Golden Dozen

Repent! For the end of the state is nigh!

Jock — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 16:44:27 +0000

The End is Nigh
Originally uploaded by Martin~

Or, why I am really a "geo-mutualist" and why I think you should be too!

The revolution has begun. In fact it's been building for at least twenty years. When history looks back it will not probably be able to identify a particular date, but it could do worse than choose Christmas Day 1990, the day a humble academic computing geek communicated with his server in something nobody had really heard of called "hyper text". Finally there was something useful to do with the "internet" that would eventually draw in users from well outside of the ivory towers and military research facilities that developed it. Users in every corner of the world; users of every age and race; users of every background.

And what will history say about this revolution? Will it be seen as a great leap in human freedoms, capable of finally fulfilling Cobden's vision that "peace will come to earth when the people have more to do with each other and governments less"? Or perhaps that it heralded an era of unprecedented interference in our lives by governments?

Actually, I think it is a one way bet; that eventually it will be a revolution in human freedoms, in co-operation and in innovation. Such are the players in this brave new world; hackers working to bust the Great Firewall of China and liberate a fifth of the world's population for example; Kenyans being the first to be able to make payments quickly and simply by mobile phone; privacy technologists working to keep us one level of information security ahead of the law; game players investing ever more realistic virtual worlds; their individuality and very lack of co-ordination in many cases makes it inevitable.

What politicians can do, however, is either to make the transition long and painful, or to smooth its passage for the "good of mankind" so to speak. We can choose to stick by the state and try and keep it working just as its citizens are less and less tied to it, which will inevitably lead to more and more monitoring and restrictions; or we can choose to look at how to build alternative civic institutions and mechanisms to fulfill our needs in an era when the state has much less power to intervene at least without the force that is endemic in state action becoming more and more obvious to the point of rebellion against it.

So what is the great weapon of mass destruction that is going to bring low the state as we know it? Why, tax, of course. I'll let you into a little secret: in order to function a state needs to be able to tax: in order to tax it needs to have the ability to track transactions or peoples' wealth and changes therein. And from the taxpayer's point of view, there is every incentive to try to minimize their tax liability. Up until now, or very recently, it has been only the global super-rich who have had the means and sufficient incentive to take advantage of loopholes and allowances that enable them to choose the lowest tax jurisdiction in which to crystalize out their tax liability.

But thanks to the global and interpersonal nature of this most recent communications revolution we are on the cusp of mechanisms being easily available to the big majority of people that will enable us to minimize our "financial footsteps". When most of us only ever relate to the majority of our money through pixels on a screen or numbers on a bank statement - a small minority of trade now relies on real metal or crinkly coloured paper currency - what does it matter what those pixels are called; pounds, dollars, euro, yen? What about a completely new, essentially fictitious currency perhaps, like the "Linden Dollars" of "Second Life"?

Add e-Bay and Tesco to Second Life for example and one could imagine a world in which most of your financial transactions are conducted entirely in cyberspace, in virtual worlds that know no territorial boundaries or tax regimes (or at least that could be relocated into a sympathetic tax jurisdiction quickly if necessary), but with delivery of goods and services in the physical world. That's not to say giants like Tesco and e-Bay would necessarily be best, or would necessarily even survive the upheaval.

Those widespread international (and local) interpersonal (and business-to-business) mechanisms for sophisticated modern-day barter are now within reach and threaten the very raison d'etre of many of our longest standing institutions - banking and currency, transnational corporations built in an era when intermediaries were necessary to trade with far off lands, and ultimately the basis on which the state is founded - its monopoly of taxation. At the same time we can form non-geographic communities of genuinely voluntary co-operation in which we can build trust relationships, quasi-legal ways of dealing with disputes and so on that make trade possible with people a few short years ago we would have never had a hope of even communicating with.

So, which side are you going to be on - freedom and co-operation or ever more intrusion, regulation and restriction? And how long have we got?

