Civil Liberties

A slowly growing sense of hopelessness and impending doom

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Story #1: London’s burning. Again.

Story #2: The markets are in freefall and various economies are failing. Again.

Story #3: There’s been a massive increase in crime in rural areas since the recession started.

I don’t know what story #4 was on the BBC’s early evening news yesterday because I switched off at that point.

Each of the stories was presented in isolation, with fuck all by way of analysis or thought apart from a flash of Stephanie Flanders’ revolting green skirt.

It’s all linked, of course, and none of it is remotely surprising for those with half-an-inch of long-term memory. It happened in the 80s during a recession. It happened during the 90s in a recession. Just because we didn’t have a recession for 15 years doesn’t mean we should raise an eyebrow that the slash and burn approach to economics adopted by PBD and Gideon have resulted in exactly the same social upheaval that occurred when That Bloody Woman did the same thing three decades ago.

There are only two differences now.

First, rolling news channels have been invented. They’ve got to fill all that airtime somehow. The riots of the 80s just got ten minutes at the start of the evening news bulletin. Now it’s all riots, all the time. Breaking news is the new light entertainment.

Second, our leaders – the people in whom apparently sane and rational individuals were inexplicably prepared to place their trust just over a year ago – were absent. Whatever other flaws she had (and I think she had a couple), you can’t imagine a complete vacuum in Downing Street when That Bloody Woman was in charge. Even Bliar and Arrivederci Gordon realised some bugger had to hold the fort.

Everybody deserves a holiday. Even PBD and Gideon. (Or, more accurately, their families.) But, in real life, everybody in my department is not allowed to go on holiday at the same time. It is shameful beyond comprehension that the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Home Secretary and the Mayor of London were all on holiday at the same time.

And I notice Chauncey Gardiner was on his hols, too, only deigning to come back from Devon’s Adenoid Extraction Recovery Unit AFTER PBD had announced he was getting on a plane to fly back from Tuscany. That tells you everything you need to know about our Leader (sic) of the Opposition.

What was our Coalition administration’s stunning Plan B while everyone topped up their tans? William Hague and Vince Cable. The former, a man whose leadership credentials have already been roundly rejected by the British electorate in a plebiscite; the latter, a man whose sole achievement over the past 15 months has been to demonstrate his lack of temperamental suitability for ministerial office. It shows how well the Don’t Panic Double Act went that first Nick Clegg, then Theresa May and then finally PBD dragged their sorry arses back to work like a half-hearted zombie invasion.

Gideon remains absent, soaking up the Californian sun. Rome burns but it’s nothing to do with him, guv.

Of course, the real salt is yet to be rubbed into the wound. Wait for it – it’s coming: the emergency police powers. We’re inches away from a police state. But then maybe that’s what our politicians have wanted all along.

And one final thing. What the fuck has this got to do with the Olympics? How many people were murdered in Los Angeles in 1983? Or Beijing in 2007? Grow a fucking pair. If you want to try to shift attention away from the fact that you have wrought this on yourselves by pursuing exclusionary policies, fine. But some of us would have preferred all along if the £9.3 billion or more of public money being spent on the Olympics had been spent pursuing inclusionary policies.

Not for the first time, the Minister quotes with approval Tom McRae:
Rioters of London, remember to leave some real estate standing so mortgage companies have a product to deny you.
I wish the poor shopkeepers luck in claiming on their insurance or getting small business loans. The wrong buildings are on fire.

(Thanks to Radio Nixon for the post title.)

Flaccidity

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I thought Iain Duncan-Smith would be the worst Leader of the Opposition I ever experienced.  Wholly lacking in personality, gravitas, communication skills or the indefinable leadership ‘X factor’, his only redeeming feature was that he was a fully paid up member of the Toryscum and his maladroit tenure was therefore amusing to me.

