You have come out and stated that you would like to see the UK return to traditional Christian values. At the same time you have said that you are a mostly non-practicing Christian.

My questions to you then are:

1) In what way are you practicing and non-practicing?
2) What kind of Christian are you? CoE? RC? Episcopal? Greek Orthodox? Pentecostal?
3) What exactly do you think the UK could benefit from a Christian Ethic that it could not gain from a secular utilitarian ethic?
4) Do you actually realise that Church attendance is on the wane? Do you realise how large the proportion of the country is that is non-Christian (not even how large the proportion of non-believers are!).
5) You were not elected on a religious agenda (heck you weren’t even elected…). What gives you the right to speak out on religious issues?

Not your credit cards and your insurance policies. Not even your mortgages. Your government debt.

Your government collects taxes from you and then pays for certain services that it has promised to provide. It lays roads. It pays the armed forces. It provides hospitals and libraries and street lighting and everything else you count on them to provide. It pays for the bureaucracy and the administration and the IT and the support and the HR and everything else that makes that work.

Every year the government anticipates that it will receive a certain amount of money in taxes. It then draws up a budget to spend that money. Of course it’s only natural it will miss that target as the economy changes over time. So when they fall short they borrow some money.

The obvious result is that they should pay that money back, with some interest, and next year they get back on track. Except that don’t.

They always spend more than they have coming in. Every major westernised democracy is spending more money every year than they KNOW they will have coming in. They think that this is ok. They do it apparently because they think that the extra expenditure will promote growth in their economy that will more than offset the interest they will have to pay on the extra amounts they borrow. For some reason they think that if they borrow and spend a bit more then it’ll fix itself.

Years go by, decades even, and suddenly a situation has arisen where if the government was to attempt to repay this debt they would have to cut so much money off of the national budget that the entire economy would collapse.

Countries like the UK, USA, Germany and France owe 50%, 60%, 60% or 80% of their total gross national production (per year) in debt. Now bear in mind that the only part of that debt the government gets is the tax and you have governments who owe 3, 4, 5 maybe 10 times their annual income in debt! Add on the interest every year and even if these governments shaved 10% off of their annual budgets (and don’t even try to count how many hospitals would close, streets would go unswept or policemen would lose their jobs) and you’re looking at up to a HUNDRED years or more of problems to get their bank balances balanced!

If you went to the bank and said I’d like to borrow 10 times what I earn and pay it back in a hundred years you’d get laughed out of the door!

Of course a country goes on for longer than you or I can work for but that’s no excuse. In effect these governments are saying that you and I and our children and great great great grandchildren are fine with paying off this debt down the years. Except at no point do they stop and say … you know what? This is never going to get fixed. We have to stop this!

Because debt is increasing faster than the output of these countries the time it would take to balance them with any given level of saving is always increasing. As more time goes by more and more generations of people are being placed into indentured servitude to pay off what people many years before borrowed in order to fail to improve the strength of an ecomony! And of course because everyone’s doing it no one gains anything! If we all just stopped and made a new law – “All government debt is cancelled and government borrowing is now outlawed” – we’d all be JUST AS WELL OFF.

Why? Because our wealth as a nation is dependent on the relative strength of our economy and other economies. Since everyone is borrowing to get one up on the others we all stay the same, barring interventions that would happen anyway (like some entrepreneur comes along and does something awesome).

But someone has to be profiting from all this interest. So who is it?

Well in recent times it is true that the Chinese government has been profiting. By deliberately undervaluing its currency it has been able to sell vast amounts of its own goods around the world generating a surplus of cash for the government in taxes on those goods. Instead of borrowing, the Chinese, lone among all the governments of the world, were saving. Then it bought the debt of other countries. And now we pay them for all those loans.

Well not all. This was going on long before China became a player on the stage. When a government wants to borrow money it issues a bond. Essentially it issues stock certificates in future taxes that it receives. It promises to pay a certain percentage return on these certificates over a period of time. Maybe 2 or 5 or 10 or even 30 years. You pay the government $100 and in 20 years you get $200 back for example. So, apart from China who was buying these? For the most part it’s not other governments – they are all borrowing too although there are bound to be a few other dabblers buying up better interest rate debt than they were issuing – which only leaves one buyer category – individuals and companies.

All that money… it’s going into the pockets of the rich who can afford to buy long term investments.

