If you are a Samizdata reader, you probably don’t have a lot of use for your Member of Parliament. However, now is the time to use them – especially if you have a Labour MP.
Here is Phil Booth:
At the Convention on Modern Liberty, I launched NO2ID’s request that everyone at the convention – and around the UK – tells their MP right now that they refuse their consent to having their information shared under any “information sharing order”, a power currently being slipped onto the statute books in clause 152 of the coroners and justice bill .
Please tell yours too. It’s important, and urgent – and something that only YOU can do. If you never have before, now’s the time to write to your MP – in a letter, or via www.WriteToThem.com.
Jack Straw has been making noises that could signal a ‘compromise’, but the only acceptable action is to remove clause 152 entirely from the bill. It is not linked to any other clause, despite being sandwiched between other powers and so-called safeguards offered to the information commissioner. It cannot be improved, and Straw can’t be allowed to merely “dilute” it. Clause 152 just has to go.
It’s imperative that in coming days every MP hears from his or her constituents. Please tell them you refuse consent to having your information, taken for one purpose, arbitrarily used for any other purpose. And ask them to vote clause 152 off the bill.
If you are skeptical about whether anything is important enough to write a polite letter to your Labour MP, then please read my detailed briefing for parliamentarians, here (pdf).
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Note: If you followed the link to Jack Straw and now feel sick, I am sorry. Here is the retired Law Lord, Lord Bingham, to make you a bit better.
Despite the sublt whiff of lefty in the air, I enjoyed the day very much. I also managed to have a quick word with Phil Booth, a nice man.
Also, you may have seen the 9/11 truther demonstrating outside the hall. From what I was told bv Guthrum, they were s.44’d by the police not long later. How they got away with that, I don’t know.
… they were s.44’d by the police not long later
Henry Porter said he witnessed that when he went out for a smoke.
Thanks for the tip. My MP is Glenda Jackson who, to her credit, is one of the few who has voted against ID cards. So I will write – but with little hope that this will change anything.
Do not despair!
The Antislavery Society, and William Wilburforce, took years to achieve their aims, but they did it! And they are the ones whom history glorifies, precisely because they kept going.