The words “complete and catastrophic failure” sum up pretty much everything there is to know about New Labour, it must be said. They have an inverse Midas Touch: Gordon even managed to make our gold supplies completely worthless.

“Yet, having some loud-mouthed but economically, socially & historically illiterate twats screaming in the background is discrediting people who want to make the civil liberties case but don’t think, for example, that trying to protect our natural environment or having a national minimum wage is the first step on the way to the gulag.”

I would try to explain things to you in words of one syllable, but you simply aren’t worth the effort. I shall, however, try to put this in simple terms.

In your opinion, the state is the best entity to protect our natural environment, yes? Let us look at a few state efforts in that direction, shall we?

The Common Fisheries Policy: complete and catastrophic failure.

The Common Agricultural Policy: complete and catatstrophic failure.

Carbon trading: complete and catatstrophic failure (apart from for the big corporates who make shedloads of money without actually having to clean up the environment at all).

And that’s just off the top of my head, without going into the massive environmental damage caused by the state-owned coal mines or the state-owned nuclear powerstations. Just for instance.

And the minimum wage? Look, little boy, if the minimum wage is set to, say, £5 per hour then anyone who’s labour is worth less than that will never, ever get a job. Do you understand that? And the higher you set a minimum wage, the more people you exclude from the labour market.

I’m sorry but I don’t know whether to laugh or cry: you defend the state’s intervention in these two areas sepcifically and then you call people like me “economically, socially & historically illiterate twats”. ******* hellski.

Go back to school, why don’t you?

DK

I agree that it is important that we allow people the freedom to promote conspiracy theories and so on, if only so the fallibility and lack of logic in their ideas can be exposed. It is true, however, that we ought to draw a line between allowing their theories to be presented, and preventing the encouragement of harmful action based on those ideas.

All I see is genuine environmental concerns being ignored by New Labour. They say greens are hysterical, hectoring & blowing things out of all proportion, but that applies to “libertarians” far more than any environmentalist I’ve ever encountered.

The thing about thought crime is right there in the name. Thought crime means that the thought is a crime, not the expression of it. Unfortunately since you didn’t leave a link to a relevant story, I can only assume that you are referring to Dr. Fredrick Toben. I’d be fascinated to find an example of his having been arrested merely for thinking anything. Whether or not he should have been arrested in Britain for a crime in Germany is a difficult legal and foreign policy question; whether or not it should be a crime to post inflammatory anti-semitic content on the internet is an interesting moral argument. None of that, however, even slightly relates to Orwell (except that Dr. Fredrick Toben appears to be attempting to rewrite history to serve his own purposes) and cannot by even the loosest definition be described as thought crime.

Seriously, do you not engage your brain before you espouse your opinions? Why should I take you seriously? What is the world coming to?

“I also predict that within 10 years it will be a crime in the UK to deny the science of anthropogenic global warming.”

Oh wow, you predicted it? How daring of you. Oh, well it must be true. I’ll tell you what, I’ve made a note in my calendar. November 1st 2018. If I’m still running this blog, I’ll put up a post denying the science of anthropogenic global warming. Let’s see who gets arrested.

Try telling that to the Australian who was recently dragged off a plane at Heathrow and imprisoned- this for expressing a genuinely held point of view (the expression of which was not even a crime in this country).

I also predict that within 10 years it will be a crime in the UK to deny the science of anthropogenic global warming.

I got the impression the historians would know instinctively, & I still think they called it right, & likewise we’re going to overturn the ***** New Labour are imposing on us because we’re not beholden to official ways of doing things & channels of communication, & a few shite blogs are a price worth paying for that breakthrough

At the time, I was a student (of history), & it struck me that actually Google were doing the right thing & the Chinese government didn’t know what they were letting themselves in for. Sooner or later, people would realise there was no point in having the Communist Party rule them, & the internet was in fact hastening that day.

The same goes for material prosperity. People won’t be blinded by riches, they’ll start looking to satisfy other needs, such as freedom & self-expression, & it will be a dark day for a regime that doesn’t in fact serve anyone other than its own cronies when that happens.

Sorry to go off topic, you just reminded me of something.

Concerning Nominet (not to drift off-topic) they don’t control .uk domains, they manage domain registration. The American equivelant (ICANN, who manage .com and .net and other TLDs) is hugely political. Managing registration isn’t the same as controlling content, to control content the government would need to own all server space – and to block all foreign content, and good luck with that one. The Internet isn’t stoppable.

I take the point about employing bloggers, but blogging is a meritocracy – would you read a permanantly pro-government blog with no personality or original thought? I wouldn’t, I don’t think many people would.

Here I am trying to argue against 42 days, ID cards, & the various state intrusion into our lives. I also think we should be out of the European Union (it’s a mystery to me why more left-liberals don’t think so, since the EU is hardly the zenith of liberal values).

Yet, having some loud-mouthed but economically, socially & historically illiterate twats screaming in the background is discrediting people who want to make the civil liberties case but don’t think, for example, that trying to protect our natural environment or having a national minimum wage is the first step on the way to the gulag.