Now some of you are thinking… but the rich pay higher taxes, so it’s ok! And you are so wrong. In the heyday of the contractor IT market I was exposed to a few tricks of the trade. Perfectly legal tax laws you can use to reduce your taxes. Earning about 100k? You might be in the 40%, 50% or 60% bracket, depending on your country, but your accountant will easily get your gross tax bill down to 25-30%. Earning 250k? Now you’re talking. If you pay over 15% you’re not with the right accountant. And when you start talking millions? Well now you’re offshore, you’re channeling funds left and right, you’re paying under 10% or you’re an exceptionally well principled person.

A quick recap.

Every year some of your taxes go to pay for interest on loans that your government took out based on the security that you would continue to pay taxes.

Your government used this money to grow your economy.

Every year it borrowed more to keep trying to grow the economy.

Every year there was less earned money and more borrowed money propping up your services, your police, your hospitals and so on.

Now the debt is so high that some of those borrowers are concerned they might not get their money back.

But at the same time those governments are so dependent on the borrowed money coming in that they cannot afford to stop borrowing!

Are you willing to accept the long term downturn in your services in order to eliminate your debt? You didn’t sign up for it but the government did on your behalf.

Are you willing to write to your MP or Senator and demand an end to this debt financed society? Do you really need that new nuclear submarine? Do you really need that new traffic calming scheme? Ultimately the money has been spent on buying your votes but at a cost that was never revealed to you. We will put more police on the streets! Well will open more hospitals! We will maintain our nuclear deterrent! Oh and we will be paying your taxes for the next 10 or 20 years towards it and have less to spend on the things we promised you!

Yes it would cause a major shift in wealth and a major shift in world power even but in 10 or 20 years your governments could get out of debt and start spending only the money it actually owned. Then everything would settle down and return to normal.

Kenneth Clarke MP was accused by the press of making a delineation between types of rape. They claim he described some rapes as more serious than others. They ‘raped’ him in the press over it. They and the opposition demanded his resignation. Both are utterly wrong.

Mr Clarke MP was on a radio show defending his proposal that if defendants were to plead guilty at the start of a trial they could get lower sentences than those people found guilty of the same crime who pleaded innocent.

In this radio show he expressed the view that the average sentencing for rapists was distorted because the figures included those of young men found guilty of statutory rape. That is to say that the figures the interviewer brought to bear included the sentences handed down to 16 and 17 year old having consensual sex with their partners, where those partners were 15 years old.

This is an entirely valid point. A guilty verdict for statutory rape for a 16 year old male with a 15 year old female are short, in consensual circumstances. They have absolutely nothing to do with sentencing of forced rape perpetrators. His point was that if you only consider the forced rape perpetrators the sentencing is much stricter than the overall average. His interviewer though, Victoria Derbyshire of Radio 5, could not see this point on the spot and stated that “rape is rape”.

Thus the entire argument ensued.

No Rape is not Rape. Consensual sex between two people, one of whom is under age is NOT the same as forced sex between two parties. Ken’s only point was that if you reduced the average sentence of the latter category offenders, if they admitted the offence up front, it would still be a substantial time in prison. And he was right.

The press, as always, seized upon the story, and Mr Clarke is not to blame… they are.

Then I read this brilliant piece of writing about journalism. It says so much about so many of these topics and more without saying more than is necessary. Each sentence of it could be the topic of entire essays. It’s a political amuse-bouche to get the brain thinking.

I give you “The war you don’t see”.

It’s just typical of recent BBC trends… unattributed articles with not even a mention of assumptions that are made in them.

At least I tried to explain what changes might happen and why!

In the AV+ system, why does the proportional part of the system only have one fifth of the weight of the AV part which for the most part is just first-past-the-post?

What if instead the House was made up from 50% AV and 50% proportional voting? You’d still have a regional MP but the overall result would be much closer to proportional representation and there would be almost no reason to vote tactically.

In fact if you’re going to go down this road you could turn it on its head and make it 20% AV and 80% proportional – or any other combination more balanced towards the proportional part of the equation.

Politicians defending the current system would probably tell you that as you move down that scale your local MP becomes less and less relevant to the views of the people in their region. And to a large extent they would be correct. But that is the whole problem with the Party system. If every candidate was an independant and the ‘party’ system only existed ephemerally as loose and shifting alliances on individual issues everyone could have a candidate who’s job it was to represent them rather than to represent their party’s views. The only time I ever wrote to my MP I got a response back that said my views were not those of the MP’s party and therefore could not be given any consideration.

Here’s another idea then…

You can keep the party system but each consituency is increased in size by a factor of 20. Each of these new mega-constituencies elects 20 MP’s on effectively the STV system. For each 5% of the vote gained by a party they put one MP in Parliament. After the 5%’s are knocked off the remaining votes generate candidates exactly as in the STV system with secondary votes being distributed.

