr Moore had never heard of me. It is obvious which explanation I preferred. Whichever might be so, however, I went off to the BBC relishing the prospect of a public argument.

A Morning in the Ministry of Truth

I had not at all expected what did happen. I knew that Mr Moore would not be able to sit with me in the same studio, but would make his contribution by telephone from home. I was now told that he would not be available at the time set for the broadcast, and so the debate would need to be recorded. Even then, the debate was nearly cancelled. Mr Moore's telephone was left off the hook, and no one at the BBC knew any other numbers for him. Eventually, though, contact was made. We were approaching the time originally set for the live debate. Would the debate now be live? I asked. No, I was told - it would still be recorded, but now broadcast much later than planned.

Never mind, I thought. At least we were going ahead. The debate started, and I gave Mr Moore five minutes of polite denunciation. I left the studio feeling pleased with myself. I had made some good points, and in front of a large audience.

It was only when people began to telephone me that I realised something was wrong. Why had I been so soft with the man? a friend asked me. Why had I not made what seemed an obvious point? Why had I allowed him to walk all over me? Why had I bothered sending out an e-mail advertising the debate when I so plainly had no interest in winning it?

Confused, I went to the BBC web page that carries the most recent broadcast of any radio programme. There, I discovered what had happened. Though everything by Mr Moore had been kept, over three quarters of what I had said was gone from the broadcast. What remained was a moan about the European Union that, taken out of context, had an emphasis different from what I had intended, and that was joined to a very smooth answer from Mr Moore.

No wonder people were disappointed. After the digital editing of my words, I sounded about as relevant as one of the drunks who call into the late night discussion programmes.

I cannot be bothered to complain. The function of the Media complaints bodies set up in this country is to give an impression of fairness that does not exist. Going through the motions of complaining, to show up how fraudulent the system is, can be useful, but I cannot be bothered even with that. Instead, I will try to be more careful in future. I was too excited by the thought of a radio debate with Mr Moore to pay attention to any attendant circumstances. Next time, I will ask for guarantees of equal time after any editing. Failing that, I will walk out. For the moment, the harm has been done. I had my chance to put my objections to Mr Moore, and the editing of what I said made me seem to have let the chance slip through my fingers. The best I can do in the circumstances is to write down what I said or wanted to say, and give it to the Internet. Here, then, is the contribution that I wish I had been able to make.

The "Free Country" Campaign

The Daily Telegraph "Free Country" campaign began last summer with a claim by Mr Moore that freedom was no longer valued in this country. He did not come out as any kind of orthodox libertarian, demanding the legalisation of guns and drugs, and the shutting down of most government. Instead, he made the milder case that the authorities should accept a presumption in favour of freedom - that while it might be necessary to restrict certain freedoms in the public interest, all such restrictions must be proved beyond reasonable doubt and subject to a continuing right of appeal. The presumption we actually have is in the other direction. New laws come out of Westminster with almost no thought of their effect on our traditional liberties - and increasingly without any scrutiny.

The stated purpose of the "Free Country" campaign is to remind politicians and the public that freedom is important. The campaign opposes illiberal new laws, and calls for the repeal of many of those already made.

Of course, I am glad that The Daily Telegraph has started to talk about freedom. Nor am I concerned that it is not running a radical libertarian campaign. There are many paths to freedom, and there are many stopping points along these paths. There is legitimate room for debate over the nature and extent of the freedoms we should possess; and I would never reject a campaign that did not go as far as I want. My objections to the Telegraph campaign fall under two headings.

A Velvet Fist in a Velvet Glove

First, the campaign lacks focus. It consists, so far as I can see, of short and unconnected moans about specific invasions. The overall effect is disappointing. Whatever may be said in a single article, it is unlikely to shift overall perceptions. Compare what The Daily Telegraph is doing with the campaign run by The Guardian against the Act of Settlement, or for any of its positive causes. Compare it with the daily campaign run by The Independent in favour of British entry to the Euro - where every apparently favourable statistic or news story is pressed into service. The leading articles in favour are like the visible parts of an iceberg - the critical mass that makes it worth attending to is elsewhere. I hope these newspaper campaigns fail, but I cannot fault the technical manner in which they are run. Compared with them, what the Telegraph is doing seems amateurish and faint-hearted.

In particular, no effort has been made to relate most present threats to freedom to their European Union origin. There are plans - active or in waiting - to abolish trial by jury, the lay magistracy, habeas corpus , and the rule against double jeopardy (this latter endorsed, it is worth saying, by The Daily Telegraph and Conservative Party). These would bring about much of the legal harmonisation demanded by the European Union. Yet they are never discussed in the light of the Corpus Juris proposals. Indeed, these proposals have never been properly discussed in The Daily Telegraph. The best discussions I can find are in the letters archive - the features and opinion archive is silent. Nor does the Telegraph spend time complaining about Europol, which is a European police agency established in this country, the officers of which have diplomatic immunity. Some "Free Country" campaign! It is as if The Guardian were to run its campaign against the Act of Settlement while not allowing any of its writers to set out a general case against the Monarchy.

Alliances - What Alliances?

Second, for all his talk about "building alliances" across the political spectrum, Mr Moore shows no interest in giving publicity to other pro-freedom campaigns. It is notorious that The Daily Telegraph has given no coverage worth the name to the Freedom Association, the Democracy Movement, or the Libertarian Alliance. The Democracy Movement is a mass movement that, about 18 months ago, filled Trafalgar Square to listen to speeches against the Euro delivered by the unlikely combination of John Redwood and the Editor of The Morning Star. No coverage in The Daily Telegraph . It did lift a Democracy Movement news story about pro-Euro propaganda in schools - and ran it without attribution. For years, it similarly ran material from the Freedom Association - again without attribution. It sometimes used to publish letters from the Director of the Freedom Association - but never once gave in to pleas for an address to be published so interested readers might know where to contact.

As for the Libertarian Alliance - though I might be thought biassed here - this is an obviously important organisation. It is the most radical free market and civil liberties policy institute in this country. Now that it is more closely allied with the Libertarian International, it has a pan-European reach. Over the past 25 years, it has published over 700 pamphlets and shorter articles about freedom - by leading academics and by leading activists of all shades of opinion: from Enoch Powell and Tony Benn, to Peter Tatchell and an East European prime minister (while still in office). Other newspapers regularly mention our work. A few months ago, The Guardian published a long feature article about incest that was based largely on a Libertarian Alliance pamphlet - and gave full credit. Other newspapers even sometimes publish articles by the main players in the Libertarian Alliance - for example, Dr Chris R. Tame, Brian Micklethwait, and me. The State-controlled BBC has a Libertarian Alliance speaker somewhere on its network at least once a week. Channel Four researchers seem to use us as a point of first call for all manner of projects. Only the Telegraph ignores us. It never uses our news releases. It never invites any of us to address its occasional conferences. The last time it gave any coverage to us was the Easter Monday of 2001, when it fabricated a story in which it called me a terrorist!

I will emphasise - I am not blaming Mr Moore because he does not turn over his campaign to us. Not am I questioning his right to cover or not cover anything that takes his fancy - though not to cover something may compromise his claim to edit a newspaper of record. But we are an undeniably important player in the debate on freedom in this country; and to go out of his way not to mention us at all indicates that his campaign has a different agenda from the one stated.

The Quisling Right Revisited

What is this agenda? I cannot say for sure, because I do not know any of the people running his campaign. But I suspect it has much to do with taking over the debate on freedom and then containing it by marginalising all those interested in winning it. With issue after issue, the Telegraph newspapers and Conservative Party have a clear record over the past few generations. Whether it has been the fight against socialism, or against the European superstate, or now with the fight against creeping authoritarianism, the pattern has been the same - take over the leadership, and do just enough to let the casual observer think that something is being done - but never do enough to produce victory.

I have written about this in my pieces on the Quisling Right [Free Life Commentary, issues 50, 52, et passim], and will not repeat myself. But in this "Free Country" campaign, all the usual signs are there of fraud and betrayal. Look at the list of speakers at the Telegraph's "Free Country" conference of last week (the 1st May 2002). There was Oliver Letwin, whose pro-freedom noises as shadow Home Secretary seem more connected with political correctness than with any recognisably liberal ideology. There was Boris Johnson, a journalistic buffoon, who has made The Spectator into an unreadable comic, and who betrayed his Eurosceptic constituents last summer by endorsing Kenneth Clarke for the Conservative leadership - and even before, I think, he had managed to take his parliamentary oath. There was John Wadham, whose leadership of the National Campaign for Civil Liberties has given neither Jack Straw nor David Blunket a single half hour of embarrassment. With one or two minor exceptions, the speakers were either non-libertarians of any shade or well-connected mediocrities. If we are to rely on these for the defence of our birthright of freedom, we might as well choose now between emigration and the implanted identity chips that are already being tried on cats and dogs.

I do not know if Mr Moore procured the editing of our debate last Wednesday. Probably he did not. But considering the nature of his campaign, it would not at all surprise me if he had.

Yes, next time, I will be more careful.

More on The Daily Telegraph,
and the "Free Country" Campaign:
An Open Letter to Charles Moore
Torquil Dick-Erikson

Editor's Note: This Letter was sent in July 2002. Needless to say, it was not printed, and no reply has been received.

Sir,

Looking through the collection of admirable articles collected now during the first year of the Telegraph's "free country" campaign, I notice something rather strange.

Here you all are, talking about threats to individual freedom in Britain today, and hardly anybody seems to notice the 800-pound gorilla sitting in the room... the biggest source of these threats.

I refer of course to Britain's membership of the European Union.

This issue seems to figure in only three or four articles (or at least in the summaries, it may draw glancing references in some others) in a list of 89 articles on the subject which you give on your website.

And yet it is so central.

There is so much you could do to inform your readers about the profound differences - which so many in Britain are unaware of - between the laws and the traditions of continental Europe and ours, precisely in the field of personal rights and freedoms vis-a-vis the State.

Why is Brussels in effect stifling so many of our freedoms, with its ever multiplying octopus-like tentacles that seek to reach out and regulate every nook and cranny especially of our economic lives? When Britain joined the "Common Market" we thought it would have the opposite effect, that it would liberalise trade and freedom of movement and so on within Europe. Even Mrs Thatcher believed that.

The reason is because the nations of continental Europe have always subscribed in practice to a doctrine whereby it is considered right, proper, and "perfectly normal" for the State to regulate many, many details of life.

Since the planespotters' case in Greece, parts of British public opinion are now aware of the fact that Habeas Corpus and Trial by Jury, those bedrock safeguards of personal freedom which Britons take for granted like the air we breathe, are not recognised in most of continental Europe. Fewer realise that indeed they exist nowhere in continental Europe.

And fewer still realise the extent to which businesses, large and small but especially small, are so often stifled by the need for government permits, licences, certificates, just in order to be able to operate "legitimately", and how the petty bureaucrat, and the politician behind him, in whose gift it is to actually grant the requisite paperwork, or withold it, or .... delay it (!), can use and abuse this position to lord it over those who actually produce a country's wealth. Therein lie the seeds of corruption, and much else besides, from unemployment to inflation. Above all, this state of affairs is uncommented on, unstudied, unresearched, because it is considered "normal" in Europe, and it is unknown in Britain.

The European Union is a project to unite all the countries into one big country, as Kohl said quite clearly. And the hyper-regulations churned out non-stop from Brussels show clearly that the model for this "one country" will be the continental model. British leaders from Major to Blair have blustered about how Britain will "show Europe the way" to prosperity through deregulation and free-market policies... but they have never had any success at all, for the vested interests in keeping things in Europe the way they are are colossal, and there is not the cultural ethos to change them.

