Taking liberties
Mark Steyn says that big government — whether in the form of ID cards or gun bans — makes life more dangerous for everyone
New Hampshire
Wired magazine ran an interesting featurette last month about a fellow called Hans Monderman, who’s been a highway engineer in northern Holland for the last three decades. A year or two back, he had an epiphany. As Wired’s Tom McNichol puts it, ‘Build roads that seem dangerous, and they’ll be safer.’ In other words, all the junk on the streets — signs for everything every five yards, yellow lines, pedestrian crossings, stop lights, crash barriers, bike lanes — by giving the illusion of security actually makes driving more dangerous. The town of Christianfield in Denmark embraced the Monderman philosophy, removed all the traffic signs and signals from its most dangerous intersection, and thereby cut the number of serious accidents down to zero. These days, when you tootle towards the junction, there are no instructions from the transport department to tell you what to do; you have to figure it out for yourself, so you approach it cautiously and with an eye on what the other chaps in the vicinity are up to.
I’m no civil engineer, but I am a smallgovernment guy and when I’m asked ‘How small?’ I usually reply that I like to find a road when I get down to the end of my driveway in the morning. My assistant’s husband works for the town road crew and they do an excellent job. But, alas, on the state highways New Hampshire is going in the opposite direction to Mr Monderman. On formerly scenic Interstate 89, the discreet mile markers have been augmented by eye level markers every fifth of a mile reminding you what road you’re on and that it’s been 0.2 miles since the last reminder. Until this summer, if you were on a bendy road following a river, you’d take the curves carefully lest you plunged over the edge and died in a gasoline fireball at the foot of the ravine. That happened to some poor fellow every 93 years or so, so now they’ve put up metal barriers along the picture-postcard river roads punctuated every couple of hundred yards by ugly-ass shock-absorbers that look like trash cans. So now you don’t have to worry about plunging into the river because the barrier will bounce you back into the road to be sliced in two by the logging truck. The uglification of New Hampshire’s highways is a good example of how, even in a small-government state, the preferred solution to any problem real or imaginary is more government.
Mr Monderman’s thesis feels right to me — that by creating the illusion of security you relieve the citizen of the need to make his own judgments. That’s really the story of September 11. If 19 punks with box-cutters had tried to pull some stunt in the parking lot of a sports bar, they’d have been beaten to a pulp. But, as I wrote at the time, the airline cabin is the most advanced model of the modern social-democratic state, the sky-high version of the wildest dreams of big government. Up there where the air is rarefied, all your rights have been regulated away: there’s no smoking; there’s 100 per cent gun control; you’re obliged by law to do everything the cabin crew tell you; if the trolley dolly’s rude to you, tough; if you’re rude back, you’ll be arrested on landing. For 30 years passengers surrendered more and more rights for the illusion of security. So on September 11, on those first three flights, the cabin crews followed all those Federal Aviation Administration guidelines from the Seventies, and the passengers did everything they were told, and thousands of people died. By the time the fourth plane got into trouble, the passengers knew big government wasn’t up there with them and used their own wits to prevent the hijackers from reaching their target.
That’s been my basic rule of thumb these last three years: anything that shifts power from the individual judgment of free citizens to government is a bad thing, not just for the war on terror but for the national character in a more general sense. But, just as the failure of the post-Dunblane ‘total gun ban’ only demonstrates the need for even more totally total gun bans, so the failure of big government on September 11 only demonstrates the need for even bigger government. So now Britain will have a national ID card, and the best you can hope for is that it will be merely useless rather than actively harmful. It’s in the grand tradition of Home Office thinking: the best way to deal with a specific problem is to universalise it. The advantage from the lazy policeman’s point of view is that it makes the general public the target rather than the ne’er-do-wells — like the totally totalised gun ban, which makes it easier for Her Majesty’s constabulary to spend their time hassling farmers with rusty shotguns rather than engaging in the somewhat more stressful pursuit of Yardies with Uzis. Given that ‘visitors’ to the United Kingdom will not be required to have ID cards, there will be every incentive for terrorists to remain, for official purposes, in the visitors’ category. So the ID card seems likely to move the bad guys deeper into the shadows, while shining the spotlight on your absent-minded granny instead.
Charles Clarke gave an interesting glimpse of New Labour Britain in a column in the Times. I don’t know anything about Mr Clarke — he hasn’t been at the Home Office long enough for any of us at The Spectator to start having an affair with him — but I found this passage revealing: ‘ID cards will potentially make a difference to any area of everyday life where you already have to prove your identity — such as opening a bank account, going abroad on holiday, claiming a benefit, buying goods on credit and renting a video.’ ‘Renting a video’? That sounds about right. When you go to Blockbuster, you’ll need your national ID card. But if you’re an Algerian terrorist cell coming in on the Eurostar to blow up Canary Wharf, you won’t. And its requirement for the routine transactions of daily life — ‘opening a bank account ... buying goods on credit’ — will have the same impact as all those street signs and traffic lights at that Danish intersection: it will relieve bank managers and store clerks of the need to use their own judgment in assessing the situation. You’d have to have an awful lot of faith in government to think that’s a good thing.