Every region would have a range of MP’s that in and of themselves would closely resemble the voting in that region. Parliament itself would obviously also be very close to proportional representation. Any party that could attract 5% of the vote in a region would get a seat or seats.

It would genuinely lower the bar to entry to Parliament that prevents the smaller parties from having seats that represent their true popularity.

I hereby name this new system ‘Multi-Candidate per Party Single Transferable Vote System’ – MCPSTVS. That doesn’t roll off the tongue well…

Perhaps… 5PASM – ‘Five Percent And Secondary Mediation’. Henceforth to be known as ‘Spasm’.

Single Transferable Vote

- Liberal Democrat preferred system

Alternative Vote

- This was previously mentioned by Gordon Brown as a possible future system

AV+

- Possible compromise

So what are the details of the three systems and how proportional are they? All three of them keep regional representation but they differ significantly in their makeup.

Single Transferable Vote

This system requires a candidate to achieve one more than 1/(N+1) portion of the votes where there are N seats to be won in a constituency. e.g. When one person is to be elected they need one half of the votes plus one. When there are 5 people elected each needs one sixth plus one. Initially all votes are assigned as per the voters first preference. The results are then calculated in a series of rounds. Anyone already past the portion of the vote required is elected. Any surplus votes they had are assigned to the voters’ second preference in proportion to how the second preference was chosen. If no one is elected in a round then the person with the fewest votes is eliminated and all of their votes are assigned to the second preferences.

There is a good example of how this works on this Wikipedia page.

The question is… how many candidates should we choose to elect per constituency?

If we only elect one the system will produce pretty much the same result as first-past-the-post. The largest pool of votes needs a lot less secondary votes to reach the number required, if it’s not over the amount on primary votes alone. On the other hand if we elect three per consituency then in most of England the three main parties will be voted in and they’ll end up with roughly the same number of seats, probably something like 30% each with the rest split to mostly the regional parties, the Irish, Scottish and Welsh interest parties. If we elect more than three then we end up giving minority parties much more influence than their actual primary vote proportion would make fair. The minority parties as they are now would end up between them with at least 25% of the seats even if they only had their current 12% or so of the vote.

The right number, as far as I can see, would be two MP’s per consituency. This would mean there was a meaningful battle between the main three parties, and where a strong candidate stands from the other parties, one of them as well. The regional interest parties would most likely land one of the two available seats in most of their regions, the three main parties ought to land seats in the rest of the UK in proportion to their actual popularity with a few exceptions where strong candidates from the Greens, UKIP or even the likes of the BNP stand.

While I’m mentioning the BNP… on the radio this morning I heard people espousing that a proportional system was wrong because it gave too much power to the extreme parties like them. This is a total failure of logic for two reasons. Firstly you cannot possibly argue that democracy is good, except where it’s too democratic. And secondly because there is no way in the world that one of the major parties would give any power to such a party by forming a coalition with them as one caller was certain they would.

With two MP’s per consituency I believe this system would be a good approximation to proportional representation. The smallest parties would be at a disadvantage but if people learn how to use their two votes effectively over a few elections they could gain a good balance with their actual popularity. The three main parties would gain a number of seats MUCH more in accordance with their votes than they do today.

Alternative Vote

The Alternative Vote system runs exactly the same as the STV system except that it only produces one winner per consituency. It would be a little better than the current system but not by a very long way. Generally speaking I believe it is fair to say that most people’s primary AND secondary votes would be for one of the three main parties – or a main party and a regional interest party. Only where multiple candidates are quite evenly matched and a strong candidate is standing for a minority party and he/she picks up a lot of secondary votes would there be any difference from the current system. There may be some changes in that one might be able to show that one of the three main parties is more or less likely to pick up secondary votes from another of them, e.g. Lib Dem being more likely to pick up Labour secondary votes than the Conservatives are. Indeed one could argue that it seems reasonable that the Lib Dems would pick up more secondary votes from the Conservatives than Labour too. In relatively balanced seats this should tend to introduce more Liberal MP’s which would go some way to redressing their seat numbers relative to their overall votes.

AV+

AV+ or Alternative Vote Plus is being seen as a possible compromise that a Lib/Lab coalition might introduce or a Lib/Con coalition might offer a referendum on as a compromise between the parties’ desires.

Constituencies would vote under the AV system to elect a single member each and then a further 15-20% more MPs are assigned on a purely proportional basis.

