In the last election Wembley posted that he felt Labour was most vunerable on their record of social authoritarianism. I read on another website that the Government wants to bring in a Bill to give them the right to enact legislation without the need for parliamentary debate and wondered if Wembley felt this qualified as authoritarianism or that some of the reaction to the bill (see Rozenberg "Henry VIII powers" below) is an over-reaction and that this is something more innocent?
Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill
Here's a report on the bill by the telegraph's legal correspondent Joshua Rozenberg.
85 comments:
MPs reject ID card costings call
Two articles on the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill.
How I woke up to a nightmare plot to steal centuries of law and liberty
Daniel Finkelstein
The Times
Now I know what I am about to tell you is difficult to believe (Why isn’t this on the front pages? Where’s the big political row?) but I promise you that it is true. The extraordinary Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, currently before the House, gives ministers power to amend, repeal or replace any legislation simply by making an order and without having to bring a Bill before Parliament. The House of Lords Constitution Committee says the Bill is “of first-class constitutional significance” and fears that it could “markedly alter the respective and long standing roles of minister and Parliament in the legislative process”.
There are a few restrictions — orders can’t be used to introduce new taxes, for instance — but most of the limitations on their use are fuzzy and subjective. One of the “safeguards” in the Bill is that an order can impose a burden only “proportionate to the benefit expected to be gained”. And who gets to judge whether it is proportionate? Why, the minister of course. The early signs are not good. Having undertaken initially not to use orders for controversial laws, the Government has already started talking about abstaining from their use when the matter at hand is “highly” controversial.
Why is the government seeking the power to pass far-reaching laws without parliament's approval?
Marcel Berins
The Guardian
Some have called it the Henry VIII bill; one MP thought Stalin would be a more appropriate dictator to put his name to it. A leading academic refers to it as the "abolition of parliament bill". You get the point. The bill's real title is bland and boring to the point of soporific, which may be why it hasn't been much noticed; but underneath the benign facade of the legislative and regulatory reform bill lurks a machinery that would give the government the power to pass far-reaching laws without the bother of getting the approval of parliament.
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On the surface, the bill is aimed at removing regulatory burdens on business by using short-cut procedures which wouldn't require parliamentary debate. The same process would also put into law uncontroversial recommendations by Britain's law commissions, the government's legal thinktanks. All that seems not only reasonable, but positively helpful to the efficiency of law-making. But look again, and Henry VIII comes into the picture. What the government has inserted into the bill is a way of allowing laws to be passed by a minister's order, which bypasses parliament altogether.
Well, so what? We're only talking about minor, technical laws which don't raise any controversial issues, aren't we? No, we emphatically are not. Try this one. It will become possible for the government, by ministerial order, without a debate in parliament, to create new criminal offences, punishable with less than two years imprisonment. It could also, according to Cambridge law professor John Spencer (who is not alone in his analysis), introduce house-arrest, give the police stronger powers of arrest and interrogation, set up new courts, and in effect re-write the rules on immigration, nationality, divorce, inheritance and the appointment of judges. Yes, there are safeguards written into the bill supposedly to prevent this sort of dictatorial behaviour, but my experience of safeguards is that they look better on the page than they perform in practice.
OK, you say, the government may have the legal power to do all those things, but is it seriously being suggested that it will really use such methods to pass laws it doesn't feel like putting to parliament? On the whole, no - and yet, in our current overcharged political climate, it is not too fanciful to imagine the government using every procedural trick to impose laws on the quiet, rather than face a parliamentary storm.
What bothers me most is that the government wants these powers in the first place. They are constitutionally dangerous, giving to the executive what should be a function of the legislature. And they are unnecessary. It would not have been difficult to achieve the bill's admirable, limited objectives without arming ministers with such questionable, wide-ranging powers. So why is the government so insistent on keeping the Henry VIII provisions if it doesn't intend on using them?
And finally here's Lib Dem leader candidate Chris Huhne.
Our freedom is at stake
Chris Huhne
The Guardian
Here's a letter from the Times from the Law Faculty, University of Cambridge
Legislative Reform
The Bill subjects this drastic power to limits, but these are few and weak. If enacted as it stands, we believe the Bill would make it possible for the Government, by delegated legislation, to do (inter alia) the following:
# create a new offence of incitement to religious hatred, punishable with two years’ imprisonment;
# curtail or abolish jury trial;
# permit the Home Secretary to place citizens under house arrest;
# allow the Prime Minister to sack judges;
# rewrite the law on nationality and immigration;
# “reform” Magna Carta (or what remains of it).
It would, in short, create a major shift of power within the state, which in other countries would require an amendment to the constitution; and one in which the winner would be the executive, and the loser Parliament.
David Howarth, MP for Cambridge, made this point at the Second Reading of the Bill last week. We hope that other MPs, on all sides of the House, will recognise the dangers of what is being proposed before it is too late.
At the last election Wembley commented that Labour was vunerable on it's Authoritarianism but that it was best challenged from within; this bill could be the test of whether that tendency can indeed be challenged from within the party or whether the mps will be caught sleeping on the job.
One final comment, if we are heading towards a period of small, very marginal, majorities (as many believe) this legislation could be very useful to the governing party.
Here are some highlights from an article by Henry Porter but it's worth following the link and reading the article in full.
Blair's new laws leave us at the mercy of future tyrants
Henry Porter
The Observer
'The attempt to make it a crime to 'glorify terrorism' is quintessentially Tony Blair. It is first of all silly. Every act prosecutable under this new offence could have been dealt with by existing legislation. When a lot of hotheads called for beheadings and terrorist attacks during the Danish cartoons controversy, the police were entirely within the law to arrest those carrying the placards. If they didn't, it was to avoid inflaming the situation. They lacked the will, not the law.
Blair's new law will contribute nothing in the fight against terrorism, but, crucially, it will limit what we can say. Should I wish to make the case for Basque separatism, or celebrate the 90th anniversary of the Easter Rising, or explain some distant liberation movement, I might expose myself to prosecution. One man's freedom fighter is another's terrorist.
Blair says everyone knows what glorification is, but in a court, the definition would quickly disintegrate. He says it sends a signal to al-Qaeda and it is worth giving up this sliver of free speech to do so. Is he deluded? No terrorist or lunatic imam is going to take the slightest notice of this piffling but dangerous law.
The attempt to make it a crime to 'glorify terrorism' is quintessentially Tony Blair. It is first of all silly. Every act prosecutable under this new offence could have been dealt with by existing legislation. When a lot of hotheads called for beheadings and terrorist attacks during the Danish cartoons controversy, the police were entirely within the law to arrest those carrying the placards. If they didn't, it was to avoid inflaming the situation. They lacked the will, not the law.
Blair's new law will contribute nothing in the fight against terrorism, but, crucially, it will limit what we can say. Should I wish to make the case for Basque separatism, or celebrate the 90th anniversary of the Easter Rising, or explain some distant liberation movement, I might expose myself to prosecution. One man's freedom fighter is another's terrorist.
Blair says everyone knows what glorification is, but in a court, the definition would quickly disintegrate. He says it sends a signal to al-Qaeda and it is worth giving up this sliver of free speech to do so. Is he deluded? No terrorist or lunatic imam is going to take the slightest notice of this piffling but dangerous law.'
An excellent article which nails Labour's destructive weakness to let PR speak infect it's law making (frightening reading for anyone who has read 1984).
War of the words
The Government is making a habit of hiding its policy behind its language
Steven Poole
The Guardian
A long time ago in China, a philosopher was asked the first thing he would do if he became ruler. The philosopher thought for a while, and then said: well, if something had to be put first, I would rectify the names for things. His companion was baffled: what did this have to do with good government? The philosopher lamented his companion's foolishness, and explained. When the names for things are incorrect, speech does not sound reasonable; when speech does not sound reasonable, things are not done properly; when things are not done properly, the structure of society is harmed; when the structure of society is harmed, punishments do not fit the crimes; and when punishments do not fit the crimes, the people don't know what to do. "The thing about the gentleman," he warned, "is that he is anything but casual where speech is concerned." The philosopher's name was Confucius, and he was referring to a phenomenon that is all around us today. He was talking about what I call unspeak.
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What is unspeak? It represents an attempt to say something without saying it, without getting into an argument and so having to justify itself. At the same time, it tries to unspeak - in the sense of erasing, or silencing - any possible opposing point of view, by laying a claim right at the start to only one way of looking at a problem.
In 2003, an 87-year-old man from Merseyside was ordered by a court not to make "sarcastic remarks" to his neighbours. Then a 27-year-old Scottish woman was threatened with jail if she was seen by neighbours at her window "wearing only her undergarments". What did these prohibitions have in common? They were all examples of a new legal device that sought to repress "antisocial behaviour", a term with a rich cargo of unspeak.
Antisocial Behaviour Orders (Asbos) were introduced in the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act. If a person was found by a court to have engaged in "antisocial behaviour", he or she could be served with an Asbo prohibiting them for a period of at least two years from engaging in a wide range of activities, not limited to those already indulged in. Subsequently, if he or she were found to have broken the order, they would face a prison term of up to five years. In threatening recidivists with a big penal stick, the Asbo was in one way related to the "three strikes and you're out" legislation enacted in many states of the US since the late 1980s. California has among the harshest such laws: in 2003, the supreme court upheld a man's sentence of 50 years to life after his "third strike" offence, in which he shoplifted some video-tapes.
While Asbos threatened shorter sentences, they were in a sense more radical. The actions they prohibited were not crimes in the first place - otherwise they could have been dealt with in the normal fashion by the criminal law. Since people were going to be threatened with long periods of incarceration as a result of committing acts that were not crimes in themselves, it was presumably of the utmost importance to be quite definite about what "antisocial behaviour" really was. In fact, the government chose the opposite route.
Alun Michael, minister of state at the Home Office, was responsible for steering the legislation through scrutiny by the House of Commons. During questioning by MPs in 1998, Michael steadfastly refused to define "antisocial behaviour". He rejected proposed amendments that would "specify the behaviour, or ... define it as serious, [or] specify that a threshold should be defined". As eventually passed, the Crime and Disorder Act defined antisocial behaviour only in this way: as behaviour by an individual "that caused or was likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress to one or more persons not of the same household as himself". Moreover, the decision as to whether the subject had been "antisocial" in the first place, and so merited the subsequent imposition of an Asbo, depended only on the civil standard of proof (the "balance of probabilities"), rather than the criminal standard ("beyond a reasonable doubt").
"Antisocial" has two quite different meanings. The first is "opposed to sociality, averse to society or companionship". In that sense you might not want to go to a party. The second meaning is far wider: "opposed to the principles on which society is constituted", or "persons or actions devoid of or antagonistic to normal social instincts or practices". With Asbos, the meaning of "antisocial" clearly leans towards the second definition, either opposed to society as a whole or opposed to certain "normal" social practices. But a judgment of "antisocial behaviour" can arise from the perceived harassment, alarm, or distress of, in the language of the Crime and Disorder Act, "one or more persons" - ie, possibly only one person. What if I think that it is "antisocial" to talk loudly on a mobile phone in a cafe - is an Asbo the correct approach there? In the case of the young Scottish woman served with an Asbo for being seen in her underwear, for instance, one might reasonably suggest that her neighbours ought simply to stop peering in at her windows if they don't like what they see.
Alun Michael at one point sought to deflect such annoying questions posed by his fellow MPs, by denying that "antisocial behaviour" really meant anything at all. "I was asked whether the term 'antisocial behaviour' added anything to the bill," he told the committee. "Legally, it does not, but it is an essential label that sets out clearly and succinctly what the provision is about: preventing antisocial behaviour." To enshrine a legally meaningless PR catchphrase in national legislation might be considered a recipe for confusion and misunderstanding, rather than something that would "clearly and succinctly" inform the public. So it proved to be.
