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Tomorrow is apparently ID-Day. Big Blunkett is expected to announce plans for compulsory National Identity Cards that will turn the civil liberties clock back fifty years.
To those who say “the innocent have nothing to fear”, look at this Liberty report .
It tells how during the Iraq conflict the Terrorism Act 2000 was systematically used to harass protestors at RAF Fairford, Gloucestershire and deny them their civil liberties including freedom of movement and the right to peaceful protest. Police even served an anti-terrorism order on an eleven year old girl!
How much worse will it get once everyone is neatly filed, stamped and indexed?
Cross-posted from An It Harm None
I second Brian’s post on the same topic. The Evening Standard reports that one in 30 Britons now has their DNA stored on a national database of genetic fingerprints. The database reached the two million mark today, and is one of the world’s largest. It is used to help solve an average of 15 murders and 31 rapes each month.
The government is trying to make it easier to add DNA entries to the database. A law before Parliament would allow samples to be stored from people when they are arrested and retained regardless of whether they are convicted or not… Have a brush with the law and you are on file for life. Currently a sample can be stored only if a person is charged.
The move is expected to dramatically increase the number of samples stored but has led to claims from civil liberties groups and the Liberal Democrats that the system is being abused by the government.
Home Office Minister Hazel Blears said that only criminals should be worried by the scale of the database.
Law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear from the retention of DNA samples.
Yes, we do.
The State is not your friend
The House of Lords has thrown out Big Blunkett’s proposals to limit the right to trial by jury. They voted 210 to 136 to reject the proposals in the government’s Criminal Justice Bill.
The government now has to decide whether to try and force their plans through, accept the Lords’ amendment or drop the entire Bill.
Downing Street had suggested earlier that the entire Bill might be dropped.
We can but hope.
Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe
MPs are planning to introduce a new law specifically to allow them to remove a protester who has been living outside the House of Commons for more than two years. With all previous attempts to remove Mr Haw having failed – a High Court judge last year ruled that his protest was an expression of freedom of speech as defined by the European convention on human rights – the MPs are now recommending passing a special law which would ban protesters from permanently demonstrating outside Parliament without permission. The move has, however, been labelled “draconian” by civil rights groups.
Some good news for once:
The House of Lords has supported repeal of Clause 28 of the local Government Act. An amendment seen by many as an attempt to preserve Clause 28 was defeated by 50 votes.
In theory Clause 28 doesn’t discriminate against homosexuals, merely against using public money to “promote” homosexuality. In practice this wide ranging and ill-defined prohibition has resulted in a climate where low-level institutional discrimination has become commonplace. Decent people have been forced to discriminate through fear of breaching Clause 28.
Clause 28 was introduced by the Thatcher government in 1988. It was a massive attack on the civil liberties of a significant minority of British citizens and has been the jewel in the crown of British homophobes. The fact that a single group was specifically targeted in this way meant that apart from anything else it was simply bad legislation.
Good riddance.
Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe
Ian Boys of Dissident UK points out that essential civil liberties are collateral damage in the war against terrorism
For better or for worse the war against terrorism is Britain’s war too: we sent a few thousand soldiers to Afghanistan and made our political support for President Bush quite clear. Now it has come back to haunt us: nine of our citizens are held incommunicado in Guantanamo Bay, together with several more from the Commonwealth. We do at least know who and where they are, even if we do not know why they are being held. Their families cannot visit them and they cannot speak to outside lawyers. Their status has been determined by the US Secretary of Defence and the only lawyers they will be allowed are US military officers: it has been suggested that their conversations even with these will be overheard. The same camp holds children as young as 13, while 16-year olds are mixed in with the adult detainees.
Imagine that Argentina’s Junta of the 1980’s or today’s Iran were holding these 680-odd detainees, including nine Britons. The outcry would be phenomenal. There would be talk of sanctions at the very least.
Yet these are actually the ‘lucky few’ among the hundreds detained by the USA. Many many more have disappeared. Let’s look at that word – reminiscent of the dictatorships of the 1960’s and 70’s. Do I mean that they have been murdered? No, probably not. Do I mean that they have been tortured? Yes – whether outright physical pressure or just being held in a steel container at Bagram airbase in the blazing sun. Do I mean that they have vanished, held in some solitary hell-hole? Most certainly. → Continue reading: The disappeared
Sir John Stevens, head of the Metropolitan Police, has supported removing the automatic right to trial by jury in some serious cases.
In a speech he argued that the move was necessary to fight organised crime by preventing “jury nobbling”. BBC report here.