Edward Samuel Miliband has, however, romped clear in the race to be the least competent and most clueless holder of the office.  The distance Miliband – a man so inept I can’t even be bothered to think of a soubriquet for him – has put between himself and the likes of Duncan-Smith, Howard and Foot resembles nothing so much as the way Shergar drew clear of the field in the 1981 Derby.

Miliband’s campaign for the leadership was pathetic insofar as he sought to claim that the calamaties of the Bliar and Arrivederci Years were nothing to do with him.  That untrue, self-serving claim ensured he did not get my vote.

Interestingly, of course, he didn’t win the vote of MPs and MEPs.

He didn’t win the vote of party members, either.

While I am in favour of both trades unions and proportional representation, you do have to wonder whether everything is entirely rosy in the garden when a candidate who lost two of the three electoral colleges on offer still wins the election.

I’ve given him as much time and cut him as much slack as I could.  But while I largely decry the knee-jerk reactionism so beloved of rolling news channels, there is also a point at which you have to accept that things are not working out and that persevering with the status quo will do more damage in the longer-term than the short-term damage of changing leaders for a second time in twelve months.

The way politicians sound and look matters.  It shouldn’t matter – and certainly not as much as what they say and do – but it does.  And Miliband sounds and looks dreadful.  For wont of a better description, he looks and sounds floppy.  While having the charisma of a breeze block didn’t stop John Major, at least he was not handicapped by also being ill-at-ease with himself and others.

So, awkward and floppy.  It’s not much of a selling point, is it?

And the electorate can’t help but draw an unfavourable conclusion in comparison with the presidential swagger and unrelenting smoooooothness offered by PBD. (LL Cool D, anyone?)

That Bloody Woman and Bliar were lucky Prime Ministers in that they faced (largely) awful Leaders of the Opposition at most of the elections they fought.  If we hope to have a welfare state, a state education system and an NHS to leave to our children, we can’t repeat that mistake.  We have to put up a vertebrate against them.

The final straw for me came with Miliband’s abysmal decision to call for Kenneth Clarke’s resignation last month.  Clarke fucked up during one radio call-in, fair enough, but anybody who has actually paid any attention to British politics over the past 30 years knows that Clarke is one of the last Toryscum standing on whom social democrats should not automatically urinate.

Miliband’s judgement was abysmal on the day of Clarke’s problems, but I might have been able to overlook it had he not compounded the problem 48 hours later by publishing a pitiful attempt at self-justification in The Independent (effectively the only ‘quality’ newspaper left to the Minister until Harry Potter is finally sacked for bankrupting The Guardian).

He could have just moved on and hoped that everyone would forget.  But he didn’t.  In a lovely little microcosm encapsulating his entire time in office, his judgement was awful and his performance worse.  He stood limply at the despatch box savaging Clarke like a dead squirrel and then awkwardly spewed anaemic, nonsensical drivel in the direction of news microphones and newspaper column typesetters.  It was only marginally less infuriating than it was embarrassing.

(I’m not going to waste everyone’s time by repeating again the various arguments about why Clarke should have rightly been called for his poor use of language in espousing a perfectly sensible penal policy proposal and then left to get on with it.  I will, however, observe that Miliband’s limp posturing almost certainly resulted in that policy being spiked.  So well done, Ed.  Fucking brilliant work.)

For the record, I voted for Ed Balls in the Labour leadership ballot.  I don’t care whether or not he’s a nice guy: he is undoubtedly the best performing senior Labour politician against the Eton Trifles.  He gets under their skin; he gets at them; he gets to the point; he gets that point across.  The contrast with Edward Samuel Miliband could scarcely be starker.

Anyway, enough whining about nonentities.  Typography For Lawyers has just landed on my desk.  And I may have just wet myself a little bit.

Now my stomach is sick

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YOU MOTHERFUCKING, HYPOCRITICAL, SHITEHAWK, CHANCER CUNT!

Former Home Secretary David Blunkett says the government should scrap plans to introduce ID cards for all in favour of mandatory biometric passports.

