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So an ICM poll for the Telegraph today claims that:

"Sunday's survey provides some good news for Mr Brown - 65 per cent of those questioned support his 42-day plan, with backing coming from voters across the political spectrum.

Thirty per cent think the limit should stay at 28 days, the position favoured by the Conservatives."

Now, aside from the fact that I must be in the five per cent not even mentioned there, because I support no extension on the 2 days before charging that applies for other crime, I don't think I know a single person that supports any extension on the 28 days already permitted.

In his acceptance speech when he took over the leadership, Nick Clegg suggested (and I do believe) that most people in Britain were inherently liberal. So just who are the 65% that support this gross extension of the state's ability to "disappear" people. This is not Chile of the seventies for goodness' sake.

I've asked before, and the point was made by Shami Chakrabarti on Question Time on Thursday night with some force (she really laid into the boy Milliband to my delight!) why it is the British police and prosecution services are unable to get far enough on with their investigative work within two or four times the amount of time other countries have to charge people with something that could keep the accused on remand if necessary, with the introduction if necessary, as they do in many European jurisdictions, of post charge questioning.

I don't have the prescience to know where this country is heading, but with that 65% for one of the most egregious attacks on our civil liberties - remember we're talking about effectively disappearing people for up to six weeks without even telling them why, leaving families in limbo, probably losing the victim of the disappearing their jobs and so on, but I don't like it.

I've not left this sceptered isle for about twenty years (and then it was only a work trip to the emerald one next door) having had the travel bug knocked out of me by twenty four hour journeys to Tanzania, Kenya and Nigeria as a youngster. I don't even have a valid passport at the moment, and was content not getting one now that the intrusive questioning to get one has started, but I'm afraid I'm thinking that now I have to think about making plans for somewhere else to go when this country eventually becomes such an affront to civil liberties that I can no longer stomach being here.

Hat tip to the Adam Smith Institute for pointing out that today is the anniversary of the death, 231 years ago, of one of my favourite wonks, David Hume.

David Hume (1711-1776):

On this day in 1776, after a long illness, David Hume died. He must have been one of the most intelligent, and indeed one of the wisest human beings to have lived - a truth that can still be inspected in the pages of his history and philosophy.

A notorious skeptic on the subject of religion, Hume found himself excluded from academic posts. But he made up for it with literary masterpieces, such as his Treatise of Human Nature and Essays, Moral and Political, his sweeping, controversial History of Great Britain, plus An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. But he cautiously reserved the publication of his essays on suicide and on immortality, and his (then) sensational, skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion until after his death.

Hume took an empirical view of the world. Our senses are the best guide to it, he thought, and not the fanciful theories of metaphysicians and churchmen. It was a philosophy of common sense. And his writings analyze a huge range of subjects - ethics, philosophy of science, free will, the is-ought problem, politics, human nature, and even economics - with a precision and simplicity that is still enjoyable to read (no really, it is) even today.

And, armed with this simple common sense and a towering intellect, he rarely seems to put a foot wrong, even when off his natural ground. Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman, for example, wrote that modern readers of Hume's essay Of Money would find 'few if any errors of commission'.

Sociable and witty, Hume made many friends among the great minds of his day, including Adam Smith, one of the few contemporaries who could claim to be his intellectual equal. On this day, we at the Adam Smith Institute should remember our friend, David Hume.

Personally, the work I like most of Hume's is a relatively minor one, the "Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth" in which he shows how we should remodel government where the power comes from the lowest rung of government upwards. Where the central government only makes laws that the counties acting together want. I even have a domain 1754.org.uk on which I would like to set up a "wonk site" in honour of the anniversary of its publication, but which I have not got around to yet!

Well done to Peter, posting on Liberal Review for looking out a piece in the Guardian from today, 97 years ago, on Lloyd-George's proposed land tax:

Land tax ninety-seven years on

The Lords and Tories fear a land tax

Tuesday September 28, 1909
The Guardian

That the Lords will reject the Budget - or postpone it, which is the same thing - till after a general election, the spokesmen of the Opposition seem now agreed.

No one with eyes and a memory really doubts why they will; what they dislike, as they started by showing quite simply, are the land taxes.

Read it all here, and recall just how much these people gave up in order not to have their land taxed - the Parliament Act of 1911 castrated the landed oligrarchy in the house of lords meaning that never again could they rule this land on a par with the elected chamber.

