The Musings of Harry

Harding, a long time supporter of Proportional Representation, reports that Labour have finally reneged completely on their ‘97 manifesto commitment to hold a general referendum on election reform, calling it “the last nail in British democracy”. Frankly, this strikes me as a confirmation of the obvious: in reality, they reneged long ago, making it one of the first nails that Labour have driven, wilfully, blindly and without remorse, into the coffin of British democracy.

In any event, this is an unsurprising development. Harding has claimed that PR would lock out Tory MPs forever, giving Labour more control, and that it is therefore in their own interest. It seems to me that the best way for Labour to stay in power is to clean up its act: stop bashing civil liberties, stop treating “database” and “solution” as synonyms, stop stripping professionals of their discretion, stop nanny statism: essentially, stop being authoritarian control freaks. It is these things that erode their majority, and adopting PR will not stop the rot. They need to change their ways, and as Barak Obama said recently, and rousingly, change happens from the bottom up: not the top down. That is a lesson that Westminster would do well to learn.

For the record, I’m not sure what I think of PR. I’m quite certain that FPTP is terrible, but what to replace it with is a difficult question.

Victorian Maiden has an uncharacteristicly wrong take on the Oxford Union debate, in this blogger’s opinion. She is, unfortunately, in good company.

While it is certainly true that the Oxford Union is engaging in naked publicity seeking, most likely in an attempt to annoy Cambridge, it is not true that they are wrong to give Griffin and Irving a platform from which to speak.

To give such people publicity is not to grant their ideas legitimacy, it is to give them the opportunity to expose themselves for the ignorant buffoons that they are. The solution to “bad” speech is not less speech, it’s more speech. The Oxford Union put two fools on a stage — dangerous fools, I grant, but fools nonetheless — and gave a large group of very bright people the opportunity to witness their idiocy for themselves. Quite rightly, there was also a gaggle of protesters outside to help them along. To echo Charon QC’s comments, it’s better that they face a public grilling and lose, than to win an implicit victory by virtue of the refusal of others to engage with them.

Some people’s ideas are objectionable, and some are abhorrent, but it is the mark of a free society that we allow their expression anyway. No one would claim that these people should be entitled to a platform to air their views, but the inverse position — where they are prohibited, if only by custom, from having any platform at all — would have chilling effects on everyone’s freedom. Short of inciting people to commit criminal acts, anyone should be able to say whatever they like, from wherever they like: if the Oxford Union wish to waste their time debating with morons in a shameless publicity stunt, that’s their business.

It may be stupid, but it’s not wrong.

False! Guns are good!

Today I had the good fortune to bump into some more of Neil Harding’s ill-argued, authoritarian claptrap. In this post, he defends the handgun ban, claiming it to be responsible for a 50% reduction in gun deaths in the UK. This is a stupid argument, but if you want to know why, go and read the post and its accompanying comments. One of the commenters (”Stephen”) is doing a marvellous job of rebutting the claptrap, and it’s a pleasure to read.

“You are potificating from the point of near total ignorance.”

Perhaps it should be his tagline?

Here, most unfortunately, we go again.

I recently posted about the partisan brain, and about how Neil Harding rather exemplifies it. It seems he was all too eager to offer up another example.

Mr Harding, it would seem, wishes to go even further than some police offers, who recently suggested that we should collect DNA for anyone who is arrested. He thinks that we should collect DNA from everyone (presumably at birth — who knows?) and keep it on file, just in case you commit a crime.

Harding says that the DNA database helps police catch the “correct perpetrators of many crimes”. He says that the success of the database is “unquestionable”. His use of words is interesting, considering that people are, in fact, questioning it: just last week, in Liberty’s response to the Home Office consultation on PACE, they asserted that the National DNA Database “does not seem to have a significant impact upon crime detection”. In fact, although the number of samples on the database has increased steadily since it was introduced…

…the rate of crime detected using the database has stayed at about 0.35% of all recorded crime (see Liberty response). If the database were so useful, one would expect that it would facilitate the detection of more crimes as it grew larger. That does not seem to be the case. It is, therefore, of questionable value. I’m sure it has a place, but collecting the DNA of everyone arrested, let alone everyone alive, is not it.

Another terribly important point to make is that all systems have a rate of failure. Although (bar twins) an individual’s DNA is unique, we are not necessarily able to collect, store or compare samples with sufficient precision to make a DNA profile unique to an individual. Just as with fingerprints, DNA profiling techniques do experience false positives and false negatives, and just as with fingerprints, these rates are more than one might expect. Here is an excellent page detailing many such experiences.

I’ve written about these problems before, so I’ll leave the subject there, except to say that a good way to deal with these problems is to keep the database as small as possible. By keeping the database small, one minimises the number of failures, making them more manageable. This, quite neatly, makes it eminently sensible to restrict people placed onto the database to those convicted of a crime: perhaps even only those convicted of a serious crime. The usefulness of the system is maintained, as is the privacy of innocent people: something which, quite clearly, Harding grossly undervalues.

PS: If the database is so fantastically useful, and if a person being arrested is a useful indicator of criminality, why didn’t Levy, Evans and Turner have their DNA sampled?