| CARVIEW |
...continue In England, ‘jury nullification’ isn’t allowed, but – says the Court of Appeal]]>
The case considered the landmark decision of Bushell’s Case from 1670, the juror who refused to convict Quakers William Penn and William Mead and his writ of habeas corpus was granted, after the trial judge fined and imprisoned him for not returning a guilty verdict.
Since Mr Bushell wrongly did porridge for saving Quakers, the law has moved on and in England, it is forbidden to mention jury nullification in court.
The Court of Appeal’s judgment held that whilst jurors have to give verdicts according to the law and the evidence, there is no mechanism to punish them if they do not do so (provided they actually follow the rules and are either split with no verdict, or acquit). The Court said this:
Bushell’s Case may be best understood as recognising an immunity from punishment in respect of their decision as to what verdict to return, rather than a right to return verdicts in defiance of the evidence.
A distinction that might be lost on some, but it means that the concept of nullification cannot be raised in court as part of a defence.
And would it be wrong to think that in the States, ‘jury nullification’ is seen as a pro-liberty stance as a check on an overly powerful State, whereas ‘jury equity’ in the UK is seen as a way to undermine property rights and allow socialist violence to go unchecked?
* The Supreme Court is based in England, but it sits as a ‘UK’ court. It could yet hear an appeal from this case if an appeal were brought.
]]>– Tilak Doshi
]]>The Chagos Islands have been what are rather grandly called a British Indian Ocean Territory. The UK government, claiming that it is required to do so under
...continue Chagos, Greenland and leaseholds vs outright ownership]]>
The Chagos Islands have been what are rather grandly called a British Indian Ocean Territory. The UK government, claiming that it is required to do so under international law (debatable), is to hand the islands to Mauritius – which is hundreds of miles away to the west of Chagos – and will pay Mauritius (a tax haven, by the way) for the ability to have control of said islands for a leasehold period of several decades. That means the UK can no longer decide if other countries – such as China – should be excluded, for example, from putting listening posts in the vicinity. The US military uses the Diego Garcia military base to operate long-haul flights, such as of the B2 stealth bomber and B52 bomber varieties, often to vital strategic effect.
In 2025, when the Starmer government was pushing this arrangement to pass over the islands to Mauritius – and pay Mauritius billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money for the purpose (which is itself a disgrace) – the newly elected Trump administration appeared to be content with the deal, although some in the defence establishment appeared to be worried about the geo-strategic implications of opening a potential door to China in that part of the Indian Ocean. The Chagos transfer remains caught up in UK parliamentary wrangling, but I fear that it will go through – but maybe not if Trump’s comments in the past 24 hours have an impact.
Mr Trump, who is angry at the UK for things such as allowing the Chinese to build a massive new embassy in London (with enhanced spying capabilities, no doubt), and about the UK’s criticism of his Greenland purchase demand (the UK is on firmer ground, if not entirely) has hit at the UK for the Chagos situation. Arguably, Trump’s move gives Starmer, if he is wise enough (is he, ed?) an “off-ramp” excuse to axe the Chagos transfer and put it down as a bad idea. (That would be the smart course, in my view.) Maybe even a smarter course would be for Starmer to let the US buy a stake in the Chagos Islands with a promise to let the UK still use the base on a joint basis. That would deal with America’s concerns about long-haul base access in the Indian Ocean and countering Chinese mischief-making, and perhaps take a bit of sting out of the Greenland issue.
I haven’t space to go into the Greenland case, but suffice to say that I think a US invasion of land that is under Danish rule (Denmark is in NATO) is unlikely to happen and would be outrageous if it did. I think Trump will pull back and over time, some sort of arrangement will be reached once tempers cool. Greenland, given some icecap melting etc, is going to be easier for surface ships and submarines to navigate around, and that makes it an important place for the US/Canada/others to want to protect, given where it is on the map.