Let us look, then, at some examples. In some cases, Asbos had been used with success to tackle clearly aggressive and violent behaviour, such as intimidation of the elderly on council housing estates, or to keep in check ugly disputes between neighbours. In cases where it could be clearly determined that genuinely high levels of "harassment, alarm or distress" were being caused, the Asbo might be an effective tool.
In 2004, however, a 39-year-old man was convicted for having breached the terms of his Asbo. The order in question had "prohibited him from entering Birmingham city centre, using or engaging in any threatening, abusive, offensive, intimidating, insulting language or behaviour, or engaging in violence or damage against any person or property within the city centre". He had been seen on a city-centre closed-circuit television camera, where he "appeared to be asking for money and acting in [an] aggressive manner when money [was] refused"; he subsequently "spat in an officer's face when in [the] police station following arrest". The man was sentenced to 45 months in prison. Had it been reasonable to ban him from ever going into the centre of Birmingham? Was nearly four years in prison a reasonable punishment for begging, even "aggressive" begging?
The editor of Criminal Law Week thought not. The length of "imprisonment for conduct which per se was either not criminal at all or, to the extent that it was criminal, was non-imprisonable, merely serves to highlight the true nature of the antisocial behaviour legislation as a Vagrancy Act for the 21st century," he wrote. The Vagrancy Act of 1824 had provided for the imprisonment of "incorrigible rogues", for a period wholly out of proportion to the specific act that had led to their arrests. Similarly with Asbos. This had all been predictable, perhaps, from the deliberate vagueness of the legislation: Asbos positively invited "abuses" precisely because of the transparently unspeak way in which they had been defined. Facetious or overly onerous terms in Asbos contributed to the fact that, by summer 2005, 42% of all Asbos were being breached, a figure that cast considerable doubt on the extent of their deterrent power.
The government's enthusiasm for vacant "labels" was further underscored last month with the release of a 44-page document called the Respect Action Plan. The reliable bogeyman of "antisocial behaviour" returned here with a vengeance, as a symptom of the most pressing problem besieging society: a lack of respect. The prime minister's foreword said: "It is not in my gift, or that of anyone in central government, to guarantee good behaviour or to impose a set of common values about acceptable behaviour. But we will set out a framework of powers and approaches to promote respect positively ..."
How was it to be done? Why, by increasing the use of Asbos and other punitive instruments, "strengthening summary powers", and introducing a bizarrely named new species of person: the "antisocial behaviour champion". This was not meant to be someone who fights for the right to binge-drink and intimidate little old ladies, but a person who, according to the National Children's Bureau, would work to "promote better understanding of antisocial behaviour cases" - in other words, act as a PR agent for the government's policy. Throughout the Respect Action Plan, authoritarianism was recast as caring. Thus, a proposed increase in the use of Parenting Orders, according to which parents are threatened with heavy fines if their children misbehave, would "help" the subjects "become better parents".
And so the vision of "promot[ing] respect positively" was to be carried out with threats. You might want to say that this amounted to promoting respect negatively. There is an essential reciprocity inherent in a genuine idea of respect: after all, the word comes from the Latin for to look back: to look back at someone who is, in turn, looking at you. The Respect Action Plan paid lip-service to this notion in some of its sloganeering chapter headings ("Give Respect Get Respect"), but its policy message was quite different: Respect, or else. Does such a stance itself deserve respect? Conducted as it is in such terms, the government's "drive" could hardly avoid the question. Official habits of unspeak, indeed, can and should be thrown back in the perpetrators' faces.
In the wide and often fatuous prohibitions on behaviour imposed by Asbos, it indeed seemed that the British government and courts were extending their role into that of managing day-to-day morality, in an attempt to "guarantee good behaviour". Yet it is not clear that most people really do want the law to govern all aspects of their behaviour. All crime is antisocial, but not everything we might call antisocial should be a crime.
There is a host of excellent reasons why law should not be entirely coextensive with morality. During the Terror in revolutionary France, Robespierre equated justice with virtue, and incivisme - lack of civic virtue, or in other words, "antisocial behaviour" - became a crime. If all our actions were governed by fear of state retribution, the idea of moral or virtuous behaviour for its own sake would be degraded. More importantly, people in large democratic countries can, and very often do, have reasonable disagreements over moral questions.
Yet the germ of the idea that no part of the moral life should go ungoverned by the state is already present in the practice, now enshrined in British law, of punishing "antisocial behaviour". The American commentator Christopher Caldwell, observing the beginnings of a similar trend in the US, argued that all such initiatives were "attempts to promote sentiments of community when such sentiments do not arise spontaneously". Indeed, what better way to conjure up a sense of social cohesion than the historically tried-and-tested method of demonising those who are deemed not to fit in, those who are "antisocial"?
Let us suppose for the sake of argument that society is best served by rational debate conducted in honest language. In that case, the government's long campaign against "antisocial behaviour", cloaking prejudicial and intolerant policies in cunningly misleading language, has from its inception been a powerfully antisocial phenomenon.
Here's the BBC's report on the Legislative reform bill. This sounds boring I know but it could be very serious.
BBC NEWS
Here's a blog that catalogues Labour legislations that restrict all of our liberty. Maybe it's time for a written constitution to protect us all (from Sharia law among other things!).
reclaiming-liberty
I think the time has come to start writing some letters. I'm planning to start a separate lobbying thread at some point, but in the meantime here's a link where you can find your MP. (Some also have email addresses.)
I fear we missed the boat on the glorification of terrorism nonsense, but it's not too late to make your feelings known about the The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill. I suggest we all (or at least those of us who are worried about the bill) write to our MP along these lines:
"Dear X,
I would like to make you aware of my deep misgivings about the power to bypass Parliament contained in The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill. There is widespread concern that there are insufficent safeguards against the potential for abuse of those powers. Several Cambridge University professors have examined the bill and concluded that "if passed, the Government could rewrite almost any Act and, in some cases, enact new laws that at present only Parliament can make" and that the limits on this power are "few and weak."
I urge you to oppose the Bill as it stands and to preserve the power of parliament against an increasingly authoritarian executive.
Sincerely,
Blah Blah.
A smiley face at the end of the letter is, of course, purely optional.
Here's something fun. Go to the homepage of all the major parties.(http://www.conservatives.com/,http://www.libdems.org.uk/, http://www.labour.org.uk/home) Do a search for 'civil liberties'. (Search the Labour site last.) It's informative and amusing.
Yes. I found it illuminating...
No way! I searched for 'civil liberties' on the labour website - 'Sorry, your search was empty'!!!???!!! What is that about?
BTW, the Conservatives had 66 results and the libdems 271.
Here's an article I found from a Labour party member on this website for the public sector.
Taking Liberties
This tendency towards heavy handedness and legislation on the hoof is far from the sign of a confident government comfortable with its own philosophy. And the erosion of freedom of speech threatens one of the most fundamental freedoms of our society.
Hmmm...
Guantánamo actors questioned under terror act after film festival
Vikram Dodd
Tuesday February 21, 2006
The Guardian
Excellent post above from Dan.
Here's a follow up on the Legislative Reform Bill. PLEASE, PLEASE READ IT. THIS COULD BE IMPORTANT.
Who wants the Abolition of Parliament Bill
David Howarth
Hardly anyone has noticed, but British democracy is sleepwalking into a sinister world of ministerial power
LAST WEEK all eyes were on the House of Commons as it debated identity cards, smoking and terrorism. The media reported both what MPs said and how they voted. For one week at least, the Commons mattered.
All the more peculiar then that the previous Thursday, in an almost deserted chamber, the Government proposed an extraordinary Bill that will drastically reduce parliamentary discussion of future laws, a Bill some constitutional experts are already calling “the Abolition of Parliament Bill”.
*
A couple of journalists noticed, including Daniel Finkelstein of The Times, and a couple more pricked up their ears last week when I highlighted some biting academic criticism of the Bill on the letters page of this paper. But beyond those rarefied circles, that we are sleepwalking into a new and sinister world of ministerial power seems barely to have registered.
The boring title of the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill hides an astonishing proposal. It gives ministers power to alter any law passed by Parliament. The only limitations are that new crimes cannot be created if the penalty is greater than two years in prison and that it cannot increase taxation. But any other law can be changed, no matter how important. All ministers will have to do is propose an order, wait a few weeks and, voilà, the law is changed.
For ministers the advantages are obvious: no more tedious debates in which they have to answer awkward questions. Instead of a full day’s debate on the principle of the proposal, detailed line-by-line examination in committee, a second chance at specific amendment in the Commons and a final debate and vote, ministers will have to face at most a short debate in a committee and a one-and-a-half hour debate on the floor. Frequently the Government will face less than that. No amendments will be allowed. The legislative process will be reduced to a game of take-it-or-leave-it.
The Bill replaces an existing law that allows ministers to relieve regulatory burdens. Business was enthusiastic about that principle and the Government seems to have convinced the business lobby that the latest Bill is just a new, improved version. What makes the new law different, however, is not only that it allows the Government to create extra regulation, including new crimes, but also that it allows ministers to change the structure of government itself. There might be business people so attached to the notion of efficiency and so ignorant or scornful of the principles of democracy that they find such a proposition attractive. Ordinary citizens should find it alarming.
Any body created by statute, including local authorities, the courts and even companies, might find themselves reorganised or even abolished. Since the powers of the House of Lords are defined in Acts of Parliament, even they are subject to the Bill.
Looking back at last week’s business in the Commons, the Bill makes a mockery of the decisions MPs took. Carrying ID cards could be made compulsory, smoking in one’s own home could be outlawed and the definition of terrorism altered to make ordinary political protest punishable by life imprisonment. Nor will the Human Rights Act save us since the Bill makes no exception for it.
The Bill, bizarrely, even applies to itself, so that ministers could propose orders to remove the limitations about two-year sentences and taxation. It also includes a few desultory questions (along the lines of “am I satisfied that I am doing the right thing?”) that ministers have to ask themselves before proceeding, all drafted subjectively so that court challenges will fail, no matter how preposterous the minister’s answer. Even these questions can be removed using the Bill’s own procedure. Indeed, at its most extreme, in a manoeuvre akin to a legislative Indian rope trick, ministers could use it to transfer all legislative power permanently to themselves.
The Bill raises fundamental questions about the role of Parliament. Ministers, egged on, some suspect, by the Civil Service, treat Parliament as a voting machine. Its job, in their view, is merely to give legal cover to whatever ministers want to do. They treat debate and deliberation as mere chatter before the all-important vote. They see no great difference between full parliamentary procedure and a truncated procedure for statutory instruments because, for them, the result either way is the same, that ministers receive legal authority for their plans. Just as a perfect criminal statute for ministers appears to be one in which everything is illegal so that prosecutors have discretion to put anyone in front of a court, a perfect authorising statute is one that makes lawful any ministerial act or policy.
Some of us have a different view. We think that deliberation and debate matter, that they are part of what makes parliamentary democracy work and make the new laws we pass legitimate. Deliberation improves legislation but more importantly, it forces governments to give reasons for their proposals that go beyond their narrow self-interest. In private meetings of the governing party, or in the Cabinet, or above all in telephone calls between ministers and special advisers, purely partisan reasons can hold sway. But in public, especially where there is real debate, ministers have to offer reasons that might persuade others. If they cannot think of any such reasons, their embarrassment constrains them. As the political scientist Jon Elster says, even hypocrisy can have a civilising effect.
The Government claims that there is nothing to worry about. The powers in the Bill, it says, will not be used for “controversial” matters. But there is nothing in the Bill that restricts its use to “uncontroversial” issues. The minister is asking us to trust him, and, worse, to trust all his colleagues and all their successors. No one should be trusted with such power.
As James Madison gave warning in The Federalist Papers, we should remember when handing out political power that “enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm”. This Bill should make one doubt whether they are at the helm now.