Speaking at InfoSec 2009, a security conference held in London, the MP for Sheffield Brightside said biometric passports could do the job.

He said he had put the idea to the current Home Secretary Jacqui Smith.

It is something of a u-turn for the MP who first mooted the idea of ID cards when he was Home Secretary in 2001.

Wave goodbye, the spineless, pathetic fucking lot of you.

A policeman knew my name/ He said “You can go sleep at home tonight if you can get up and walk away”

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Her Majesty’s Opposition is supposed to fulfil two roles.  First, to oppose the platform offered by Her Majesty’s Government.  Second, to propose an alternative platform to that offered by Her Majesty’s Government.

PBD’s Tories are perfectly adequate at opposing Arri’s Army – every time a Minister pops up to say something, up pops a Shadow Minister – however inadequate, implausible or generally soggy – to say that they are wrong on every count.  I can’t fault them on that score.  But they offer no alternative in any sense of the word other than them simply not being Labour.

For many at the coming elections, Anyone But Labour will itself be enough of a reason to vote for PBD.  And it’s hard to argue otherwise these days: most are long past the point of being prepared to stick Polly Twatbee’s clothes peg on their nose yet again.

But, the Minister humbly contends, simply opposing the Government for the sake of attaining office oneself is not enough.  The Minister believes that politics matters and if you want the Minister’s vote you have to earn it by at least proposing something different, something substantial and something concrete.

A case is point is offered up today by Sir Simon Jenkins.  Jenkins remains one of the few Tories I can stomach, in part because he regularly offers up columns like today’s and in part because he doesn’t insist on his knighthood appearing in his byline.

Jenkins’ column sets out a well-argued critique of the disgraceful and immoral erosion of civil liberties perpetrated by the most sustainedly illiberal peacetime administration of the modern era.  Where Straw (barrister), Blunkett (teacher and letch), Clarke (management consultant and letch), Reid (drunkard [reformed] and letch [reformed]) and Smith (bad joke married to a letch) have salami sliced our civil liberties to the point where the former bosses of the Stasi are wondering where they went so badly wrong themselves, Jenkins points out that their measures are both draconian and – in practical terms – almost entirely chimerical.

He does not, though, offer an alternative platform other than to echo Father Ted’s, “Down with this sort of thing.”

But it is not, of course, for a Guardian columnist to write the Tory Party’s manifesto.

Nor, however, is it entirely unreasonable for us to expect the Eton Trifles to stand for something, to have given we proles an inkling – now at most one year out from the start of a General Election campaign – about how they propose to do things differently.

Would they scrap ID Cards?  Would they stop throwing money at the national NHS database everyone with half-an-inch of brain knows will fail?  Or would they instead quietly keep up their sleeve all the tools and powers that Jack, David, Charles, John and Jacqui have amassed, ready for use should the going get tough enough?  Who knows how far the imminent Tory administration will interfere needlessly in our lives?

Perhaps naively, I think civil liberties matter.  It should come as no surprise to anyone on a site called Minitrue to learn that the most influential book I have ever read was Nineteen Eighty-Four: there is no room in a civilised society for Thoughtcrime, whatever Wacky Jacqui is trying to achieve.

I come down firmly on the side of the argument that says ten guilty people should walk free in order to save one innocent person from incarceration.  When it comes to civil liberties, I am closer to the traditional Tory standpoint than on any other subject.

One problem, as Jenkins points out, is that today’s Tories can no longer claim to be libertarians.  Another is that the old standby chestnut of “the innocent have nothing to fear” is a proven sack of shit.

The Labour majority in my parliamentary constituency in 2005 was just 3,383.  The sitting MP is a joke-and-a-half, so wedded is he to the party line, but at least he puts himself about a bit.  I might not like him, but I know who he is.

I couldn’t tell you the Tory candidate’s name if he, she or it were sitting on my face right now, so I certainly couldn’t tell you what he, she or it stands for or believes in – despite the fact that this constituency has returned Conservative MPs far more regularly than it has returned Labour MPs.  That sorry state of affairs is replicated across the country.

