How would a libertarian government handle Libya?

On the Eurotunnel back from France I picked up a copy of the FT. It featured this picture of Tony Blair's "hand of friendship", extended to Muammar Gaddafi on 24 March 2004.


I also read Norman Tebbit's latest article, bemoaning the fact that private British companies had to arrange the evacuation of their employees from Libya:

After all, there are plenty of airlines with under-utilised aircraft at this time of year, and if an oil company could find one, why could not HMG?

I found myself wondering how a libertarian government would have handled our relationship with Libya, and the current crisis.

Presumably there would have been no efforts by the government to promote trade with Libya (or any other country). This would have been left to private companies (the primary beneficiaries of such trade).

A libertarian government would not have done "all it could" to facilitate the release of Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi.

If British companies chose to do business in dangerous parts of the world, would a libertarian government deploy our armed forces to rescue expatriates who found themselves in trouble? For that matter, would it rescue British tourists who likewise found themselves in danger? Would it depend on whether the foreign aggressors were openly associated with a foreign government?

Like Palmerston [1], I'm attracted to the idea that

as the Roman, in days of old, held himself free from indignity, when he could say Civis Romanus sum; so also a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England, will protect him against injustice and wrong.

In practice, we no longer have this power (if we ever truly did). But is it right, in principle, for our compulsorily-funded military to protect the rights of private British citizens in foreign lands, irrespective of the cost? It seems likely that a strict libertarian government would constrain our military action to defence of the realm.

For the same reasons, a libertarian government would probably not be considering military action in Libya for humanitarian reasons. Again, I have mixed feelings about this, but we don't have the resources to save the world, and nobody would suggest that our past 'humanitarian' interventions have been prioritised according to the severity of the slaughter or oppression. There is always an ulterior motive, and it typically serves specific interests, rather than some hazily-defined 'national interest'.

If the government declines to act, should citizens be free to hire mercenaries? Perhaps with different parts of the British population supporting different sides?

Would a libertarian government allow its citizens to trade with countries that did not respect individual rights? In the extreme, would it allow trade with slave-owners?

Would a libertarian government allow the sale of weapons to tyrants, for aggression against their neighbours, or repression of their own people? What about trade in other goods that facilitates the purchase of weapons from third parties?

Who should decide where to draw the line?

It will be a long time before these questions get tested, but it's interesting to speculate.

[1] 25 June 1850, Hansard CXII [3d Ser.], 380-444

State 'care' for the elderly

Tom Paine is back, and he's written an excellent post about the failure of the NHS to provide basic care for elderly patients:

When every widowed grandparent incapable of looking after him or herself moved in with their family, the children of the house learned both to value them as humans and to help take care of them. They were family, after all. Nothing could be more natural. Now they are looked after in state nursing homes, where “carer” is just a job title; usually with as much relation to reality as most modern job titles. An old school-friend works in just such a home and routinely starts her shift by cleaning up residents who have been allowed to sit in their own filth by "carers" who couldn't be bothered because "they will only do it again." Tellingly, she reports that residents are only really cleaned up (other than by her) when relatives are due to visit - for fear that the families will "make trouble." The very families who would, if the welfare state did not exist, be looking after their old folk themselves.

He continues,

If I am ever in a nursing home, I want my daughters to be paying the bills, checking up on the service and making it clear to the proprietors that they are ready to take our family's business elsewhere if they are dissatisfied. No bureaucrat, however kindly s/he may be, can replace that.

That the State could replace - or even do a better job than - a loving family is the most barbarous of the fallacies by which the 1946 generation has lived. They were so hung up on this fantasy that they systematically undermined the very concept of family at every opportunity. They actively encouraged people to depend on a burgeoning, state that would nurture them "from cradle to grave." Not only was that wrong, it was corrosively wrong.

The whole article is well worth reading.

Restaurants forced to display calories on menus?

One of the segments on BBC Breakfast this morning considered the idea of compelling restaurants to list calories on menus.

Do people really need to count calories in order to tell when they're getting fat? Is it so difficult to take corrective action if your weight edges up? To exercise more, perhaps, or eat at home for a little while, where you can count calories to your heart's content.

Will the people most at risk from obesity pay any attention to the calorie counts? And is it any of our business whether they do?

How much expense and hassle would the requirement impose on restaurateurs? Would the counts be accurate? And isn't the whole point of going out for a nice meal that you're indulging in good food? Do you really want calorie counts there to spoil your fun?