Some of these technologies fall into the category of "overestimated penetration at 2 years, underestimated at 10 years." I think the state will be lucky if it has another decade of relatively easily collected taxes based on productivity, sales and incomes. If people want the state to be able to function beyond that, without increasingly authoritarian intrusion into our economic lives, we need to be looking now at how to make it pay its way through user fees for any value for money services we want it to provide. And as soon as it does of course it must also open itself to competition - else it's a monopoly again whose only rationale is to use its discretionary power to rip off the very people who both fund and use its services.

Unsurprisingly any of the various forms of land value tax will do to start with and would be especially beneficial implemented soon, near the bottom of the crash in land values currently underway. The present situation in financial markets offers an ideal opportunity for new means of trading without the sort of money so invidiously inflated and deflated by the banking cartels. Again, these alternatives could operate either on a local scale or in an international, or non-geographic trading community. Land has the singular benefit of being immoveable. You can't virtualize land as easily as you can income - for we all still need to have a base somewhere.

There's another major reason for helping this process away from the power of and dependency on nation states rather than fighting it - the state is expensive. The sort of redistributive measures required to ensure that everyone gets a fair crack at opportunity - the level playing field - are getting more and more expensive. Our interventions into the affordable housing market for example, in the form of subsidy, will continue to rise when land values rise, subsidizing the already-haves in the name of assisting the have-nots. Far better to try to ensure the fairest of level playing fields for all than trying to play uphill on a steepening playing field.

So, when you find me criticizing the state and its acolytes, it's less about what has gone on in times past - I would say times of missed opportunity for sure - but more on how we will be able to live in future, a future I think is pretty inevitable, in which the very idea of a state with the power to tax fairly will be severely compromised. The elephant in the room needs to be dealt with, and dealt with soon. Will it be freedom, or more desperate attempts to maintain the ailing state structures? You choose! read more »

geo-libertarian, internet, monetary reform, mutualism, surveillance state, tax

Discontent on Lib Dem benches?

Jock — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 22:09:39 +0000

To Reading this morning for South Central Regional Conference at the wonderful, if somewhat seriously cramped, Oakwood Centre in Woodley. The first, opening, speaker was Sandra Gidley, MP for Romsey. The "Romsey Redhead" herself. She seemed to devote most of her speech to having a go at the Lib Dem parliamentary press operation for watering down anything any MP want to press release so it says nothing at all preferably by the sound of it, but certainly nothing "spikey".

Now, as a defence against charges that our MPs are invisible, even to us, that's one thing, but frankly I don't want to hear that sort of excuse even if it is correct. If it is correct then we should be getting new press officers perhaps. Or not constraining them as much. But it is none of our, South Central ordinary members', business. The Parliamentary Party has to sort this out, not us.

But then she said something that somewhat let the side down - that we should "stop banging on about Site Value Rating and Constitutional Reform" and speak about things that matter to real people. Huh? When last did you ever see a parliamentary party press release about PR, less still LVT/SVR?

I very much suspect that the last press release on SVR was one of Herbert Asquith's.

And frankly, since it is, though I say so myself, the single most important step towards economic and social freedom we could take, perhaps we should be talking about it in press releases. At least it would differentiate us from the anodyne bull turds coming from the red-blue parties.

But to suggest that we do too much of that and too little responding to other issues is just fantasy Sandra. read more »

Private charity, voluntary co-operation or state welfare

Jock — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 20:56:26 +0000

One of the most common points of disagreement between, let's call them "state-interventionists" and "non-interventionists", is the claim that "non-interventionism" would leave the poorest in society on the scrap heap with no welfare, no support. That the much vaunted idea of "non-interventionists" that "private charity" or "voluntary co-operation" would take the place of state welfare is just an impossible pipe dream. So determinedly do "state-interventionists" believe their own claims that they frequently castigate "non-interventionists" as heartless uncaring selfish individualists who would rather see others die than pay taxes. One quote from a Lib Dem Voice "discussion" just today will give you the general idea:

"Well none of them [Libertarians] are serious, because it an incoherent philosophy....send the kids back down the mines, it’s only a lifestyle choice."