If juries are in danger then it is the job of the police to protect them – not throw out a fundamental part of our constitution because it is inconvenient and expensive.
To be fair Stevens did say that the restriction to trial by jury – proposed in Big Blunkett’s discredited Criminal “Justice” Act – should be limited to special cases and determined by a judge. However any erosion of this basic Magna Carta right is unacceptable. This proposal is akin to saying “we already know you’re guilty so we won’t give you the same rights as anyone else.”
Remember how door-to-door DNA testing was initially introduced for “special cases” only? Now any time there is a serious crime police roam the neighbourhood asking innocent citizens to “volunteer” a DNA sample.
Special cases have a tendency to become commonplace.
Partially cross-posted to The Chestnut Tree Cafe.
Jason and stuff has a brief but relevant pointer to the draft bill on Civil Contingencies:
The definition of emergency is, it seems, quite broad. It doesn’t appear to define what scale of emergency is “major” enough to require emergency powers, nor allow for less extreme emergencies to trigger less extreme powers.
The measures that introduce those emergency powers are not subject to being suspended or struck down by the courts under the Human Rights Act. Parliament “has no role in confirming or approving” a state of emergency – it can be proclaimed by the Queen, or ordered by a Secretary of State, and then Parliament just has to be told about it. And those emergency powers, incidentally, appear to be a little scary – they may “make any provision of any kind that could be made by Act of Parliament or by the exercise of Royal Prerogative”, with a few restrictions (no conscription, no banning strikes, no creating of offences punishable by more than 3 months in jail or without trail).
Jason hopes that things will improve from the draft version, especially if we pester them…
I’m no China hand, but this (Headline: “Bill to Curb Hong Kong Civil Liberties Is Shelved – Experts: Move may be a signal the territory’s leader is in trouble”) sounds like good news:
Hong Kong – One week after half a millon people marched through this city’s sweltering streets to protest the government’s efforts to impose sweeping anti-subversion legislation widely seen as a threat to civil liberties, the territory’s leader abruptly decided to shelve the bill.
An opinion piece about the identity cards news in Telegraph is yet again explaining what is wrong with Blunkett’s argument. Basically, each of the claims made by the Home Secretary in support of his pet scheme is wrong.
- First, Mr Blunkett says that there is strong public support for the idea. In fact, the Home Office’s recent consultation exercise focused on the concept of an entitlement card, a very different prospect. (Also, according to this Out-law article, the goverment has admited that the public opposes the ID card scheme.)
- The Home Secretary goes on to argue ID cards will help fight crime. This is one of those assertions that is forever being made, but hardly ever substantiated… The public mood is said to have changed since September 11, 2001, but no one has explained – or even seriously tried to explain – how ID cards would have thwarted those bombers, many of whom died in possession of forged papers.
- Nor, by the way, are ID cards a solution to illegal immigration. The root of the asylum problem is not that we cannot find clandestine entrants, but that we never enforce their deportation.
- More faulty still is Mr Blunkett’s central proposition, as set out in a letter to his Cabinet colleagues: “The argument that identity cards will inhibit our freedom is wrong. We are strengthened in our liberty if our identity is protected from theft; if we are able to access the services we are entitled to; and if our community is better protected from terrorists.” In an appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell describes how a concept can be traduced if the words used to express it lose their meaning. The example he gives, uncannily, is the word “free”. Now here is Mr Blunkett using “freedom” to mean more state control.
- Any doubts as to the wisdom of the scheme must surely be removed by the Home Secretary’s final argument in its favour: that we are “out of kilter with Europe”. Indeed we are, thank heaven. Policemen in Britain are seen as citizens in uniform, not agents of the government.
The most worrying is Blunkett’s spin on the concept of freedom. In his view we are strengthened in our liberty if our identity is protected from theft; if we are able to access the services we are entitled to; and if our community is better protected from terrorists. This is vaguely based on the distinction between negative and positive liberty, which are not merely two distinct kinds of liberty; they can be seen as rival, incompatible interpretations of a single political ideal.
Negative liberty is the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints. One has negative liberty to the extent that actions are available to one in this negative sense. Positive liberty is the possibility of acting – or the fact of acting – in such a way as to take control of one’s life and realize one’s fundamental purposes. While negative liberty is usually attributed to individual agents, positive liberty is sometimes attributed to collectivities, or to individuals considered primarily as members of given collectivities.