Cobden, talking about the Corn Laws half a century earlier, hit the nail on the head:

"For a period of one hundred fifty years after the [Norman] Conquest, the whole of the revenue of the country was derived from the land. During the next one hundred and fifty years it yielded nineteen-twentieths of the revenue. For the next century down to the reign of Richard III it was nine-tenths. During the next seventy years to the time of Mary it fell to about three-fourths. From this time to the end of the Commonwealth, land appeared to have yielded one half of the revenue. Down to the reign of Anne it was one-fourth. In the reign of George III it was one-sixth. For the first thirty years of his reign the land yielded one-seventh of the revenue. From 1793 to 1816 (during the period of the land tax), land contributed one-ninth, from which time to the present [1845] one-twenty-fifth only has been derived from the land. ...Thus, the land which anciently paid the whole of taxation paid now only a fraction. ...The people had fared better under the despotic monarchs than when the power of the state had fallen into the hands of a landed oligarchy who had first exempted themselves from taxation, and next claimed compensation for themselves by a corn law for their heavy and peculiar burdens." [from a speech delivered during the Parliamentary debate on the Corn Laws, 1845]

And you can read more about Winston Churchill's arguments IN FAVOUR of the land tax courtesy of "Wealth and Want".

Interesting thing over at Tim Worstall's place on the statistical evidence for the smoking ban.

i wonder if it is also statistically significant that Sir Richard Peto, probably the foremost epidemiological statistician and long time collaborator with the late Sir Richard Doll on the tobacco issue, says rather non-commitally that "if this ban helps people who want to stop to manage to do so then it could save a lot of lives and prevent a lot of premature deaths."

If, of course, they survive the pneumonia.

Let's face it, this is a grubby piece of nanny-state legislation used to demonise what is a grubby habit - and I write as a smoker who is at the same time not proud of my addiction but not in the "right place" to have the willpower to give up at the moment. And at the same time presents an interesting precedent about property rights and the state.

All sorts of figures were trotted out before the debate on the ban, such as that 80% of people would prefer going out or start going out to pubs and restaurants if they were smoke free. Why then, could the leisure industry not react to this fantastic market potential without legislation forcing them to do so? Well, any pub or especially pub chain would be taking a risk with their existing customers by unilaterally banning smoking. So, in a classic piece of rent-seeking and market manipulation they wanted government to tell them they had to so they would all be "disadvantaged" at the same time.

Yes, smokers had become too bolshy over the past couple of decades, exercising a "right" to smoke anywhere that they hadn't enjoyed previously - old fashioned pubs had "smoke rooms" long before any desire of the middle class to segregate smokers; I remember in upmarket restaurants and hotels and at formal dinners nobody would dare smoke at the table - that one smoked in the lounge with one's coffee and digestifs in a similar fashion to ladies being dismissed to the drawing room so the gentlemen could smoke after genteel dinner parties.

Of course, the sort of places the hoi-polloi want to go these days are too focussed on money making to have redundant spaces like lounges for after dinner mints and cigars or rooms specifically established for the working man to stop for a pint and a fag on the way home. Many a pub has had its internal walls ripped out to make more space for crammed in binge drinkers.

I daresay that the most effective way of making smokers face up to the grubbiness of their addiction would have been to allow a two tier system to develop in response to market demands, and have some pubs full of pristine, crystal clear air and others where you couldn't see the bar as you entered the establishment for the clouds of smoke. Eventually, even smokers, and especially their non-smoking friends, going out for the evening would abandon the filthier establishments and persuade their addicted friends that a better night would be had without the smell and choking fumes.

Technorati Tags: liberty, smoking ban

Paul Walter reminds me of the fuss created by this supposed request for the new-ish mosque in Oxford to broadcast an amplified call to prayer. Paul has some links in his post, but to recap, it has now managed to engulf two bishops, Rochester ("no-go areas") and Oxford ("my area, shut up, Rochester"), Peter Hichens ("I really don't mind Muslims so long as they only help me rail against modern decadence and don't wake me up") and, I understand, our own dear leader ("the sound of the divine, aagh, beautiful"). And many acres of newsprint, many billion pixels and several trees have been employed in railing against or jumping to the support of Oxford's beleaguered no go areas.

Well, I heard what I believe is closer to the true story today. Apparently, no such "request" has been made. What happened is that a well known local figure in "inter-faith relations" a retired Christian minister who did things like organize an interfaith cricket match after 9/11 and similar things, thought one day what a jolly good thing it would be to have the call to prayer sung out from our new city mosque. He went to the Imam and suggested it and they agreed to present a petition to the council. A petition, get this, apparently of two, yes, more than one, less than three, signatures - that of the interfaith dialogue chappy and the Imam himself.

The Imam had not consulted or particularly mentioned it to anyone else, and speaking to a couple of Muslim city councillors seems to confirm that there's been no popular movement, nor do they feel they want one, to get them the call to prayer - the responses seemed to be along the lines of - "do you think we're stupid, we know when we're supposed to pray and don't need reminding".

So, whilst it has stirred up an interesting debate, which however has occasionally turned into naked bigotry, it's all apparently based on virtually nothing at all. I can't help wondering whether the local story of a bunch of primary school parents getting upset about Halal meat is related to the anti-muslim hype that's been dredged up in some quarters by the non-story of the call to prayer.