And to an extent, I used to believe that propaganda. As a geo-libertarian of course I do have an answer of sorts - the basic income derived from land user fees (which would on their own create an almost unimaginably more equitable society in any case) would cover the basics of life for everyone, and give everyone an incentive to top it up with as much or as little work as they can manage.

But a recent discussion on a "non-interventionist" mailing list I've been frequenting recently has challenged the basic assumption of this debate for me. Would people really not contribute voluntarily to the upkeep of others if you don't have a government apparatus threatening them with the confiscation of their property and ultimately the loss of their freedom unless they pay their taxes?

It is a strange proposition. Governments for at least the last sixty years have been supporters at some level or another of some form of state welfare. They may argue about how much is appropriate but the fact is, people have overwhelmingly voted for a state that takes money from you in order to give some of what's yours to someone deemed "less fortunate". We even have a cliche about the inevitability of death, and taxes.

We have tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people who do voluntarily give up their time to care for another. Most people are someone's relative, someone's friend, someone's colleague. And whilst I recognize that some do not have such support networks and would still require some form of collective support, most people do not want to see their friends and relatives on skid row or worse.

One has to wonder whether the interventionist route actually makes things worse. And in how many ways. When we look at our pay packets do we not think often that we've given quite enough for the support of others through our taxes thank you very much. National Insurance and Income Tax between them effectively make the worker near forty per cent worse off. I know what I would do with an extra forty per cent each month. It would pay the interest bill on the piece of land we have just acquired for our first Community Land Trust for a start.

Other taxes and protectionist policies keep the prices we pay for basics artificially high and create incentives for companies to produce cash cows rather than exciting developments. I'll bet if we didn't guarantee one pharmaceutical company a contract for however many millions of doses of Metformin diabetes pills every year a dozen others would have put the effort in to find a cure, not a chronic treatment regime.

The attempt to do welfare as a "universal" system, with the same rules for everyone, means a bloated bureaucracy enforcing inflexible regulations. If welfare were, say, to be dealt with at the parish level, and the barriers to job creation caused by taxes eradicated, I'll bet you more people would be found some work, appropriate to their abilities, even if it didn't give them everything they need and then people would feel much better about helping them out with the rest - because they were trying to help themselves as best they could. We have no way of measuring that at a national level really.

We have a Professor here at Brookes, a chap called Steven King. His area is the History of Welfare mostly in the 18th and 19th centuries - probably the period which received wisdom says was the harshest environment if you were poor or hapless. But I was fascinated by a lecture he gave a couple of years ago on being elevated to the professoriate (you are elevated to that aren't you?). Apparently when parishes were responsible for pensions, those who actually got a pension - those whom their own peers and neighbours if you like knew had simply tried and been unable to support themselves (in common parlance I guess the "deserving poor") would get on average 75% of the average working wage for their area. For others there were varying levels of support down to a pretty basic safety net that was intended to be subsistence rather than comfortable for those they felt were "swinging the lead".

And then there's the problem of administrative costs. If I had an extra 40% in my pay packet and was going to give it away, I'd know that the people or organizations I was giving it to would get all of my donation. I'll bet for the 40% the state apparatus take off me in taxes, probably half actually gets to someone who needs it, to direct service delivery, if that.

So, given all those disadvantages of, and the singular advantage that people actually vote for, this tax based welfare system at some level or another, is it not just possible that by doing away with all that coercion, all that centralization, all that unproductive bureaucracy, the people who get to keep what they earn would be quite proud to "do the right thing" by their neighbours and communities? If they vote at the ballot box to have money taken off them by the state for things they obviously believe are necessary, would they suddenly feel they were not necessary or that they should not contribute towards those same things without the threats of the state? Isn't that a totally illogical position? You'd vote for it but not do it if the people you vote for didn't force you to do it?