Europeans simply do not share our cultural assumptions that include a passionate attachment to individual rights and freedoms. When faced with a case of evident injustice by the State against an individual, they seldom get indignant, they just shrug, and say "Well that is life, you just have to adapt to the idea that certain people/institutions etc are more powerful than the little guy, and they will ride roughshod over him, and there is nothing you or he or anyone can do about it, there is no form of valid redress". Look at the legal systems, look at the criminal legal systems. No Habeas Corpus ? No Trial by Jury? But that, they say, is as it should be, the underlying idea is that the State MUST triumph over the individual, always, even when it is in the wrong, for the only alternative they can see to that is anarchy. The concept of "liberty under the law" is quite alien, and causes genuine puzzlement, or at most raises a hollow laugh of scornful derision at your naivete, once you cross the channel. Even in economics, the Italian, French, etc equivalents of "free market policies" are political insults, and hardly anybody in these countries, whether on the left, centre or right of their political spectrums, wants to be accused of supporting "free market policies".

So Britain, under a succession of Europhile governments, has been set firmly on a course of convergence with the economies, the polities, the legal systems, of our continental neighbours, with whom we share so little in terms of cultural assumptions about individual freedom.

This is a colossal fact, giving rise to so many effects, especially on our personal freedoms. How can you fail to see it?

Of course much of what we laugh at in our politicians and call "control-freak mania" is due to their personalities, or even to human nature in general if you like. Yet how come that in previous periods of our history these tendencies have been more successfully held at bay than now? The true agenda for much of the liberty-crunching legislation now being brought forward has been carefully hidden.

It is realised that if the Home Secretary and the Lord Chancellor announced "We must curtail jury-trial rights and restrict the use of lay magistrates because neither of these safeguards for individual freedom vis-a-vis the State exist anywhere in Europe and Brussels has decided that the different national systems of criminal justice must all ultimately be harmonised and unified, and the single model to be adopted by all will be the continental inquisitorial model, so our British way of doing things must be phased out." - there would be a storm of protest and opposition.

So what are they doing? They are saying, "We think it will be advantageous to reduce jury-trial / safeguards against double jeopardy /rights of the defendant... etc etc, in the interests of speedier justice / more economical justice / better protection against criminals/because of the terrorism emergency... etc etc", and everybody gets embroiled in a debate on these details, failing to see the big picture.

The big 800-pound gorilla sitting in the room is the EU, which is saying "Britain must make these changes, so as to become harmonisable with the other countries of the Union", and the British governments are obediently making (or trying to make) the changes, amputating our liberties so we will fit into the EU Procrustes' bed.

Just take ID cards - they are normal and compulsory throughout Europe, where the poor dears have never known any better, (they think it is a "privilege of citizenship" to have to carry one). Surely this fact, and the talk we hear from time to time coming out of Brussels about the need for a unified "European" ID card / driving licence / passport, bears some relation to the moves by the UK govt to bring ID cards into Britain? The simple fact is that Britain MUST adopt ID cards if it wants to be "European" like the other countries of the EU.

A surprisingly large number of the measures presented by the Blair-Irvine government as "domestic" measures, and which would chip or slash away at the traditional safeguards of our liberties, are actually to be found in the Corpus Juris, that blueprint for a single European criminal code, which was written at the behest of the European Commission and unveiled in 1997 (I was present), and which has since been put on the back burner owing to British opposition (Kate Hoey - then Home Office minister - promised Parliament in December 1998 that the govt would veto it if it were ever introduced, this following an outcry led by the revelations of the Daily Telegraph on the existence of Corpus Juris). It is on the back burner now, but only for the moment, while the tactic has changed, and the EU's assault on our liberties is now being spearheaded by the EU arrest warrant.

I say "spearheaded", for rest assured, once the EU arrest warrant is in place, it will be followed up with implacable logic by further measures for: 1) a European Public Prosecutor with the job of overseeing and "coordinating" all these "European arrests", and he will need not just a list of criminal offences as is provided by the EU arrest warrant, but also 2) a book of rules to govern his activities - oh here is Corpus Juris! how handy; and then of course they will need 3) arms and legs (and guns) so that the whole apparatus can get up and running and operational, so the call will be, "Well let's beef up Europol, give them an operational brief, and have them carrying out the Prosecutor's arrest warrants with EU-wide jurisdiction".

Try recovering national independence once you have armed squads of Europol (immune as they already are from prosecution for their acts!) stationed in every borough....

This is the plan, it is plain to see, the EU architects themselves ( e.g Prodi) make no mystery about it. To mobilise defences for freedom in Britain I believe you need to do a lot more to tell people about this, the main source of danger, the driving force behind so many of the apparently unconnected government initiatives.

Of course that will mean that policy shifts will need to be contemplated, especially by the Tories. If what I say about the EU is true, then we must start getting ready to leave the EU. But the sooner that nettle is grasped the better, at the very least as a policy option. Otherwise, if we carry on saying, like William Hague did, "Never" leave the EU, they will be able to push us around as much as they like, and our freedoms will most surely be taken from us.

The "Metric Martyrs" and the Constitution
Sean Gabb

On Monday the 18^th February 2002, judgment was given in the Court of Appeal on the "Metric Martyrs" case (Thoburn v Sunderland City Council. These were appeals from four men who had in different ways been told by lower courts that it was no longer legal for them to use the English system of weights and measures for any purpose of trade. The grounds of their appeal were that the relevant laws had been made further to powers contained in the European Communities Act 1972, whereas it appeared that their right to continued use of the English system had been protected by the Weights and Measures Act 1985. According to the doctrine of implied repeal, an earlier Act cannot be used to amend or repeal a later Act. Instead, where any conflict arises between Acts of Parliament that cannot be smoothed by judicial interpretation, the later one always takes precedence: leges posteriores priores contrarias abrogant.

What made this case so important was that it was brought to clarify the constitutional status of our membership of the European Union. Either the Judges could apply the doctrine of implied repeal, in which case, our membership of the European Union was compromised to whatever degree the European Communities Act had been repealed, or they could announce that Parliament was no longer sovereign, and that we were now unambiguously under the rule of a centralising, Roman Law despotism based outside this country. In the judgment given last Monday, the four men lost their case. According to Lord Justice Laws and Mr Justice Crane, the 1972 Act was protected against implied repeal by the 1985 Act, and the English system of weights and measures has been legally abolished to the degree stated in the disputed laws.

Now, looking at the superficial aspects of the case, it is a defeat. As a conservative, I deplore the legal suppression of weights and measures which are an integral part of our culture. Whatever its merits considered purely in themselves - and these are probably not so great as is usually claimed - the metric system is an alien thing. Its imposition cuts us off from part of our history, and makes it harder for us to enjoy that intimate communion with the past that is part of any nation's strength and cohesion. As a libertarian, I deplore the imposition of anything. If greengrocers want to sell bananas by the pound or the kilogramme - or indeed by the ancient Athenian mina - that is a matter for them and their customers, not for the authorities. However, if we look beneath the surface, we can see that the judgment was not so much a defeat as a great if conditional victory for both conservatives and libertarians. For while it would not have been politically conceivable for the Judges to strike down any part of the European Communities Act, they did preserve parliamentary sovereignty to the extent that a majority of the House of Commons will be able in due course to repeal that Act by positive legislation; and that is, let us face reality, how we shall eventually withdraw from the European Union - not by some clever legalistic trick, but by full public debate followed by parliamentary repeal. And of equally great importance for us, when the Judges squared the apparent circle given to them, they did so by reviving the ancient doctrine of fundamental law.

This is a mediaeval doctrine that last flourished in the rather strange legal soil of the 17^th century. Its most famous statement is in Lord Chief Justice Coke's judgment in the case of Dr Bonham (1610). Bonham had been fined for practising medicine without a licence from the Royal College of Physicians. The charter under which he was fined had been confirmed by Act of Parliament. In giving judgment for Bonham, Coke CJ commented:

And it appears in our books that in many cases the common law will controul acts of parliament, and sometimes adjudge them to be utterly void: for when an act of parliament is against common right and reason, or repugnant, or impossible to be performed, the common law will controul it, and adjudge such act to be void (8 Coke's Reports, 117-18).

By the end of that century, though, the whole notion of a fundamental law that could be used to judge the validity of Acts of Parliament was in decline. In the American colonies, the notion retained its hold among the lawyers, and is preserved in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. But in this country, the very different notion emerged of the absolute legislative sovereignty of the Crown in Parliament. Our rulers were restrained by their sense of right and wrong - or more often by their caution - in exercising power, but were under no legal restraint so long as they could rely on Parliament to pass whatever Acts they wanted. Parliament was sovereign. Its Acts could be interpreted by the courts - and frequently have been into senses that no Member of Parliament might have recognised in the division lobbies - but could not be called in question.

The doctrine as a whole was elaborated to its full logical conclusions by A.V. Dicey in his Law of the Constitution (1885). It was fully accepted by the courts. "For us an Act of Parliament duly passed by Lords and Commons and assented to by the King, is supreme, and we are bound to give effect to its terms" said Lord Dunedin in 1906 (Mortensen v Peters , 8 F.(J.C.), 93,100).

The only limitation of sovereignty was its protection. It was held that no Parliament could bind itself. Parliament could do anything, except preserve its own Acts from repeal. An Act from the time of Henry VII, for example, states that it cannot be repealed. An early 19^th century annotator of the State Trials refers to this as a void provision. A later Act would always override an earlier one - and do so regardless of whether that had been the intention of Parliament. Repeal could be intended or simply implied. "The Legislature cannot, according to our constitution" said Lord Justice Maugham, "bind itself as to the form of subsequent legislation, and it is impossible for Parliament to enact that in a subsequent statute dealing with the same subject-matter there can be no implied repeal" (Ellen Street Estates Ltd v Minister of Health [1934] 1 King's Bench Reports , 753. 14.).

Now, suddenly, the notion of fundamental law has been pulled out of the legal grave in which it had been rotting for three hundred years, and declared part of the law of our Constitution. In one sense, it was the only way out of the paradox that the "Metric Martyrs" case had apparently raised. By announcing that there was a "hierarchy of Acts of Parliament" - "ordinary" and above them "constitutional", the Judges were able to save the European Communities Act from implied repeal. Undoubtedly, they emphasised, European Union law is supreme in this country - but only to the extent given by the European Communities Act, which can be repealed should Parliament explicitly decide to do. Even so, short of explicit repeal, it is immune from any implied repeal. But in another sense, the judgment is only an extension of the growing impatience that Judges have felt for a very long time with the constraints imposed on them by the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. And, in spite of the status given for the moment to the European Communities Act, these are constraints that should be regarded with impatience by everyone who values freedom in this country.

"The sovereignty of the Crown in Parliament" is a nice set of words. The phrase rolls off the tongue and carries the mind back to earlier ages in our history. But the phrase no longer describes what is at all a desirable state of affairs. We are ruled by people who get an almost sexual thrill from messing up our lives. Because they run the two main parties, they are able to pack the House of Commons with a combination of sheep who would vote black white and white black if ordered, and of weaklings who know that something is wrong, but are controlled by bribes and blackmail. Every so often, a few decent people get elected. But that is because the control is not yet perfect; and its main effect, sadly, is to keep alive in some minds the delusion that parliamentary democracy still actually exists. The general result is tyranny mitigated by recollections of a better time.

The Judges have been worried by this for generations. According to Lord Wright in 1942,

Parliament is supreme. It can enact extraordinary powers of interfering with personal liberty. If an Act of Parliament... is alleged to limit or curtail the liberty of the subject or vest in the executive extraordinary powers..., the only question is what is the precise extent of the powers given (Liversidge v Anderson, Appeal Cases, 106).