David Howarth is Liberal Democrat MP for Cambridge and Reader in Law at Cambridge University
Guantánamo actors questioned under terror act after film festival
Presumably if they'd actually been dressed as suicide bombers and had been carrying placards calling for the ritual beheading of journalists etc the police would have ignored them.
For anyone that's interested, here's a link to a website campaigning for a cross party British Constitution.
Talk Politics
If you read the comments some of the contributors on the thread are also alarmed about the Leg and Reg Bill -
"Some of the current legislation that Blair in putting through and has put through is genuinely frightening - both the Civil Contingencies Act and Leg and Reg are enabling bills that make Hitler's enabling act look tame in terms of the scope of powers reserved to the Executive."
Essential reading. A clear picture of how much closer to a police state we have moved.
We are giving the authorities an open invitation to abuse their power
My brush with the law at Heathrow reveals our intimidating relationship with the modern state
Jenni Russell
Saturday February 25, 2006
The Guardian
Two key quotes:
Everyone noticed the case of Walter Wolfgang, but 425 other people were also stopped under the terrorism act. This, like all such acts, was intended to be used in cases of serious threat. Instead, the act was used against people making what most of us would regard as mild and legitimate political protests. An 80-year-old peace protester was searched and asked to accept a caution because he was wearing a T-shirt accusing Bush and Blair of war crimes. A man organising a petition against ID cards was searched and filmed by five police officers, and told that the record of this encounter would be permanently kept. People were being targeted not for terrorism, but for political dissent.
[...]
I fear that many of us are failing to see the danger we are now in, precisely because we have grown up in a largely benign state. We still trust in the good sense and reasonableness of its agents, and the rest of officialdom. We don't understand that that has been sustained only by the existence of our legal rights, and by a respect for our freedom of action. We don't see the lesson of every society: that if you do not place constraints on official power, its instinct is to grow. Our tolerant world is disappearing, and it is only when many more of us start running up against that reality that we will realise what we have lost.
Four years ago, just after 9/11, an American judge wrote a warning that is worth repeating. Andrew Napolitano said: "In a democracy, personal liberties are rarely diminished overnight. Rather, they are lost gradually, by acts of well-meaning people, with good intentions, amid public approval. But the subtle loss of freedom is never recognised until the crisis is over and we look back in horror. And then it is too late."
I certainly recognise in myself a basic trust in the 'good sense and reasonableness... of officialdom' and fear that I too have believed in the good intentions of'well-meaning people'. Is it too late? Have we sleep-walked our way to an irreversible curtailment of our freedom to protest, to offend, to publish, to speak? I hope not. The world outside my window still looks much the same, so it's hard to see the changes. It's like watching a glacier move. Imperceptible perhaps. And yet, it does move.
btw Andy, can you post a direct link to the Unity campaign you mentioned? I had a quick look at the blog but didn't find it (I may well have just missed it).
And while we're in campaigning mode, here's a link to The Freedom Association. I always thought of them as a bit of a wacky bunch (founded by the McWhirter twins) but the site is worth a look (though I can't vouch for all its contents). And in these troubled times we may have to take our civil liberties campaigners where we find them.
One for the diary:
Dispatches: Stealing Freedom
Channel 4
Monday 27 February 8pm
Political commentator Peter Hitchens takes a look at how the recent avalanche of security legislation has affected the civil liberties of ordinary people in Britain. The result, Hitchens explains, is that we are sleepwalking into a Big Brother state. Travelling across Britain, Hitchens meets ordinary people who have suffered needlessly because of new legislation and increased police powers. The programme also contains interviews with the Lord Chancellor Charles Falconer, Lord Carlisle, an independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, and Shami Chakrabarti, Director of Liberty.
http://www.channel4.com/news/microsites/S/stealing_freedom/index.html
I'm sure Tony has been meaning to comment on this thread but from what I read he's still getting to grip with using the internet. Anyway, here's the Prime Minister's response to the recent accusations of Authoritarianism:
I don't destroy liberties, I protect them.
Tony Blair
Sunday February 26. 2006
The Observer
A couple of quotes from the Tony Blair article above with some acompanying points:
“But first, the true record. This government has introduced the Human Rights Act, so that, for the first time, a citizen can challenge the power of the state solely on the basis of an infringement of human rights, and the Freedom of Information Act, the most open thing any British government has done since the Reform Acts of the 1830s.”
It is worth pointing out that both of these acts are from the Labour’s first term in Government and it could be argued that it is disingenuous of Blair to point to this as the Government seem to have deeply ambivalent about passing both Acts ever since the build up to the Iraq war. Moreover it is in these two acts that the Government could be seen to have been architects of some of their own troubles with the courts, the Human Rights act especially has proved to be a real thorn in their side constantly frustrating their attempts to deport troublesome Islamic Clerics. Much of the subsequent terrorist legislation has in part been an attempt to undermine the commitments made in the Human Rights Act and Freedom of information act. If all the current legislation did was loosen the restrictions of the Human Rights Act it might not be understandable (1997 was a more innocent and naïve time) the problem for many of his critics is that they feel the new legislations vandalises perfectly good laws that provided protection to ordinary citizens.
“On ID cards, there is a host of arguments, irrespective of security, why their time has come. Most people already have a range of different cards, for workplace, bank or leisure.”
Some critics of the Government have argued that the existence of Bank credit cards and Gym club membership cards doesn’t necessarily justify the enormous expense and intrusion of a State Controlled ID card.
“If I were the Tories, the one area where I would stick with a traditional line is law and order. That they find themselves in a strange place explains why the Tories may ape the Lib Dems on this issue in parliament but talk tough to the electorate.
Their attitude to liberty does indicate, though, a refusal to understand the modern world. If the nature of the threat changes, so should our policies. That is not destroying our liberties, but protecting them.”
Blair has been accused of playing party politics with national security before and it might appear that this is exactly what he is doing here. I think the Tories would argue that it is arrogant of the Prime Minister to characterise any position apart from his own as being soft on terror. Many of the Tories opposed the Human Rights Act at the time fearing it would be too restrictive. The Tories accuse Blair of posturing over this issue when he could have had cross party consensus and they criticise the Government for ‘Ineffectual Authoritarianism’: not enforcing old laws when they have good reason (Danish Cartoon protests) and abusing the new legislation (The arrest under prevention of Terrorism of the pensioner at the Labour party conference). For example, on the controversial Glorification of Terrorism Bill William Hague accused Blair of "posturing" saying the Tories wanted a "watertight law designed to catch the guilty rather than a press release law designed to catch the headlines". Their point isn’t that there is no place for any new laws to tackle this threat, more that they are dangerously ill defined and vague.
Here is William Rees-Mogg's comment in today's Times on the Prime Minister's article in The Observer:
"The Prime Minister knows what the issue is. He is against due process as such. He has written a most extraordinary attack on the whole concept in yesterday’s Observer. The article is so incautious that he must have written it himself.
“In theory,” Tony Blair writes, “traditional court processes and attitudes to civil liberties could work. But the modern world is different from the world for which these court processes were designed.” This view that due process is obsolete explains the Prime Minister’s conduct; it explains the connection between extradition without safeguards, detention without trial, Asbos without criminal offences, subjective and discretionary judgments, police powers to arrest, and increasing ministerial powers. They are all characteristic of Blair legislation; they all avoid due process of law.
I wish I could think of an appropriately “offensive and insensitive” epithet to describe Tony Blair. Perhaps “antinomian” would do."
an·ti·no·mi·an
(n.)
An adherent of antinomianism.
(adj.)
1. Of or relating to the doctrine of antinomianism.
2. Opposed to or denying the fixed meaning or universal applicability of moral law: “By raising segregation and racial persecution to the ethical level of law, it puts into practice the antinomian rules of Orwell's world. Evil becomes good, inhumanity is interpreted as charity, egoism as compassion” (Elie Wiesel).
an·ti·no·mi·an·ism
(n.)
1. Theology. The doctrine or belief that the Gospel frees Christians from required obedience to any law, whether scriptural, civil, or moral, and that salvation is attained solely through faith and the gift of divine grace.
2. The belief that moral laws are relative in meaning and application as opposed to fixed or universal.
I had to look it up. Good word though.
Henry Porter picks up on the Legislative Reform Bill in this response to the Prime Minister's claims to be defending our liberty:
How we move ever closer to becoming a totalitariam state
Henry Porter
The Observer
"The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill is hardly an aerodynamic title; it doesn't fly from the lips. People have difficulty remembering the order of the words and what exactly will be the effect of this apparently dull piece of lawmaking.
But in the dusty cradle of Committee A, a monster has been stirring and will, in due course, take flight to join the other measures in the government's attack on parliamentary democracy and the rights of the people. The 'reform' in the title allows ministers to make laws without the scrutiny of parliament and, in some cases, to delegate that power to unelected officials. In every word, dot and comma, it bears the imprint of New Labour's authoritarian paternity.
Like all Labour's anti-libertarian bills, it appears in relatively innocuous guise. The bill was presented last year as a way of improving a previous Labour act and is purportedly designed to remove some of the burden of regulation that weighs on British business and costs billions of pounds every year. Labour says it will enable ministers to cut regulation without needing to refer to parliament and so simplify and speed things up.
The reality is that the beneficiaries of this bill will not be industry and business, but ministers and the executive, who will enjoy a huge increase in their unscrutinised power. As with the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, which was presented as modernising local and national emergency measures but which went much further to give ministers arbitrary powers, this bill takes another chunk out of our centuries- old democracy.
The really frightening thing about last week's proceedings is that there were just two journalists watching as the minister piloting the legislation, Jim Murphy, refused to debate constitutional implications. Instead, he intoned replies drafted in advance by himself and, presumably, his civil servants. Disgracefully, he dismissed as 'debating points' considered objections from Tories Christopher Chope and Oliver Heald and Liberal Democrats David Heath and David Howarth. All raised the Kafkaesque possibility that this bill was so demonically drafted that an unscrupulous government could use it to modify the bill itself and so extend its powers even further.
Watching, I reflected that this was truly how democracy is extinguished. Not with guns and bombs, but from the inside by officials and politicians who deceive with guile and who no longer pretend to countenance the higher interests of the constitution.
The 'debating points' were rather more than that. They concern the powers that may be granted to ministers that could further damage the concept of habeas corpus, alter the law on Britain's relationship with the Commonwealth, on the relationship with the EU, on extradition, the appropriation of property and the criminal law. In theory, even the monarchy could be affected.
This is to say little about common law, the centuries of precedents and rulings which contain so many of the historic rights of British culture. 'Oh no,' said the minister, as if talking to a child, 'ministers will give assurances; they will confine themselves to the regulations that concern business.'
If that is the case, why does the bill not say so? Why is it drafted so loosely? Why is Jim Murphy doing so much to protect its versatility? Why won't he put the safeguards in the bill from the start? There can be only one answer: ministers want to bypass parliament and transfer authority to themselves and their officials under the cover of helping business.
Mr Murphy has let it be known that the government might concede powers for select committees to veto use of the fast-track process for issues they consider controversial. But it is worth remembering that membership of select committees is controlled by the whips and that the chairmen are generally biddable. We should also wonder why Mr Murphy has not already drafted this veto, if he genuinely wants to protect and reassure parliament.
The essential point, however, is that the individual decisions taken by ministers as a result of this new law will not be scrutinised in the chamber of the House of Commons.
Sometimes, I wonder if those of us worried about the attacks on British democracy by Tony Blair's government are getting things out of proportion or misunderstanding the Prime Minister's mission, as he described it in last week's Observer
I certainly understand that the capillaries of a society run from bottom to top, bearing all the bad news, intractable problems, mood swings and crises; that it is all ceaselessly pumped upwards in the direction of the Prime Minister; and that the view afforded in Downing Street must sometimes be truly extraordinary, a seething, organic, Hogarthian panorama of delinquency and unreason.