But where the Greenland case is relevant in the Chagos case is that the US has a lease of a military base there (signed in 1951 – there were several attempts by the US to buy the place). And Trump has said that leaseholds aren’t enough – the US must own it. The logic he uses is similar to the logic that critics of the Chagos transfer have used – leaseholds aren’t enough because you must have the ability to exclude. Exclusion is the key issue here.
Maybe, therefore, a way forward for Trump and other NATO powers is to insist that US/Western leases in Greenland must involve no such leases for China, Russia and others potentially hostile to NATO members, and that such leases should be reviewed, such as once every 10 years to account for changing geopolitics.
The ability to show a measure of maturity on all sides – including ours in the UK – is critical. I worry that the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing pact between the UK, US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia is likely to end unless matters change. Starmer, who has been a clanking disaster of a Prime Minister, should stop goading the US by foolishly, and in my view fecklessly, giving every impression that the UK is becoming a useful idiot for Beijing. Whatever criticisms one might make of Trump’s recent foreign policy moves, on this occasion, he is more on the side of the angels than some might admit.
Recently, I flicked through James C Bennett’s The Anglosphere Challenge, written more than 20 years ago, a few days ago. Reading it in light of recent events show what’s changed in the world, and what hasn’t. Recommended.
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“Similarly, in the world of policing, in particular, we’ve already been rolling out live facial recognition technology, but I think there’s big space here for being able to harness the power of AI and tech to get ahead of the criminals, frankly, which is what we’re trying to do.”
– Shabana
...continue Samizdata quote of the day – when the state starts saying the quiet bit out loud]]>
“Similarly, in the world of policing, in particular, we’ve already been rolling out live facial recognition technology, but I think there’s big space here for being able to harness the power of AI and tech to get ahead of the criminals, frankly, which is what we’re trying to do.”
– Shabana Mahmood (£), Britain’s Home Secretary, explicitly states she wants to turn the country into a panopticon, quite literally a prison.
Jeremy Bentham, an 18th-century philosopher and social theorist, promoted the Panopticon as a circular prison with a central inspection tower from which a single guard could observe all inmates all the time while unseen.
– Sherelle Jacobs, Daily Telegraph (£).
]]>– Sherelle Jacobs, Daily Telegraph (£).
]]>“Housing is arguably the most broken industry in the world, with tough competition from healthcare and education. It’s a gigantic market that affects us all,” writes Stephen McBride.
He argues that firms such as Cuby Technologies are doing for housing what shipping containers did for transportation and global trade, with massively positive effects.
Cuby’s product is the Mobile Micro-Factory (MMFTM).
...continue Building a factory that can build affordable, great houses – lots of ’em!]]>
“Housing is arguably the most broken industry in the world, with tough competition from healthcare and education. It’s a gigantic market that affects us all,” writes Stephen McBride.
He argues that firms such as Cuby Technologies are doing for housing what shipping containers did for transportation and global trade, with massively positive effects.
Cuby’s product is the Mobile Micro-Factory (MMFTM). It’s a standardized, portable factory that turns homebuilding into a predictable manufacturing process. I can see that acronym MMF, in this context, getting the same visibility as SMR for “small modular reactors”, and tapping into the same idea of using economies of scale, mass customisation and fiendishly clever computer tech to produce lots of useful, not eye-wateringly expensive things for our homes, power generators, whatever. And I can see, in time, how this fits with still-developing tech such as 3-D printing (which has been around a while). It will of course give some folk the vapours, such as those in the construction trades, much as happened with other disruptive changes. But if, for example, ageing and other forces squeeze labour market supply of people in such trades, then business models such as the MMF one, able to churn out homes, will have a lot of appeal. Plus new jobs can be created around design and all the associated, value-add opportunities that can arise.
One aspect of all this is that if it lives up to the billing, the precision with which homes are built will be very high.
Also, there is an appeal, is there not, for the likes of Elon Musk in figuring out how to efficiently produce things for spacefaring and the settlement of Mars. I can bet he is following all this closely.
Final thought – for places that have suffered a devastating loss of housing (such as Southern California exactly a year ago because of the fires), being able to produce attractive homes at scale for people seems to have a lot of appeal. And, er, that’s where the horrible politics comes in. To date, only a fraction of the number of houses lost have been replaced. That is a shameful state of affairs, and one for which the local politicians deserve to pay a high price.
