The Home Office [Bureau of State Security for overseas readers] would be ludicrous in its crudity, if it did not present such a threat to liberty. Bids for more arbitrary power are always, but always, acompanied by a scare story.
Today’s example:
Reid proposes register for terror offenders
John Reid will today propose setting up a terrorist offenders register as part of a series of long-term counter-terror measures.
The proposal, based on similar lines to the existing sex offenders register, is one of a series of ideas that the Home Secretary will suggest should be part of the country’s antiterror defences.
One idea being studied by Mr Reid would be to allow the register to operate retrospectively, making an estimated 40 people convicted under terror laws since 2001 liable for immediate listing.
The Home Secretary will say that police should be allowed to continue questioning terror suspects after they have been charged.
He will also outline a plan to allow judges to impose a harsher sentence on people with links to terrorism who are convicted under the criminal law.
This would apply in particular to people convicted of credit card fraud who have links to terrorism.
Another measure would give police the power forcibly to enter the home of a terror suspect held under a control order.
But the pamphlet, to be published today, will not include firm proposals to extend beyond 28 days the length of time that police can hold terror suspects.
Is juxtaposed with:
Security checks on petrol tankers in London
Security spot checks are being carried out on petrol and chemical tankers, cement mixers and other vehicles that could be used by suicide bombers.
Police are monitoring lorries on key routes into London amid concerns that terrorists might copy tactics which have been deployed to deadly effect by insurgents in Iraq. […]
But Scotland Yard stressed today that there was no specific intelligence to suggest that any kind of lorry bomb attack was imminent. [….]
“A counter-terrorism element has been added to the routine work of checking vehicles carrying dangerous goods,” said a police spokeswoman.
The first story is filed by the Times’ home affairs editor. The second by an interesting chap called Sean O’Neill, co-author of The Suicide Factory a highly sensational account of Abu Hamza’s career at Finsbury Park mosque. According to his agent’s website:
“Sean O’Neill joined The Times in 2004 after working for the Daily Telegraph for twelve years. He has covered the Matrix Churchill affair and the Scott Inquiry into arms to Iraq, the Soham murders and the trial of Ian Huntley, and has reported extensively from Northern Ireland. Since 2001 he has focused largely on the al-Qaeda terrorist threat in the UK.”
Mr O’Neill has something of a speciality in reporting the suspicions of the authorities. He clearly has very good police and intelligence contacts, and can make a livid story out of a change in a police checklist. But the inclination of such unofficial official contacts will be to feed such tidbits to the press to suit themselves, knowing an energetic journalist will make much of them.
What is the purpose of allowing the police to question someone once they have been charged?
Once charged, anyone with any sense at all will simply no comment the interview. The police have charged you with a crime, you are going to go to court, and you can give your account there before a judge and jury (assuming they have not abolished juries that is). It is not in your interests to answer a single question once you have been charged. Of course, the NuLabor Stasi might well make failure to answer their questions a criminal offence, and get you that way. Once the very idea would have been ludicrous, but now I can see it happening.
Once upon a time, in a country not so very far away, you could not be detained at all without the intent to charge. Arrest on suspicion ‘for questioning’ was unlawful, though police would commonly browbeat people into ‘helping with enquiries’. Even now, the theoretical position in England and Wales is thus:
{From Liberty’s Your Rights site.}
My emphasis. The bits I have emphasised are what’s currently under attack, though in practice fishing trips are now procedurally embedded: DNA samples, fingerprints get matched, and computers, vehicles and premises get checked for evidence of any offence whatsoever, whatever you are charged with, once there is grounds for a search in connection with the original suspicion. (Which there usually is – without warrant, US readers may like to note – once you’ve been arrested.)
The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2006 ammended the powers, effectively abolishing the concept of an ‘arrestable offence’, so the main grounds for arrest are anyone:
* who is about to commit an offence or is in the act of committing an offence
* whom the officer has reasonable grounds for suspecting is about to commit an offence or to be committing an offence
* whom the officer has reasonable grounds to suspect of being guilty of an offence which he or she has reasonable grounds for suspecting has been committed
* anyone who is guilty of an offence which has been committed or anyone whom the officer has reasonable grounds for suspecting to be guilty of that offence
And in addition, under the Terrorism legislation:
* anyone or any vehicle can be stopped and searched in a designated area (designation can apparently be secret) without reasonable grounds.
What puzzles me re. these scare stories is – are people actually afraid in this country?
I certainly don’t get that impression. I think what Islamonutters may or may not be getting up to is pretty far from people’s minds generally. In the words of Luke Skywalker, “It’s all such a long way away from here.”.
Of course maybe thats just because I live in Devon so it really is a long way away from here.
I’m not afraid, not of terrorists anyway. I don’t claim to speak for anyone else when I tell you that I am afraid of where we as a society are heading, and the means used by our government to get us there.
The problem is that when the media claims to be speaking for the people, its actually speaking for a very vocal but small group of people (generally the people who own the newspapers) who actually do want to run the country along the draconian lines that I am afraid of. These people pull the government’s strings by claiming a public outcry when there is none, by claiming that people are afraid when they are not, and by making the world seem like it is filled with peadophiles, mass murderers, and terrorists, when it is not.
Because this government put so much stock in what the media tells it the people are saying, it doesn’t actually listen to the people. they might as well be governing from the Big Brother house.
What about that suicide bomb-sorry-‘gas explosion’ recently in that ‘welder’s van’?