Disappointed Man seeks UK Freedom to sell Tainted Artefacts

A HM government body called yourfreedom.hmg.gov.uk has aims which may at first sight appear laudable:

We're working to create a more open and less intrusive society. We want to restore Britain’s traditions of freedom and fairness, and free our society of unnecessary laws and regulations – both for individuals and businesses. This site gives you the chance to suggest how we can do this. Your ideas will inform government policy and some of your proposals could end up making it into bills we bring before Parliament to change the law.

Great, so they'll be protesting laws which forbid spitting in public parks on Sundays and suchlike no? Well, one of the ones put up for consideration most probably I would guess by a member of the closed access Yahoo AncientArtifacts discussion group run by Tim hanes concerns dealing in portable antiquities. This has been proposed by a guy calling himself "disappointedman" and it is " Scrap Dealing in Cultural Objects (Offences) Act 2003". Why should this law be repealed? Disappointedman reckons that the law is totally unnecessary because:

The amount of looted material on the antiquities market is greatly exaggerated. The market is largely supplied by the vast amounts of legally acquired antiquities collected over the last 300 years. Dealers and auction houses have no need to deal in "tainted objects" as there is so much legally-acquired material on the market. For example, the law making all antiquities subsequently discovered in Egypt property of the State was passed only in 1983. Before this date, tens of thousands of Egyptian antiquities were exported from Egypt with full permission of the Egyptian authorities of the time. Vast numbers of artefacts from all cultures are hence in private ownership and form the basis of the antiquities trade today. Many of the objects in dealers and auction catalogues have been circulating on the market for decades, even centuries.

[yawn] This (and the bit about provenance below it) is in fact ripped off from the "Collecting Antiquities FAQ" of Guy Rothwell's (is Mr Rothwell a Disappointed man?) Ancient Relics Co.UK ["Genuine and affordable antiquities, Third Reich medals and historical collectables for sale"]. It is totally false, a large number of artefacts have been illegally taken from the ground by nighthawks from the 1970s onwards in the UK, by illegal artefact hunting in many other countries across the ancient world, and they are going somewhere, aren't they? "Not here in the UK, honest" says Mr Disappointedman.

Disappointedman argues, like the Mr Rothwell and the US coineys: "If an item is unprovenanced, the most likely reason for this is that it has been around for a long time on the market and has had a large number of owners". Yeah right, it is not at all likely that any of it comes from the looting of sites all over the ancient world, because as we all know (common sense innit?), that is all spirited away by the coin pixies, and never makes it to any market. Pull the other one.

As for why repealing the law is immportant to Disappointedman:

This needless law has the potential to seriously damage Britains place as a leading centre of the international art market [...] sellers will look elsewhere, such as the emerging art markets in the Middle and Far East.

What "sellers" would be unwilling to offer goods on a market that (only) has regulations against tainted goods? In whose interest would it really be to repeal this law? What in fact does somebody dealing in verifiably legitimately obtained material have to fear from it?

There is a button on the above-mentioned webpage for people to signal the suggestion as inappropriate. Those who think it is can press it and disappoint Mr Disappointedman further.

It is terribly interesting that there's a whole group of lobbyists both sides of the Atlantic (like Mr Disappointedman and Rothwell, the serried dealers and collectors of the AncientArtifacts forum, the ACCG, the PNA and IAPN) loudly protesting how "legitimate" the whole antiquities selling industry is, trotting out armfulls of justifications and pseudo-arguments to that effect. But these are the very same people who given half a chance are first in line (as here) to attempt to demolish any form of regulation of the market to make it more legitimate. Where are the legitimate traders in antiquity who are arguing loudly for the increase of measures aiming to make the market a safer place to buy licit antiquities and push out the cowboys? Can anyone point to even a single example of this in the last decade or so?