And, I respectfully contend, the country deserves better.

That’s how the light gets in

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Nice.

What could Arrivederci’s Army possibly want or need to suppress, what with this being such an eminently sensible idea, executed so well, by such competent and clever people?

The government has been ordered to publish two reviews into the ID cards scheme after a four-year battle.

“Gateway” reviews are carried out on government projects by independent assessors who look at their progress and likely success.

The government has been fighting Freedom of Information attempts to get the reviews into the controversial scheme published.

It argues that confidentiality is essential to the reviews’ process.

But in a judgement published on Friday, the Information Tribunal – which hears appeals against FOI rulings – ordered both reports be disclosed within 28 days.

“For long as I’ve seen him, he’s always given the impression of being a slimy invertebrate”

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I’m quickly falling in love with the blog spEak You’re bRanes.

Who couldn’t fall in love with a blog that describes itself thus?

This blog is dedicated to the dribble-spattered lunacy of BBC “Have Your Say” discussions. Part of me thinks that the right-wing “blogosphere” of America is encouraging its slow readers to get over to the BBC and add their ill-informed opinions… but another part of me fears that the sample is actually more representative… perhaps the majority of people in the world really are this awful and stupid.

This is possibly a better description though, from an avid reader: “I just love the way you’ve appointed yourselves as the moral arbiters of what is posted on HYS, as if you have something significant to contribute. That and your self-satisfied sanctimonious attitude…“. Bang on, bitch.

Today’s posts have been immense.  First, some nonsense about the proposed Very Big Horse statue in Kent; then a mighty contribution to the debate about the Clusterfuck To The Poor House that is prefaced in the following terms:

I have a lot of respect for perfumiers. I mean, think of the genius who had to come up with Kerry Katona’s signature scent. They had to consider the fundamental abstract notions of Katona-ness, distill them into a chemical form, and manage to make the result not smell like chip fat and tears.

I fucking love it.  The only tears here are induced by laughter, and are rolling down my plump and rosy Ministerial cheeks…

And now I’ve found this – Disgraced Former Europe Minister Keith Vaz imploding on live national television – I’m really going to have to start making more of an effort to stay awake until 11.15pm:

If you don’t have 10 minutes to spare – and cut yourself some slack; you’re busy people – allow Sid (from Pickled Politics) to sum matters up succinctly in his exquisitely entitled post, Vaz Deference:

Keith Vaz, Labour MP of Leicester, pretends to engage knowledgeably on the intricate points of the issue of freedom of speech that underlies the whole [Geert Wilders] episode. Instead his ruse is blown when it becomes apparent that not only does he wilfully misunderstand the fundamentals of FoS, he has come on a discussion on Wilders’ 18 minute film on national television without even having seen the film.

He then proceeds to self destruct in a thunderous self-inflicted detonation, causing blood, sperm and liquid bullshit dripping off the studio furniture. Leaving the other protaganists in the discussion to carry on with the semblence of a conversation, while the fulminated entrails of Vaz’s credibility twitched involuntarily around them.

What a cunt (Disgraced Former Minister Keith Vaz, that is, not Sid from Pickled Politics).

I love the t’Internet.  What the fuck did I do with my life before it existed?

Harry Potter and the Lunatic Asylum Management Buy-Out

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Mr. Rubbisher must be on holiday because parts of today’s Harry Potter Bugle are positively Trotskyite.

First we’ve got Mark Thomas providing a cut-out-and-keep card to wind up The Filth when they seek to impinge our civil liberties.

Then we’ve got George Mobiot absolutely flaying that android/banshee Hazel Blears in terms so vitriolic they could have been written by a hungover Minister:

An open letter to Hazel Blears MP, secretary of state for communities and local government.