A viewer from Switzerland emailed to ask whether it's reasonable to expect your friends to provide calorie counts when you're invited over for dinner. What is it about commercial transactions that makes the hand-wringers feel that interference is justified?

The key question is not whether money changes hands, but whether all parties act voluntarily and honestly. If customers demand calorie counts, restaurants should be free to provide them, and if they do, they have an obligation to provide accurate information. But if customers are happy to visit a restaurant despite the absence of calorie counts, nobody has a right to intervene.

This is all so obvious that it really shouldn't need saying. Not for the first time, I find myself empathising with Wonko the Sane.

A supreme court?

The latest "human rights" violation to be declared in the UK concerns sex offenders.

Personally, I don't like the idea of a sex offenders register. Any offender who poses a danger to the public should not be released. If that means they spend their entire life in prison, so be it.

This time the ruling came from the British Supreme Court, but the law they appealed to was not our own:

Five supreme court justices upheld a decision by the Court of Appeal that the lack of a review was incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights, the strongest judgement they can give against a piece of legislation.

This is the same convention to which John Hirst appealed for the right to vote. At the time, the Supreme Court did not exist, so after being rejected by the High Court in April 2001, Hirst took his case to the European Court of Human Rights in March 2004. Had the case been brought today, it seems likely that our Supreme Court would also have saved Hirst a trip to Strasbourg, and provided the same ruling with a veneer of domestic respectability.

According to the Supreme Court's website,

The Supreme Court is the highest court of appeal in the United Kingdom. However, The Court must give effect to directly applicable European Union law, and interpret domestic law so far as possible consistently with European Union law. It must also give effect to the rights contained in the European Convention on Human Rights.

Under the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (article 267), The Court must refer to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in Luxembourg any question of European Union law, where the answer is not clear and is necessary for it to give judgment.

In giving effect to rights contained in the European Convention on Human Rights, The Court must take account of any decision of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. No national court should “without strong reason dilute or weaken the effect of the Strasbourg case law” (Lord Bingham of Cornhill in R (Ullah) v Special Adjudicator [2004] UKHL 26).

An individual contending that his Convention rights have not been respected by a decision of a United Kingdom court (including The Supreme Court) against which he has no domestic recourse may bring a claim against the United Kingdom before the European Court of Human Rights.

Not such a supreme court after all.

Prisoners' votes and the ECHR

The resolution from the House of Commons on Thursday was encouraging:

That this House notes the ruling of the European Court of Human Rights in Hirst v . the United Kingdom in which it held that there had been no substantive debate by members of the legislature on the continued justification for maintaining a general restriction on the right of prisoners to vote; acknowledges the treaty obligations of the UK; is of the opinion that legislative decisions of this nature should be a matter for democratically-elected lawmakers; and supports the current situation in which no prisoner is able to vote except those imprisoned for contempt, default or on remand.

It was passed 234-22.

Back in November, things weren't looking so good. I wrote at the time that we looked poised to submit, once again, to the will of the EU, but it's worth noting that unlike the European Court of Justice, the ECHR isn't actually an EU body, but rather a Council of Europe creation. The CoE (not to be confused with the Council of the European Union or the European Council!) predates the EU, and includes, among others, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Russia, and Turkey.


With such company, one wonders what penalty we would really face for defying the will of the ECHR.

Today, Daniel Hannan asks "what specific benefits accrue to the United Kingdom as a result of our adhesion to the European Convention on Human Rights?"

It ought to be the most basic question of all, yet it is almost never asked. Most politicians, together with virtually the entire legal establishment, take our continued membership as a datum or given; yet they rarely get round to explaining why it’s so necessary.

The European Convention might once have served a useful purpose. It was drawn up immediately after the Second World War, when there was an understandable determination to secure civic freedoms in countries emerging from tyranny. We can argue about how much the freedom of Europe owed to human rights judges and how much to Nato armies. But even if we accept the importance of the ECHR, why is this a reason for Britain’s continued participation in 2011?

Who has benefited from the ECHR?

IRA terrorists won a number of cases. Illegal immigrants regularly reach for the Convention to overturn repatriation orders. Prisoners have used it to secure their right to have twigs in their cells for use in pagan rituals and access to fertility treatment. And, of course, lawyers have done tremendously well out of it: whole chambers have sprung up, deriving their livelihoods from the growing corpus of human rights jurisprudence.