A Prime Minister must try to reach beyond the day-to-day business of government, frantic though it is, and make sense of what he sees below, seek the connecting threads, order up the policies and implement them so that improvement becomes possible. Few will disagree that this is the chief impulse of Tony Blair's premiership. As he told us long ago, he is a moderniser. Modernising is still the closest thing he has to a political ideology and it was significant how many times the words modern and modernity appeared in last week's article. At one point, he declared: 'For me, this is not an issue of liberty but of modernity', as if liberty and modernity were somehow at odds.
Because he is by his own account well-intentioned, he believes that nothing should get in the way of this modernising purpose, the exercise of his benevolent reason on the turbulent society below. Like Mrs Thatcher, he has become almost mystically responsible for the state of the nation. And like Mrs Thatcher, he finds that after a long period in Number 10, he is still surrounded by sluggishness and resistance. Public services are slow to reform; the judiciary obstructs ministerial action with footling concerns about individual rights; and parliament is agonisingly slow to produce the fast-acting laws he craves.
You can see why, as time runs out, he has the need to cut through it all to achieve the things that he so dearly believes are right for our society. That is the way a moderniser works, because it is the only measure of success.
Yet this addiction to the idea of modernity is also a kind of arrogance about the times we live in, a sense that no Prime Minister has ever faced the problems coming across his desk. It indicates a common condition in modernisers and modernists of all hues and that is an almost complete lack of a grounding in history. If Blair was more interested in British history, he would understand that the present, while certainly unique, is not uniquely awful.
But more important, he would see the great damage his laws are doing to the institutions we have inherited - to the constitution, to the tradition of parliamentary sovereignty, to the independence of the judiciary, to individual rights and to the delicate relationship between the individual and the state. All of them are products of British history. They are not perfect, but they make up a fairly large part of the body politic. This is who we are.
This rush of laws presented to parliament in disguise, with their hidden sleeper clauses, are a disaster for our democracy. They are changing our country rapidly and profoundly. What I saw in Committee A was the triumph of Tony Blair's modernity over liberty."
Phillip Johnson in the Telegraph comments on the Legislative Reform Bill:
"The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill completed its committee stages in the Commons last Thursday and, despite a spirited counter-offensive by Opposition MPs, remains largely intact as one of the most pernicious measures to have come before a British parliament.
The Bill would empower any minister by order to make provisions amending, repealing or replacing any legislation, primary or secondary, for any purpose, and to reform the common law to implement Law Commission recommendations.
This does not mean by a stroke of the pen; there would still need to be a debate or a vote in the Commons or the Lords, although only if MPs or peers object within a specified time frame.
But if a government has a big enough majority, such procedural niceties are largely irrelevant. Furthermore, there would be no requirement for full scrutiny on the floor of either House, but only for a somewhat perfunctory debate in a committee.
Why is such a measure needed? The Government says a "fast-track" method of repealing laws is essential for its war on red tape. Armed with such a weapon, it can scythe through the forests of regulations, many of them planted by the very same government, and relieve the £50 billion annual burden on hundreds of thousands of hard-pressed small businesses.
It is all part of Gordon Brown's efforts to reduce form-filling and wasteful bureaucracy, a laudable aim in itself but a bit like handing out weapons to everyone in the land and then declaring martial law on the grounds that the streets have become too dangerous. More to the point, the Bill does not confine itself to deregulation; it could be used for anything, although ministers have promised not to do anything "controversial"."
Here's the article in full:
A Doomsday Machine for Parliament
Melanie Phillips comments on the Legislative Reform Bill:
"According to the Government, it is nothing more than an attempt to remove the burden upon business of official red tape by making it quicker and easier to tackle unnecessary, out-dated or over-complicated regulation.
But as critics have pointed out, the only red tape it will remove is the entirely necessary regulation of Parliamentary scrutiny. For the bill is drafted so widely that it gives the Government the draconian power to amend legislation or enact new laws by ministerial order without any proper Parliamentary debate at all.
The implications of this cannot be overestimated. It means that ministers could tear up or alter legislation or pass new laws at whim. They could arbitrarily change the common law of the country. Tony Blair could postpone the general election and stay on in Downing Street indefinitely.
The bill doesn’t mean that any of these things would happen, but it gives ministers the power to make them happen if they wanted to. The safeguard of Parliament and the courts – the essence of our Parliamentary democracy -- would be almost wholly overriden.
The bill is, in short, arguably the biggest single threat to our freedom since Oliver Cromwell dismissed the Rump Parliament in 1653 and assumed the powers of a quasi-dictator as Lord Protector of England."
Here's the article in full:
The self-neutering Parliament
"Guy Fawkes - where are you now that we need you?"
Lords back down on glorification
I think the Lords were in a tricky situation. The government were commited to using the parliament act to override any opposition from the Lords. The most they could have done was to delay the law they could never hope to defeat it.
A quick clarification: the Guy Fawkes comment was not specific to the Lords. It was intended as a parody of 'glorification' which is now illegal. The post was designed to highlight the passing of the law, not to point the finger at the Lords in particular.
Henry Porter argues that we need a British Constitution more than ever:
Only a constitution can save us from this abuse of power
Henry Porter
The Observer
'Take the Civil Contingencies Act 2004. I had not read it fully until a week ago, but I was shocked to find that during an emergency - which can be declared by Ministers orally and without parliament being consulted - the government can make special legislation in a seven-day period which allows the forced evacuation of people, the seizing of property without compensation, the banning of any assembly (which conceivably might include parliament itself) the conferring of jurisdiction on any new court or tribunal that it wishes. And guess what: the Minister only has to believe that an emergency is about to occur to grant himself or herself these powers. If it turns out they are wrong, mad or have acted in bad faith there is no sanction.
Meanwhile, the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, presented under the guise of cutting red tape for business, grants ministers powers to alter legislation without the scrutiny of parliament in almost every area of government. Yet you could hear a pin drop in parliament as these measures were debated.
What has happened to the morale and self belief of MPs? Have they been swamped by the many extreme left-wingers who now parade in the chamber in New Labour clothing? Are they simply hypnotised by the power of Blair and his advisers?'
'We, the people, all need a constitution to protect human rights and fundamental freedoms, to set the legal limits upon the legislative and the executive and to guarantee an independent judiciary which has the duty and the power to protect the constitution. It is an irony - or something more sinister - that the people who will never give us a constitution are the modernisers of New Labour.'
The Governmment appears to be backing down on the Leg Reg bill ahead of expected resistance from the Lords. Jim Murphy the minister piloting the legislation has agreed to make clarifications 'so that it can no longer be misconstrued as an attempt by government to take wider constitutional power'.
The embarrasement of the lords opposing the Bill seems to have played a big part in the Government decision. If that is the case it is a strong arguement against the Government's plans to further diminish the Lord's powers.
Henry Porter covers the latest on the Leg Reg and Labour's creeping Authoritarianism here.
And Simon Heffer reports on the government's proposed amendments to the Lords here.
Anyone who has visited Oxford Circus over the years may have witnessed a strange man preaching christianity and telling passers by to 'Be a Winner, Not a Sinner'. He's now been given an Asbo and faces five years in prison if he uses his megaphone during the next three years. From what I could tell he was a classic example of the British eccentric - mildly annoying and obviously a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic but harmless. Shame.
Thing is, it wasn't the Labour Government who brought the action against winner-not-sinner, it was Westminster Council (who may also be Labour, dunno): ASBO slapped on Oxford Street preacher
I used to think he was a real prick till I read this interview with him a while back, since then I regarded him as the classic eccentric, nuts but colourful. Here's a pic of the good old days.
Some other comments on his demise here.
Westminster Council is Conservative, but the ASBO is Labour legislation. That being said, those comments have put me off him slightly and reminded me that if he didn't catch you in a tolerant mood he could be bloody annoying.
According to a report in the Times Whitehall officials believe that ID cards are doomed . This simply confirms what many of its critics have been saying for some time. Ian Angell, London School of Economics Professor in information, is one of them.
'Ian Angell is a curious kind of dissident. The London School of Economics professor in information systems has emerged as one of the most trenchant critics of the UK's troubled ID card project, but not on any of the usual grounds.
Angell, speaking at the University of Wollongong and in Sydney this week, professes not to care whether the project goes ahead or not. In fact, on balance, he'd rather like it to. He'd like to "study the Titanic from the drawing board to the iceberg".
Angell and his team at the LSE are predicting disaster for the project, saying costs will be far higher than so far estimated and the risk of technical failure is high.
[...]
"The ID card project has fiasco written all over it," Angell says. "And I say that not as a privacy advocate, but as a student of information systems."
[...]
His argument against the cards has always been that they won’t work, that complexity will defeat the project and even if it were to get up it will rapidly become corrupted.
[...]
Angell, who claims to be the only Tory professor at the LSE, says a single ID card will become a "one-stop shop" for identity fraud. It will be a criminal's dream come true.
Here is the full report.
This Angell guys rocks, that's exactly what I've been saying all along.
I'm not yet definitively persuaded either way of the theoretical (de)merits of ID cards (on balance am currently against), but it is obvious to me, given the UK government's record on large IT projects, that the implementation will be an expensive disaster. So what's the point of even discussing the principles?
More on the likelihood of ID cards screwing up (this time from the Adam Smith Institute):
Identity Crisis
The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee thinks that the UK government is being too vague about its ID card plans. On Friday it published a report saying that the lack of information released by the government made it "difficult to ascertain the true scope of the scheme and to fully understand how technology will be used within the scheme". However, Chairman Phil Willis pointed out that the private sector firms involved in the programme are speaking openly about their concerns with it – something that ‘should set alarm bells ringing’. Meanwhile the Freedom of Information Commissioner has demanded that the government should publish an internal efficiency study of the scheme.
Prime Minister Tony Blair still maintains that ID cards will be a "major plank" of Labour's next election manifesto, though of course he is unlikely to be around right then. The fact is that government are useless at commissioning bit IT projects – I calculated recently that the budget spent on IT in the National Health Service was enough to give every doctor, nurse, porter and administrator 20,000 PCs each. And naturally enough, that implementation programme is years behind schedule.
The ID card scheme is, of course, even bigger and therefore even more likely to be a major foul-up. The programme is not really about cards at all – that would be simple. Rather, it is about creating a vast national database with all the essential information on everybody in the UK – where they live, what they do, what they look like, you name it. No doubt more and more information will be added in over the years in a sort of stealth accumulation of all our information. Just making that lot run – never mind making it secure from civil-servants taking backhanders or terrorists and fraudsters seeking to steal other people’s identity – is, I am sure, too big a project for any government to commission well. And given the evasion that the House of Commons has identified, maybe too bit for a government to do at all.
This is a recipe for disaster:
Ministers are preparing to overturn a fundamental principle of data protection in government, the Guardian has learned. They will announce next month that public bodies can assume they are free to share citizens' personal data with other arms of the state, so long as it is in the public interest.
The policy was agreed upon by a cabinet committee set up by the prime minister, and reverses the current default position - which requires public bodies to find a legal justification each time they want to share data about individuals.
Excellent article in the Telegraph on New Labour's obsession with PR and media control (thanks JP).
3,259 PR men with nothing to say
Julia Langdon
Telegraph
difficult job, trying to control the media. Any study of competent bureaucracies will show it is always going to require a very large number of drones labouring in the ministry basements in order to try to achieve that particular end. It is therefore no surprise to learn that the "enormous team of experts" now employed in the Government's PR business has swollen from a few hundred in 1997 to the ludicrous figure of 3,259 today.
I take Wembley's point, but it's nonsense to suggest (as I think he does)that PR management under Labour has been an unexpectional continuation of the policies of previous Governments - I doubt other departments of Government have grown from a couple of hundred to 3,259.