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...continue Samizdata quote of the day – who did Robert Jenrick throw under the bus?]]>
– Allister Heath, asking a question that sort of gets a natural, logical answer: because Iran’s regime is against Israel and Jews, and against the West more generally. And in the minds of those who used to protest about Israel’s attacks on Hamas/Hezbollah and others, that is what counts. A few thousand people dead in Iran is all about the smashing eggs/omelette equation according to this anti-West calculus. In a way, this plays to the whole “two-tier” issue of the thinking about much
...continue Samizdata quote of the day – hypocrisy about Iranian]]>
– Allister Heath, asking a question that sort of gets a natural, logical answer: because Iran’s regime is against Israel and Jews, and against the West more generally. And in the minds of those who used to protest about Israel’s attacks on Hamas/Hezbollah and others, that is what counts. A few thousand people dead in Iran is all about the smashing eggs/omelette equation according to this anti-West calculus. In a way, this plays to the whole “two-tier” issue of the thinking about much of today’s Left (and the barmier forms of it on the Right): If you are on the “right” side of a particular argument (say that you are against Israel’s existence, or at least ambivalent about it), then it creates moral “space” to be indulgent towards regimes that are against Israel, etc. We see this over and over.
(Daily Telegraph link behind paywall.)
]]>This is troubling when one considers that DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service) checks include not just criminal history but ‘non-crime hate incidents’, which may even appear on the records of people who haven’t been contacted by police. These highly-political
...continue Samizdata quote of the day – Is Britain in the process of ‘democratic backsliding’?]]>
This is troubling when one considers that DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service) checks include not just criminal history but ‘non-crime hate incidents’, which may even appear on the records of people who haven’t been contacted by police. These highly-political charges are far more likely to be directed at those with Right-wing opinions.
When western European countries do things like this, I try to gauge whether this is normal by asking the question: what if Hungary did this? In most of these cases, I imagine the assessment would be that it was an assault on liberalism and democratic norms. In which case, what if Britain is undergoing the sort of ‘democratic backsliding’ usually levelled at central European countries with conservative governments? What if Keir Starmer is actually one of these illiberal ‘strongmen’ we read about, just not a very effective one.
– Ed West
]]>It was last summer when Aston Villa drew Maccabi Tel Aviv in the Europa League. Immediately, the local, “Gaza Independent” MP Ayoub Khan launched a campaign to cancel the match. His petition demanded the match be cancelled because Aston is, in his words, a “predominantly Muslim community”.
After police planning started for the match, due to be played on November 6, officers met Birmingham councillors and officials at the Safety Advisory Group meeting on October 7. Two local councillors present said the “community want it stopped”. They met behind closed doors, but the minutes
...continue Without their monopoly on force, the police are just the second biggest gang]]>
It was last summer when Aston Villa drew Maccabi Tel Aviv in the Europa League. Immediately, the local, “Gaza Independent” MP Ayoub Khan launched a campaign to cancel the match. His petition demanded the match be cancelled because Aston is, in his words, a “predominantly Muslim community”.
After police planning started for the match, due to be played on November 6, officers met Birmingham councillors and officials at the Safety Advisory Group meeting on October 7. Two local councillors present said the “community want it stopped”. They met behind closed doors, but the minutes now show the truth. Even in the “absence of intelligence” the “planning assumption” of the police was that no away fans would attend the match.
The chairman of the Safety Advisory Group contacted the police two days later asking for a “more clear rationale”. A position had been reached, but the police were asked retrospectively to drum up a justification. The chairman warned the police to make sure the decision did not look like “anti-Jewish sentiment”.
When the committee met again on October 16, the police magicked their “significant intelligence” about the supposed violence of the Maccabi fans.
