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Comment by de_keyboard | Hacker News Reader

> Peter Bone, a veteran Conservative MP, says: “I wholly welcome this. It goes down the route of personal responsibility. It’s spot on.”

Personal responsibility does mean you get to decide when to put others at risk, for example by going near them without a mask. Now, we might argue that there is a trade-off between respecting individual sovereignty on the one hand and lowering the friction of society on the other, but to frame this as a "personal responsibility" move is absurd. The Conservatives should read their intellectual heroes more carefully. Last I checked, Libertarians believe in the non-aggression principle.

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I agree with your comment.

But I'd like to point out that the Conservatives in the UK are nothing like Libertarians. There are a few perhaps, like the MP in the article, who would like to think of themselves that way. But the Conservatives as a whole are Authoritarian bordering on Totalitarian, and they are the most Authoritarian of all the big parties (more than the left).

You just have to look at their "hostile environment" policies to see the difference: It is the law that all landlords (even for someone staying in a spare bedroom of someone's home), banks and health services must verify a person's documented right to rent, open a bank account or have healthcare.

Every major party is against those policies except the Conservatives.

As many people in the UK lack or can't obtain documentation even when they do in fact have legal rights (the Home Office in charge of such things routinely breaks the law and is ruled against by the courts), and many don't find out about their restricted status until they turn 18 years old then find out they aren't allowed to go to university after all, and some lose status without knowing because we have a rather opaque system which does that to people for capricious and secretive reasons, we have rather a lot of people affected by those laws, who were either born in the UK or entered legally at the time they entered. This is why the Windrush abuse by government was so damaging, as many elderly people who had been in the country for some 50 years were suddenly affected by the hostile environment policy and had their lives ruined.

No true libertarian would condone those policies, as they are directly opposed to personal freedom between individuals to make small, private transactions. Renting is a private transaction between one individual and another, yet it is illegal under these policies. And preventing the doctor from providing services so that people die when the doctor is perfectly willing to help is also rather unlibertarian.

> But I'd like to point out that the Conservatives in the UK are nothing like Libertarians. There are a few perhaps, like the MP in the article, who would like to think of themselves that way. But the Conservatives as a whole are Authoritarian bordering on Totalitarian, and they are the most Authoritarian of all the big parties (more than the left).

I agree, however the media insists on talking about Johnson's "Libertarian instincts" and the "Libertarian wing of the party". I don't see them as very Libertarian at all! See also drug policy, protest bill, internet surveillance, housing market interventions...

Describing them as borderline totalitarian isn't helpful in the debate. It's OTT, hyperbolic and undermines the point you are making. Requiring someone to prove their legal status in the country isn't "totalitarianism" or even "authoritarian". Agree windrush was a total shambles and shameful, but that was largely down to incompetence and not malice. Anyone who genuinely is in a life threatening condition can receive treatment at NHS A&E hospital - like any tourist visiting from overseas.

I disagree. Describing them as not borderline totalitarian is making them out to be milder than they are towards the set of people I've highlighted. They demand severe subservience by those people who face severe consequences otherwise, and that is the definition of totalitarian.

Requiring someone to prove their status for a private, low value transaction between individuals is a strongly authoritarian state. Requiring ordinary people to act as police for the state is also strongly authoritarian.

I don't believe that is a hyperbolic view.

And "requiring someone to prove status" means a lot of different things. If the issuing of status is itself done abusively, and without regard for the law (the Home Office routinely breaks the law and is routinely found to have behaved abusively), that phrase sounds much more reasonable than it is.

You would not think this unless you have witnessed the distressing multi-year effects on people of ambiguous status who are still trying to get a straight and justifiable answer out of the system designed with rejection quotas in mind, irrational decisions at times, and horrible consequences for some individuals. (Note I said "ambiguous", not "without". There are so many cases which ultimately end up resolved as "ok you're fine" after a few years fighting unlawful judgements).

The result is obvious: There are people sleeping rough because it is, essentially, the law that they must be kept homeless until their status is resolved. There are many more currently sleeping in dangerous accomodation, and in abusive relationships they cannot leave. And there are people living with life-threatening, curable diseases, where there is nothing they can do but slowly die.

I also think requiring people to earn significantly above the median wage before they can live with their own spouse is also, in my view, authoritarian. To be honest I was shocked when I discovered that. I always assumed any decent state would at least allow genuinely married couples to be together.

And in fact, EU law does allow that - it's considered a fundamental human right (the right to a family life). But it's not a human right in the UK.

> Anyone who genuinely is in a life threatening condition can receive treatment at NHS A&E hospital

This statement is false. People have died as a result of withheld life-critical treatment under the hostile environment, and not by mistake.

One immediately comes to mind who was in the middle of life-critical cancer treatment, when it was abruptly suspended by a hostile environment requirement, and then some months later they died as everyone knew they would.

What you are thinking of is emergency treatement, which is not the same as life threatening.

Unfortunately I also know of people who have avoided going to A&E despite facing a life-threatening emergency, preferring to cross their fingers than to risk being placed in prison ("detention centres") and later deported, when they turn up at A&E. After all, even if you get emergency treatement, enforcement sometimes turns up to take you away after the treatment before you leave hospital.

Whether that fear is justified or not, it is a fact that some people believe that it is dangerous to go to hospital, due to the messages put out by the "Conservative" government and the "embedded" immigration staff at hospitals. There are also pregnant women who ought to attend hospital for the safety of their child, but again, are too afraid to attend hospital due to justified fear of the consequences.

Another fine example: The Home Office sentenced a woman to death while she was still in a coma, saying she could recieve "palliative" care in the destination country instead of life saving treatment she was in the middle of receiving in the UK. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/uk-immigrati...

In my view, it's not hyperbolic to describe those decisions as authoritarian bordering on totalitarian for those people.

But it's because it only affects a subset of people that most other people don't think it's a problem.

Those are completely different conditions to those faced by "any tourist". A tourist would receive life saving treatment in the above example.

> [Windrush] was largely down to incompetence and not malice.

The screwup with documentation was negligence. It's incompetence if it's just a screwup. It's negligence when it can be foreseen to cause material harm, which it clearly could by those working in the same office as sets the enforcement policies.

Policies intended to cause immediate harm to whoever's documentation happens to be screwed up - which is inevitable (known to be inevitable from appeal court statistics) - instead of treating people reasonably while sorting out the documentation. That part is malice.

The Home Office policy of "deport first, appeal later" is not designed to allow errors to be sorted out while treating people in a civil manner. (It often prevents people from accessing their own belongings and paperwork.) It's designed to prevent people from sorting things out unless they have someone still in the UK to do it on their behalf. That boosts the deportation quotas and keeps the appeal rate unjustly low.

BBC News - Covid-19: Dutch PM Rutte 'sorry for easing restrictions too soon' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-57811538

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