The Abolition Of LibertyI have just started reading 'The Abolition of Liberty' by Peter Hitchens. I'm not far in as yet, but the subject of the book got me thinking. The book itself relates to the changing roles of police and prisons in the UK, but it provoked much more wide ranging thoughts than that. I have been involved of late with a couple of mortgage applications and life assurance applications for properties / clients. To be blunt, they have been a nightmare. Recently, the money laundering regulations in the UK were upgraded. It is now much tougher to prove just who you are than ever before. This is a good thing ... right? Well in theory, yes. Stopping money launderers in their tracks will, one presumes, make the life of the professional criminal much tougher. If you can't launder the proceeds of your drug selling, it will be harder to operate and you will become, hopefully, easier to catch. So why am I bleating on about this? The new legislation applies to all 'financial products'. Including, for example, life assurance. Just think about it for a moment. How are you going to launder money by using normal life assurance? It has no investment element (so no surrender value) and only pays out when you die. Sounds like it has limited appeal to me! I have been thinking about it and I have no idea how you might clean your funds with (for example) term assurance. At least, not without having to kill someone. All the changes are really achieving is more paperwork and making the lives of the average Joe more complex. After all, if you really were a drug smuggler, you'd hardly put the details in the box marked 'occupation'. For all the changes we are going through - ID checks, airline passenger information, proposed ID cards, biometric data at airports, money laundering rules - are we really any safer? Are the drug dealers out of business? As far as I can tell, the answers are no. Is the extra 'safety' worth the price to our liberty? The BBC recently reported the amount of money confiscated thanks to the new laws. Call me an old cynic, but, the £3m they reported as an annual figure isn't actually that much is it? If you think about the profits that must be being made in the British Isles thanks to the drug trade every day, it is but a drop in a very large ocean. I have hunted out a few quotes for you to mull over. They are from 'across the pond' as the freedom, liberty and big government debate has already been held. The Founding Fathers debated long and hard about the nature of government (guess who studied A Level (American political) History?) and hence the constitution as they wrote it. 'They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.' - Benjamin Franklin 'Privacy is a pretty abstract concept. Like our health, it's something we tend not to think about until we lose it - and then discover that out lives have been very unpleasantly, and perhaps irretrievably, altered.' - George Radwanski (former) Privacy Commissioner of Canada 'It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones.' - Calvin Coolidge 'Can our form of government, our system of justice, survive if one can be denied a freedom because he might abuse it?' - Harlon Carter Today we are conducting the war against terrorism in a manner that is inimicable to those values of freedom and justice. It is weakening our cause at home and around the world.' - Retired US Navy Admiral John Hutson * This was published in the November 2004 edition of the newsletter *
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