It's also false to point to the proliferation of media outlets as the cause of this expansion. Wembley is working on the assumption that for every new channel (BBC News 24, Sky News etc) that pops up you need more PR staff - it doesn't work that way. If anything the new media outlets aid PR by spreading information.
Regarding Campbell and Ingham. They may have similarities, but I think Campbell had vastly more control, power and influence and I doubt you could find a credible editor or journalist who would disagree.
Here's Rod Liddle's humourous take on the 3,200-or-so PR men. Less paraniod than the Telegraph and lots of great lines.
My main reason for on this occasion choosing to believe Conservative Central Office is, however, wholly anecdotal. The inbox on my e-mail account is clogged with fatuous and unenlightening missives from every government department and regional party office, telling me that, for example, the work and pensions secretary is about to reannounce something he reannounced back in February, or that party membership in the Darlington area has increased by 9% for the last quartile.
All of these unbidden correspondences open with the words “Hi Rod — just thought you’d like to know!” and continue in the horribly over-familiar and slightly menacing tone you might expect from someone you have recently slept with but have subsequently, shamefacedly, avoided.
[...]
During the World Cup I even got unbidden correspondence from Alastair Campbell, who I thought had given up being a paid dissembler of untruths. Perhaps he was just doing it for fun, in his spare time.
Anyway, these contained observations on the progress of the England team and I didn’t read any of them, fearing that Alastair would be no more reliable on the question of Peter Crouch’s effectiveness than he was about those weapons of mass destruction. I could imagine all too well what he might write: “Great news! This afternoon England won the World Cup by beating Brazil 6-0 in a festival of attacking football and impeccable sportsmanship.”
My opinion of Blair has recently been surprisingly positive. Then he goes and says something stupid like the State should "target problem children in the womb".
...
"If we are not prepared to predict and intervene far more early then there are children that are going to grow up in families that we know perfectly well are completely dysfunctional, and the kids a few years down the line are going to be a menace to society and actually a threat to themselves," he told BBC News. There could be sanctions for parents who refused to take advice, he added.
...
Tony Blair has said it is possible to identify problem children who could grow up to be a potential "menace to society" even before they are born.
...
Er right. To achieve that would involve a massive (quite probably unaffordable) increase in resources and an extremely authoritarian government with no respect or consideration of privacy.
Blair is right to point out that there are real problems here that need addressing but unrealistic La-La land intitiatives aren't the answer. The solutions might lie in reforming Welfare but none of our parties have the balls to confront that particular issue (remember what happened to Frank 'Think the unthinkable' Fields).
Your shifting the arguement. The point wasn't about whether the 80's press was biased against Labour and Kinnock, but whether Ingham had more influence and control over the media than Campbell. The Sun was biased against Kinnock but it had little to do with Ingham. The Tory Government didn't need to control the media as their interests and the Murdoch press's interests were in tune with each other during the 80s.
To address your principal point - that the Tories will use them too. Probably. Cameron is an ex PR man after all.
Remember back in '05, how we slumbered through the abolition of 'double jeopardy' (for serious offences)?
Well, today marks the first conviction of somebody previously acquitted for the same offence.
Murder conviction is legal first
Reports (and indeed his plea) suggest he was indeed guilty.
So why do I feel so queasy?
This story makes me very uneasy:
A MAN has been banned from his home town for ten years after terrorising its residents for the past three decades.
Mark Bowkett, 40, described by police as the “Scourge of Lydney”, was expelled from the town and the surrounding areas as part of an antisocial behaviour order made at Gloucestershire Magistrates’ Court. It has left him homeless and separated him from his wife and seven children.
Now he's obviously not a good man (the article states that his behaviour has brought him an average of two criminal convictions a year since 1977). However I am decidely uncomfortable with exiling him from his family. A fact that the District Judge acknowledges in his closing statement 'This is an extremely important order and I am conscious that this will make the defendant homeless, but not his family'.
The reintroduction of the concept of exile into English Law - is that something to be concerned about?
If a company made a mistake that resulted in a man losing his business and home the law would rightly ensure that that company was held legally accountable for any damages.
Why then when the Inland Revenue makes and admits to a mistake that results in a business and individual going bankrupt is their no liability?
Neil Martin faces bankruptcy and losing his home because of an error by the taxman. He has been told the law can do nothing. The taxman is not liable for his mistakes even when he seriously disadvantages customers, a judge ruled yesterday.
[...]
The judge ruled that the tax office has no "duty of care" to the individuals it advises, meaning that no individual can prosecute it for incompetence.
Full story here.
This one is a real shocker (thanks to JP for finding the story):
They said the teacher had ''dragged" the two-year-old girl across the classroom before ''roughly" placing her in a chair and tapping her twice on the forehead with her finger. One official said the child's "feet virtually didn't touch the floor", something Mrs Rack denied. But the circumstances were important. The toddler had just smashed a baby on the head with a toy brick and was having a tantrum. Mrs Rack, with almost 40 years' experience behind her, dealt with the matter firmly and professionally. Not even the girl's mother complained and continued, indeed, to send her children to the nursery, so confident was she in their safety.
Even though this was an everyday occurrence to which normal people would not have given a second thought, it may well be the case that one, or both, of the inspectors felt the treatment was a bit rough. They were entitled to have said so at the time, even though Mrs Rack had far more experience than they in dealing with such circumstances. One of the inspectors cuddled the girl in what can only have been a gratuitously deliberate attempt to undermine the teacher's position.
In a sane world, that is where the matter would have rested. But sanity went out the window long ago, along with common sense, judgment and decency. A month later, Mrs Rack was contacted by Ofsted, the inspectors who have blighted the lives of nursery owners up and down the land with their nitpicking requirements and pointless form-filling. They told her that a complaint had been made, not by the girl's mother, but by the inspectors.
Enter the next link in the chain, the police. Mrs Rack was arrested, her biometrics taken to be stored on the national criminal DNA database, and questioned about the alleged "assault". You might have thought that, at this stage, a senior police officer might have thought this had gone far enough and apologised to Mrs Rack for wasting her time. But, probably egged on by social services, they put up prima facie evidence of a crime to the local branch of the Crown Prosecution Service.
I think Wembley makes a fair point about the polemicising of the Telegraph article. But I would add that as an opinion piece polemicising is in some ways it's function. It's not there to be unpartisan. Gary Yonge, Toynbee or Monbiot are all polemicising when they write for the Guardian (and their arguements are chock full of unsubstantiated assertions.) But I suspect you aren't as annoyed by the Guardian because you have more sympathy with their arguement.
You've made a lot of very good points on this article though. The fact that you instinctively disagree with the Telegraph probably makes you far more questioning of it's pieces than a sympathetic reader.
Wembley makes an interesting point here:
The underlying assumption that government (local AND central) play such an ideological influential role in dictating general policing and prosecution policy on none-law-and-order [sic] issues is frankly just laughable.
Wembley denies that direct government intervention caused the ludicrous over-reaction in the above nursery case, and another relevant recent case nobody believes it was government interference that led to six detectives piling in to the Cherie Blair slap story, where the crime was 'motioning to slap a 17-year-old'.
But I would like to draw a distinction between causation and correlation. It is not the throwing back of my duvet in the morning that causes the air temperature in London to rise (though both are correlated), but there is a 3rd element (the sun rising) that causes both. Similarly Andy sees direct causation in the correlation of Labour's authoritarianism and the corruption of values in other institutions (such as the Crown Prosecution Service).
But perhaps we should focus more on the mutual cause of both the authoritarianism and the corruption, ie
an underlying political philosophy, often known as political correctness, that is ripping at the heart of liberalism. Though there is clearly a feedback loop in both directions, the state of our Government is as much an effect of this political philosophy as its cause. We sometimes credit our politicians with too much influence.
Finally, while Wembley may know a whole bunch of uncorruptible law enforcement officers, I know a fireman whose equally important institution is being ripped to shreds by the dreaded "Equalities", and I thus don't find it surprising at all that the moral compass of the legal establishment should be in need of recalibration. After all, the fireman's lift has been abandoned because it was stopping the recruitment of the necessary quota of insufficiently strong female firepersons. Is that any more or less mad than arresting a nursery teacher for doing her job?
On the Inland Revenue story, I wonder if anyone has dug up the judge's justification for this?:
However, he ruled that the tax office is immune to prosecution by individuals and businesses, unlike other public services such as hospitals and police forces.
Seems an extraordinary and arbitrary exemption to me.
The fireman friend told me that a standard part of fireman's training - the lift - was dropped when a female firefighter couldn't manage it in training (indeed she dropped and injured a colleague). Previously that would have been an automatic fail. Had a man done it, it would have been an automatic fail. Within the fire service, I am told, the change was perceived as being blatantly for political quota-reaching. But perhaps you know better. However I don't think you'll be making the same argument the day an inadequately physically-equipped firefighter tries and fails to lift *you* out of a burning building.
Re: Cherie. Personally I'd rather live in a world where a complaint of an adult assaulting a minor was investigated, even if it was cherie, even if it was rubbish. Perhaps the police did have to respond to a complaint, though I hardly think six detectives proportionate. But I am 100% certain that the police do not respond to *every* complaint they receive - a certain amount of vetting must take place, and that vetting was prima facie deficient here.
But even if not, we have merely shifted the blame of hysterical overreaction to those who did make the complaint and the institutions they represent, in this case the CPSU. They, along with the council nursery advisers in the nursery story should now be prosecuted for wasting police time. Do you think if I made such a complaint that six detectives would come running?
Agree with a lot of that. Have been musing for the last couple of hours on who I blame for the mass panics about how we treat children, and my broad answer is "our appalling tabloid media", which is undoubtedly spread across the political spectrum.
I agree with many of the points made by JP and Wembley. Just a couple of things Wembley wrote that I wanted to follow up on.
What I think is nonesense, though, is to ascribe the 'blame' to the left wing, or to this government. For every Dave Spart, there is a Richard Littlejohn AND a Peter Hitchens AND a Melanie Phillips.
Wembley is right that the Government often gets the blame for all number of things which they aren't directly responsible for.
It reminds me of the way the Left would hold the 80's Tory Government responsible for all kinds of individual greed. I think what the Left wing press were attacking the Tories for then was promoting a culture of greed and in a similar way I think the Telegraph, Mail, Times etc are now attacking Labour for promoting a culture of political correctness.
..so Melanie Phillips might be right about Islam, but she's wrong about so much else that it's dangerous to support her on anything...
But I would add that it would also be dangerous to disregard her arguement simply because you disagreed with her on other issues.
Dangerous? Not really, I think you just have to be clear-headed enough to justify each argument on its own merits, as I'm sure all impdecers are. I'm not a great fan of the Pope, but I thought his recent comments on Islam had merit. Similarly I don't dislike dogs, Autobahns or vegetarianism because of Hitler's passion for them.
Ahem... circa 1985, what left wing press would that be, then?
Well, the Guardian mainly. But what I was trying to point out was that the Left also attacks Tory Governments for stuff that they aren't directly responsible for (i.e that it's not just a tendency of the right.) In both cases what is being attacked is the values and culture that the Governments are percieved to be promoting. Often they are unreasonable criticisms sometimes they're not.
Point taken about Phillips, but it's a dangerous thing... like aligning oneself to a BNP policy on controlled immigration. Tehre might be something in some of it, but it's dangerous to subscribe in that particular context.
I don't know about this. It reads as if you are drawing a parallel between Phillips and the BNP which I don't think is fair.