Constituencies would have to be made larger so there were the same number of seats overall but if we had the same election voting over again with this system adding a further 20% of seats we would end up with 779 Seats split thusly:

Conservative – 352 Seats – 45% of Seats (-2%) – from 36% of vote
Labour – 296 Seats – 38% of Seats (-2%) – from 29% of vote
Liberal Democrat – 87 Seats – 11% of Seats (+2%) – from 23% of vote
DUP – 9 Seats – 1.1% of Seats (0) – from 0.6% of vote
SNP – 8 Seats – 1.1% of Seats (0) – from 1.7% of vote
Sinn Fein – 6 Seats – 0.7% of Seats (0) – from 0.6% of vote
Plaid Cymru – 4 Seats – 0.5% of Seats (0) – from 0.6% of vote
Green – 2 Seats – 0.3% of Seats (+0.15%) – from 1% of vote
UKIP – 4 Seats – 0.5% of Seats (+0.5%) – from 3.1% of vote
BNP – 2 Seats – 0.3% of Seats (+0.3%) – from 1.9% of vote

As you can see it’s not significantly fairer than the current system. However people would vote a bit differently. A lot of people either vote tactically or do not vote at all because their preferred candidate has no hope of victory. In this system there would still be a good reason to vote for your preference. I believe everyone except Labour and the Conservative Party would benefit at their expense. I would hazard a guess that perhaps 20 more seats would change hands because of this.

The Conservatives for their part have offered the LibDems a referendum on the reforming the electoral system to use the Alternative Vote System. However the Conservatives are further away from the Liberals than Labour are, in their general ideologies and there’s plenty of backbenchers that aren’t keen on a coalition with them. Many of them would be happy to see a Lib/Lab coalition that pushes through the necessary unpopular tax and spending changes that will be needed to fix the economy and then in a few months force a general election on a vote of no confidence. They forsee themselves winning a majority in this second election because of the bills that need to be passed on the economy making Lib/Lab less popular and the fact that they can campaign on the message that the government is a coalition of losers – and with today’s revelation that Brown will stand down – that we again have an unelected Prime Minister.

However I foresee this backfiring BADLY on them. Most of the minority parties stand to gain (perhaps with the exception of one of the Irish parties) in an AVS electoral system. They mostly have a smaller share of the seats than their share of the vote. In addition those parties that failed to gain any seats would campaign hard for this system too. Remember from my earlier post that the BNP would stand to gain 12 seats and UKIP 22 in a pure proportional representation system. They wouldn’t gain that many under AVS (I still plan to write about why) but they could only benefit from it.

So, if Lib/Lab could push through the AVS system before a new election is called, by getting the backing of the smaller parties in Parliament as well, then in another election the two of them would start from having over 50% of the vote. They might lose a few, or even quite a lot of primary votes because of the above reasons, but they would most likely still pick up over 50% of the seats through the second or third votes that people place. In fact they would, in my opinion, more likely end up with closer to 60% of the seats between them. The conservatives would likely pick up around 35% of the seats and the last few would go to the minor parties. Lib/Lab could continue their coalition with a large majority.

With 617 of 650 seats declared so far the voting for each party is:

Conservative

• 10,168,583 Votes
• 36.1% of Votes
• +3.9%
• 291 Seats
• 47.2% of Seats

Labour

• 8,236,191 Votes
• 29.2% of Votes
• -6.3%
• 248 Seats
• 40.2% of Seats

Liberal Democrat

• 6,435,621 Votes
• 22.9% of Votes
• +1.0
• 51 Seats
• 8.3% of Seats

Democratic Unionist Party

• 168,216 Votes
• 0.6% of Votes
• -0.3% Change
• 8 Seats
• 1.3% of Seats

Scottish National Party

• 482,823 Votes
• 1.7% of Votes
• +0.1% Change
• 6 Seats
• 1.0% of Seats

The shift in voting

In Elections a 5% swing is considered to be large and a swing of 10% is huge – roughly what Tony Blair achieved in 1997. The swing from Labour to Conservative in this election was 5.1%, with a few seats still to declare. So political commentators talk about this as significant and in terms of the numbers of seats it is indeed a big change. Still it seems pretty feeble to me. The net change is only 1 in 20 people decided to change from voting Labour to Conservative. I’m not going to attempt to analyse this as it would take an age to discuss all the issues and the tactical decisions that might be involved. There’s plenty of comment from more qualified people all over the networks. But I am underwhelmed by the change when you consider the nature of the pre-election discussions about the state of the economy and unelected prime ministers.

