Voting

Yes, in a parliamentary "democracy," people are not really qualified to vote on issues that affect their lives and general wellbeing - so someone else has to do it for us, those good old MPs. And the leftiest of the lefy Labour "rebels" have really distinguished themselves this week by.... falling in to line with precisely the sorts of things they claim to dislike most about Blair's "New" Labour programme. Rowan Atkinson's (and the House of Lords'... but who listens to the House of Lords? Celebrity is our nobility!) efforts to defend freedom of speech (specifically, to stop "glorifying terror" being criminialised) have been thwarted by a second vote which affirmed that it should be criminalised. Some pedantic person might trawl through what the Foreign Office and Mr. Blair (or his successor-in-training) have to say about, say Palestine, Iraq, Indonesia, or other places where state-sponsored terrorism abounds - I'm confident some glorification could be found; any mention of the invasion of Afghanistan by "the coalition" is sure to be pretty glorified...

You now can't smoke whilst eating your dinner in public... probably not unwise all in all, but how many people smoke during dinner? (I fear some pubs, including a very nice one in St. Albans will be rendered unprofitable if they are faced with a choice between stopping serving food and banning smoking). Perhaps one could blame smokers for never sticking to the 'designated non-smoking areas' they have in a lot of pubs. I'm pretty ambivalent about it really - all you need to keep workers safe is decent ventilation. The argument that says "why should we tax-paying non-smokers pay to treat lung cancer that people knew they were going to get by smoking" is a bit silly though - you don't have to run very far with it to find a long list of people the NHS "shouldn't have" to treat because they were basically being negligent: people who get heart disease from an unhealthy diet, people who drive to fast and crash their cars (or even: people negligent enough to use a form of transport as unsafe as the car) people who play rugby? And so on...

Worst of all though, on Monday the MPs voted in favour of the introduction of these wretched biometric ID cards, which will essentially be: an enormous amount of free money for whichever private company (probably Capita) wins the contract to make them; the cost (and, doubtless, the risk - this is the key distinguishing feature of PFI, simple to understand but systematically concealed) will be socialised on a highly regressive basis (ie everyone has to pay the same, no matter how rich they are) instead of being funded by tax, a massive increase in the capcity for government surveillance to diminish the possibility of privacy (and, surely, freedom). Let us be clear, terrorism has not a thing to do with it, and the Home Secretary so keen on their introduction has admitted that if every British citizen had had one of these ID cards, it would have done NOTHING to prevent the callous murders of July the 7th.

Whatever one may think of these decisions in isolation, it is surely difficult to defend the claim that democracy and freedom (the two watchwords of the 'war on terror' which increasingly seems to define the present era) can be served by bowing to the wisdom of political leaders - these things must be claimed at the popular level, before the opportunity to save the world from "ultimate doom" has passed. (The threat of "Ultimate doom" isn't me being over-dramatic, but a fear which writers in Daedalus, the rather conservative and reserved journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences judge to be a very real possibility for the near future, which will surely be guaranteed if we as citizens can successfully be convinced of the most powerful deception of our time: that the idea that people make their own history is false. It is for this reason that, contrary to what someone said to me the other day, history is not 'optional' - it is necessary, at least for those who count a better future among their concerns.)