Since then, things have grown worse. Bad laws pour out in a continual stream. A well-funded interest group only has to demand, or a media campaign to start, and the politicians reach for their legislative hammer. In the 1960s, the insurance companies complained about the level of awards in civil cases where they were known to stand behind a defendant; and so the politicians virtually abolished the right to trial by jury in the civil courts. In 1987, there were complaints when some defendants in a criminal case pooled their right of peremptory challenge to secure a more sympathetic jury; and so the politicians abolished that right. Around the same time, the authorities wanted to raise the conviction rate or financial crimes; and so the politicians created the Serious Fraud Office, and gave it the right to compel self-incrimination. In 1991, a few children were bitten by dogs; and so the politicians brought in a law that almost everyone now regards as mad. Arguments about the rule of law drew at best a blank stare, at worst an exultant sneer.

Nor is it just that Parliament is churning out bad laws - though many are very bad. It is that Parliament is churning out thousands of pages of new law every year, supplemented by thousands more of statutory instruments. No one has read or can read all of these. No one is co-ordinating the process of their manufacture. Quite often, no one knows what the laws are on an issue from one day to another. Not surprisingly, they frequently contradict each other. This is what led to the challenge to the metrication laws. The Weights and Measures Act does contradict the European Communities Act. No one intended this to happen. No one noticed it had happened for about 15 years. But it did happen.

Now, the politicians are being brought under control. Let me quote from the relevant sections of the judgment:

In the present state of its maturity the common law has come to recognise that there exist rights which should properly be classified as constitutional or fundamental.... And from this a further insight follows. We should recognise a hierarchy of Acts of Parliament: as it were "ordinary" statutes and "constitutional" statutes. The two categories must be distinguished on a principled basis. In my opinion a constitutional statute is one which (a) conditions the legal relationship between citizen and State in some general, overarching manner, or (b) enlarges or diminishes the scope of what we would now regard as fundamental constitutional rights. (a) and (b) are of necessity closely related: it is difficult to think of an instance of (a) that is not also an instance of (b). The special status of constitutional statutes follows the special status of constitutional rights. Examples are the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights 1689, the Act of Union, the Reform Acts which distributed and enlarged the franchise, the [Human Rights Act 1998], the Scotland Act 1998 and the Government of Wales Act 1998. The [European Communities Act] clearly belongs in this family.... The ECA is, by force of the common law, a constitutional statute.

Ordinary statutes may be impliedly repealed. Constitutional statutes may not. For the repeal of a constitutional Act or the abrogation of a fundamental right to be effected by statute, the court would apply this test: is it shown that the legislature's actual not imputed, constructive or presumed intention was to effect the repeal or abrogation? I think the test could only be met by express words in the later statute, or by words so specific that the inference of an actual determination to effect the result contended for was irresistible. The ordinary rule of implied repeal does not satisfy this test. Accordingly, it has no application to constitutional statutes. I should add that in my judgment general words could not be supplemented, so as to effect a repeal or significant amendment to a constitutional statute, by reference to what was said in Parliament by the minister promoting the Bill pursuant to Pepper v Hart [1993] AC 593. A constitutional statute can only be repealed, or amended in a way which significantly affects its provisions touching fundamental rights or otherwise the relation between citizen and State, by unambiguous words on the face of the later statute.

This development of the common law regarding constitutional rights, and as I would say constitutional statutes, is highly beneficial. It gives us most of the benefits of a written constitution, in which fundamental rights are accorded special respect. But it preserves the sovereignty of the legislature and the flexibility of our uncodified constitution. It accepts the relation between legislative supremacy and fundamental rights is not fixed or brittle: rather the courts (in interpreting statutes, and now, applying the HRA) will pay more or less deference to the legislature, or other public decision-maker, according to the subject in hand. Nothing is plainer than that this benign development involves, as I have said, the recognition of the ECA as a constitutional statute.

Some people, I know, are angry that the European Communities Act has been given this special status. However, its protection against implied repeal comes not - as the Sunderland City Council lawyers argued - because on entering the European Union, we accepted a new legal order in which our own constitutional arrangements were reduced to the status of a town council, but because the Common Law now recognises a whole class of special Acts of which the European Communities Act is presently one. If we ever repeal the European Communities Act by explicit Act of Parliament, it will drop out of this special class, but the special class will remain.

And we can repeal the European Communities Act. That much is now certain. The various judgments in the Factortame legislation left the position of European Union law highly ambiguous - was it or Parliament supreme?. This judgment make it clear that the laws of the European Union enjoy a borrowed primacy in England. Parliament may have chosen to indulge a foreign authority, but cannot subordinate itself to it: "there is nothing in the ECA which allows the Court of Justice, or any other institutions of the EU, to touch or qualify the conditions of Parliament's legislative supremacy in the United Kingdom. Not because the legislature chose not to allow it; because by our law it could not allow it."

This is not the outcome that the supporters of the "Metric Martyrs" were hoping for. It is not an outcome, I think, that anyone was expecting. The point of fundamental law was not raised in any of the hearings, and it is highly unusual for Judges to go beyond the points raised in a case except for giving obiter dicta, which have no binding force as precedent. But it is a not a judgment that the Government was hoping for. Its general implications have yet to be revealed. But it seems reasonable that a vast mass of bad laws can now be set aside as inconsistent with fundamental laws that they have not explicitly repealed. Therefore, the sections of the Road Traffic Act 1982, that allow the Police to impose fines on motorists without going to court, may be inconsistent with the guarantee of due process in Magna Carta. The various Firearms Acts - especially the most recent ones, which are intended to criminalise rather than regulate the possession of guns - may be inconsistent with the Bill of Rights. The Government's proposed Confiscation Agency, which will import the American doctrine of civil asset forfeiture, will require the explicit repeal of Magna Carta and parts of the Human Rights Act. At a stroke, the Judges have put the politicians under a restraint that may be as severe in practice as that imposed by the Supreme Court in America. It means that they can carry on their game of stealing our freedoms - but they must do so in the open, by spelling out what they are doing in words that cannot be ignored by the courts. I have no doubt that if they had known in advance the outcome of this case, the authorities would quietly have connived at breaches of their metrication laws.

We have lost the right to use our traditional weights and measures. But we may have gained the vast benefit of living again under a Constitution that protects our fundamental rights. I feel sorry for the four men who have taken on the considerable legal costs of getting this case into court, and I hope that the public appeal will be sufficient to pay these costs. But it was, most emphatically, a case worth getting into court. It has given us, I repeat, a great and unexpected, if conditional, victory.

Big Brother Plans Compulsory ID Cards
Stuart Smith

Big Brother is, most definitely, watching you.

With nearly two million spy cameras on our streets Britons are the most closely monitored people on the planet. Now they are softening us up for the big one - compulsory ID cards for each numbered citizen.

The government have been desperate to introduce such a card for years but public opposition forced them into retreat. They have been waiting; hoping for a suitable 'national emergency' to allow them to steamroller-through this legislation whilst people are still dazed. Such an opportunity was handed to the them on September 11th, 2001 and they seized it with indecent haste.

Within 24 hours of the World Trade Centre attack, before the dust had even settled onto the streets of New York, the UK government stated that they wanted compulsory ID cards for all citizens. The reason? No reason was given. It was left to us to assume, in some vague way, that such a card would reduce terrorism...somehow.

Apparently, fanatical suicide bombers who set out to murder the innocent will now all become pacifists. They realise that the risk of being caught is just too great due to the piece of plastic they all dutifully carry in compliance with the law. Rapists, drug-dealers, murderers and robbers will, we are assured, turn away from crime in significant numbers because they are more likely to be caught through having an ID card.

Exactly how will compulsory ID cards reduce terrorism or crime? Total silence from the government. The terrorists who carried out the WTC attack were all using fake ID and what about future terrorists who might be card-carrying UK citizens, born and bred? How would ID cards protect us against them?

Such cards could even increase the likelihood of terrorism. Once they are accepted as genuine 'unfakeable' ID, security will be dropped. If you have an ID card, no further checks will be made. Can you imagine the headlines ten years from now?

Westminister Bombers Might Have Used Forged ID Card, Experts Claim.

Please do not think I am talking about some cheap plastic 'bus pass' with a faded photograph. This is not what the government has in store for you. They want DNA tagging, iris scan or some other high-tech method. Within a few years of introduction, this will also become your medical card and cash card. It might even contain a tracking chip to monitor your movements.

So if 'anti-terrorism' is a thin smokescreen, what is the government's game plan?

The real agenda is the removal of cash, the destruction of the entire 'black economy,' 100% tax compliance and elimination of social security fraud. With a microchip ID card, the government could achieve their dream of a cashless society. It is a very short step from ELECTROCASH ACCEPTED HERE to SORRY, WE ONLY TAKE ELECTROCASH.

They could also track any citizen, profile him and categorise him or her into pro-government or anti-government. At the touch of a button they could freeze all the assets of any citizens they did not like. I hope you can see a more compelling motive at work here than some weak 'anti-terrorism' smokescreen.

The government want to know where you are right now, where you've been, what you are spending your money on, and who you are associating with - preferably from the comfort of an air-conditioned Whitehall building. They want complete control over every penny of your money because when they control your money, they control you.

Most people disagree with my pro-privacy views. The News of the World recently carried an opinion poll showing that 86% of Britons support compulsory identity cards. That makes me sad. Governments do not need to use force to make us give up our basic freedoms - we queue up like sacrificial lambs to hand them over willingly.

Why is this?

I think I have the answer. When a disaster happens, the reaction of decent people is to ask "What can I do? How can I help" People feel frightened and impotent - they want to do something. They are in a sacrificial mood and governments seize upon this and answer: "Why, thank you for offering. You can sacrifice. In particular, we need to remove some more of your freedoms in order to combat this evil. Please sacrifice your liberty."

If I thought anyone was listening, I would say to the government: "I am not a numbered worker-drone in a state collective. I was born a free man. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are my natural right - they are not dispensed to grateful citizens by government favour. The noble purpose of human life is not crime prevention. Crime and even terrorism are merely destructive interruptions in the normal flow of a creative life. The price of 0% crime is 100% dictatorship. Terrorism is a serious attack on liberty and freedom but the correct response is not the removal of liberty and freedom, because then terrorism will have won."

The government would disagree. They might respond with these sound-bites:

"In order to fight for the freedoms we all believe in, you must... give up your freedom. "

"In order to have a society in which people are not numbers on some dictator's citizen list, you must ...become a number on a government list."

"In order to catch criminals we must control, monitor and track the innocent."

"In order to preserve our way of life in which the people control their government, you must ...hand over to the government the tools of total control of the population."

Does that remind you of Orwell's with its 'doublespeak' slogans such as Freedom is Slavery, Peace is War?

Diary Entry Covering Dennis O'Keeffe's
Inaugural Lecture at Buckingham University
Sean Gabb

Introduction

Though I have a number of writing and Internet assignments to keep me busy, and I hope in funds, I am presently on holiday. I have much more time than during the academic year. Sadly, I am not using this to much effect. I spend much of my time sat around reading novels and listening to Wagner. I should be painting and decorating in Deal. At the least, I should be producing more issues of Free Life Commentary, and even an issue of Free Life, which, though said to be quarterly, has not come out since last November.

Something, however, I must do is report on the inaugural lecture given by Dennis O'Keeffe last Wednesday the 25^th July at the University of Buckingham. It was an interesting lecture, and I owe much to Dennis. Though the lecture will be published in full, I may be the only person inclined to write about the context and incidental details of the lecture. I could sit down and write a formal report of the event. But I might well find the sort of excuse for delay that has stopped me from producing my promised defences of Geoffrey Sampson and Roger Scruton, not to mention all the other articles I have been meaning to write since the end of the summer term. So here instead is an extract from my diary - that wonderful standby for when I feel I should write something but am too lazy to put my head in order.

The entry is lightly edited to supply full names where the lack might confuse, and to suppress one or two private or embarrassing details. It is also, I must confess, written from about the middle onwards in the suspicion that it would be published. As such, it goes into more detail than would normally be the case.