Proportional Representation

What really is interesting in this is how the constituency based, first past the post system skews the ratios of votes to seats. For the parties outlined above the number of seats per million votes is:

• Conservative Party 28.6
• Labour Party 30.11
• Liberal Democrat Party 7.92
• Democratic Unionist Party 46.56
• Scottish Nationalist Party 12.4

So a vote for the DUP is 50% more effective than a vote for Labour and four times as effective as one for the SNP. A vote for the Conservative Party is almost four times as effective as a vote for the Lib Dems. And voting for the DUP in Northern Ireland or for the Green Party in Brighton Pavillion is five to six times more effective than voting for the Lib Dems in general. If anyone fails to see the unfairness in this system then I despair!

If the seats were allocated on a pure proportional representation basis these 617 seats would be allocated:

• Conservative 222 (-69)
• Labour 180 (-71)
• Lib Dem 141 (+89)
• DUP 4 (-4)
• SNP 10 (+4)
• Sinn Fein 3 (-1)
• Plaid Cymru 4 (+1)
• SDLP 2 (-1)
• Green 6 (+5)
• Alliance Party 1 (+0)
• UKIP 19 (+19)
• BNP 12 (+12)
• UCU-NF 2 (+2)
• And a few others with 1 seat up from 0.

You can clearly see what an enormous impact proportional representation would have on the system. Electoral reform does appear to be on the cards and in my next post I will examine the Alternative Vote System that the Lib Dems want to see implemented and could make a requirement of any pact they make to form a government. The pure proportional system has the problem of not having MP’s representing specific regions. The AVS system tries to keep proportionality at its heart but have regional MPs.

Defenders of the current system say that it leads to strong governments. In the past this has been mostly true although I think that the critics of the system claiming that this one election proves this is wrong are themselves wrong. One anecdote does not make data. However I think that a hung parliament is for the best and proportional systems would almost always lead to one. It forces the parties to work together on the ideas that unify them and it creates some give and take which means the actions of the parliament more closely match the desires of the populace. In the current system a party can have a majority in the house with barely 40% of the vote and then run roughshod over the desires of 60% of the population!

The first story I read that made me think to write about them was some time ago on the BBC. I seem to be in a fair minority but I don’t have a problem with the kinds of images that it produces. It’s not the sort of image I would choose to have made of me but then I’m not intending to post it on my facebook profile. And do you seriously think that the person viewing the images – hundreds or thousands of them in a shift – is going to actually care that you have a little penis or a slightly chubby arse, digitally rendered in slightly vague greyscale? They don’t have a photo of you to go along with it. It’s not like some pervy bloke is going to be sat there looking for fit girls so he can see what they look like under their clothes.

I’m sure some people must have brought up “oh but the poor children!” and probably even “oh but what about the pedos!”. Most likely these are the same people who let their kids go butt-naked on the beach. Most likely they’re the same people who think that a Pedophile is the same thing as a Pediatrician. Did you notice that one of the finalists in Masterchef (UK) this year was a ‘Children’s Doctor’? In the first round his caption actually said “Pediatrician” but we dumbed it down so as not to confuse the witless.

It is worth noting that the scanners used in the US are able to store and offload the images which we were assured they could not do. I am not aware of any reason to believe the UK or Dutch scanners can do the same.

I haven’t actually taken a flight since these scanners were introduced in the UK. They should remove the need for people to remove coats, belts etc, although shoes will probably have to come off still as the picture angle is horizontal and can’t really scan the shoes’s soles properly. But when I went through a US airport last they STILL made us take all that stuff off. That is just bloody stupid. It’s utterly unnecessary and it would really help people accept them more readily if it alleviated a lot of the hassle (and bottleneck) in getting through those controls.

Has anyone been through the new scanners yet in the UK? Has it improved transit speeds through there?

Anyway, despite the fact that I’m not really bothered by the images these scanners make what does annoy me enormously is the two-facedness and hypocrisy of the government. In 2008 the EU Parliament refused to support the EU Commission’s desire to implement the scanners across Europe because:

In MEPs’ opinion, the measure is “equivalent to a virtual strip search” and “has a serious impact on the right to privacy…and personal dignity”. British Conservative Philip Bradbourn MEP said that such scans “were a grave violation of the right of privacy and a degrading measure”.

Then late last year they suddenly started getting trialed in Manchester. In 18 months all the ‘grave violations’ of people’s rights were no longer a concern. Now we were being told that it’ll help us get through the security checks faster and therefore it’s fine to have a trial. The public were outraged and it would seem that any government who actually cared about PR would just let the trial end and drop them.

