“Once this puritanical misery is lifted,” I suggested during one of those interminable family quiz sessions in lockdown 2020, “It’ll be like Restoration Britain all over again – we’ll party like it’s 1660.” The Great Aunt – sharp as a tack – snapped back, “I hope we haven’t got to wait 11 years.” The House Party App (remember that!) fell silent. She was right of course. The first little three-month lockdown was simply an appetiser for a grim stretch of puritanical misery of which we’re only five years in. Charles II had to fight and wait just shy of 12 years to reclaim the throne from the boorish Cromwell after the execution of his father in 1649, and I fear we Cavaliers will have to commit to a similar time frame.
In last week’s news alone, there were three announcements that prove we are still sludging through the grim Puritanical period where fun is banned and everyone is skint. Interest rates have been held at 5% and national debt hit 100% of national income; apart from Lady Starmer and Sue Gray with her salary, who has got money to party? No one I know; all our money is going on increased mortgages or food. Rachel Reeves is rehanging her office with inevitably unappealing paintings of women or paintings by women (Mrs. Thatcher, anyone? – no, not her). And joy of joys, the fourth plinth is scaffolded with death masks. And this is just one week of news; of beauty, joy and optimism there is none.
One in five children are said to experience mental health issues, the most inspiring policy on offer from Grey Labour is assisted dying and the most exciting thing the Prime Minister has done with his greedy receipt of gifts is buy himself some grey glasses. Starmer clearly agrees with the dreary state of the nation, repeating his mantra that everything is “appalling”. Things must be bad, as the King has taken to reciting poetry.
Turning on the radio, I’m scolded for not giving up my tube seat for someone with invisible needs and cautioned not to speed. What counts for socialising today consists of ‘An Evening of Menopause Myth Busting’ or perhaps attending my local city’s Green Week, an event-free festival of recycling and worry. The countryside dinner party scene has almost resurrected itself after lockdown, but not quite in the same flamboyant fashion: people seem to have to get up earlier, or they’re ‘fasting’ (the new word for dieting/clean eating/food intolerances).
“Perhaps you’ve just got old and dull,” suggests my husband. “By the way, the drains are blocked.” The only conversations we seem to be having recently revolve around the paying of colossal bills: “Have you done the car insurance for the eldest son?… What shall we do about the damp patch?… Just remembered from last winter the chimney needs relining… yawn, yawn, yawn.” And even to venture these comments will cause the fun police to tut: “Oh, look at her with her chimney”. Of aspiration or enjoyment of “nice things”, as Ed West terms them, there must be none.
The mood music from the current Government is this: be quiet and do what we tell you. Not dissimilar, I would suggest, to Cromwell’s miserable reign. Here, John Evelyn, the great diarist, records Christmas Day in Cromwell’s Britain; the prying nature of the state into men’s souls and social media posts is the same:
I went with my Wife to celebrate Christmas Day… The chapell was surrounded with souldiers, and all the communicants and assembly surpriz’d and kept prisoners by them… In the afternoon came Col. Whaley, Goffe, and others, from White-hall, to examine us one by one; some they committed to ye Marshall, some to prison. When I came before them they tooke my name and abode, examin’d me why – contrary to an ordinance made that none should any longer observe ye superstitious time of the Nativity… With other frivolous and insnaring questions and much threatning; and finding no colour to detaine me, they dismiss’d me with much pitty of my ignorance.
December 25th, 1657
Compare this to the casual festivity that Samuel Pepys records when the Merry Monarch is back on the throne:
Lay pretty long in bed, and then rose, leaving my wife desirous to sleep, having sat up till four this morning seeing her mayds make mince-pies. I to church, where our parson Mills made a good sermon. Then home, and dined well on some good ribbs of beef roasted and mince pies; only my wife, brother, and Barker, and plenty of good wine of my owne, and my heart full of true joy; and thanks to God Almighty for the goodness of my condition at this day. After dinner, I begun to teach my wife and Barker my song, ‘It is decreed’, which pleases me mightily.
December 25th, 1666
Has anyone recently felt so joyful that they’ve composed a song and played it heartily for their wife on Christmas Day? All we have, by way of musical levity, is the return of the miserabilist Oasis, and even that this joyless Government has thought fit to moan about.
Why did Britain choose to shrug off the Puritan yoke? A combination of the incompetence of Richard Cromwell (watch out, Labour NEPO babies), clever strategic alliances made by the future Charles II (Farage or the next Tory leader), general weariness of Republican rule and shift in popular sentiment that yearned for the stability and freedom (us). I have no doubt we too will shrug off this heavy, proscriptive Government of scolds and Net Zero zealots, and we too will party like it’s 1660.
Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence mentor.
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Pre Crimes the Next Tyranny
8 days late? Perhaps the G has production problems; it would have made sense on 1/4, after all.
They should change the name once more to:
Sharing Archives To Improve Risk Evaluation.
The revised name comes with its own handy mnemonic.
The most scary bit here is acutally that our officials are stupid enough to believe this is possible. Especially, this includes being ignorant enough about pretty basic math to believe that the relative frequency of a non-random past even equals the probability of it repeating in future.
Despite being taught in GCSE Maths in the UK, the False Positive Paradox (aka Base Rate Paradox) still does not gel with most people, including ignorant officials. A highly relevant example of the paradox can be found by googling for “Base rate fallacy Example Terrorist identification”. (Ironically, Google’s AI introduction summarises this!)
The idea behind this is much more f***ed up. A probability is the relative frequency a specific outcome of a random selection will approach if the random selection is repeated often enough. The usual simple example is rolling a dice. Each individual outcome as a probabilty of ⅙ and this means there’ll be approximately n/6 occurences of each number when a dice has been rolled n times. The actual number of occurences will converge towards n/6 as n increases.
Relative frequencies can obviously be calculated whenever there’s a group whose members have a property X and a subgroup whose members also have an unrelated property y but the y/x is not the probability that the next person with property X will also have property Y as there’s nothing randomly selected here.
We don’t know what the outcome will be is a necessary condition for a random selection process but it’s not a sufficient condition: Just that we don’t know why something occurred doesn’t mean something occurred randomly.
Mathematical de-nonsenifying: Let nx be the number of people with property X and ny the number of these people with property y. ny/nx is know the relative frequency of number of people in the property X group which also have property Y but not the probability that the next person where property X is observed will also have property Y.
Good example – I like the example around tossing a coin – many people believe after a series of one result, you are more likely to get the opposite, when in reality it’s basically still 50/50 because each event is separate
This is actually not true because the probability of an event occuring is the number of times “event occurs” in the total set of events divided by the total number of events. When tossing a coin once, the total number of possible outcomes is 2 (front or back) and both front and back thus have a probability of 0.5 of occuring. But when tossing a coin twice, the total set of possible outcomes is
This means the individual probability of each outcome is now only 0.25. The number of possible outcomes doubles with each toss of the coin. But a sequence of all front or all back always remains only one of the possible outcomes. This means the probability of it decreases exponentially with the number of coin tosses.
Here we go again! Matt Hancock allegedly based his strategy to
control everyonecontain a ‘deadly, killer virus’ after watching the film ’Contagion’.Who has now been watching Tom Cruise in Minority Report?
Perhaps anyone that has should be subject to a double eyeball transplant without being told that it only works in the pretend world of Hollywood.
They’d need a brain transplant first
*For those who haven’t seen the film, Cruise plays a cop who, after being assessed by an AI pre-crime programme, is falsely accused of a pre-crime. He has to fight the system to clear his name.
Dear Mr Smith,
Our algorithms detect that you are more likely than average to commit murder, and so we need to talk to you about your thinking, and enrol you in our Homicide Awareness Course. You should report to Blogtown Community Centre next Monday at 6.30pm, bringing this letter and a utility bill with you as evidence of eligibility.
Failure to complete this course may make you liable to summary arrest in front of your children, 48 hours in our cells, and then release on Police Bail followed by a “no further action” notification, as is usual in non-crime situations.
If you belong to any of the following Protected Categories, you may ignore this letter…
I’m surprised that there is no mention of ‘number of years residing in the UK’ as one of the predictive variables.
So the algorithm might not work very well if they don’t include all the variables that correlate strongly with crime.
They can’t help themselves can they.
They’ve never seen a dystopian film or book without thinking “ooh that’s a good idea, we’ll try that”.
Truly we are governed by moral and intellectual pygmies.
“Explore alternative and innovative data science techniques…“
…Meaning find new ways of making stuff up. Outcome life sentence for the heinous pre-crime of predicted premeditated homicide.
Elementary, my dear Two-Tier.
Just another excuse to pry into private citizens and then control them. But it is all protect the individual. “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” Benjamin Franklin I believe.
Its been said before, but 1984 was not intended as an instruction manual.
“Statewatch says data from people not convicted of any criminal offence will be used as part of the project, including personal information about self-harm and details relating to domestic abuse. Officials strongly deny this, insisting only data about people with at least one criminal conviction has been used.” Like they denied the introduction of vaccine passports and look at what happened…..