And so, at the very least, would it not be at least a courtesy to accept that Libertarianism is an optimistic creed; that it is positive about humanity's innate ability and even need to help each other. You may call that a naive optimism. But I'd rather be a glass half full freedom lover than the glass half empty authoritarian approach that says humanity will not help itself unless it is forced to do so by the agents of a state apparatus that may, just may, cause more problems than it actually solves. Libertarian is not a "devil may care/beggar thy neighbour" philosophy but one that places the utmost faith in people, as individuals, to know and do what is right.

And as to whether it is a "coherent philosophy" or not, I submit that "non-interventionism" is the only truly coherent philosophy in the game. For once you admit the state can do one thing better than we can through voluntary co-operation, you inevitably end up in endless arguments between factions about just how much the state can do better, and the ultimate end of that arms race is totalitarianism - that the state can do everything better than voluntary co-operation. Which is manifestly not true. read more »

Evan harries the invincible Cable

Jock — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 01:44:16 +0000

So I figured I would restart blogging with some feedback on what turned out to be an excellent South Central Regional Liberal Democrats' conference on Saturday here at Oxford Brookes University. Given that I see the place every day my motivation to get there in time for nine-thirty speeches on a Saturday morning was not great, and I actually arrived a few minutes into the first keynote speech by Evan Harris.

Some in the party and elsewhere give Evan a hard time I hear, but I have a lot of time for him. I get the impression he works his proverbials off in his constituency and has a penchant for minority interests which suits me. But listening to him on Saturday and then later hearing Vince Cable they between them seem to epitomize what one might call the "old" Lib Dems - leftist, statist, more interventionist - and the "emerging" Lib Dems - more liberal in every sense.

Evan restated his support for the fifty pence tax rate and bemoaned the federal conference at which it was removed from party policy, Vince emphasized that the new tax policy, trying to focus, as Churchill said, on not just "how much have you got" but also on "how did you get it", was in fact the most redistributive set of tax policies on the table from any party.

Harris's main point, as I understand it, was that the fifty pence tax rate sent a signal, even if it did not in fact promise to raise terribly much, that we were prepared to take more from the highest earners if need be to lift the poorest out poverty. It is a simple message to be sure, and easier to communicate than the "new" idea that we should be more carefully targeting tax on externalities and unearned privilege, but not one that adds to the progressiveness of the overall tax system one iota.

But Evan is exactly the sort of person we want to attract to our book the ALTER executive are putting together to launch centenary celebrations of the 1909 People's Budget. We want to show him how rigourously applying what we have been calling the "liberal economic tradition" will in fact raise the lot of the poorest by increasing the returns to labour, by rooting out corporate welfare, and by allowing genuine competition to bring down the cost and increase the quality of all sorts of goods and services some take for granted are best delivered by the state. In short that there need be no dichotomy between "social" and "economic" liberalism. read more »

"Lib Dem" donorgate...bring it on

Jock — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 08:44:57 +0000

The former standards chief Sir Alistair Graham led calls yesterday for an inquiry into how a businessman linked to the Liberal Democrats’ biggest donor was given a peerage.

Sir Alistair called for the Lords Appointments Commission to examine how it was kept in the dark about £395,000 in gifts from the newly elevated Lord Hameed’s business partners.

Labour and Conservative MPs demanded action after an investigation by The Times revealed that Lord Hameed was helped towards his independent peerage by leading Liberal Democrat figures.

Yup - do it. Investigate all you like. I'm pretty confident they'll find that apart perhaps from a breakdown in communication, they'll find nowt amiss with all this. Hameed's "new" business partners have been Lib Dem supporters for a long time. He was nominated for a "people's peer" not a Lib Dem appointment, and just happened to get a Lib Dem peer on his supporter's list. read more »

Faraz Bhatti - I'm not doing my job...

Jock — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 14:36:34 +0000

...so I'll go set up a one man "group" and be even less likely to be able to do it:

Some of the excuses that execrable defectors use are astonishing really -

"Faraz Bhatti, 34, who also stood at the 2005 election, told the Manchester Evening News the Lib Dems were not providing a credible opposition." read more »

Karim defection a blow for Nick Clegg?