Blunkett and his New Labour chums are classic and rather unexceptional anti-liberals. I use the term liberal in its original meaning, based on negative definition of liberty and claiming that in order to protect individual liberty one should place strong limitations on the activities of the state. In Blunkett’s mind, the pursuit of liberty (whether of the individual or of the collectivity) requires state intervention, which, by definition, is not contradictory with limitations on personal freedom. As a result, the protests of civil liberties groups do not make sense to him.
The concept of freedom as being unprevented from doing whatever one might desire to do is alien to him. According to Isaiah Berlin the defender of positive freedom will take an additional step that consists in conceiving of the self as wider than the individual and as represented by an organic social whole – “a tribe, a race, a church, a state, the great society of the living and the dead and the yet unborn”. The true interests of the individual are to be identified with the interests of this whole, and individuals can and should be coerced into fulfilling these interests, for they would not resist coercion if they were as rational and wise as their coercers.
I will not grant Blunkett’s social and political philosophy such level of ‘sophistication’. I will say that his are the simple and toxic insticts of a collectivist and a statist and that those protesting policies based on them will have their words muffled by the Big Blunkett.
Having been published last month, this article, in blogosphere terms, is verging on the archaeological but it is well worth a delve into the archives for a sobering illustration of just how despotic and deranged our ruling classes have become.
Not content with having turned our justice system into a playground for victimologists, parasites and professional race-baiters, the Home Office is now preparing the ground for an arbitrary police-state:
The government’s war against men is now plumbing ever more astonishing depths. On Radio Four’s Today programme yesterday, the Home Secretary David Blunkett could scarcely wait to boast of new proposals to deal with domestic violence.
Anyone truly concerned with civil liberties could not fail to have been appalled by Mr Blunkett’s comments. The problem was, he enthusiastically explained, that at present ‘you have to get someone through court’ before a domestic violence suspect can be restrained.
So his solution is to restrain them before they even get to court. In other words, he wants action taken against a man on the basis of an unproven allegation by a woman– made under the protection of anonymity, to boot. So much for this Home Secretary’s understanding of the presumption of innocence, the meaning of justice and the necessity for a trial of the facts.
The article deserves to be read in it entirety in order to understand the extent to which the Home Office has deliberately ignored or manipulated statistical data in order to justify their insistence that male violence in the home is far worse and far more common than it actually is. Another case of tailoring the data to fit the political agenda.
These wicked and spiteful proposals are not on the books yet but they are clearly on the drawing board and, as per usual, it is only a matter of time before they are enacted thus ending the protection of the law for every man in this country.
The scope for abuse of powers like this is simply enormous and any case of abuse will lead to a man losing his home, access to his children and possibly even his livelihood all on the basis of an unproven and unanswerable allegation.
The damage this will cause to families and the fabric of society remains to be seen but, tragically, it will be seen thanks to a regime which is deeply in thrall to dangerously extremist femininst ideologues and which has now run out of easy targets.
Andy Duncan may take up smoking again…
The UK government’s chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, has claimed that outlawing smoking in bars, pubs, clubs, restaurants and at work would dramatically reduce levels of lung cancer, and other lung diseases, caused by passive smoking. It seems the push is on, by the UK do-gooding society, to follow the example recently set by Michael Bloomberg, in New York.
Significantly, Sir Liam cited a recent government report, which claimed that 88% of people were in favour of smoking restrictions in restaurants. He obviously knows where to hit a government hard, especially one with no other principles than those dictated to it by opinion poll.
No doubt the UK government’s response will be to say, at first, that it has no plans to impose a public area smoking ban. Then it will say if private businesses fail to co-operate with a ‘voluntary’ ban, it will be ‘forced’ to take the necessary action to impose one, and then eventually, it will ‘regretfully’ impose the ban, if the appropriate opinion polls tell it to.
I am non-smoker myself, having taken seven New Year Eves to finally give the filthy weed up, but I am with South Oxfordshire’s very own TV celebrity chef on this one; Antony Worrall Thompson said on Channel 4 News last night:
I believe in smoking and non-smoking areas. If you don’t like a place because people are smoking don’t go in.
No doubt one day smoking will be banned completely in the UK, if these do-gooders keep up their do-gooding work, even in the privacy of your own home. The fact that people have to die of something, eventually, seems to have fully escaped them.
On the day they do successfully get smoking fully banned, thereby creating an enormous black market and making it even more sexually attractive to teenagers causing them to start up in the first place, is the day I will light up again. I am not looking forward to smoking Golden Virginia roll-ups again, but if it is in the cause of freedom, and helps the US economy to boot, so be it!
Cross-posted from Samizdata.net
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