This appears to be largely a re-run of the Home Office Initiative around 2001 (under various “Blair Babe” focus groups, presumably led by Jack Straw). This reached the level where the Home Office tried to get national and international definitions of mental illness changed to introduce a new one: “Severe and Dangerous Personality Disorder” (SDPD). This was defeated, not so much by human rights activists and lawyers, but by psychiatrists, doctors, medical professionals, researchers and, above all, mental health practitioners. On the whole these did not want the responsibility for “diagnosing” the politically-motivated new disorder of SDPD, especially as such a diagnosis would, under the Home Office proposals, render the person immediately liable to indefinite detention without charge, simply on the basis of a couple of opinions of psychiatrists. Also it tended to work the opposite way to that recommended by psychiatrists dealing with this type of case: namely, instead of encouraging the patient to take responsibility for their own actions, it would have specifically removed that responsibility from the patient and transferred it to the doctor, or the medical facility. As well as being psychiatric bad practice, it would have placed doctors and anybody else in a position of responsibility in a situation where they would be fearful of the consequences of NOT making such a diagnosis if the patient then went on to commit murder; such fear would tend to make the person adopt the contentious “precautionary principle” and make a SDPD diagnosis, knowing that they would not be held responsible for any violation of the patient’s human rights.
Twenty-five years later, what has changed? First, the government of the day still seeks votes by appearing to be able make the electorate “feel” safe from the extremely small number of people who pose a risk to the general public, while playing down the much larger risk of the much larger number of essentially basically harmless people, who happen to tick all the “right” boxes in the opinion of psychiatrists, being detained indefinitely. (It’s the old False Positive Paradox again, which came to fore during Covid testing.) Secondly, AI has come along, or whatever small development in software and hardware has been thus dubbed. This will encourage even more dependence on “computer says” diagnoses, based on even more obscure algorithms and models of human behaviour. The potential for unscrupulous, incompetent or merely mistaken people (whether entrepreneurial, medical, political, legal or social) to cash in on this, and the resulting human rights violations, will be enormous.
However, there will be opposition. One obvious tactic will be to point out that “psycho-eugenics” would be tainted by bad history, because it comes out of the same stable as eugenics, the difference being that eugenics was about extirpating carriers of “defective” genes, whereas psycho-eugenics is about extirpating carriers of “defective” memes. Another defence is the lessons from the psy-ops applied during Lockdown detecting people who might be labelled as potential “granny killers” just because they up-ticked a comment sceptical of the value of Lockdown and vaccination.
I hope this research does not result in the roll-out of an “early intervention” programme to stop crime before it occurs: the lessons of the 2001 Blair/Straw research must surely be available.
Scary!
“‘Murder Prediction’ Tool to Identify People Most Likely to Kill” Lite woke version no doubt.
The pre-crime tool will of course work only in identifying white people, any other person ethnic or sexual protected status will be filtered out.
I wonder if it could have predicted the Nottingham and Southport murders? It’s funny how all the layers of ‘experts’ couldn’t, yet the man on Clapham Omnibus would have done this in 5 secs.
This is just another boondoggle for the useless Home Office and MoJ.
At which university is this “research” taking place?
The Odeon or Cineworld.
Ha-ha! Brilliant!
Algorithm is:
white?
male?
not in trade union?
heterosexual?
not disabled?
score 2 or more positive answers to get arrested.
The biggest problem with this approach is not that it might identify those most likely to kill people but that following that identification nothing will be done.
Potential murderers will no doubt claim a right to enjoy a family life under the EHCR which trumps the ‘identification by algorithm’.
You don’t seriously want people to be punished for some AI claiming they might commit a crime in future with a certain probability, do you? If you do, why not just send people to prison street-wise? Some of them would certainly have committed some crimes otherwise! Or why not just gather people at random and shoot them?
Nice one. That’s a quote to remember:
“Why not just gather people at random and shoot them?”
Is this the real reason Stalin Starmer is so keen to force schoolchildren to watch that Marxist Indoctrination programme called “Adolescence”???
Softening up the public with propaganda, so they will accept White Working Class Boys as the primary targets of the “Pre-Crime Murder Prediction Tool”???
TPTB: We think you’re likely to commit murder so we have you under round-the-clock observation.
Subject: !! I’ll ****ing kill you. Make sure they get it on camera.
I presume this will only be deployed against white British people ….. since they know who the most likely to murder are and they all have various shades of darker skins and have come here from places where violence, particularly against women, is the norm and often sanctioned by their faith and their governments.
it was known at least thirty years ago that there are typically 39 to 39 antecedent criminal events prior to the major ‘index event’ such as murder, rape, etc and that the obvious job of the ‘relevant authorities’ was to work on the perpetrator during the first batch of criminal acts to prevent the probability of the major incident – but, as ever, the bureaucrats and politico’s ignored the research … no wonder we’re ‘at’ where we’re at