Here's my 10 cents: (my 2 cents is free)
1) PC Gone Mad. I take (and have taken) Wemb's point about it being a term more used to criticise a policy than promote one. I'm sure there are examples but I rarely encounter letters/articles in which the author describes something as a 'fantastic example of political correctness'. I would suggest substituting the less loaded term 'relativism' (perhaps with a 'moral' in front of it.) Then we can all sit down and figure out if we're relativists and if not, why not. (My own position is complicated and I won't bore you with it now. I'm not one, but I recognise that it's a choice, much like being an atheist rather than an agnostic.) I am aware that I may be beckoning you all towards something of a blind alley.
2) Police investigations. They didn't bother coming round when someone tried to break into my house. So there. (They did however, make some effort to find the gentlemen who stole my phone. And somewhere in between the two, they encouraged my wife to visit the police station to report a 'hate crime' though they stopped short of coming round.)
3) You agree or disagree with the argument not the person be it the BNP or Melanie Phillips. If you find their other views repugnant then you simply don't vote BNP or read Melanie Phillips. I think it's more dangerous to shut your ears(?!) to any overlap between people you despise and opinions that might not be unreasonable. I think the BNP's electoral gains have largely been a result of mainstream parties telling local people that they were racist everytime they raised concerns that immigration would lead to increased competition for scarce resources. I spent too long not hearing certain arguments simply because I disliked the people putting said arguments forward. (The Euro is a classic example - all the people in public office that I disliked were against it so I assumed I was for it. A little research of my own led me to the conclusion that I was also against it, regardless of what I thought of William Hague's '8 days to save the pound.')
4) I must confess that the Hitler thing has always slightly put me off vegetarians.
Largely agree with your comments on PC / moral relativism, and maybe we should think about moving this part of the discussion to a separate thread.
But other aspects to "PC" that "moral relativism" doesn't necessarily include (indeed, that a strict moral relativism may oppose) are the elevation of group identity over that of the individual, and the consequent promotion of the causes of groups identified as "victims" over that of the "oppressors", regardless of the actual facts of the situation.
I'm also unsure what priority "moral relativism" would give to our use of language, something that seems to be at the very heart of "PC".
I think you're right. Proponents of PC sometimes use relativism as the basis for attacking one set of assumptions without necessarily questioning their own assumptions.
I'm not sure what term to use to cover things like quotas - 'egalitarianism gone mad'?
As for language, PC sees language as a construct, a fulcrum on which to move the world.
So at heart, maybe what links all of these ideas is the notion of language and identity as constructs, that can be made and remade at will.
Not sure. Just musing.
Read Pinker to see the scientific foundations of this linguistic view of the world smashed to smithereens. ;-)
Thanks to Andy, I have done. And he was v. much in my thoughts when I posted my previous comment.
A couple of things:
1) Of course it is better to avoid derogatory language. Atticus Finch the straight-shotting hero of 'To Kill a Mockingbird' had no concept of 'political correctness' but he still refrianed from calling his client a nigger. I agree with Wemb that sometimes the railing against 'PC' misses the point that there is nothing especially controversial about preferring not to insult people (or to be insulted) on the basis of ethnicity, gender, etc. However, we must be cautious about assuming that the battle is won by changing words alone. 'Gay' which used to be the PC term, is now the term of abuse in playgrounds up and down the country, in much the way that 'poof' and 'queer' were in our day.
2) Melanie Phillips et al. I don't think anyone is asking you to wear an 'I love Mel' badge. Scepticism is ok by me. This whole discussion reminds me that when arguing it's largely irrelevant who else holds those views. If the argument is sound we shouldn't really need mel, Chomsky or indeed anyone else to call on as an authority to bolster our opinions. (Unless those views are directly related to personal experience - e.g. quoting the head of the prison service on prison reform. But generally I am reminded of the old adage about opinions being like arseholes - everyone has one.) That being said, I think we've all come through a system that encourages us to cite our sources, so that may account for some of the use of quotation.
3) Quotas. I hope this story from The Guardian will convince you that not all talk of quotas (sorry, 'targets') is confined to retired generals in the letters page of The Telegraph.
BBC pressed on racial equality targets
John Plunkett
Wednesday May 31, 2006
MediaGuardian.co.uk
The Commission for Racial Equality chairman, Trevor Phillips, is to call on the culture secretary, Tessa Jowell, to enforce strict new rules on the BBC's employment of black and ethnic minorities.
Mr Phillips wants the BBC to be subject to an amendment to the race relations act requiring it to publish information on training, retention rates and complaints, as well as data it already provides on targets and recruitment.
"The duty would make them subject to regulation by the CRE in terms of their programmes for promotion of ethnic minorities - to some extent, the balance of what they broadcast and to a large extent, what they do on training and how they treat different ethnic groups among their staff," Mr Phillips told the BBC's inhouse magazine, Ariel.
"Ultimately, as we have done with the police, we could take compliance action against them."
4) I too instinctively thought I'd disagree with Pinker until I read The Blank Slate which I thought was brilliant.
Yet again I have the feeling we should have started a separate thread (who's going to remember we had the Fire Service stuff under "Labour's Authoritarianism"?), but we've started here, so on we go.
I checked with my firefighter friend that what I had blogged was an accurate representation of what he'd told me a while back (see above: principally about (a) the abandonment of the fireman's lift and (b) the dilution of recruit quality, both on "Equalities" grounds).
He got back to me with the following, which is certainly food for thought:
------------
You were quite correct, the lift was stopped at training centre because generally the female recruits simply couldn't do it, except perhaps maybe 1 or 2. The reason given to the rank and file was there were more injuries in training than the benefit of gaining this skill.
There still remains no replacement method of removing an unconscious casualty down a ladder with a crew of two. This is the most likely scenario: an old man trapped / overcome / dead in a 2nd floor bed-sit, and the stairs are involved in the fire so unusable. You first need to lift the old guy's dead weight from the bed onto your shoulders, climb out of the window onto ladder carrying him, and once on the ladder you descend using *both* hands with your arse sticking out to try and provide enough friction to stop the casualty sliding off you and dropping to the ground. That's how we were trained, and that is how it is done in reality, it's fucking hard, and you can end up dropping the casualty on your mates! :-)
When the lift was stopped we challenged those above as to what we would do if in this scenario with an untrained person. The answer was: wait for someone who is trained and can do it to come along.
The same thing happened when the height restriction was dropped; you now often have girls that can't reach the ladders on the back of the engines to pull them off!! During training they are given boxes to stand on... I'm not making this up.
The fitness selection part of recruitment was lowered as well, as it was preventing females progressing through. It was a shuttle run to test cardio fitness, when I joined the pass level was 10.4 (you normally want to puke at that point) but now it is 8.0, which is a jog really.
If there are certain minorities that academically aren't up to scratch and are not getting past that part of the selection process then they are now invited to attend evening classes / college to raise them to the required standard free of charge. The main reason this has occurred is that in 1999 the government set targets on recruitment and retention of females and ethnic minorities, and the standards in place at the time were preventing these targets being met, so the simple solution was to lower the standards. And yes, the standard of firefighters has certainly dropped since then.
You might be getting a diverse workforce that represents the community it serves, but they may not all be able to reach the kit on the fire engine, work at incidents without falling over, turn up for work etc etc, and this is apart from the separate issue of getting value for your tax money.
JP's friend obviously needs to attend an Equality and Diversity convention.
But all joking aside, I was looking to see if I could find independent verification of JP's friend's claims (not that I don't believe him, I'm just a belt and barces kind of guy). I didn't find a news story, but what I did stumble upon was a feminist discussion which makes the interesting claim that:
Tests of [physical ability] are based on average abilities. Of course, some women will be able to lift the same heavy weight that some men will not be able to lift and vice-versa. What may make a difference in a woman's ability to lift the object is how she is being told to lift it. If workers are told that there is one appropriate way to lift an object (like a person in a fire), and that lifting procedure was developed using men who were the traditional workers in that field, then the procedure will most likely make the most of men's upper body strength. What [Karen] Messing* and her colleagues found was that if women are allowed to develop their own techniques to lift heavy objects, then they will most likely shift the burden toward their lower-body strength and perform the task successfully. Women will use their hips. Think of how women hold babies for long periods of time - they balance the baby on their hips. When I have to lift heavy boxes of books to high shelves, for instance, I rest the book on my hip, then I scoot it up from there. This is a practical solution to the problem of holding and/or lifting
heavy objects whether these objects be babies, boxes of books, or adults caught in a fire. When given some freedom to structure how they will perform certain tasks on the job, women are much more likely to be able to perform on par with men than when women are told "this is how it needs to be done." The argument Messing makes is that jobs traditionally held by men (such as firefighting) developed tests (such as strength tests) specifically with men's bodies in mind.
*One-Eyed Science (1998, Temple UP) - Are Women Biologically fit for Jobs? Are Jobs Fit for Women?" (Ch
3).
The person posting then goes to say that all jobs are "social contructions" which I'm not so sure about (where's that copy of Pinker?), but I thought the argument about tests designed with men's bodies in mind might have some validity.
This does not, however, serve to negate JP's friend's concerns. I think I'd be OK with women being allowed 'the freedom to structure how they
will perform certain tasks' so long as they can still carry me out of a burning building. JP's (friend's) claim is not that women are using an alternative method but that the requirement (to accomplish the task) is being dropped altogether.
Anyway, nothing like a bit of a feminist chinwag to get Monday off to a good start.
The "social construct" stuff is utter garbage, and should be treated as such. The correct attitude of course is to treat all people as individuals, not as representatives of groups. No sane person would object to a female firefighter who was able to perform all the necessary tasks adequately.
And I'd like to know what the new feminist technique is for reaching a ladder if you're too short. Presumably the female firefighter recruits tried, and failed, at the (traditional? masculine?) approaches known as "reaching" and "jumping".
Universities urged to spy on Muslims
The Guardian
Lecturers and university staff across Britain are to be asked to spy on "Asian-looking" and Muslim students they suspect of involvement in Islamic extremism and supporting terrorist violence, the Guardian has learned.
They will be told to inform on students to special branch because the government believes campuses have become "fertile recruiting grounds" for extremists.
The Department for Education has drawn up a series of proposals which are to be sent to universities and other centres of higher education before the end of the year. The 18-page document acknowledges that universities will be anxious about passing information to special branch, for fear it amounts to "collaborating with the 'secret police'". It says there will be "concerns about police targeting certain sections of the student population (eg Muslims)".
[...]
It says: "Special branch are aware that many HEIs [higher education institutions] will have a number of concerns about working closely with special branch. Some common concerns are that institutions will be seen to be collaborating with the 'secret police'.
"HEIs may also worry about what special branch will do with any information supplied by an HEI and what action the police may subsequently take ... Special branch are not the 'secret police' and are accountable."
[...]
The document gives five real-life examples of extremism in universities. The first talks of suspicious computer use by "Asian" students, which was reported by library staff. In language some may balk at, it talks of students of "Asian appearance" being suspected extremists.
Henry Porter on civil liberties in Britain:
'There will be many reasonable people among you who will argue that the fight against terrorism or some other compelling problem makes the removal of a fragment of liberty the best option available to us. A little bit here, a little bit there doesn't really matter, particularly when it involves somebody else's rights. Without thinking very deeply, we say to ourselves "if you've done nothing wrong you've got nothing to fear from these new laws". Not true. There is something to fear - because someone else's liberty is also your liberty. When it's removed from them, it's taken from you even though you may not be able to conceive of the circumstances when you might need it. A system of rights must apply to bank managers, illegal immigrant cockle pickers and every type of defendant otherwise it doesn't count.
I worry that we are not alert to the possibilities of social control. No matter how discreet this surveillance, it increases the spectral presence of the state in the everyday consciousness of each individual. I grant that it is a slow process and that it is nothing like the leaden omnipresence of the Stasi in the GDR. But I think we're heading for a place from which we will not be able to return: the surveillance society where the state will crowd in on the individual human experience and threaten the unguarded freedoms of privacy, solitude, seclusion and anonymity. We may continue to attest to the feeling of freedom but in reality we will suffer more and more restrictions. Inexorably we are becoming subjects not citizens, units on a database that may be observed and classified by a Government which is taking control in areas where it has never dared in democratic times to trespass before.'