But…

On Boxing Day 2009 a man attempted to blow up a plane traveling from Amsterdam to Detroit. And suddenly the scanners were a ‘proportionate reaction’ to the threat. The scanners were suddenly implemented everywhere.

Perhaps I missed something here? Perhaps you did to? This man boarded a plane in Amsterdam – which started using these body scanners in 2007. Yet they didn’t see fit to scan passengers transferring from a flight from a country as ‘interesting’ as Nigeria to a flight to the US. In fact I’ve flown through Schiphol airport numerous times since 2007 and I’ve never been scanned once. I haven’t even seen the machines.

You might also notice that the article states that the millimetre wavelength radiation used bounces off the skin and nothing is absorbed. Referring to the article about the Manchester Trial again the head of the airport’s “Customer Experience” team says:

“Passengers can go through this machine 5,000 times a year each without worrying. The amount of radiation transmitted is tiny.”

So is it tiny or is it nothing? It might be trivial compared to a day in the sun or a minor x-ray but there is a difference between something and nothing. I certainly would not want my pregnant wife to go through the scanner – just because that’s how you treat pregnant women! It may well be irrational but it’s also an evolutionary imperative to protect them!

Refer back to the Manchester Trial again. It specifically states that people will be able to decline the scan and be patted down instead. But of course this only applied to the trial. Anyone who refuses now is turned away and not allowed to pass through the security checks.

You might also notice this:

The scanners, made by RapiScan Systems, have already been tried at Heathrow Airport from 2004 to 2008.

Well I went through Heathrow at least a dozen times in that period and I wasn’t scanned once. So it seems to me that the trials were shams. The Manchester one appears to have been genuinely implemented but the others I have serious doubts about. It really looks like we were being conditioned to accept something that the government(s) knew we would rail against.

Did you also know that the EU Parliament bought six of these machines at enormous tax-payer expense to protect the parliamentary buildings in Brussels and Strasbourg? Well the MEP’s decided they didn’t want to be scanned. And they still don’t want to be scanned. So they’ve been trying to sell them and trying again. No luck though!

So is the threat any greater than it was before the Boxing Day bombing attempt? Was there some new intelligence that made these scanners a proportionate reaction? After all, these scanners were rushed in as a response to the attempt but they have no legitimate place if the danger is not higher. Nor do they have any legitimacy if the use of them is a sufficient invasion of privacy that does not offset their benefit. As I said at the top I wouldn’t care if they just said “hey these will get you through security quicker and we promise never to allow the pictures to be stored or offloaded” and they were right on both counts.

I don’t recall the terror alert status getting any higher. It was definitely higher nearer 9/11 and it must have been really high around the time of the Iraq invasion and the start of the Afghanistan operations. How is it that one more failed attempt at bombing a plane means the threat is now higher? One would actually think it’s lower. One more would-be bomber is out of circulation and every other would-be bomber has been reminded yet again how difficult it is to pull it off.

So are we actually any safer with these things installed? The head of InterPol doesn’t think so and on German TV they have demonstrated how the machines can’t even detect the kinds of materials that a bomber might use these days.

All we have is a greater perception of a threat because we see measures like these implemented. All we have achieved is to increase the fear that people live under. This is not a fair game to play. If every time something gets past security we decrease people’s liberties and/or privacies to counteract it then we will be in a permanently escalating state of deprivation. There will always be someone who gets past security and we have to accept that. In fact I think the vast majority of people do accept it. But the government use the perception that it is an acceptable game to play to put us further and further under the thumb. Maybe, as some of my friends believe, it is a deliberate choice made to deprive us of our liberty whilst getting us to agree to and accept it. Maybe, as I more moderately believe, politicians honestly think that these apparently positive actions serve to protect us and to get them votes. Either way I think the game is up and people won’t stand for much more of it. The level of risk that people are prepared to live with if it preserves their liberty is much higher than it is now and it applies to many many more areas of our lives than just airport scanners. CCTV’s, the Police, ID Cards, RFID Tags in everything, teacher’s rights to censure pupils, even the right of a parent to smack a child. The last years of government legislation has really revolved around finding a liberty that COULD be abused and then taking that liberty away from everyone just in case someone abuses it, even when there is a law that already prohibits them from abusing it.

The only problem is, do we have enough liberty left to reclaim what we’ve lost?

Benjamin Franklin said it first and he said it best:

Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.