The weather has much improved over the past week. I sat for three hours in the sun last Friday, reading and listening to the wireless; and I now have the beginnings of a nice tan. It was a glorious weekend in Deal, and Mrs Gabb and I both spent more time in the sun. We did far less on the house than we had intended. Indeed, we did nothing. Today, I plan to spend another couple of hours in the sun. If we do get away on holiday this year - Northern Cyprus beckons - I shall this time be ready for that hot foreign sun and not have to cover myself with smeary lotions or risk having my skin burned off me.

On Saturday morning to Bromley for an eye test. I have been progressively less able to see close objects for over a year now, and so something had to be done. The optician told me my eyes were getting old, and the muscles going slack. Apparently, there is nothing to be done about this except get different lenses. So I am now moving to varifocal lenses, which will allow me to see both close and distant objects depending on which area of the lens I am looking through. The total cost was nearly £300, which I object to spending, but which I had to spend if I wanted to go about my daily business without permanently squinting and moving things further away from me.

I was depressed about this - by the ageing eyes and by the cost of correcting them; and I drove down to Deal in a moody silence that provoked comment from Mrs Gabb. But, on the beach in Deal, I had a strange reversal of mood. Let me try to recollect the sequence of thought. The local ants were swarming that evening. I noticed a princess flying past with a male clamped to her back. Ants have what by mammal standards are disgusting breeding habits. The male couples and then has his sexual organs ripped off. He falls to the ground, where he dies or has his head cut of by the waiting ants. There must have been thousands of such couplings around me.

I asked how could a just and loving God allow this to happen. Though I cannot say I believe in such a God, I do sometimes hope there is one. Now hope was fading, confronted by the facts of the animal world. The standard answer came back to me - either there is no God, or He cares nothing about the suffering of His creatures. We are born. We reproduce. We die. We stay dead. Those better adapted to the world reproduce more, the others much less. That explains the diversity of life among the lower species; and all our own customs and institutions are at heart just a non-biological means to get the job done for us. And here I am - half way through my one and only life, with no children, less achieved than I'd like, far less cash than my more enterprising contemporaries, a house that is falling down - for all everyone enthuses over its beauty and size - and a wife who unaccountably still believes in me and is waiting for me to deliver the goods.

I might have fallen into a black despair, and provoked some very sour comments from Mrs Gabb. Instead, however, I found snatches of Lucretius coming into my head:

E tenebris tantis tam clarum extollere lumen
Qui primus potuisti inlustrans commoda uitae
Te sequor o Graiae gentis decus....

What Epicurus did for his followers was to relieve them of the fear of death, concentrating their minds on the present world so they could make the most of what they had. Lucretius does go on rather about the man's greatness - the worst Randroid is more moderate about his idol. Even so, that gloomy masterpiece began to work its magic. I cheered up greatly, and began to run up and down the shingle reciting over and over again the passage ending

Non si terra mari miscebitur et mare caelo

What relevance this had to my bad eyes and lack of cash escapes me. But it fitted in with the roar of the withdrawing tide - or perhaps it was coming in (mem: get timetable from local council). Perhaps we are alone in the universe. If so, my best reaction is simply to get on with this life and make the best of it. I have many advantages for which I ought to be glad. I am reasonably bright, and reasonably well-educated, and even reasonably industrious. I have good friends and the love of a very good woman. I feel and probably am healthier than I deserve to be, and am far better looking. I still have nearly all my teeth and most of my hair. If I have bad eyes, at least I live in an age and country where something can be done about them; and, for all my complaints, I have the money to pay for the spectacles and not go noticeably short in other things. All I need do is pull myself together and use the advantages that I was born with or unaccountably have acquired and kept. I went off to dinner feeling much improved in spirit.

Dinner, sadly, was vile. Mrs Gabb had suggested fish and chips, but all the chip shops close at nine in Deal. So we went for a kebab in a shop near the main taxi office. Yuk! Some dog food smells better than that tasted. I should have been warned of what was coming when I saw the chips being refried. When we got it home and unwrapped it, Mrs Gabb threw hers into the bin untouched, commenting sharply on my resolution - or meanness - in eating mine. I replied that if I was still alive in the morning, she'd regret having skipped dinner. We opened some beer and agreed that here was another fast food outlet to boycott in the future. All those health and safety laws enforced by mini-Gestapos up and down the country; all those perfectly decent eateries forced out of business - and many of the ones that survive serve up food that would disgrace a boot fair burger stall. Needless to say, I was still alive the next morning - though Mrs Gabb's untouched kebab now smelt decidedly off.

Now I must sort myself out for the next few weeks. That is all the time I may have left of this summer for work. For the past few weeks, I have done almost nothing. This always happens in the summer. I spend my time fretting and wishing I could settle down to some proper work. The reason is that I feel I have unlimited time. But I don't. In a few weeks, Mrs Gabb's family comes over for a fortnight, and I must contrive to be cheerful and speak lots of Slovak. After that, we may go on holiday, finances permitting - and they probably will somehow permit. I also have some continuing teaching commitments. This means that I can count on all my fingers the number of days I have in which to get done all the things I have vaguely projected. So let's do it all and be fast about it.

First to catch up with this diary. Last Wednesday, we went off to the University of Buckingham, where Dennis O'Keeffe has been appointed Professor of Sociology. That evening, he was to give his inaugural lecture. I drove into the centre to give my lecture on Economics. This done, I collected Merrie Cave, Editor of The Salisbury Review and Michael Connolly, whom I knew from about twelve years ago, when he was a colleague of Dennis at the North London Polytechnic. Then I collected Mrs Gabb from Finsbury Park Underground Station. The journey to Buckingham was uneventful but long. Dennis has suggested I should go there and teach. Getting there from London is a bind - from Deal will never do.

The University campus is an entire village out in the country. It reminded me rather of York. Used to the grittier London places, I had forgotten how nice universities can be out in the country. I suppose in the mid 1970s, it was cheap enough to buy all that land. I wouldn't like to think of its present value.

The lecture was impressive. Dennis never thought he would make it to a professorship, and he had worked hard on the lecture. But let me pause here and say something about him. It's all scattered through other entries. But let me draw it together and summarise it in one place.

I first met Dennis O'Keeffe in August 1989, when the Libertarian Alliance put on a lecture by David Friedman at the IEA. The lecture was interesting, but memorable now only because of Dennis. I bumped into him after the lecture was over. He was a small, fat man with white hair and a bow tie and an accent so artificially clipped, I thought at first he was German. He was there with a very handsome young man who looked so like him I knew he was the son. I didn't speak to them, but I was not likely to forget the meeting.

I next met him again the following September, when Dr Tame took me off to North London to attend an evening seminar course that Dennis had started to amuse himself after a day of putting up with his lefty colleagues at the Polytechnic. He was at the time a senior lecturer in the Education Department. Brian Micklethwait was also there, I think. I forget who else was there, and cannot be bothered to look up the relevant entry. Dennis sat at the head of the table, announcing that all the ills of society proceeded from our "socialist education system". Afterwards in the Student Union Bar, he developed this and other themes.

The bald facts sound boring. But they didn't seem so to me. Without knowing what was happening, I was drawn into the O'Keeffe orbit. Tuesday evening became the high point of my week. I think my first visit was the first seminar, as within a few weeks, the chaotic structure of that first evening had firmed into something more formal. Every week, one of us would deliver a paper, on any subject we chose. The only rules were that we should announce the subject in advance, that copies were to be circulated at the beginning of the evening, and that the presentation was to be around the paper, not a straight reading. The other rule was that the meeting finished sharp at nine, so we could all retire for an hour in the Student Union bar or in some other drinking establishment chosen by Dennis. Here, the conversation would continue until we all got tired.

This was a disaster for my career in the Civil Service. Though I hated drafting legal documents and giving procedural advice to Judges, I was able to put up with the boredom by keeping on moderately good terms with my colleagues. One of the chief means of keeping in with them was to go on the first Tuesday of every month to dinner at some restaurant that we all took turns in choosing. So the first Tuesday of every month presented me with a choice - Dennis or my colleagues. I never thought there was a choice worth considering. August 1989 was my last attendance at the monthly dinners. Over the next few months, I found my colleagues growing more distant from me. When, in February 1990, that beast [name deleted] decided to have a go at me, I was effectively without friends. It was now only a matter of when I resigned, not whether. I knew it was time to go when, in the November of 1990, I sat up all night finishing my seminar paper on the law of incest. I went to bed at five, and got up at nine to call in sick. A few weeks later, and I had resigned, and my life started anew.

In the purely negative sense, Dennis had done me an immeasurable favour. But for his providing me with something more interesting to do on Tuesday evenings, I might even now be dragging out a miserable existence in the Civil Service. Everyone can think of times when a wrong turn was made in life, and speculate on what might have happened without it. I'm lucky enough to be able to look back on a right turn. However bad I may sometimes think matters actually are, I know exactly how worse they could be.

But I celebrate my friendship with Dennis for the positive things that have flowed from it. First, there is the joy of knowing him. Dennis has always reminded me of Dr Johnson - the unfinished portrait by Reynolds in the National Portrait Gallery could be Dennis in a brown wig. His manner of conversation is also Johnsonesque - a mixture of goodness, religious piety, common sense, dogmatic utterance and crushing wit. Like Johnson, he also has got better with age. His stilted manner has softened over the years into something much more relaxed. His later writing is better than his earlier, and his name will live on the basis of what he has done in the past five years. Of course, as with Johnson, his real glory is his conversation. Sadly, he has had no Boswell. I come closest. I am too lazy to go back over my old diary entries, but I think I have briefly summarised some of the gems from our public house adjournments of the late 1980s. One day, I may extract and publish these - though one day, I may do many things!

In 1991, the seminars moved out of the Polytechnic - some trouble, I think, with the rooms - and were now in the FOREST office in Central London. They continued otherwise unchanged, and I was delivering a paper every month. By now, Dennis was a close friend, and was encouraging me to write my thesis on the history of state education. This never worked out, though he did examine me when I wrote my public choice analysis of English liberalism since the 17^th century.

I stopped attending his seminars when I went to Czechoslovakia. Nowadays, I'd set up a videoconferencing session. Then, I was cut off from England as effectively as if I'd gone to the Moon. But I met him again near the end of my time there. He called me at my office to say he was giving some lectures in Olomouc and would be pleased if I could get over the next day from Bratislava. I was supposed to be having a final lunch with the Prime Minister. This time, there was a contest. Even so, Dennis half won. I divided my time between him and the Prime Minister. I had lunch, but left early, getting with Mrs Gabb into a government car and going at over 100 MPH up the motorway. We had neglected to make any agreement of where to meet, however. Mrs Gabb and I got out of the car and wandered at random through the streets of the old town. No mobile telephones in those far off days - or none for me at any rate. Suddenly, I heard Dennis round a corner, denouncing something Communist. There he was with a Czech friend. We had coffee and then a nice dinner at his expense. He fitted us up with a room in the student halls of residence at the university.

Over dinner, he explained that he had got himself a contract with the Department of Education - or whatever it was called at the time - to study patterns of truancy in England and Wales. His research showed what any fool knew, but what no other writer on the subject had noticed - that children stay away from school because they don't like going. He commissioned me to write the introductory literature survey to his book. He paid me more than the thing was probably worth, and this was welcome cash, bearing in mind I was flat broke and about to get married and return to England. My chapter was well received, and is now considered one of the best overviews of truancy research into the 1990s. Every few weeks, I get an e-mail from some writer asking if he can quote the version I published on my website. It deserves to be good, bearing in mind I absented myself from school for about 40 per cent of the first three years of my own secondary education. I wrote from experience!