The full article which is a reproduction of a lecture Porter gave recently is on the Independent's website (unfortunately only available by subscription).
Since this thread has been leading an unfortunate double life as our "PC gone mad" placeholder, I'll reluctantly blog this here:
Police anger over ban on arrests during Ramadan
October 22, 2006
The Observer
Manchester Police have been told not to arrest Muslims at prayer times during the holy month of Ramadan. The order is said to have angered a number of officers in the Greater Manchester force. An internal email listing prayer times has been sent to officers who have been asked not to execute arrest warrants during prayer times for reasons of religious sensitivity.
Ex-PC Bell, love it!
Met spends £450m on diversity
Metro
Friday, October 27, 2006
Scotland Yard faces criticism today after it was revealed it spent almost £450 million on promoting 'equality and diversity' in the past three years. The vast majority of the £450 million figure was spent on officers and staff who work with minority communities and research issues such as black-on-black gun crime and child protection. The spending, which includes £187 million on recruitment, training and research within minority communities in the past year alone, takes up six per cent of the overall Met budget, according to a report in today's Evening Standard. The budget has also gone towards crime fighting and prevention.
The 'equalities-related expenditure' covered not just race issues, but those of gender, faith, disability, age and sexuality. Since 2003, more than £21 million has been spent on interpreters' fees. However, new figures show the number of race-discrimination claims against officers made by colleagues or the public rose by 24 per cent from 259 in 2003/4 to 320 in 2005/6.
In the latest case this week, Pc Wayne Bell was ordered to resign for making monkey noises at a suspect in custody at Plumstead police. He was acquitted of a racially aggravated public order offence at Bow Street magistrates court but ordered to resign for three breaches of the force's code of conduct. A second officer has also been ordered to quit for failing to report Pc Bell's behaviour.
...
The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry in 2002 labelled the Met 'institutionally racist' and led to an overhaul in its approach to equality and diversity. Every unit at Scotland Yard now addresses the 'quality and diversity implications' of everything they do.
In 2004/5, the cost of Operation Trident, which tackles gun crime in the black community, was £24 million. For child protection, it was £37.6million.
"John Reid announced new powers today to evict people from their properties within 48 hours for anti-social behaviour as part of the Government's crackdown on loutish behaviour.
The Home Secretary said the "common sense" policies would aim to speed up the justice system, in some cases bypassing the need to go to court.
Full report here
"A new contract between the state and the citizen setting out what individuals must do in return for quality services from hospitals, schools and the police is one of the key proposals emerging from a Downing Street initiated policy review.
Examples include an expectation that a local health authority will only offer a hip replacement if the patient undertakes to keep their weight down. Parents might also be asked to sign individually tailored contracts with a school setting out what the parents must do at home to advance their child's publicly-funded education.
The police might also promise to achieve a specific response time in a local area, so long as an agreement is struck on the local law and disorder priorities. The aim is to build on the government's rights and responsibilities agenda, and papers released yesterday by the Cabinet Office speak of seeking "a new more explicit contract between the state and the citizen on agreed public outcomes".
This story makes me apprehensive. Obviously state services are a scarce resourse like any other hence the need for some form of rationing... and yet this proposal still makes me nervous. Why? Well, I think it just that this contract seems to put more obligation on the citizen rather than the state. It's also that in the case of the police there is no alternative provider we could switch to if we were unhappy with their service and so the idea of a such a one sided contract seems inherently unfair, as I said it puts these new duties and penalties on the citizen not the state.
I think this blogger makes a valid point:
'In the original concept of the social contract, the benefits were obvious - peace and security rather than anarchy and chaos. The suggestions of what these new contracts could be made to do include conditions on access to the NHS, to education and even (implicity) to the police's protection. Blair's cunning concept of the contract is to reduce the state's own obligations while increasing those of the people, so that it will be the people to blame when everything comes crashing down - for not upholding their end of the deal.'
"Instead of wasting hundreds of millions of pounds on compulsory ID cards, let that money provide thousands more police officers on the beat in our local community." Tony Blair 1996
Sometimes I read a news story that makes me wonder whether I'm really living in a Science fiction Dystopia dreamed up by Phillip K Dick. This Times piece about Blair's new 'Super Asbos' is like something out of Minority Report.
'These new “super-Asbos” will be aimed not only at people who have a history of violent behaviour or who have just left prison but also those who may not yet have committed an offence.
According to a Home Office document outlining the plan, to be published next month, the measures will ban potential trouble-makers from certain areas or mixing with certain people, alert police when they move house and possibly force them to live in a named hostel, give details of vehicles they own and impose a curfew on them.
The orders will last for at least two years, with no upper limit. Any breach could lead to up to five years in jail. Ministers believe police will apply for 300 to 450 Voos each year.'
Ok. So you don't have to have done anything wrong just look a bit suspicious and the State can decide on balance of probablities inc Hearsay evidence that you move out of your home ... lovely.
Here is a list of things that might qualify you for an order:
'The paper identifies a series of “risk factors” that could lead to a person being targeted for the new order. These include a person’s formative years and upbringing, “cognitive deficiencies”, “entrenched pro-criminal or antisocial attitudes,” “a history of substance abuse or mental health issues”.
Factors could also include a person’s domestic situation or relationship with their partner or family, as well as more obvious signs such as “possession of paraphernalia related to violent offending (eg, balaclava, baseball bat), or extremist material”.'
Janet Daley lays in to "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime":
At the heart of this fiasco is the belief that words equal action
By Janet Daley
29/01/2007
Someone should tell John Reid that '1984' is a work of fiction not a how-to book.
'Talking' CCTV scolds offenders
"Talking" CCTV cameras that tell off people dropping litter or committing anti-social behaviour are to be extended to 20 areas across England.
They are already used in Middlesbrough where people seen misbehaving can be told to stop via a loudspeaker, controlled by control centre staff.
About £500,000 will be spent adding speaker facilities to existing cameras.
Shadow home affairs minister James Brokenshire said the government should be "very careful" over the cameras.
Home Secretary John Reid told BBC News there would be some people, "in the minority who will be more concerned about what they claim are civil liberties intrusions".
"But the vast majority of people find that their life is more upset by people who make their life a misery in the inner cities because they can't go out and feel safe and secure in a healthy, clean environment because of a minority of people," he added.
"What really upsets people is their night out being destroyed or their environment being destroyed by a fairly small minority of people"
The talking cameras did not constitute "secret surveillance", he said.'
Since I was talking about political interference in the fire service earlier in this thread....
White men can't run fire service, says Ken Livingstone
Daily Mail
18th June 2007
Ken Livingstone has blocked the appointment of nine white men because they are "unrepresentative" of London. The Mayor used his powers to promote equality to stop them serving on the London fire authority.
He refused to confirm all but one of the Tory and Liberal Democrat nominations to the body that sets the brigade's budget and policies. The Mayor's opponents are expected to seek a High Court injunction to overturn his ruling saying that it has caused "unnecessary and damaging uncertainty".
Mr Livingstone rejected the nominations of five Assembly members and four borough councillors because they "failed to tackle the under-representation of women and black, Asian and ethnic minority Londoners". The authority is made up of nine Assembly members and eight councillors according to each party's political strength across the capital.
The Mayor said he had taken the step after the Tories nominated six white men and one white woman, while the Lib-Dems selected three white men.
He said: "It is unacceptable that when there are 1,861 councillors in London, of which 555 are women and 293 from black, Asian and ethnic minority groups, all seven Conservative nominees are white and include only one woman, and all three Liberal Democrat nominees are white men.
"To fulfil my duty to promote genuine equality I have decided not to accept these unrepresentative nominees and to ask those who are making these nominations to ensure that they reflect London as it really is." The Mayor approved all five Labour nominations, as well as one Tory woman and the sole Green and One London party representatives.
Merrick Cockell, Tory chairman of London Councils, said: "It is disappointing that the Mayor has rejected two pensioners, an openly gay councillor and a councillor under 30 as being 'unrepresentative' of London's diverse communities. "The fact remains these councillors were democratically elected by London's diverse communities."
This thread hasn't recieved any posts for a while, but these two articles just had to be blogged.
1) Mind How You Go... 'People who even think about going for a drink face being banned from their town centre for up to two days under wideranging new police powers.' (I'm hoping this story is bollocks, it is in teh Metro after all)
and
2) A must read piece on state authoritarianism by Nick Cohen - 'Even the begonias are puritans now'
very good piece by Geoffrey Robertson in The Guardian on the Government's proposed witness anonymity bill:
There can be no fair trials with this perjurer's charter
British Justice coped with the Krays and Northern Ireland without recourse to secret witnesses, and we don't need them now
Geoffrey Robertson
The Guardian
Parliament will this week be asked to make the most serious single assault on liberty in memory. The witness anonymity bill abolishes the right of defendants to know the identity of their accusers. This will result in thousands of unfair trials; and the principles of open justice, which this nation has contributed to the lexicon of human rights, will be gutted by a panic-stricken measure that encourages courts, in criminal cases of any kind, to suppress the identity of crucial witnesses.
The bill is being rushed through before the summer recess to empower all criminal courts and courts martial to receive voice-distorted evidence from witnesses whose identity defendants and their lawyers will never be allowed to know and whose faces they will never see. Defendants could be imprisoned for life solely on secret evidence they can never test by cross-examination so as to reveal, for example, a witness's malice or personal animosity; spiteful or score-settling motives; a reputation for telling lies or devious relationships with the police. Such witnesses will now be handed a perjurer's charter, by way of a statutory "anonymity order" that will keep their identity for ever hidden.
The bill will in effect place the trial process in the hands of the police, who will offer anonymity in most investigations into violent crime; the prosecution will be permitted to make an application in secret to the trial judge to claim that witnesses will not testify unless an anonymity order is made. The judge will have no way of weighing this claim, because the defence will not be present to challenge it. On many occasions at these one-sided hearings, judges will give in to the untestable claim (a form of forensic blackmail) that without these orders trials cannot proceed.
There are no safeguards for the citizen. The prosecution does not even have to prove that a witness has been intimidated or fears any kind of mental or physical threat: any "harm to the public interest" is sufficient - a formula that might cover up questionable police operations. There is no safeguard against a conviction relying entirely on the evidence of an anonymous witness; incredibly, this bill does not require judges to ensure corroboration (independent evidence pointing to guilt), or even to warn juries about the dangers of convicting on the word of witnesses who can't be effectively cross-examined. There is no right of appeal against the granting of anonymity orders."
[]
The witness anonymity bill is the result of a panic that followed last month's ruling by the law lords that, under the principles of English common law and the European Convention on Human Rights, a defendant could not be convicted "solely or to a decisive extent upon the testimony of one or more anonymous witnesses". This should never have been doubted: as a matter of common sense, no trial can be fair if critical evidence cannot be challenged. However, in 2006 the court of appeal erroneously endorsed this unlawful practice, which led to a flood of applications from the police - some 600 are said to have been granted. One unedifying reason for rushing this bill through is to validate, retrospectively, orders that were unlawful when they were made.
The police claim that they cannot secure convictions without anonymity orders because of an increase in intimidation. But this is not a new problem: the Krays and Richardsons terrorised London, yet were convicted without resort to secret witnesses. At the height of intimidation in Northern Ireland, Lord Gardiner (Jack Straw's greatest of predecessors) rejected a proposal for witness anonymity for the very reason that it infringed the right to a fair trial. In the US and Italy today, effective witness protection schemes minimise the danger of reprisals from mafia gangs."
"on a matter of principle, I cannot support 42 days’ precharge detention. I don’t see on a practical basis, as well as a principled one, that these proposals are in any way workable.”