The police thought they could get away with it. Instead, their case has utterly collapsed. The “intelligence”, which the Chief Constable said had “changed the assessment”, focused on disorder in Amsterdam in 2024. It said the Maccabi fans were “linked to the Israel Defence Force” and targeted Muslim areas, throwing people into the river. Their report claimed the Dutch police sent 5,000 officers to tackle the violence. But none of it was true.
The fabricated “intelligence” supposedly came from an unminuted meeting between West Midlands Police and Dutch commanders on 1 October. This meeting was held six days before the meeting when the police said there was an “absence of intelligence”.
Amsterdam’s mayor, local police chief, and chief public prosecutor have all contradicted the “intelligence” – even calling it “nonsensical”. The disorder in Amsterdam was in fact violence against the Maccabi fans, which was described as a “Jew hunt”. It was an Israeli who was pushed into the river. Only 1,200 officers were deployed.
And it gets worse. West Midlands Police received intelligence on September 5, before the Safety Advisory Group meetings, saying local Islamists planned to “arm themselves” and attack Maccabi fans. But this information was suppressed, seemingly because the police did not want to admit that the true source of the threat lay closer to home. Instead of confronting the mob, the police gave in and banned the Israelis.
In modern times, the British social contract was meant to be that we, the people, give up the right to use force to protect ourselves in exchange for the police protecting us. Cue Libertarian grumbling “I do not recall signing this contract”, but that is the Britain we used to live in. It wasn’t ideal but it wasn’t bad either. It was one of the better societies that have ever existed.
The social contract relied on the idea that the only people permitted to arm themselves were servants of the state such as police officers or soldiers. If the state got wind that members of any other group – a white nationalist militia for example – were preparing to arm themselves in order to attack their enemies, an armed response unit would be kicking down their doors faster than you can say “Terrorism Act 2000”.
Now that some sections of the police have acquiesced in other groups taking the right to arm themselves, and, worse yet, have covered up their shame by portraying the aggressors as victims and vice versa, what reason do we have to continue to grant them special status as the sole holders of the right and responsibility to bear arms? Without the majestic aura of the law around them, the police are just another gang. They are not even the dominant gang.
]]>After an immigration agent shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis on Wednesday morning, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and President Donald Trump portrayed that use of lethal force as clearly justified. Noem averred that the dead woman, Renee Nicole Good, was engaged in an “act of domestic terrorism” because she was trying to “run a law enforcement officer over.” Trump went even further, saying Good “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer.” (Reason magazine.)
Bystander
...continue Thoughts on the fatal shooting by an ICE operative of the motorist in Minnesota]]>
After an immigration agent shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis on Wednesday morning, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and President Donald Trump portrayed that use of lethal force as clearly justified. Noem averred that the dead woman, Renee Nicole Good, was engaged in an “act of domestic terrorism” because she was trying to “run a law enforcement officer over.” Trump went even further, saying Good “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer.” (Reason magazine.)
Bystander video of the incident immediately cast doubt on those accounts. Footage from various angles “appears to show the agent,” later identified as Jonathan Ross, “was not in the path of [Good’s] SUV when he fired three shots at close range,” The New York Times reported on Thursday. “The SUV did move toward the ICE agent as he stood in front of it,” The Washington Post noted. “But the agent was able to move out of the way and fire at least two of three shots from the side of the vehicle as it veered past him.”
I am not going to get into the “who did what?” side of this, but I think that to some extent, this is what happens when people who are pressured to “get results” and operate in a system where they are encouraged to do so. For many years, law enforcement in different countries has had this issue, with the US in the lead. We are seeing the increasing militarisation of law enforcement. Radley Balko, who now works at the Washington Post, has done important work in shining a light on where this is going for many years. Things are seemingly getting worse the current administration but this did not come from nowhere.
Several Samizdata commenters are, if I recall correctly, those with law enforcement experience, so I’d be interested to know what the rights and wrongs are here.
]]>...continue Samizdata quote of the day – Let’s not have a second world war]]>
– Stanley Baldwin (Prime Minister as was), 9 January 1926. Maybe fear of a repeat of the collapse of the Roman Empire is an ever-present feature of Western civilisation. I still fear it though.
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