Your point about the proles is excellent & might well make its way into my head, though I wouldn’t advise you to take any bets on that given that it’s so early

I mainly find myself on Liberal Democrat blogs, given that they agree with me on most things (except Europe), & the bloggertarians are having a go over there. You might like to check out the arguments raging. As they are between a social democrat & a libertarian, I don’t really agree with either of them.

http://momentsofc.blogspot.com/
http://reluctantlylibdem.blogspot.com/

I think they are a bit obsessed with each other

I wish I shared your optimism Stu. I hope you’re correct but recent experience says to me that more ways are being found by the day of ignoring opposing ideas.

The huge increase in ways of engaging not just Government but also business, seems to have been met with an inverse reaction in the form of more ways of ignoring it. Whereas a letter used to guarantee a reply, an e-mail can now be ignored if need be, seeing as not replying to e-mails is now culturally acceptable.

Blogs can be equally ignored and it’s only this current Government being slow off the blocks in the blogosphere that is giving an edge presently. Mandelson is seeking controls now according to Ian above, but even if that fails, they will just employ highly-paid bloggers to skew it in their direction if that fails.

Like I say, I hope I’m proved to be barking with that theory.

You said: Orwell’s future relied on total government control of all communication channels. Without complete control over what the people see and hear, how could anyone possibly control what they think?

One more step on the road, it is why Madelson only yesterday asked Nominet (who control all of the .uk domains) to justify why they should be outside of the control of Whitehall.

The thing is, that makes us the Proles. The proletariat in 1984 had complete liberty and utter autonomy, which is exactly what you’re after. It really didn’t make any difference to them who the government was, they were just allowed total freedom to get on with their lives.

(yes, yes – that’s a tortured analogy and bears no real genuine relation to the world today, but then that’s rather the point I’ve been making all along…)

Martin, last year I would have agreed with you absolutely. I’m aware that most people don’t know a blog from their elbow. Now, I’m utterly convinced that the internet has changed everything. Look to America, see what’s going on with Obama, then think 5 years into the future of the UK. The difference will be huge.

It’s not the amount of people that read blogs that will make the difference, it’s the influence that citizen journalism and user generated content will have over the mainstream media. The Labour Party are already having trouble keeping the media on their message because of the influence of the blogosphere. That’s what’s going to change.

Re your second comment, yep, there’s an EU thing about controlling blogs going on – but it will fail. 42 days failed, this will fail. And, as I said above, there’s no practical way of implementing it anyway, so even if they passed a law, we’d just break it.

“Orwell’s future relied on total government control of all communication channels. Without complete control over what the people see and hear, how could anyone possibly control what they think?”

Isn’t that what the EU (and by implication, HMG) are trying to control at this very time? Still very Orwellian in my book (no pun)

“What he never imagined – probably couldn’t have imagined, is the effect of many-to-many communication, which has taken hold of our entire society in the form of blogs, forums, wikis and social networking sites over the last five to ten years. The effects of this cannot be ignored or underestimated”

I see this point of view proposed so many times and it is always wrong. Your post is a good one but you fail to realise that you are living in a different sphere to the majority of the country. For the ‘many’, all they see is what they read in The Sun and publications like it. I mention blogs at my place of work and their eyes glaze over as if I was asking them to understand Quantum Physics. ‘Many-to-many’ communication is currently many-to-the-ones-who-don’t-turn-off-the-news-and-recognise-the-threat. The one-to-many communication still holds sway with enough of the electorate to negate any kind of true democracy.

Labour, for example, still believe their unpopularity is because of the economy when a cursory glance at accumulated opinion polls show quite clearly that the problem happened well before that.

The 1984 comparison is perfectly valid IMO.

WRT Nineteen Eighty-Four itself, I think that what we’re seeing in society today is an amalgam of that vision, and that of Huxley; e.g. the mental and physical doping of folks. The two scenarios are not mutually exclusive, and the ‘best’ of both seem to be in play.

But Nineteen Eighty-Four still resonates with people forcefully (witness the use of terms from the novel in everyday life), so was the right choice of book to use in order to make a point. And I do hope that it does more than that, and that at least some of our MPs do reread it…

As I said above – I’m all for small-statism, freedom and liberty, but why are you focusing on a conspiracy theory and a banal allusion to a 50’s book when you could be out arguing about issues that are actually affecting people, like the obscene portion of their hard-earned incomes being funneled into wasteful projects like the ID database?

For a more detailed look at the cumulative effect of the past 11 years, perhaps you should read the Libertarian Party response to Tom Harris’s blog posting.

http://lpuk.blogspot.com/2008/10/1984-arrogant-tom-harris-mp-just-doesnt.html

And ‘we’ account for what percentage of the population? Providing that the majority who are not hackers or bloggers continue to receive their news ‘n’ views via the MSM or a filtered internet (to come), ‘we’ can shout until we’re blue in the face — nobody will be listening, except ourselves. Political onanism doesn’t do it for me, so I’d suggest that we need to call a halt to the path we’re treading before we actually reach that point.