Ex MI5 chief Eliza Manningham-Buller debating the counter terrorism bill in the House of Lords
Tom Griffin of Open Democracy considers an unnoticed section of the Terrorism bill which he argues would allow the state to remove coroners and create secret inquests:
Terrorism Bill 'a fundamental attack' on inquests
"The Counter Terrorism Bill continues its passage through Parliament today, with its second reading in the House of Lords.
Most of the controversy around the bill has focused on 42-day detention, but there are a number of other provisions that deserve serious scrutiny. Inquest has produced a briefing that focuses on part 6 of the bill, which it calls "a fundamental attack on the independence and transparency of the coronial system in England and Wales."
The proposals could result in inquests into highly contentious deaths in custody taking place without juries and partly in private with appointed coroners and appointed counsel. This would exclude bereaved families, their legal representatives and the public at large from the investigation process in breach of article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
The immediate justification for changing the law is the case of Azelle Rodney, who was shot dead by police in London on 30 April 2005.
In July 2006 the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) announced that there was insufficient evidence for a successful prosecution. After the CPS decision, the family was told by the coroner that the full inquest could not be held because large portions of the police officers' statements had been crossed out under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) 2000, which covers information obtained from covert surveillance devices such as telephone taps or bugs. Lawyers acting for the family of Azelle Rodney threatened to take the government to court to show that RIPA was in breach of the Human Rights Act 1998. His family have already been told that their case will be subject to the new measures despite the Bill still progressing through parliament.
The new proposals could also be extended to a much wider range of cases, according to Andrew Dismore MP, the chair of Parliament's Joint Human Rights Committee.
We are seriously alarmed at the prospect that under these provisions inquests into deaths occurring in circumstances like that of Jean Charles de Menezes, or British servicemen killed by US forces in Iraq, could be held by a coroner appointed by the Secretary of State sitting without a jury. Inquests must be, and be seen to be, totally independent, and in public to secure accountability, with involvement of the next of kin to protect their legitimate interests. When someone dies in distressing, high profile circumstances their family need to see and feel that justice is being done, and where state authorities are involved there is a national interest in accountability as well.
What's particularly worrying is the implications of combining these proposals with those on 42 days. The state will be able to hold people for six weeks without charge, and if they die during that time, they will be able to deny their family a public hearing before a jury. Surely a Government that is attempting to justify a longer detention period should be strengthening such safeguards, not weakening them.'
Here is a comment in the Times Blog on the arrest of Tory MP Damian Green:
"
Damian Green - arrested under the most sinister law in Britain?
So to the Damian Green arrest, which police say was made on suspicion he was "aiding and abetting, counselling or procuring misconduct in a public office". Looking back at the handful of prosecutions this statute has brought about, stories about the police's use of this offence make frightening reading.
First what I presume it's intended to do: to prosecute police officers who use the police national database to get revenge on ex-lovers, or trading standards officers who try and fiddle the system themselves.
But there are more pernicious examples out there too.
Perhaps the scariest is the case of Sally Murrer, a reporter of 33 years' standing who was arrested last year and later charged using this law. She is expected to stand trial in January.
The Crown Prosecution Service alleges that a police contact tipped her off about three stories: that a local celebrity footballer arrested in a brawl would not be charged, that a man killed in a fight had previously been arrested on drug offences and an Islamist the authorities released early from prison had boasted about becoming a suicide bomber. The third tip, potentially the most serious, never even made the paper.
By this scorehand Ms Murrer is hardy an enemy of the state. Yet here, according to an excellent account by Nick Cohen, is what the police did to collect evidence in their case.
The security services planned the arrest of the journalist with painstaking care. They bugged her contacts and assembled an elite squad to take her down. On 8 May 2007, eight detectives swarmed into her home and seized her address book, mobile, laptops and bank statements. In a simultaneous raid, a second team searched her newspaper office - going through everything from filing cabinets to boxes of Cup-a-Soup by the office kettle.
Police aren't alleging that she paid her contact for the stories, just that he gave her more information than he was contractually allowed to. I commend the Cohen piece, which goes into what is more broadly a very complex case and hints at the bigger reasons why the CPS may be pursuing the prosecution.
But it's clear from that if this law was rigidly applied most of the journalists, and several of the politicians, special advisers and press officers I know would be in jail. And from my brief reading about the case it seems to strike a worrying blow for the public's right to know more than politicians and public sector bosses want them to.
There can be no doubt that tonight the police decision to arrest a shadow cabinet member was political with a very big P."
The Guardian's report on the Damian Green arrest:
"Green, the shadow immigration minister, was held for nine hours before being released late last night. His Ashford constituency home and office in Kent, his London home, and his office in the House of Commons were all searched.
David Cameron, the Conservative leader, who has given Green his full backing, said that ministers and the police needed to explain why such heavy-handed tactics were employed.
He said it was "a worrying stage in our democracy" if shadow ministers could not release information in the national interest.
"If this had happened in the 1930s, Churchill would have been arrested," said Cameron, referring to the way Winston Churchill used leaked information to support his campaign for Britain to rearm against Adolf Hitler's Germany.
Michael Howard, the former Tory leader and an ex-home secretary, said the decision to arrest Green could be seen as a "contempt of parliament" – an offence against parliament which in the pre-democratic age would result in culprits being jailed – and he said that there were "real questions" about the incident for Brown to answer.
"Gordon Brown made his reputation by very effectively exploiting government leaks when he was in opposition. Now, are we to have one law for Gordon Brown and a different law for everybody else?" Howard said, in an interview on the BBC's World at One.
"What we need to know from the prime minister is what he thinks about this. Does he agree that it's essential for opposition politicians to be able to make use of leaked documents, as he did? If this approach had been in place when Gordon Brown was in opposition, he would have spent half his time under arrest."
Guardian editorial on the Damian Green arrest (Wembley you're a sometime supporter of the Government, what's your view on all of this?):
""One thing I am determined to do is uphold the independence of the police," the prime minister said yesterday. It is depressing that he did not mention a more important task, which is to uphold the independence of parliament. MPs are not above the law. But the arrest and questioning by anti-terrorist officers of the shadow immigration minister, Damian Green, while others raided his office in the House of Commons, was an dangerous overreaction to the leaking of some embarrassing Home Office documents. It reached the boundary between the rigorous application of the law and the partisan persecution of opposition freedoms.
Mr Brown, whose own shadow ministerial career benefited in the 1990s from regular supplies of leaked government documents, must know that the police have made a bad mistake. Why it was made is unclear. Ministers are surely speaking the truth when they say they had no warning of the arrest, although that denial is carefully specific. David Cameron went too far in the heat of the moment when he called the raid "Stalinesque". This was surely not a sanctioned attack by the government on its critics, but a foolish act by a police force that did not think through the implications of what it was doing. A similar spirit motivated the showy dawn raids on people close to Tony Blair during the cash for honours investigations, although in that inquiry anti-terror officers did not turn up to arrest an MP for causing trouble.
Nor did they tramp into parliament in their search for evidence. MPs can be pompous in their description of ancient liberties, but they do matter. This week's raid on Mr Green's office was no equivalent of Charles I's arrival in the Commons in 1642. But parliamentary privilege is an important principle, and it was challenged by this action. The House of Commons is a unique place, its members elected to confront and annoy the government, as well as to support it. Extraordinarily, the Speaker seems to have been informed of the police action before it took place, and not objected. If this is true then he neglected a basic duty."
Well, Peter Hitchens certainly walks his own path, here is his view on the Damian Green arrest:
"I do hope that plenty more MPs, of all parties, are arrested, DNA-swabbed and, if possible, strip-searched and locked up in police cells for hours or even days. And I’d be glad to see a series of raids, preferably heavily armed, on the House of Commons, with or without warrants.
For it is entirely the fault of politicians that the police are now simultaneously useless and over-mighty. It is largely their fault that the police are also politically motivated and obsessed with bagging celebrities in the hope of bringing about a noisy show trial. And it is their abiding shame that, in the past 20 years, they have destroyed or dismantled most of the protections that innocent people used to enjoy in this country, while creating dozens of ‘human rights’ safeguards for the guilty.
It would be particularly sweet if some of them found themselves held on ‘terrorism’ charges, banged up in Paddington Green for the full 28 days that these credulous nonentities feebly agreed was necessary. In the case of any Cabinet Ministers who get arrested, and one can only hope that this happens a lot, I suggest 90 days without a hearing, since they think it is such a good idea and so many of them have suspiciously concealed their past links with extremist revolutionary organisations.
Just possibly, if they experienced in person the disaster they have inflicted on the rest of us, they might be persuaded to think, in many cases for the first time in their lives, and to repair the dreadful damage they have so thoughtlessly done.
As it is, they live in a sort of Enid Blyton fantasy world of courteous, jolly bobbies in smart tunics, a breed extinct outside the Palace of Westminster. The rest of us, if we ever see a police officer at close quarters, must be content with shaven-headed, grim-jawed, slouching, paramilitary social workers – too often armed – who treat the law-abiding with disdain and take a special joy in prosecuting them for defending themselves.
Amid all the pointless fuss about the Speaker, and the rubbish about how this is all New Labour Stalinism, the British media have missed the point – as they usually do. The politicisation of the police has been backed by both parties, and could be turned against both parties.
The creation of our new arrogant, distant police ‘service’ – as I documented some years ago in my book The Abolition Of Liberty – began in the Sixties. ‘Bobbies on the beat’, for instance, were secretly abolished under Labour by the Home Office Police Advisory Board on December 7, 1966. This decision was not reversed under the Tories, who were in office for 22 of the following 42 years. The destruction of proper policing has been continued by both parties ever since.
It has been accompanied by a grave rise in crime – partly caused by the retreat of the police from foot patrols but also by the socialist and socially liberal policies of both major parties, and the Marxoid ideas that have grown up in the new centralised police ‘service’.
If you subsidise fatherless families, deliberately destroy discipline in schools and licence the transmission of mental slurry by broadcasters, you will get more crime and disorder.
If you abolish the distinction between right and wrong, don’t be surprised if the police are neutral between criminal and victim.
The collapse of order, plus the flammed-up terrorist threat, has given governments the excuse to enact ‘tough’ laws. And they have done. The right to silence is gone. Jury trial is fatally weakened by majority verdicts and teenage jurors. The ancient rules against being tried twice for the same offence have been destroyed. The independence of judges and magistrates has been whittled away. The police have terrifying powers to probe our lives and enter our homes.
But those laws will not help us, since they do not address the problem. You can deal with Britain’s crime and disorder crisis only by undoing the Left-wing revolution of the Sixties. Socialism, alas, always leads to tyranny by one route or another. We are remarkably close to such a tyranny now. If the arrest of Damian Green makes anyone in high politics reconsider, even the Useless Tories, it has to be a good thing."
British Police set to step up hacking of home pcs
'THE Home Office has quietly adopted a new plan to allow police across Britain routinely to hack into people's personal computers without a warrant.
The move, which follows a decision by the European Union’s council of ministers in Brussels, has angered civil liberties groups and opposition MPs. They described it as a sinister extension of the surveillance state which drives “a coach and horses” through privacy laws.
The hacking is known as “remote searching”. It allows police or MI5 officers who may be hundreds of miles away to examine covertly the hard drive of someone’s PC at his home, office or hotel room.
Material gathered in this way includes the content of all e-mails, web-browsing habits and instant messaging.
Under the Brussels edict, police across the EU have been given the green light to expand the implementation of a rarely used power involving warrantless intrusive surveillance of private property. The strategy will allow French, German and other EU forces to ask British officers to hack into someone’s UK computer and pass over any material gleaned.
A remote search can be granted if a senior officer says he “believes” that it is “proportionate” and necessary to prevent or detect serious crime - defined as any offence attracting a jail sentence of more than three years.'
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