Last week you used an article in the Guardian to attack my “cynical and corrosive commentary”. You asserted your political courage, maintaining that “you don’t get very far in politics without guts, and certainly not as far as the cabinet table”. By contrast, you suggested, I contribute “to the very cynicism and disengagement from politics” that I make my living writing about. You accused me of making claims without supporting evidence and of “wielding great influence without accountability”. “We need more people standing for office and serving their communities,” you wrote, “more people debating, engaging and voting; not more people waving placards on the sidelines.”

Quite so. But being the placard-waving sort, I have a cynical and corrosive tendency to mistrust the claims ministers make about themselves. Like you, I believe opinions should be based on evidence. So I have decided to test your statements against the record.

Courage in politics is measured by the consistent application of principles. The website TheyWorkForYou.com records votes on key issues since 2001. It reveals that you voted “very strongly for the Iraq war”, “very strongly against an investigation into the Iraq war” and “very strongly for replacing Trident” (“very strongly” means an unbroken record). You have voted in favour of detaining terror suspects without charge for 42 days, in favour of identity cards and in favour of a long series of bills curtailing the freedom to protest. There’s certainly consistency here, though it is not clear what principles you are defending.

Other threads are harder to follow. In 2003, for instance, you voted against a fully elected House of Lords and in favour of a chamber of appointed peers. In 2007, you voted for a fully elected House of Lords. You have served without public complaint in a government which has introduced the minimum wage but blocked employment rights for temporary and agency workers; which talked of fiscal prudence but deregulated the financial markets; which passed the Climate Change Act but approved the construction of a third runway at Heathrow; which spoke of an ethical foreign policy but launched an illegal war in which perhaps a million people have died. Either your principles, by some remarkable twists of fate, happen to have pre-empted every contradictory decision this government has taken, or you don’t possess any.

You remained silent while the government endorsed the kidnap and the torture of innocent people; blocked a ceasefire in Lebanon and backed a dictator in Uzbekistan who boils his prisoners to death. You voiced no public concern while it instructed the Serious Fraud Office to drop the corruption case against BAE, announced a policy of pre-emptive nuclear war, signed a one-sided extradition treaty with the United States and left our citizens to languish in Guantánamo Bay. You remained loyal while it oversaw the stealthy privatisation of our public services and the collapse of Britain’s social housing programme, closed hundreds of post offices and shifted taxation from the rich to the poor. What exactly do you stand for Hazel, except election?

The only consistent political principle I can deduce from these positions is slavish obedience to your masters. TheyWorkForYou sums up your political record thus: “Never rebels against their party in this parliament.” Yours, Hazel, is the courage of the sycophant, the courage to say yes.

Let me remind you just how far your political “guts” have carried you. You are temporarily protected by the fact that the United Kingdom, unlike other states, has not yet incorporated the Nuremberg principles into national law. If a future government does so, you and all those who remained in the cabinet on 20 March 2003 will be at risk of prosecution for what the Nuremberg tribunal called “the supreme international crime”. This is defined as the “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression”. Robin Cook, a man of genuine political courage, put his conscience ahead of his career and resigned. What did you do?

It seems to me that someone of your principles would fit comfortably into almost any government. All regimes require people like you, who seem to be prepared to obey orders without question. Unwavering obedience guarantees success in any administration. It also guarantees collaboration in every atrocity in which a government might engage. The greatest thing we have to fear in politics is the cowardice of politicians.

I believe there is a vast public appetite for re-engagement, but your government, aware of the electoral consequences, has shut us out. It has reneged on its promise to hold a referendum on electoral reform. It has blocked a referendum on the European treaty, ditched the regional assemblies, used Scottish MPs to swing English votes, sustained an unelected House of Lords, eliminated almost all the differences between itself and the opposition. You create an impenetrable political monoculture, then moan that people don’t engage in politics.

It is precisely because I can picture something better that I have become such a cynical old git. William Hazlitt remarked that: “Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.” You, Hazel, have helped to reduce our political choices to a single question: whether to laugh through our tears or weep through our laughter.