Jock — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 11:27:26 +0000

I have to admit that I viscerally loathe defectors. So don't expect any nice words of regret at losing Sajjad Karim to the Tories, for whatever reason he thinks justifies his actions.

But back within the party he has just run away from, I wonder whether it has any importance. One of the things that Nick Clegg got plenty of plaudits for recently was the idea of an "earned amnesty" for existing illegal immigrants, a measure that I have not seen Cameron, even last week in Prague, beat. But given that this is one area where we have clear blue water between us and the Tories on if Sajjad thinks we've made a mistake, does this translate into a bit of a blow for Nick's policy?

Me, of course, I'm an open borders advocate. You cannot expect to have free movement of goods and services without free movement of people. The challenge is not how to stop people coming here for whatever reason, but to help build a world in which people do not feel the need to migrate simply to better themselves in a minimum wage job.

Such a task is not one for the petty isolationists in the Tory party, and will need a truly co-operative internationalist party to understand. Which is, in the UK, only the Lib Dems, at least of the major parties.

Here's some century old words of wisdom and humour for Sajj:

I often think it's comical -- Fal, lal, la!
How Nature always does contrive -- Fal, lal, la!
That every boy and every gal
That's born into the world alive
Is either a little Liberal
Or else a little Conservative!
Fal, lal, la! —
(Iolanthe, Gilbert and Sullivan, 1882)

"Liberal Conservative" or "Conservative Liberal" are ideological oxymorons. Sayonara, Sajj, I hope you really do know what you are joining.

UPDATE: It just goes to show what people will read and what they won't that this post makes it into the "Golden Dozen" and some of my more thoughtful posts don't! Maybe I should try to be salacious more of the time!

Revolutionary Liberalism: 1 - Leadership

Jock — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 12:01:17 +0000

"We are the only party willing to come into office committed to controlling our own power." These were the words of Alan Beith, now our Deputy Leader, speaking at the Party Conference of 1991. They are the very heart of what Liberalism is all about. They would be recognised, not just by British Liberals, not just by twentieth-century Liberals, but by Liberals in all countries and in all times as what Oliver Cromwell used to call 'the root of the matter'.

One of the reasons why it is so hard for parties to understand each other is that they have their philosophies about different things. Traditional Conservatism was largely about property. Traditional Socialism was largely about class. Liberalism is and remains largely about power.

Chapter 2 - Controlling Power, from "An Intelligent Person's Guide to Liberalism", Conrad Russell, 1999

Looking back on Conrad's words after a further eight years' Labour government and at the personalities that have bubbled to the surface of the modern Conservative party in an attempt to counter Labour's hegemony, I think we would want to change his characterization of those two parties. They have both become about power too.

Not just one Ming, but a whole team of them!

But Conrad means that Liberals are about the careful control of executive power, ensuring that it never oversteps the mark into authoritarianism, that as much as possible it respects the negative liberty of individuals to do as they please in their lives short of harming others. Both the Conservative and Labour parties are now largely obsessed with how to attain power, consolidate it, hold onto it, and wield it. The leaderships of both parties have become presidential and autocratic. Policy formation appears to pay only lip service to ordinary members and has to be vetted, then vetoed or announced personally by the leadership as part of their great guiding "vision".

Nothing makes me more nauseous, frankly, about contemporary British politics than this cult of the "dear leader" - and I'm afraid that the sight of all the blue stockings clapping and singing along to Jimmy Cliff last week was a supreme example! Nothing makes me more worried about the future of our basic freedoms to live as we choose as far as possible than the sight of these great visionaries with a plan for the country, and by extension its people, us, and their adoring crowds of followers. The Nuremberg Rally meets Top of the Pops!

It would be fair to say, of course, that we have always had big personalities in Number 10. But just as growing wealth, technology, travel and so on have given people more freedoms and more choices, it is easy to forget just how difficult communication was only a generation ago compared with today. Mobile phones were barely around during Mrs Thatcher's rule, the internet merely a military-academic project, indeed computers themselves a millionth fraction of what they are today. Yet the more connected we are, the greater our choices of with whom we might associate, learn and collaborate, the more our political leaders are there, in our face, every day, announcing what they think is good for us. And somehow we are all the more apathetic, all the more dependent on them for it. This cannot be progress.