Back in England, the seminars started again, though I was unable to get to all of them, and the life seemed to have gone out of them. But Dennis remained a good friend and benefactor. In August 1994, he took me to a conference in America, to speak about truancy there, and I wrote up my paper for another of his books - again being paid more than I was worth. I also met Bruce Cooper, an American academic, who remains a good friend, though we only ever communicate by E-mail.

At last, as said, Dennis was there to examine my thesis. He obviously wanted to get me through, but gave me a very professional hard time.

I therefore regard Dennis as one of my best friends and as a wonderfully generous benefactor. How could I possibly criticise his lecture?

The answer is that I won't. It was a good one. He sat at the front of a big hall, dressed in a black academic robe, Lord Harris chairing the event. As he looked round the crowded room, I could see on his face the pride mingled with fear - pride at having achieved an ambition he had almost abandoned, fear at having to give the lecture of his career in front of a fairly distinguished audience. There was David Conway, Professor of Philosophy at Middlesex. There was David Marsland, Professor of Research Methods at Brunel. There was Norman Barry, Professor of something somewhere in the Midlands. There was Julian Morris, someone big at the IEA. There was his wife, his son, his future daughter-in-law. There were many others - all distinguished in their fields, all waiting for Dennis to show his full abilities. Failing to impress in these circumstances is not something to think lightly about.

To switch comparisons, there is something Beethovenian about his style of lecturing - a combination of hard thought and a forward, driving rhythm that holds the attention. A good lecturer holds attention by a combination of subject matter, body language and voice inflection. Dennis is a very good lecturer. Though I'd have hated studying any of the subjects he taught at North London, I wish even so I'd had him as a lecturer.

The subject of his lecture was standard for Dennis. There is, he said, a contradiction at the heart of our society. We live in one of the richest, most successful societies that has ever existed. Modernity depends on property rights secured by an impersonal framework of general laws, in which we can develop and use our human and physical capital to the best of our ability. Yet we have an education system that denies all the assumptions on which our success is built. The system has been captured by a pack of educational bureaucrats and academics who daily preach the evil of all that we have achieved, who deny the validity of our open society, and who have imposed a centrally-ordered curriculum that had denied millions of working class children the ability that he had of getting a good basic education and taking advantage of the social mobility that capitalism has made possible. The answer is not to tinker with the system, but to replace it with something more receptive to consumer choice. We would never tolerate an economy run in this way, he said. Why do we tolerate an education system that reproduces the methods and failures of the old planned economies of the Soviet world? The middle classes can buy their way out of the system by sending their children to private schools. We need to find ways of extending this option of exit to the working classes. His solution is to abolish the compulsory attendance laws and to hand out vouchers to parents to let them buy the education of their choice.

Because I had heard all this many times before from Dennis, I was not startled by his lecture. I simply admired his ordering and presentation of familiar themes. Afterwards, Lord Harris asked for questions. There was a long pause, which I broke with a soft question about American education. There, I said, was a very diverse system, yet with all the problems of our own and worse. Indeed, I said, America was the home of political correctness. Dennis answered by saying that the American system is not that diverse, being regulated by the States; and then explaining that the real heart of political correctness and post-modernism was French - all from horrors like Foucault and Althusser. The ice broken, there was another 40 minutes of close question and answer.

Mrs Gabb had a harder question, but didn't ask it. Dennis had been denouncing socialism in education, she told me afterwards. Yet she had received a standard socialist education in Czechoslovakia - nothing special, as she didn't come from the privileged orders in that country - and this was vastly better than anything she had seen in England. She left school with a stock of mathematical and scientific knowledge that most undergraduates here don't have. Including Czech, she also learnt four other languages. History and the other humanities, she admitted, were a joke; and probably the universities were far worse than ours outside the purely scientific faculties. But Dennis was surely wrong to denounce socialist educations on the grounds of technical incompetence.

Had she asked her question - and I wish she had - I am sure Dennis would have answered it as follows. Her country before 1989 was run by East European Communists. Yes, they had all the ridiculous economics of Marxism, and the police state means of enforcing them on the people. But they shared with Marx the old Germanic respect for learning and belief in its potential for improvement. Our own lefties are just an embittered clique of anti-nomians. They retain a vaguely Marxist economics, but are untouched by the educational traditions that Marx and his East European followers unthinkingly accepted. What they deliver here is an education that sends 20 per cent of working class children illiterate into the adult world, and the other 80 per cent ignorant of history, mathematics, the natural sciences, and just about everything else worth knowing.

I had another objection to what Dennis said, though a question about it would have taken too long to ask and to answer. This is that Dennis is too persuaded by the Francis Fukuyama line - that we are at the "end of history". Modernity, he seems to believe, is something quite unlike anything that has ever existed before, and it will eventually bring all humanity into a common civilisation of liberal democratic capitalism. I don't believe this for a minute. We are undoubtedly richer than in all other ages, and have more control over our physical environment. But these are superficial advantages. They allow a wider distribution than ever before to the highest values of our civilisation, but don't determine what those values are. What makes our civilisation so special is its openness and toleration of diversity. But our open society is not the only one that has ever been. The Greek city states managed one. So, in a less transfiguring way, did the Roman Empire of the first and second centuries. Both passed away. I don't believe that our own will last. Dennis is right that our educational arrangements are largely to blame. But I don't agree that marketising these will do nearly enough to prevent another collapse. The flight from rationality and trust in the individual pervade nearly all our institutions, private as well as public. Indeed, while institutions have an influence on what people think, they are much more an emanation of our thoughts - and it is our thoughts that are now generally corrupted.

Dennis is an optimist. I am not. Our civilisation and all of its works will pass away, and will do so noticeably in the time of many now alive. It will be replaced by a universal and scientifically advanced despotism that will then itself crumble into a new dark age of superstition and local brigandage. Certainly, reforming education will help in the short term - which makes it worth doing - but I doubt if it will do more than delay the collapse that is waiting for us.

Yes - I was right not to put this one. It would only have depressed everyone, or had them lose patience with me. Indeed, having written the above, I'm not so sure I am right. Perhaps getting the State out of education will do the job. Perhaps a better educated citizenry will mean a less credulous media than we now have and less worthless politicians than now get elected. After all, would the Great War have been so bloody without the state educations that fitted the European masses to put up so meekly with the hate-filled propaganda and incompetent strategies that led to horrors like the Somme and Verdun? I don't know.

Dinner was nice, but I've had enough of this entry.

Letters to the Editor

Sir,

Usually I read your articles with much interest and value many of the points you make. However on this occasion, rather than have any objective viewpoint on why we in the Conservative Party lost (I was the Conservative candidate in the target seat of Stretford and Urmston) you embarked on a ludicrous rant about William Hague. ("Why Did the Tories Lose the General Election?", Free Life No.38, July 2001)

For what it's worth I think the Conservative Party lost for three principal reasons. Firstly William Hague was not seen by the electorate at large as Prime Minister, no matter what policies we had people just didn't see William as leading the Country. This is extremely sad as he would make a far better Prime Minister than Blair, and indeed many others who went on to hold the highest office. However the electorate cannot be bucked.

Secondly, we fought on completely the wrong grounds. The European issue is hugely important. To me the keep the Pound message is right, for all time not just for the next parliament. Similarly we should be looking beyond the EU and towards true internationalism (if I can borrow a phrase) which has always been the UK's historic mission. Asylum again is a hugely important issue and we were on the right lines.

Where I differ with the Party is the tactics. These are not General Election issues and we were outflanked completely. On no occasion was Europe or Asylum raised to me on the doorstep or during walkabouts. I spoke to literally thousands of people and yes when prompted they all, or the vast majority, wanted to keep the pound and for Britain to be a safe haven but not a soft touch.

In spite of this the Party became monomaniacal, almost a single issue pressure group. We had innovatory policies on schools and hospitals, where they would have been freed from municipal control and the deadening hand of the state. Yet we chose to fight not on these issues but in the last week on Europe, which was not the ground staked out for this election. History tells us that elections are won and lost on economic issues and public services. Even John Major's famous Save the Union election of 1992, was fought on economic grounds and not constitutional.

Thirdly, there is the British sense of fair play. The thought that they had 18 years we'll give the other lot another four years and then judge. Do not under estimate this point, it was a powerful message which came over.

Where does the Conservative Party go from here? Well I think we are on broadly the right lines. We are talking about freeing the individual which is true Toryism, allowing people to determine their own way in life. Personally I would wish the Party to be less feeble on the tax agenda (you cannot free individuals when the state continues to tax and spend almost half of GDP), more robust on Europe, explain that education and healthcare as currently delivered is a disaster and only the introduction of the private sector, using the state a revenue providers will give Britain the public services we deserve. Finally we need to preach less and liberate more. Become Liberal Tories in the true context of laissez faire.

The leadership election will determine which way we go, although there is one candidate who I feel is acknowledging the agenda of tax cuts, and liberalisation. If he is elected I am confident that at the next election we will be returned.

I look forward to your future articles when you have regained some of your usual equilibrium.

Best wishes,
Jonathan Mackie
jonathan@mackiejd.freeserve.co.uk

Sir,

I echo Chris Tame's comment that this is a brilliant analysis ("Why Did the Tories Lose the General Election?", Free Life No.38, July 2001). More relevant is whether there is truth in it. As Sean Gabb knows, an intelligent observer from the Left could construct an equally fascinating but quite different analysis of late 20th century British politics. Such 'histories' are very useful for justifying and motivating a particular political ideology, but they rest entirely on acceptance of the political 'labels' they use. Some people, rightly or wrongly, wouldn't recognise them.

And that is where the problem lies in reversing what I agree are the negative political trends we have all witnessed over the period covered. Academics can construct, in hindsight, a plausible Machiavellian theory of political history. But how can we get the public to recognise, accept, and act upon such theories? Even if they did recognise them, it seems the majority can willingly give their support to the "Enemy Class" and the "Quisling Right". I sense an underlying feeling from the article that Sean would like us to get a new public. After all, the lines of Blair's legitimising plastic army behind him in the Commons are now largely unthinking MPs drawn indiscriminately from the ordinary 'plebs' [my phrase].

While acknowledging much of Sean's objections to political policy over the years, its characterisation into a perpetual war between 'them' and 'us', what is evil and what is not, is dispiriting.

There are a variety of political ideologies. Sean says the Conservative party much of the time has been following the wrong ones. But it is a little harsh to condemn the party as a whole, particularly if there is no conspiracy. Surely disappointment with 60 years of Conservative policymaking must bring into question what "Conservative" really means, or at least "Conservative Party". Can a party be in denial for so long? If there is no grand conspiracy for "quislings" to run the Conservative party then perhaps the Conservative party is "just what it is". Given Sean's eloquent description of how the party has departed from the policies he favours over so many years I doubt that such policies are 'necessarily' the province of the Conservative party, it is just that it is the party most likely to adopt them at times.

The problem seems to be that Sean sees the Conservative party as the only practical (electable to government) vehicle for the policies he favours; his disappointment is that it hasn't followed them. His belief is that only these policies reflect true Conservative ideology. I suggest this isn't necessarily true. I agree there are many within the party's "broad church" who believe fundamentally in Sean's ideological principles. But perhaps there aren't enough at present to share Sean's ideas of which policies are "right" and which are "wrong". I'm quite happy with entryism to rebalance the party toward the ideological policies that he favours (I might favour some such policies too). But getting people to join the Conservatives, or any party, that's an uphill struggle.

Sean 'might' draw some comfort from the candidate's statement from Iain Duncan Smith today (or is he a "quisling quisling quisling Right"?)

I would also be interested to know where Sean places Gary Streeter in his description of how the Conservative party failed to win the last general election.