For the country as a whole, however, the balance is surely negative. It’s hardly as though we suffer from a massive breakdown of civic freedoms from which only a foreign court can rescue us. The ECHR degrades our democracy without enhancing our liberty.

How easy would it be for us to walk away? Hannan explains the tangled mess:

It is true that the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights are different institutions. The first is attached to the EU (which has 27 member states), the second to the Council of Europe (which has 47). Yet the two institutions are not unconnected. The ECJ has for some time drawn on ECHR judgments as precedent, and the European Convention is now officially recognised in the EU Treaties. The two organisations use the same twelve-star flag, and the EU is in the process of formally joining the Council of Europe – to which all its members belong individually. Indeed, as I discovered the other day, the two bodies are linked even in the most literal way: an underground corridor connects the European Parliament in Strasbourg to the ECHR.

In short, it is by no means clear that Britain could walk out of the Council of Europe without also leaving the EU, a prospect which scares most of our politicians witless. For the country at large, however, leaving the EU would be a delicious bonus.

Schengen aside, we currently occupy the 2nd worst spot in the Venn diagram, inside all EU groups except the Euro [1]. We'd be far better off with Norway and Iceland (inside only the EEA, EFTA, and CoE). Better still would be Switzerland's position (inside only the EFTA and CoE). But best of all would be to exit the whole lot. For centuries we led the world in individual liberty and genuine human rights. We can do so again, but only if we break free.

[1] We partially opted out of Schengen; Blair and friends signed us up for Police Security and Judicial Cooperation in 1999.

The power of a label

An excellent post from Daniel Hannan:

The excuse is a telling one. The Labour politicians who taunted Paul Maynard, a clever, charming and energetic Conservative MP who suffers from mild cerebral palsy, say they stopped the moment they realised he had a disability. In other words, they think it fair game to make faces at someone who has a tic or another mannerism, but not when that mannerism results from a medical condition.

The more you think about this distinction, the more you realise how artificial it is. Man is fallen, and none of us is perfect. One person might have a squint, another might spit as he talks, a third might have a more severe disability. All such conditions are, to a large extent, beyond our control. Yet making jokes about, say, someone’s baldness, or short temper, is considered fair game.

I recommend the whole article.

How fair is the Office for Fair Access

I was surprised to see a guest speaking sense on BBC Breakfast. Harry Phibbs rightly condemned the interference of OFFA, the Office for Fair Access.

This quango was set up by New Labour, but retained by the Coalition:

The Office for Fair Access (OFFA) is an independent, non departmental public body. Our role is to promote and safeguard fair access to higher education for lower income and other under-represented groups following the introduction of higher tuition fees in 2006-07.

With Oxford University joining Cambridge in raising tuition fees, they will come under increasing pressure to choose applicants based not on their achievements or potential, but instead according to the ditktats of a quango whose only concern (besides its own existence) is to boost the representation of "under-represented groups".

According to Oxford's access agreement,

35. The University will monitor progress towards achieving benchmarks in terms of the representation of its undergraduate student population. The benchmarks will be
internally-developed, taking account of existing external data such as HESA PIs, and
will be established with regard to the following groups:

(a) State school students.
(b) Students from NS-SEC groups 4-7.
(c) Students from black and minority ethnic groups.

36. The University will also monitor the admission and progress of care leavers.

37. In each case, the benchmarks will be adjusted to take into account the specific
academic requirements for entry to Oxford (i.e., normally 3 A grades at A-level, in
subjects appropriate for our courses, excluding General Studies).

NS-SEC groups are based on occupational background; 4-7 are "Small employers and own account workers", "Lower supervisory and technical occupations", "Semi-routine occupations", and "Routine occupations". It's a remarkably condescending hierarchy. Oxford apparently drew the line at the lowest rung: "Never worked and long-term unemployed".

I've never understood why blacks get special mention in "black and minority ethnic", as if they are not themselves "minority ethnic". But why should any of this matter? Admission should be based on merit, and merit alone. White students shouldn't lose out on account of their skin colour. "Minority ethnic" students, and their classmates, should have confidence that they deserve their place at Oxbridge.

What's next? Steps to ensure that "under-represented groups" get a "fair" proportion of 1st and upper 2nd class degrees? If positive discrimination trumps merit at A-level, why not take it to the next level? Think of the boost it would give to "under-represented groups" seeking employment after graduation!