Earlier this year, the showboating hacks on the 9/11 commission in Washington were making a big hoo-ha about the Clinton administration’s heightened millennium security measures, as an example of what the Bush folks should have done to combat terrorism. You may recall that a fellow called Ahmed Rassam was stopped at the Washington State/British Columbia border en route to blow up Los Angeles airport. This was apparently a great success for the Clinton anti-terror team. In fact, Diana Dean, the Customs agent who caught Ressam, didn’t know there was a heightened security alert. She never got the memo. Instead, she noticed the guy seemed a bit shifty and nervous, and decided to search the car. There was no ‘plan’, no ‘system’ — just one sharp-eyed official exercising her judgment.
Mr Ressam, incidentally, is a very instructive case of how easy it is to proceed through modern Western ‘security’ systems. He was travelling under a false name on a genuine Canadian passport which he obtained by forging a Quebec baptismal certificate: the passport is high-tech, computer-readable, hard(ish) to fake, but the document you need to produce in order to get the hard-to-fake document is much easier to fake. Mr Ressam was originally from Algeria and when he landed at Montreal he was admirably straightforward. He told officials he’d spent five months in jail back home for being an Islamic terrorist. But Immigration Canada declined to take him at his word. According to spokesperson Huguette Shouldice, many asylum-seekers try to pass themselves off as terrorists to ‘exaggerate the persecution they fear in their homeland in order to impress Canadian immigration officials’. Read that again slowly: according to Mme Shouldice, claiming to be a terrorist increases your chances of being admitted to Canada, so immigration officials have learnt to disregard it as no more than a little light resumé-padding. Yawn: here’s someone trying to slip in on the mad-bomber fasttrack admission quota again.
Given the ethnic squeamishness built into Western governmental bureaucracies these days, who’s more likely to fall foul of the mandatory ID regime? The Ahmed Ressams or your Auntie Beryl? The principal political requirement of the scheme will be to demonstrate that it’s not ‘Islamophobic’, so if your auntie’s new NHS glass eye finally comes through and she fails to re-register her biometric data promptly, she’ll be hauled into court to demonstrate the ‘fairness’ of the new legislation. Michael Howard and his awful Me-Too Tory party may believe it’s a vital tool in the war on terror, but in practice it will prove a grand diversion from it. Meanwhile, the dodgier imams will be enjoying the great benefit of new ‘hate crimes’ legislation. As we’ve seen this week with the Sikhs and the poor old Birmingham Rep, the more robust religions are already very effective at silencing debate. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders, who’s spoken out against radical Islam, now shows his face in public only for parliamentary appearances and even then has to be accompanied by armed guards. I’m sure he was relieved to hear that the Muslim who put out a video on the Internet threatening to behead Wilders for the ‘sin’ of ‘mocking Islam’ was sentenced to 120 days of community service.
The religious ‘hate crimes’ law is another example of excessive street signage applied to the broader byways of society. It attempts to supplant human judgment with government management. The multicultural state is working out so well that we can no longer be trusted to regulate our own interactions with our neighbours. Islam, unlike Anglicanism, is an explicitly political project: sharia is a legal system but, unlike English common law or the Napoleonic code, for the purposes of public debate it will henceforth enjoy the special protection of Her Majesty’s government. Given that the emerging Muslim lobby groups are the Robert Maxwells of ethno-cultural grievance-mongers, you can bet that they’ll make full use of any new law. Political debate in Europe is already hedged in by excessive squeamishness: Holland’s ‘immi gration problem’ is a Muslim problem, France’s ‘youth problem’ is a Muslim problem, the ‘terrorism threat’ that necessitated the ID cards is in reality an Islamic threat. How is preventing honest discussion of the issue going to make Britain any safer?
The term ‘nanny state’ hardly covers a society where you need retinal-scan ID in order to rent Mary Poppins and you’re liable to be prosecuted if you express your feelings too strongly after the next Beslan or Bali. In his last book, published a few months ago, the late Anthony Sampson claimed that after September 11 ‘the fear of terrorism strengthened the hands of all governments’. It certainly shouldn’t have. In America, I don’t believe it did. And, if my correspondence these last three years is anything to go by, the British on the whole decline to accept the basic premise of the brave new world — that this is the primal threat, the central challenge of the times. Given that you’ve yet to have London or Birmingham or Newcastle hit by the Islamists, that seems fair enough. But why then are you going along with laws that would be ill-advised even after they’d nuked Glasgow? In Hans Monderman’s Holland, they’re finally realising that the multiculti pieties of the last 30 years were a dangerous fantasy; in Britain, you’re still larding it on. The road ahead will be difficult enough; cluttering it up with ‘no parking’ signs isn’t going to make it any safer.
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