Jeremy Stanford
euroscep@dircon.co.uk

Dispatches From A Dying Country: Reflections on Modern England
Sean Gabb, with a Foreword by Chris R. Tame
The Hampden Press, London, 2001, 222pp, £10.00 (pbk)
ISBN 0 9541032 0 3.
Reviewed by Nicholas Dyke

Editor's Note: This is the only review so far received of my book. The fact that it is a pretty damning one does not deter me from publishing it, though I had hoped for someone, somewhere, to write something more flattering. I thanks Mr Dykes for his very thorough review, and hope that it will not damage further sales of the book!

Sean Gabb's Dispatches is a reproduction in book form of 32 essays previously published by him on the Internet as Free Life Commentaries, plus two Editorials from this magazine of which he has been Editor since reviving it about ten years ago.

The book falls into the category of political journalism. It is about trends and personalities in contemporary politics and about the advisability, or consequences, of political acts. Since Sean is a noted Libertarian commentator ('notorious', his opponents might say), his book is spirited Libertarian political journalism. As such, it provides less energetic fellow thinkers with spiritual comfort and thought-provoking speculation, as well as accurate, acerbic and enjoyable debunking of gun laws, video censorship, encryption bans, enforced metrication, European union and other such horrors. The essays are mostly quite short, so Dispatches makes good bedtime reading; sending one off with a 'yess!' or a 'yeah!' and a sense of gratitude and relief that somebody out there is putting the case for freedom with well-articulated passion.

As one of the 'less energetic' myself (perforce, through illness) I have a great deal of admiration for Sean Gabb. Every month, for years, despite the demands of a PhD thesis, a teaching position and family life, he has aimed a stream of well-honed verbal darts--in print, on radio, and on television--at the pretentious buffoons who claim the right to rule us, and at those who support or defend them. Unlike many other such efforts his darts have hit home, actually bursting some British political balloons; his greatest success being the Candidlist enterprise--the exposure of deliberate misrepresentation (or obfuscation) of their positions on Europe by Conservative MPs--which is fascinatingly described in Sean's book.

But there is more to my admiration than that. It takes courage to do what Sean does. Political buffoons do not like their ignorance and hypocrisy exposed, and some have the power and nasty will to make life unpleasant for the journalists who demonstrate their fraudulence. Sean has had his garbage sifted, his mail opened, his phone tapped, his flat broken into and his computer stolen. Even a thick-skinned maverick like him finds this a bit nerve-racking on occasion [92]. I salute his bravery.

The best essay in Dispatches from a Dying Country is "Robert Henderson v. Tony Blair: A Tale of New Britain" (pp. 76-92). This examines in considerable detail how the present Prime Minister abused his office and the law in order to hinder the attempts of a perfectly reasonable man to obtain redress for a blatant injustice. The essay reads like a thriller, grabbing and holding one's attention from beginning to end, yet is as carefully documented as an article in a good academic journal. This is journalism at its best. Add to it the Candidlist story; other essays exposing the hypocrisy of politicians such as Jack Straw and Clare Short; plus some intriguing speculation, and £10 seems a low price indeed.

Given my admiration for Sean, my hope that his book is successful, and my agreement with a lot of what he says, it is difficult to criticise Dispatches from a Dying Country. But I do think a few modifications would have made the book a lot stronger.

The basic issue involves the transition from periodical literature to the more permanent medium of a book. In a book, readers' expectations of an author are higher.

Certainly mine are, and Dispatches contains a string of minor flaws which, though amounting to very little individually, together give an impression of sloppiness. Sean tells us at the beginning not to expect "perfect consistency of thought"; adding that he writes in "great haste, usually without revision", and that "unless I am looking for typing errors… I make no effort to read what I have already written before writing again on the same or a similar subject" [xi]. This made me suspicious at the outset. It suggested that Sean was aware of problems but chose to ignore them.

The minor flaws begin on the title page. We are told there is an Introduction by Chris Tame. But, when we turn to it, it is entitled "Foreword", the "Introduction" follows--by Sean. Another minor flaw which begins early is a slight excess of self-congratulation: "I did rather well…" [4], "I am pleased with myself [75], "My Candidlist… is one of the most important political uses of the Internet anywhere in the world"[196], "… my achievement" [200]. Then there's the odd hint that the author is showing off: e.g. "I think of Cicero's in verrem speeches and the 1783 India Act--and I shudder"[125], or the overuse of the rather precious term "clerisy" [e.g. 125, 140, 142] which was introduced into English by the poet Coleridge to mean the class of learned men or scholars, but is used in this book to mean "those who really govern the country" [207]. Although not a frequent occurrence in Dispatches, and hardly egregious, this sort of thing makes me fidget.

Sean did ask us to overlook the occasional inconsistency but, as other peccadilloes mount, one becomes less tolerant. For instance, his statements that "Freedom of speech is the most precious freedom that can ever be possessed…. The right … is central to our existence as rational beings" are contradicted in the next two paragraphs: "I accept the occasional need for limiting the means of expressing certain opinions" which "… may rightly be controlled by law" [5]. But rights precede law, they are what laws are enacted to protect or guarantee. A right controlled by law is not a right. Elsewhere, Sean defends liberal democracy [4, 8], then scoffs at British hereditary peers for being "too soaked in democratic sentiment to believe any more in their right to sit in Parliament" [59]. An inherited right to govern, which Sean so enthusiastically advocates, is not a plank of liberal democracy.

On another front, The Daily Telegraph is scorned throughout the book--e.g. "Telegraph journalists are notorious for their inability to check the truth of the stories they are fed"[74]--then suddenly becomes "the only daily newspaper in the country which seems to care anything about the freedoms we have lost…" [165]. Other famous journals are abused several times as "controlled media" [e.g. 111], then suddenly relied on as 'quality' newspapers [152].

There are also several inaccuracies, some not so minor. Sean states "the normal penalty for drink driving is six months imprisonment" [27]. In fact, it's a fine and a ban. (I rang a solicitor friend who said he hadn't seen imprisonment for drink driving in 25 years of practice). In another minor mistake, Sean refers to "Kurdish repression against Turkey"[125] when in fact it's the Kurds who have been so repressed by Turkey that they have risen in rebellion or fled the country.

Among more serious inaccuracies, Sean calls the House of Lords "the best second chamber that ever existed" [53]. Since the Lords was emasculated in 1911, and has done virtually nothing to hold back the statist onslaught during the last nine decades, such hyperbole is off key. Moreover, the German Bundesrat, the Swiss Ständerat , and the US Senate all carry out far more effectively both the Lords' function as a body of review, as well as their erstwhile if poorly defined role as representatives of the regions, so the assertion is just plain wrong.

Another obvious inaccuracy comes earlier. Sean asserts that "only a fool" would doubt that severe penalties deter criminals [3]. Well, I don't believe Sir Edward Coke was a fool, yet it was he who pointed out that it is not the severity of punishment which is the true deterrent for crime, but its certainty. And the three centuries since Coke wrote have born out the truth of his dictum annually: steady streams of heinous crimes despite draconian, sometimes diabolical, punishments. In criminal reality, severe penalties merely make some criminals more cautious. The majority of them can safely rely on the inefficiency of state police monopolies to avoid punishment, no matter how dire that may be. Besides, many criminals are both stupid and arrogant, hence overconfident in their ability to avoid detection.

As the list of errors in Dispatches grows, other things one wouldn't normally comment on become irritants. Such as more than a few typing errors [e.g., 17, 82, 132, 133, 135, 147, 164, 169 and 217] and some infelicitous phrasing: "Except I accused… " [26], or paragraph 2, page 125, or "Nor since… " [135]. One even starts being annoyed by those inelegant typesetting errors which printers call 'widows' [e.g. 13, 37, 83, 125, 149, 199] and spotting tiny mistakes in punctuation, such as en dashes ( - ) suddenly changing into hyphens [e.g. 133].

Lastly, Sean claims his Index is "reasonably complete" [xi]. It isn't. For instance, William Hague is cast as one of Sean's villains, so features frequently in the text, yet is not indexed. Similarly, the Criminal Justice Act, The Guardian, The Independent, Kosovo, the Liberal Democrats, Panorama,Patriotism, The Racial Attacks Monitoring Unit, the Representation of the People Act, The Times , Wales, and other things, people, places or events all play roles in the book, but are excluded from the Index. Bit part players such as the Brixton bombing, 'Lord' Bragg, the Chechens, Cicero, Noam Chomsky, The Communist Manifesto, Frank Dobson, 'Lady' Jay, Kevin McFarlane, News-night , Newsweek,Albert J. Nock, councillor Margaret Payne and the Queen fare even worse: literally dozens of them are missing. Far from being "reasonably complete", I'd say the Index isn't half done.

It is also misleading. Philosopher David Hume is indexed for page xi, but doesn't appear there. Alphonso Hales is indexed for page 7, but not for his more significant appearances on page 8. Anthony Flew and Dennis O'Keeffe appear together on page 22, but only O'Keeffe is indexed. Augusto Pinochet is indexed for page 127, but not for pp. 128-30. Habeas corpus is indexed for xiv, a page that doesn't exist, but not for page 15 where it appears: etc, etc, etc.

To repeat, these points are mostly minor by themselves, they would hardly count in periodic literature. However, in a book, read at leisure, perhaps studied, or used as a reference, the accumulation becomes more noticeable, less forgivable and, in a work one wants to promote, disappointing. A little revision might not in future be such a bad idea, plus an outside reading of the manuscript.

A more serious problem, however, is unsupported assertion or allegation. We expect this in journalism; sources may need protecting, time may not permit referencing. We just keep our eyes open and over time recognise which journalists are the more trustworthy. But, in a book -- particularly one which is going into libraries of deposit to educate and inform our children and grandchildren--unsupported, undocumented statements or assertions are not admissible.

Let me give some examples of what I mean. Sean proclaims that William Hague was "the most childishly stupid leader" of the Conservative Party "in its entire history" [18]. This might be true, but in the biting critique which follows there is nothing to establish the allegation. At best, Sean shows that Mr Hague was weak in opposition. But since the list of events supposed to show this is neither documented nor backed with solid evidence, and since one remembers several occasions when Mr Hague bested Mr Blair in debate, even the lesser charge is unconvincing. 'Childish stupidity' ends up looking like abuse, which does Sean no credit.

Elsewhere, Sean asserts that Mr Hague "has at least one secret he does not want the world to know" [157]. True or not, without further information, this becomes the sort of 'reporting' one would expect from a tabloid. It's of a kind with "Are you still beating your wife?" Mr Hague may indeed have secrets; but dark, unsubstantiated hints about these do nothing for the credibility of the author who publishes them.

Sean also asserts that Edward Heath was a "disastrously--indeed, a treasonably--bad Prime Minister" [154]. I agree. But without something in support (a sentence or two would do) this is just an insult. And not only do insults persuade nobody of their truth, they risk rendering suspect their author's other judgements.

On the same page Sean repeats a charge made earlier [19] that the Blair government "has quietly amended the electoral laws so that its creatures in the police and local government can rig any important ballot." I was not aware of this. Perhaps I don't read the papers as carefully as Sean does. But since ballot-rigging is the most serious charge that can be brought in a democratic system of government--it's normal practice with election-subverters such as Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, or Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe--I naturally want to know what the basis for the charge is. I think many other readers would like to know too. But Sean tells us nothing. Everything rests on his bald assertion.

On page 124, Sean asserts that Mr Blair ghosted an article about himself for Newsweek. Again, fascinating stuff. I would love to know the details. But I can't accept the truth of it merely on Sean's say-so.

On page 156, Sean asserts that "the Quisling Rightists who run the Conservative Party… took over and destroyed the Countryside Alliance." Well, I live in the country, and welcomed the posters going up--"Never underestimate the power of a minority"--and the grand parades. Subsequently, as I watched wind and rain destroy the once proud banners, I wondered why the revolt had petered out. Sean may well be right that the movement was eviscerated by the Conservatives. But no matter how much I admire him, I can't possibly take the charge for granted just because he tells me so.