And so I for one do not want a Liberal leadership to be a facsimile of these statist behemoths. Sure, we need an individual whom people can identify as the person most likely to be taking the taxi to the palace in the event of a Lib Dem election victory, but he or she should be no more than a primus inter pares, chairman of the cabinet rather than president for life (even if that life has been short in Tory circles lately), and should be the embodiment of what we would want a Liberal leader to be, which to my mind is quite the opposite of the sort of Labour and Tory leaders we have seen in the last decade. And we have to sell that idea, not try to make our leader pretend to be otherwise just to compete with what we don't want him or her to be!

We should have a publicly visible leadership team. And I don't just mean Ming and his chosen team, such as Ed Davey and Chris Rennard or whoever. But I mean a team put in place by and accountable to different constituencies in the party. One from the parliamentary group, one from our councillors or our LGA group to reflect that we are about localism and devolution, one from each of our devolved assembly groups (though not necessarily the relevant assembly group leader), and one or more put there directly by the membership, or by different groups from the membership even - one GLD, one LDYS, one WLD, one EMLD and so on and one, preferably no more than that, from the party administration. And we should strive to give them all pretty well equal public exposure on the notion that they will be the core of a Lib Dem executive in government dedicated to dispersing power and not centralizing it.

If this sounds an awful lot like the existing Federal Executive, you'd be wrong. The latter would retain responsibility for running the party machinery which would in turn still be responsible for the management of policy formulation and so on. What I am talking about is a group of spokespeople, not necessarily in or from parliament, who represent the core areas of our "narrative" and who would be expected to take on significant jobs in that first Liberal government. This would be more like the Swiss Federal Executive, with everyone having their own brief, and with one of their number elected as chair and prospective head of the government periodically.

Gordon Brown has no real idea what a "government of all the talents" is whilst he himself remains, Shelob like, controlling everything from the centre. Let's show him what it could look like, from a Liberal perspective.

General Erection

Jock — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 22:29:44 +0000

There seems to be a spate of group self-abuse going on with excitement at the prospects of a general election. I do not share this excitement. Indeed I look upon the prospect with dread and depression. I'm a democrat, right? So I should welcome the chance for the people to have their say, right? Wrong.

I'm with Winston when he said:

No!
Originally uploaded by Mig_R

"Look at all the power [Mr Attlee] is enjoying today. No Government in time of peace has ever had such arbitrary power over the lives and actions of the British people, and no Government has ever failed more completely to meet their daily practical needs. Yet the right hon. Gentleman and his colleagues are avid for more power."

Nobody currently vying for Mr Attlee's job today even remotely proposes sufficiently to reduce what Churchill went on to call "this idea of a group of supermen and super-planners, such as we see before us, “playing the angel,” as the French call it, and making the masses of the people do what they think is good for them, without any check or correction, [which] is a violation of democracy."

No!
Originally uploaded by Will...

The stakes are abhorrently high. That you and your coterie of friends and sycophants should have control over the better part of half of the entire nation's income. And with it the power to condone or more frequently condemn the personal choices of millions - more, probably, than lived under the Pax Augusta in Rome's entire empire.

I want a revolution. A revolution of devolution. I want power, the vast majority of it at least, held by people I can go and meet at my local civic centre. If there is anything that needs a joint decision between two or more civic centres let them agree on it mutually, and if, in the very last resort, something that has to be dealt with at a national level, let them send representatives to argue the case on an ad hoc basis if possible but with a minimum of permanent representatives - just enough to give every civic centre a voice - if necessary.

No! Not even you!
Originally uploaded by Ming Campbell

And I want to be able to elect some of them every year so that if they are not doing a good job we can make our views plain on a sort of a "1 year moving average" basis to which they will necessarily have to react by forming and reforming their power sharing agreements to reflect the true will of the electors.

