Impressions from the Liberty League Forum

By | | , ,
2 Comments

I had the good fortune to attend the Liberty League freedom forum the other weekend. For a decent write up of it I’d suggest heading over to Samizdata, who are a lot more positive than I fear I’m going to be. First off lets start with the good, congratulations to the organizers for putting together such an excellent range of talks, I genuinely had a hard time choosing which sessions to attend. The talks I attended where well presented interesting and informative so speaking from experience of having organized a conference in the past congratulations job very well done.

All that said I doubt I’ll be attending next years conference. I attended with a friend of mine who doesn’t identify as a Libertarian but wanted to know more – after the first talk she was ready to give up as the language was very much aimed at people from a political science/philosophy back ground. I spent the coffee break summarising the talk into normal language, which is fair enough it’s difficult to pitch talks at a level suitable for all, but it was a bit of a theme through out the weekend. There’s nothing wrong with this, it’s that sort of conference I’d just been hoping for something that would reach out more rather than being for those already immersed in the names and theories of political science and libertarianism. So it’s not the sort of conference for me, nor would I recommend it to people who want to discover more or who don’t already have an academic political background.

That rather brings me to my other problem with the event, Samizdata describes the attendees thusly:
” It was mostly young, mostly students. And it was very smart. As you will observe if you take a look at my crowd shots, most of the audience, besides being young, was male. But not all of it was. And the young males looked like they are the types to be going places in the future.”
My impression doesn’t disagree but I don’t take heart from this, the crowd was very homogeneous being mostly in suits and ties. Now I may be odd and way out of touch with todays youth but a student voluntarily in a tie let alone anything resembling a suit at a weekend seems well just a tad unnatural. There were very few alternative types, it reminded me of nothing so much as the political societies from when I was at university, so what we have here may well indeed be the next generation of politicians. They are almost certainly people “going places”, where they’re going is into politics. Judging by this conference (and I know making generalisations like this is unfair) the next generation of Libertarians are going into politics following the same path as the other political parties today:
student politics -> think tank -> Wonk/SPAD -> candidate -> MP
This doesn’t fill me with hope, as I don’t believe we ‘ll get the radical change needed from people casting themselves in the same mold as our existing political class. This idea that these were people who want to be politicians was typified by a conversation over heard when queuing for lunch:
“I think I’ll go along to a UKIP meeting to see if I want to stand for them”
I’ll not expound on that as I suspect either you’ll have the same reaction/thoughts as me or I’ll not convince you.

I wish the Liberty league all the best, but I don’t think I’ll be going back – though I did have some good conversations with people there and it wasn’t all suits and wannabe political wonks so it may well prove that I’m being overly pessimistic, I hope that proves to be the case.

0

Do you really support protecting all sub cultures against hate crime?

By | | , , , , ,
Comments Off on Do you really support protecting all sub cultures against hate crime?

My friends feed continues to be full of people rejoicing at Greater Manchester police not treating everyone as equal before the law, and calling for the extension of hate crime legislation to include alternative subcultures and as the Sophie Lancaster campaign says:
“To campaign to have the UK Hate Crime legislation extended to include people from alternative subcultures or Lifestyle and Dress.”
The press is even being terribly glad about it and people are writing articles praising this new attack on equality. Last time I checked assault was illegal and so was harassment so there is recourse if you need it, but no some flowers are more special than others. To be fair to my friends and acquaintances there are voices speaking up for the equality of all humans, and the idea that assault and harassment are bad no matter the cause or who’s being hassled and assaulted.

However for those of you that still think that protecting those delicate type belonging to alternative subcultures or who like to dress strangely well here’s a simple graphic to explain how it works. In case you don’t recognise the bottom right picture she was attacked by Somali girls shouting “kill the white slag” it wasn’t treated as a hate crime and they were given lenient sentences as they weren’t used to drinking.

How extended hate crime will work

Oops forgot to include neo-nazi’s on that middle gallery.

0

It’s all hate crime now

By | | , , ,
3 Comments

Punk with Strongbow

A delicate little flower

I will confess from the outset that I’ve never been convinced about hate crime legislation, from experience it doesn’t hurt anymore if the people attacking you are calling you names or not, nor do I see why some forms of verbal harassment should be considered worse than another. Still slowly but surely the special interest groups are getting their favoured groups tagged onto an ever expanding list of people you mustn’t say nasty things about. Today it’s the turn of Goths and Rockers to joined the hallowed ranks of special victims, with Manchester police force recording attacks on members of “subcultures” such as Goths, Emos, punks and Metallers as hate crimes. As a goth I find this really quite embarrassing, for the Punks and Metallers well if you need special protection for your feelings and when attacked well you’re probably in the wrong subculture. So far this is just a recording exercise and thankfully won’t make a blind bit of difference to the sentencing, but I do have to wonder when the term is as broad as “subcultures” where it can stop and just who’d be excluded and who gets to decide which subcultures count. It does though rather start to look as if the only person who can be attacked without risk of it being a hate crime will be your average white bloke, although I suspect they could be heading towards a minority once you exclude all the other subcultures and special groups.

The decision of Manchester police follow campaigning by the Sophie Lancaster foundation – with it’s rather forced tag line of “Stamp Out Prejudice, Hatred and Ignorance Everywhere”, because nothing does that like legislation aimed at specific groups. The foundation was set up following the murder of Sophie Lancaster by a group of yobs and want “Hate Crime legislation extended to include people from alternative subcultures or Lifestyle and Dress.” – so plenty of room for everyone under that banner. Whilst I may have missed it and whilst the murder was tragic for her friends and family – I’ve not seen any evidence that the yobs were motivated by hate rather than just general malevolence, but I’m cynical like that.

For the moment the former director of public prosecutions is “a little cautious about extending that the list of groups subject to hate crime, which is reassuring. Still if you’re in Manchester and get attacked don’t forget to follow NightJack’s advice for decent people and make sure to claim the attack was motivated due to your belonging to a special group – any group, it doesn’t matter any more. After all giving perpetrators of violence mo matter what the motivation decent sentences that even if not posing a significant deterrent (people after all never expect to get caught) would keep the aggressors away from the rest of us a much better plan than just teaching them not to call their victims names during the attack would be just too crazy for words.

-2