On page 201, Sean asserts that the Conservative Party's Central Office "went to extreme lengths… to have a BBC Panorama documentary about me first delayed and then cancelled." I am very ready to accept this. I would love to hear the story. But how can I or anybody else be expected to believe such a disgraceful tale with not one word of evidence to back it up?

I could carry on like this about virtually every essay in the book. Of particular concern is Sean's identification of a "Quisling Right" helping an "Enemy Class" to establish a "New World Order" [e.g., 71, 158-61, 205-9]. An intriguing notion indeed. It may be true. But until the existence of these entities is established by careful scholarship--with names and dates and documents and persuasive analytic reasoning--I can't see most people taking them any more seriously than I do the Bogeyman. Especially because the "Enemy Class" is merely a new name for an old enemy: the parasitical State, with all its apologists, employees and dependants.

My other problems with Dispatches from a Dying Country are philosophical. I simply cannot agree with Sean's nationalism; his adulation for the British Constitution and belief that it can be reformed to defend our liberty and property; his affection for patriotism, in my view the first resort of despots, and so different from "the sense of place and unforced pride in community that is inseparable from living in a free society" [205]; or his support for the death penalty and other harsh punishments. But since I have neither time nor inclination to turn this into a review essay, I shall leave those matters where they lie.

Some might see my emphasis on the book's flaws as mere quibbling or nit-picking. I would not agree. Sean has enemies, enemies who also write. The mistakes I have pointed out are exactly the kind of weaknesses hostile critics like to seize on. What's the point of offering your opponents handholds with which to throw you? One can imagine the sneering and scoffing: "Dispatches? It's just a 200-page rant by a basement gun nut who wants to bring back hanging while encouraging drug use, child-molesting and drink-driving. The man's plainly mad. In any case, the book's so embarrassingly full of typing and other errors that it's just not worth wasting time on." Or: "Dr Gabb is such a backwards-looking, hang-and-flog, arch conservative that he even clings to out-of-date software. He would have saved himself and us lot of embarrassment if he'd used Microsoft's grammar and spelling checkers. On the other hand, a bazaar scribe with a clickety old sit-up-and-beg typewriter could have produced a better Index."

Readers of Free Life whose memories go back to the mid-1990s might also be tempted to dismiss my criticisms as retaliation for the sarcastic, unfair review of my book Fed up with Government? , which Sean published in issue No. 21 of this magazine (November, 1994). They would be mistaken: it would be neither to my taste nor my self-interest to work that way. I replied forcefully to the review at that time (although Sean did point to the opportunity for retaliation when he recently invited me to review his own book!). Besides, I have moved on a long way since then. I no longer espouse the political philosophy of limited government which underlay my book. I don't regret writing it, however, because doing so helped me to see the flaws in my own philosophy and, equally important, to get a lifelong fascination with politics out of my system.

No, my criticisms of Dispatches From A Dying Country are solely inspired by the fact that, despite our many differences, I am on Sean's side. I want to destroy what he calls the "Enemy Class" just as much as he does--as any reader of Fed up with Government? will know. But the enemy have in their ranks hundreds of well-educated, intelligent, skilled and experienced writers and debaters who, together, make the Enemy Class a difficult foe to combat. We do indeed have truth and reason on our side, but the better way to defeat Britain's 'Court Intelligentsia', and their lapdogs in the media, is by becoming better political journalists than they are. Sean is often a lone figure, a solitary voice in opposition. My hope in criticising him is that by doing so I will help him to become even more effective at attacking and debunking our mutual enemy. And with successes like Candidlist behind him, he's off to a very good start.

To conclude, Dispatches from a Dying Country falls a bit short of what it might have been--a brilliant rallying cry for British freedom lovers--due to an over-reliance on the power of diatribe, a lack of evidence and calm analysis, and an excess of minor flaws. On the other hand, it contains some excellent and some good reporting, some interesting facts, fascinating speculation, true opinions, a lot of passion for the cause of liberty, and some refreshingly new perspectives on fashionable or 'politically correct' causes. I would urge all Libertarians, Objectivists, Randians, Classical Liberals, true Conservatives, and any genuine lover of freedom to buy the book, if only to enable Hampden Press to publish more of the same!

Final Jottings
Brian Micklethwait

One of the many casualties of the recent attack on the World Trade Centre has been the idea of building buildings like the World Trade Centre. Various tall buildings which were about to be built now won't be. The people who always did hate skyscrapers are now crowing from their boringly low rooftops.

I love skyscrapers. They look great, and they cram lots of people into a small space which is also great. The whole point of living in a city is that, what with millions of people all working and living so near to each other, you can work and socialise with just the people you want to work and socialise with and enjoy whatever stuff you want to enjoy, instead of, as in the low density provinces, just making do with whoever and whatever is nearby. Population density increases choices. City air makes men free.

The trouble with the modern architecture of the nineteen sixties and seventies is not what happens up in the air; it's what sometimes, but by no means always, happens at ground level. The modern architecture I hate is the stuff that disfigures or destroys street frontages, not the stuff that towers up behind and above such frontages.

There's a smallish tower across the road from my third story London flat. It's not pretty and I don't live in it, but to me it's home and I like it. It's in the middle of what would have been a regular London square. The space around the bottom of the tower, prettily tricked out with trees, is a car park, which is only reasonable, and there's still room for a quite large walled garden in which the female inhabitants of the tower sunbathe and mind their children.

A bit further away from my home are the three identical and, by London's drearily low-rise standards, huge slabs of the Department of the Environment. Cabinet Minister Tessa Jowell was recently on TV denouncing these slabs and rejoicing that they are soon to be demolished. The slabs, said she, were nasty to work in, and I'm sure they were. They are, after all, typical architectural products of the sixties, and must accordingly be assumed to be full of bizarre architectural blunders.

The slabs are also ugly, said Madame Tessa. I dissent. True, they might have been done in some other style, such as Chrysler Building art nouveau, or perhaps in Victorian gothic like the nearby Houses of Parliament. They might have had fake Greek columns on the outside. Any one of these options might also have been very handsome. But the Le Corbusier identical row of slabs style has its own grandeur, to my eye. These triple slabs do, sadly, spoil the view of the Houses of Parliament from the new London Wheel, but, when I see them from around where I live, from street level, they, along with other landmarks in my area such as the tower of Westminster Cathedral, the Millbank Tower (where New Labour has its innermost being), tell me where I am and give three dimensional shape to my particular part of central London's flatness.

The nastiness of the DoE slabs is at ground level. Unlike my local tower, they are surrounded at their bottoms by concrete nothingness. No cars, no gardens, no shops. Just a few dull, faceless buildings that stick out across the nothingness on stilts. The entrances to the slabs have all the open-hearted, welcoming atmosphere of an old Communist embassy. Only the street frontage next to the service entrance, where foliage has been allowed to grow over what would otherwise have been pitilessly ugly concrete, has any charm. There's no good reason why this bleakness could not have been hedged about with urban activity. It's merely that this is not how things were envisaged when architectural modernism was first decided upon. Then, the plan was to have only "public open space" at the bottom of towers.

The modern movement maniacs said that the old streets had to be done away with to make way for their new towers. Lies. They just hated streets, which they associated with the muddle of the free market. Now that we are sensible enough to want both streets and towers, we can have both.

Note to devotees of Ayn Rand. Howard Roark's design for a skyscraper, as seen in the film of The Fountainhead, is very fine. But I agree with the old geezers who wanted to attach to it a large olden-style front door. That would have made it even finer. A complete ring of shops or offices around the entire lower few floors of the tower would have improved it even more. But alas, Rand believed that buildings, like her heroes, should have no small talk, in that part of their lives where they impinge upon the lives of other less magnificent buildings or persons. This is the tiresomely superficial integrity of the graceless teenager who believes good manners to be dishonest.

Just this side of Victoria railway station from me, there's a fine example of how to mix the modern style with the smaller and gentler decencies of the past. A tall new lump has been constructed, but the frontage of the bottom few layers of this lump has been tricked out in fake olden style, in brick and carved stone, in a way that lines up with and blends in with the other olden-style buildings in the area. Above this typical London frontage, a sleek modern building rises up, covered in shiny dark glass. Great. Skyscrapers don't require the destruction of the old streetscape, and nor do they themselves have to ape the styles of the past in their entire height. They can simply be planted above or among the older buildings, or, as with this new building in Victoria, they can have human scale replacements of the frontages of the old buildings at their lower ends.

But, in the wake of the WTC attack, and assuming the ground level is done nicely, what sort of skyscrapers should be built?

I believe that a distinction should be made between "political" skyscrapers and "economic" skyscrapers.

The purpose of political skyscrapers is to dwarf all the other buildings in their vicinity, to overawe, to rule, to dominate. This outcome is achieved either by (a) paying for the excessively huge skyscraper out of tax revenue or by some other political slight of hand, or, in the event that a whole cluster of skyscrapers would be economically viable in the locality, by (b) forbidding all other skyscrapers in the vicinity from rivalling the dominant edifice in impressiveness, or both. The political machine, in other words, is fixed in favour of the dominant monument. It alone is allowed to scrape the sky.

Economic skyscrapers occur where it makes economic sense to build skyscrapers, and where every developer is playing by the same rules. The politicians either don't regulate the situation at all, or else regulate it impartially.

Economic skyscrapers, like "economic" buildings of all kinds, tend to cluster, like with like. At any given moment one skyscraper will necessarily be slightly bigger and grander than the others, but if business in the area continues to buzz onwards and upwards another even bigger and grander building will soon spring up, only in its turn to lose its pre-eminence to yet another, and so on. Only if business is permanently blighted in the entire area will the cluster become fixed as if in a photograph, with one recent giant becoming the permanent winner in a now profitless race.

The first skyscrapers, the ones built in late nineteenth century New York and Chicago, were economic. The architectural "modern movement" freaks then devised their own political skyscrapers which they considered to be an improvement: in identical groups, surrounded by nothingness, in the manner of those DoE slabs in London. God forbid architects should just allow the free market that they so hated to work its magic, unbullied by their grand and fascistic selves.

Speaking of fascism, almost all of the recent tallest - skyscraper-in-the- world type skyscrapers built around the world have the look, to my eye, of political skyscrapers. Yes, business-men are now in on the deal, the way they weren't supposed to be when the modern movement first got going, and that improves things a lot. But the business being done is hand in glove with politics.

Despite being planted down in the middle of one of the great world capitals of capitalism, those World Trade Centre towers looked decidedly political to me. If it was worthwhile to build them that big, in that part of town, how come no one had since built any similarly large towers in their near vicinity? It looks to me as if it either didn't make economic sense to build such big towers in the first place (and that the books were squared by some political trick), or that it did make economic sense, but that all who have since tried to make similar money by rivalling or even surpassing the Twin Towers were politically forbidden to do so.

The World Trade Centre has never been more famous than in the months since it was destroyed. In TV shows and films beyond counting, the Twin Towers still stand proud, as often as not in the opening credits and on the packaging of the videos and the DVDs.

As the WTC towers illustrate, I'm not the only one who often likes the look of these political monsters, in much the same way that I like Concorde and was excited by the moon landings. The public sector, even and especially when it is being seriously wasteful, can often be a fine spectacle. But political skyscrapers (like Concorde and the moon landings) are ruinously expensive, and since September 11th, we can also see that they have other drawbacks.

By their nature, it is quite easy to drive an aeroplane, or fire a rocket from a distance, into a political skyscraper, because a political skyscraper is, at any rate towards its top, unprotected by surrounding, only-a-bit-smaller skyscrapers. Driving an aeroplane into the towers of the World Trade Centre was easy, because the World Trade Centre towers were about twice as tall as any other towers near them.