In the immortal words of Hong Kong Phooey, “Fanriffic!”

Harry Potter And The Onset Of Self-Doubt

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Cock it.

I agree with Marcel Berlins.

I cannot remember the last time there has been such hysteria over something so relatively minor as the Damian Green affair. Rarely can so many normally reasonable people have lost so many of their marbles.

Marcel clearly must have missed Manuelgate…

The political and media reaction has been stunningly excessive and mostly misguided. The band of columnists and so-called expert commentators fearing the demise of parliamentary democracy – as absurd a slippery slope argument as I’ve heard – or worrying about the decline in our civil liberties, have taken the concept of disproportion to a new level. If I were to look for evidence of our traditional liberties being diminished, it is there in abundance in the laws passed by parliament over the past few years.

Let us look at the reality of what has happened. We don’t know all the facts; indeed, we can be sure of very few. But even accepting a worst-case-scenario speculation, there has been a quite extraordinary over-reaction. I’m not saying everyone involved has behaved perfectly. Mistakes appear to have been made all round. But they do not justify the response that has occurred…

After a flurry of inquiries and furrowed brows, whatever wrongs were committed this time won’t happen again. The Speaker won’t be as accommodating in letting the police into parliament, the police will learn to be more subtle when investigating certain kinds of crime, and the home secretary may learn not to look quite so shifty and terrified each time she appears on television. The unnecessary panic and the suicidally gloomy prognostications will be laid to rest.

What I fear, though, is that this relatively unserious incident will be used to rearrange the relationship between police, politicians and government. This would be damaging.

I’m going to have to kill myself.

The Times they are a-changin’

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On Saturday I was dispirited to read on the front page of Times Online a small article by David Leppard headlined ‘Sneak’ plan for mandatory ID cards.

Being the saddo I am I wanted to look at the bill to which the article referred, so I just did a search for the article using the Times Online website’s own search facility.

No sign of it under searches for ‘ID cards’, ‘identity cards’ or ‘David Leppard’.

Yet it’s still there (via Google News) or if you know the direct URL, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article5162669.ece

How curious.

Surely The Thunderer isn’t censoring itself, having inadvertently drawn attention to a matter on which the Tories remain curiously silent when not openly schizophrenic…?

Anyway, one more time in full for those with a tendency towards depression:

‘Sneak’ plan for mandatory ID cards
David Leppard

Ministers have been accused of trying to introduce compulsory identity cards through the back door, despite promises that people will not have to carry them.

Lawyers at Liberty, the civil liberties group, say that little noticed clauses in the draft immigration and citizenship bill introduce new powers to make people produce identity documents or face arrest. The bill is expected to be in the Queen’s speech next month.

At issue is a clause in the bill which says that anyone who is to be examined by an immigration officer “must produce a valid identity document if required to do so”. Failure to produce an identity card or otherwise prove identity will become a criminal offence. At present, producing a passport counts as proof of identity.

It had been thought the clauses applied only to people entering the UK at ports.

But Liberty says a separate clause in the bill extends powers of examination to new categories of people. They include anyone in the UK — whether a British citizen or not — who has ever left the country.

Isabella Sankey, Liberty’s policy officer, said: “Immigration law is being used as a cloak to introduce measures that would effectively compel us all to carry ID cards. Under these paranoid proposals if you have ever set foot outside the UK you could be required, at any time, to prove your identity and nationality.”

The Home Office disputed Liberty’s reading of the bill. A spokesman said: “The bill does not contain legislation that will require UK citizens to be issued with compulsory ID cards. It clearly states that valid identity documents must be produced on request to maintain effective immigration control.”

Launch of the ID cards scheme begins next week when marriage visa holders and non-European Union students will be the first recipients.

Airside workers at some airports will then be issued with cards — a move opposed by pilots’ unions and related groups.

The cards were proposed after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in America. Opponents say they are expensive, unnecessary and infringe on human rights.

Cards will carry a picture and security chip containing biometric data.

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