I find it repugnant that anyone believes they are so much greater than any of the rest of us that they believe they can run the country and our lives better than the Almighty gave us the free will to do for ourselves. They should humble themselves to recall again what Churchill said:

"Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, continuously rule, and that public opinion, expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters."

We seem to be at the last roundabout on the road to Serfdom (probably courtesy of some new town super-planner). We must decide to go right round it and head back the way we came.

Coincidentally, overnight I've been pointed to this article by a fellow Georgist, Fred Folvary, on a similar issue on the other side of the pond.

Putting the genie back in the bottle

Jock — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 07:03:03 +0000

We should be grateful to Lord Justice Sedley for one thing - re-igniting the debate about the national DNA database. His prescription, however, is completely wrong, and unjustifiable. He is right when he says that:

...the current database, which holds DNA from crime suspects and scenes, was "indefensible" because it was unfair and inconsistent.

but we should be very wary of his suggested fix for that, that...

...whole population and every UK visitor should be added to the national DNA database.

He is of course correct that the current situation is indefensible, Black men are more than twice as likely to be on the database than white, just because of the disproportionate way in which the police target black men for stop and search operations. But his prescription that:

"Going forwards has very serious but manageable implications. It means that everybody guilty or innocent should expect their DNA to be on file for the absolutely rigorously restricted purpose of crime detection and prevention."

So, we are to be scared from committing any crimes because we know they already have our DNA and when they find that at the scene it'll be an easy next step to "pull" anyone whose DNA is found for questioning. With no other probable cause than that their DNA was at the scene - Paul Walter's Liberal Burblings puts this much better than I have, describing it as "presumed guilt", overturning what must probably be, after Habeas Corpus perhaps, the key principle of English law.

One could imagine a situation where, for example, a victim of crime in the hours before being raped or murdered or whatever was in a place with lots of other people - perhaps a bar or a club. He or she brushed up against countless innocent bystanders, some of whom left a hair on the victim's clothes or sneezed over them or somehow transferred DNA to them or to another item of evidence. The police could just pull all of those people for questioning. Or perhaps that the crime scene was quite a publicly frequented place, and countless innocent samples are collected and the owners of that DNA pulled for questioning.

And as if that weren't enough, what sort of access would the defense have to be given to make this fair? Someday one could imagine the argument succeeding that with evidence disclosure rules, the defense could subpoena anyone whose DNA sample was found to try to create reasonable doubt for their client.

And in future, when the purpose of individual genes are steadily discovered, a witness statement might describe someone that may or may not be involved at the scene and based on that physical description the police could pull all blond men with blue eyes and the obesity gene in the local area to question?

The judge talks also about how many "cold cases" have been solved using DNA evidence. Yes, that may be one of the advances that has been made possible with DNA technology. But I wonder how many of them have actually been solved simply by matching up with the database. I rather suspect very few. That most have probably been a case of arresting the person first suspected many years ago and then checking them up against the DNA. Ie that DNA is used merely to corroborate existing evidence that somehow proved insufficient at the time to convict. That's a very different proposition from having a pro-active database from which to go and pull every person that brushed past the victim twenty years ago and happened to leave DNA that was subsequently collected.

No, storing our DNA is storing a little part of each and every one of us. As I said last week, our DNA should be subject to habeas corpus. It's like putting us all on bail for further questioning, sometime, about any other matter they feel we might be able to help with. The implications even now, let alone in some future time when we may have a seriously authoritarian regime in power or where the technology is available to extrapolate from descriptions what the suspect's DNA might look like, are horrendous.

In an accompanying article, the BBC puts the other side of the case. We already hold proportionally more DNA samples than any other country. Since it was first allowed in 1995 it has been steadily extended. The evidence of "mission creep" is clear already. We cannot trust any government with this sort off information. One only has to have seen the film Gattaca to know why. We must go back to the 1995 regulations, and strengthen them indeed so that people have rights to know and control whether their DNA is held if they are not currently in the criminal justice system for a good reason.