Another example of a political skyscraper, I surmise, is the Sears Tower in Chicago, which immediately after the WTC attack became, quite reasonably, the focus of a huge security flap. This also is an enormous edifice. There are no other towers remotely as tall anywhere in its vicinity. Or consider those other "twin towers", the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur. Those are definitely political. And here in London our tallest building, the Canary Wharf tower, was erected in an environment rotten with fascistic political manipulation.

Quite apart from it being easy to attack political skyscrapers, it also makes sense to attack them. Hit one of these monsters and you hit a huge, unique landmark. You do huge ego damage, huge political damage, huge damage to the skyline and to the look of the place generally, and thus achieve maximum terroristic impact. If all goes really well and you reduce the entire thing to rubble, you get by far the biggest body county.

In contrast, attacking economic skyscrapers makes a lot less sense. Which one do you attack? They're all much of a much-ness, with no huge one being dominant either physically or aesthetically. So, you hit the biggest and latest one? Big deal. You knocked over one rather big upward pointing shed, surrounded by a dozen or more similar sheds.

On their own economic skyscrapers are seldom anything special except in their mere bulk. The saving aesthetic grace of economic skyscrapers is that they grow in clusters, a skyscraper cluster being a thing of extreme beauty and grandeur, even though its constituent elements are nothing like so beautiful. Knocking down an entire skyscraper cluster can't be done by a terrorist with anything less than a nuclear bomb.

It is going to be much harder to build political skyscrapers in the wake of the September 11th attack. But economic skyscrapers, the kind that don't invite aerial assault with their architectural grandiosity and uniqueness, and which defend each other against such assault, will go on making sense.

Incidentally, the IRA took a crack at that Canary Wharf tower a few years ago. Since then, London's powers-that-be have allowed (or paid by political methods to have built, whichever) a couple of other towers of similar size and design to the original one, in its immediate vicinity. Coincidence, I wonder? It looks like Canary Wharf is either being allowed to become an "economic" skyscraper cluster, or that the outward manifestation of such economic rationality is, for defensive purposes, starting to be politically faked.

As far as London is concerned, the two big landmarks of recent years have been the Wheel and the Dome, the contrasting fortunes of these two objects being as perfect an illustration of the superiority of the free market over politics as you could hope to witness.

The Dome does look quite good. Even its enemies mostly concede that. That's because it was designed by an individual architect. But the political nincompoops who decided that it should be built gave the order to start building before they had any clear idea of what was to go inside, and they never did settle this to anyone's satisfaction.

Every time I journey forth to visit Our Editor I change at the Dome Underground Station, so I've seen the outside of the Dome from close up. But when it came to the hideously overpriced inside, I, like millions of other Brits, participated in that Great British National Experience of the Year Two Thousand: I didn't visit the inside of the Dome. Those who did said it was, you know, "okay", and "quite good", and "worth a visit". Children often seemed to like it a lot, but children are easily pleased and they're not paying. From what I saw in the magazines and on television the dome exhibits were no great shakes, just a few dozen propaganda stands of no more interest than a few dozen car launches, in fact less so. The famously shambolic opening ceremony on Millennium night looked like an incompetently staged seven hour half-time show at the Superbowl.

The Dome cost about a billion pounds. That is to say, the thing itself cost around a third of that, and the confusion about the inside cost about two thirds.

The Wheel cost about fifty million quid, i.e. one publicity cheque from British Airways, who introduced the one big foolishness of the Wheel, which is that they insist on calling it the British Airways London "Eye". But it's not an eye, it's a wheel. Eyes don't look like wheels. Those big things that look like big wheels, and twiddle around like wheels, are called "wheels".

Unlike with the Dome, the people who made the Wheel had a plan for what people could do with it once it was finished. They could ride around in it and look out of it at London, which was already there and didn't have to be argued about by incompetent politicians and corrupt design gurus. The Wheel, from start to finish, was organised by one husband-and-wife team. It is a thing of great beauty, an instant loved landmark. The original idea was to knock it down after a few years, but so popular and successful has it been that it will probably stand for decades, and if knocked down will then be replaced by another even bigger and better wheel.

The Wheel was not without its teething troubles, if wheels other than cogwheels may be said to have teeth. It took them two goes to get thing up. The political classes did their best to spoil things by arranging a safety scare involving the pods, which meant that the Wheel didn't actually start revolving with paying customers in it until well into the Spring of 2000.

The biggest drawback of the Wheel is that London from the air is not that great to look at. Come back in a hundred years time and it could really be something, but from the time being, the best place to enjoy the delights of London is from the ground. Take a walk. The joy of London is the way its mood seems to change every few yards you travel, and you can't see this from three hundred feet up.

I step outside my home and confront an ugly but to me pleasing sixties tower, and a car park. I walk a few yards and I get to offices, some handsome, some not, full of businesses you've never heard of and never will. If I go the other way, I get to an inner city housing estate full of mixed race single parent families and mixed race juvenile delinquents. If I retreat in terror from this place then within about a minute I find myself in a huge London square in which the young gentlemen of Westminster School may be observed on summer afternoons playing cricket.

Little of this intricate detail is visible from the air. Only Parliament is both beautiful enough and near enough to the Wheel to look really good from it, and the river looks nice, I'll grant that. There are occasional more distant glories, like St Paul's Cathedral, but mostly, and unlike New York or Hong Kong or downtown Los Angeles or downtown Chicago, London is just a huge horizontal smudge. Parliament looks good, but more typical of London is what is about the same distance away from the Wheel as Parliament but down river. There you will observe the National Theatre, which looks like a Le Corbusier design for a concentration camp crematorium. The view from the National Theatre, we Londoners like to tell each other, is the finest view in London. From the National Theatre you cannot see the National Theatre.

And, since the Wheel is one of the best things in London, the view from the Wheel ought to be one of the worst in London. From the Wheel, you cannot see the Wheel. Except that from the Wheel you can see the Wheel! The view of the Wheel, from the Wheel, is one of the best things about the Wheel. From afar, the Wheel is a thing of beauty. From nearby it is even finer. And it looks finest of all when viewed from inside itself. This is because of the design and construction of the individual pods, which is world class. They are not complicated. They're about forty feet or so by about ten feet by ten feet, shaped like slightly elongated eggs, and built like the a gun bay of a World War Two bomber but without the guns, only with shiny architectural metal struts instead of shabby grey ones, and with lovely curvy glass. (In this respect the aviation connection supplied by British Airways is most appropriate.) They're just beautifully done. The difference between the Wheel's pods and the Dome's exhibits is the difference between capitalism and collectivism in three dimensions.

At night you can see the flash bulbs going off from inside the pods in a steady silent firework display from half a mile away. Almost all of the photos will deliberately include bits of the Wheel, and as likely as not the next few pods to the one occupied by the photographer.

The contrasting locations of the Wheel and of the Dome are also typical of the intelligence of commerce compared to the idiocy of politics.

The Wheel is smack dab in the middle of London, just across the river from Parliament. The Dome is off in an easterly direction, in an abandoned power station or aluminium factory or some such, also next to the river. It had to have a special underground line extension built for it, which is to say that it really cost two billion quid and not a mere one billion.

The abiding memory of my trips to see Our Editor was of vast approach ways and vast underground stations which were obviously built to accommodate vast throngs but which were in fact almost deserted. The bottom of the Wheel, by contrast, is permanently surrounded at its base by a vast puddle of humanity. No sane tourist would dream of visiting London without checking out the Wheel, and any normal tourist would want a ride on it.

This giant puddle of people may do London another huge favour. The patch of urban desert between the Royal Festival Hall and the big thirties building next to the Wheel which used to accommodate the old Greater London Council is a great big nothing. About seventeen different public bodies have spent the entire second half of twentieth century preventing each other from doing anything with this strange place, surely one of the great unused pieces of real estate in the entire world. (For about two of the five decades in question, Australians used part of it to sell each other Volkswagen minivans.) Well, thanks to the Wheel, Londoners can now hope that all those millions of milling tourists, fanning out across the globe with tales of urban nothingness slap in the middle of what is supposed to be one of the world's great cities, will finally embarrass the public sector in this particular part of London into creative action.

The Royal Festival Hall itself might have done this long ago. This was built at the time of the Festival of Britain, which was the last thing to happen in this patch of desert, and the RFH might have brought a torrent of important people from all over the planet to gaze on the nothingness and shame it into shape. But alas, the Festival Hall was built at that ghastly moment in architectural history when architects, prating of how the function of a building was everything, would take it upon themselves personally to supervise every detail of all its functions, instead of allowing knowledgeable people to do these jobs for them and being content to arrange and decorate the result. Architectural modernism is now getting into its stride, even in Britain, and is getting more popular. But in its earlier, public sector dominated manifestations, architectural modernism, at any rate in Europe, was disfigured by a relentless determination on the part of architects to re-invent every technology involved in the building of each of their buildings, and to despise traditional methods of doing things. But tradition contains knowledge. To solve every problem from scratch, while ignoring all those despised experts with their pessimistic prophecies of doom if tried and tested recipes are not followed, is pretty much to guarantee disaster. Hence all those hospitals whose lifts aren't large enough for the beds. Hence all that wallpaper hanging off the slime-ridden walls of publicly owned high-rise "dwellings". Hence the crime rate in those urban deserts that replaced traditional streets. Hence the grim little desert at the bottom of the Department of the Environment. And hence the acoustics of the Royal Festival Hall.

Listening to a symphony orchestra in the Royal Festival Hall is like listening to a bad recording. Most of the music performed there has been relentlessly sub-world-class, as have most of the performers. God knows what bribes have to be paid to get world class orchestras, from Berlin, Vienna, New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, St Petersburg or Amsterdam to endure a night of playing there, as they very occasionally do. Much of the assumed success - assumed by the BBC anyway - of the BBC's Promenade Concerts, which at least have a world class audience, is caused by the awfulness of all other orchestral concerts in London.

The reason that modernism has always worked so much better in America than in Europe is that American modernism, aside from a few Le Corbusian public sector atrocities, was and always remained an evolved and ever- evolving technological and aesthetic tradition. The "modern movement", cooked up by Europeans who merely visited America at the begging of the twentieth century (and who then returned to commit the occasional Le Corbusian atrocity), was something else again, and it has now been discredited. But architectural modernism as such has never been in a healthier state. It is becoming everywhere what it always was in America: a mass of tried and tested recipes, a tradition. And tradition works. When the city of Birmingham recently built itself a concert hall, they hired an acoustics expert and gave him the right to veto the design. Only when he was satisfied that the new Symphony Hall would satisfactorily serve its number one function did building proceed. The result is a world class concert hall, miles better than anything in London.

Further note for Randroids: Ayn Rand swallowed this modern movement guff about the irrelevance of tradition whole. Howard Roark's towers, in addition to not having proper front doors would also, in reality, have been full of other more serious and uncorrectable blunders, and for the same philosophical reasons. As for that ridiculous housing project Roark designed, full (in the film of The Fountainhead) of spikily perverse angles in the manner of many a London tower of the sixties, well, let's just say that if Roark hadn't blown it to kingdom come, publicly employed demolition experts soon would have. Randroids sometimes reply to this criticism by quoting Rand to the effect that Roark's buildings actually worked splendidly, and that Roark was omniscient about building technology. But such protestations do not reveal Roark to have been a competent architect; they merely reveal Ayn Rand to have been a less than satisfactory novelist. Omniscience is impossible. No time, and certainly not the tiny few years Roark devotes to the subject, would be enough to master all aspects of building technology. It's as if a novelist who has a character repeatedly and stubbornly jumping over a cliff in defiance of traditional ideas about how to conduct oneself tells us that this same character has a highly developed sense of self-preservation. It can't be.