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Cheers - AE

Friday 2 July 2010

I'm feeling sorry for Nick Clegg.

Pity the poor Younger Twin. It was a good idea, that Your Freedom website, even if it did go tits up almost immediately because it couldn't cope with the traffic. But it's real problem is that it relies on a democratic process where anyone can chuck in whatever thoughts are fizzing around their brain as a serious suggestion. In turn this means that there have been suggestions for the repeal of laws that don't actually exist, suggestions that are totally irrelevant and suggestions for new laws to be brought in instead of existing ones to be repealed, and more often than not these tend towards the illiberal. I read through a few and just shook my head with despair.

Under the section 'Restoring Civil Liberties' (and these are all copied and pasted with absolutely no adjustment on my part, just some bracketed comments here and there) we have such gems as:
Under the section 'Repealing Unneccesary Laws':
Under the section 'Cutting business and third sector regulations':
I'm not saying it's all bad or even that I disagree with all of the above. Far from it, there are some great suggestions about liberalising gun ownership, scrapping the ridiculous and hopeless prohibition of drugs, repealing the smoking ban and so on, none of which is at all likely to happen and has attracted the all too predictable comments from hoplophobes, busybodies and anti-smoking zealots respectively. There are even some well intentioned ideas up there, though usually with no clear idea what piece of law that want repealed and/or stuffed in a section where it makes no sense and is going to get moderated out. But reading an awful lot of it is like being inside Paul Dacre's head. It says Freedom, right? It asks for laws to be scrapped and how civil liberties can be improved, and what happens? Along come thousands of fucknuts with lists of the things they want other people banned from doing. You could almost think that people tend to be narrow minded, prissy, bigoted nimbys or something. So you see, Cleggy, your idea for a democratic style approach to increasing liberty was nice, but flawed. Democracy really is the worst system apart from all the others. At worst the tyranny of the majority and at best a genteel form of mob rule.

If you're really serious, Nick, I suggest you tear down the law. Seriously, scrap every last law, rule, statute and regulation, the whole fucking lot to cease effect at, say, one second before midnight on a given day. And start again from scratch from 00:00 with the Zero Aggression Principle at it's heart. You ought to be able to get all the law an ordinary citizen will ever need to know on the back of a fag packet. The only question is whether you, Dave and your respective parties have the balls to do it.


PS - On the other hand here and here are a couple of good suggestions:

5 comments:

Dick Puddlecote said...

Excellent post, AE.

"You could almost think that people tend to be narrow minded, prissy, bigoted nimbys or something"

The population has certainly been leaning that way for the past 5 years or so.

JuliaM said...

"Death Pentalty (another one, but unusually this one seems to think it would help businesses - AE)"

Businesses selling rope, I suppose..?

Angry Exile said...

DP, you sure it's just the last five?

Julia, could be, but then the anti-drug moralisers will probably object to the use of hemp. Seriously, what really worries me about the death penalty brigade is they invariably want it to apply to rapists. I haven't done a count of the cases of false rape accusations at yours but if these bozos had their way it's almost inevitable that some of those innocent blokes would have been judicially killed by the state. And I've got one recent one where cross contaminated DNA overruled a strong alibi and convicted a guy of a rape he didn't do. They'd probably have wanted to waste him without even taking him back to his cell.

Democracy, eh? Fucking love it [spits].

JuliaM said...

"Seriously, what really worries me about the death penalty brigade is they invariably want it to apply to rapists."

Not all of them! I certainly don't.

I wouldn't extend it to child abuse either. It should be reserved for deliberate murder, and ONLY deliberate murder.

Angry Exile said...

You know my feelings on that issue. The power of life and death in the hands of the state - ultimately the sitting PM, and there isn't one since abolition I'd have trusted with it - is not a good thing and fundamentally never will be. Even if you trusted all those PMs since Wilson could you be sure that the next one or the one after or the one after that wouldn't abuse it? And as I said, there was that bloke here who was wrongly convicted on the strength of cross contaminated DNA evidence... that could just as easily have happened in a murder case that hinged on DNA forensics.

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