Who ordered the arrest? …. Did one of those factors apply?

Should all be italicised, as Sunfish’s question.

Who ordered the arrest? If it was pursuant to a warrant, the warrant should have been issued by a judge. Correct?

Did one of those factors apply?

No. Police and prosecuting authorities have much more arbitrary power here than in the States. It has been accruing for over 20 years, but has been massively increased in the last decade.

No warrant is in general required for an arrest, unless the arrest is being made on behalf of a third party such as court whose order is being defied, the HMRC in its tax function (though the Inland Revenue is pushing to get police arrest powers too). No warrant is required for very extensive search and seizure of property associated with the person arrested, provided the reason given for arrest is moderately serious. Police can authorise themselves to bug suspects or to use numerous powers of entry.

The next day a mainstream independent association of scientists (the Royal Society of Chemistry, I seem to remember) reported that science education (in all the sciences) was now a farce at school level – with “A” (advanced) level examination at 18 year of age, having collapsed in the level of knowledge and problem solving the courses teach.

No doubt H.B. will also deny that the recent arrest has anything to do with trying to create a “chilling effect” on dissent – that would be “cynical” and such a cynical attitude “should not exist”.

Who ordered the arrest? If it was pursuant to a warrant, the warrant should have been issued by a judge. Correct?

At least here, if the arrest was made without a warrant, then additional justification would generally be needed: inability to identify the arrestee, reasonable basis to believe that the arrestee would flee the jurisdiction or refuse to appear if summoned to court, or reasonable grounds to believe that he’d pose a danger to himself or to the public at large if not arrested.

Did one of those factors apply? Was it not possible to identify a member of Parliament? Was there a concern that he’d run over people in his car and beat up nuns if not immediately taken into custody? Did he have a secret Namibian passport and a private plane with warm engines waiting?

My entire adult life as a cop has taught me one thing: the truth generally sounds true, and a lie generally sounds like bullshit. The relevance: when the PM and the HS both claim not to have been informed ahead of time of a police plan to arrest an opposition member of Parliament, I know how that sounds-about like if the US AG had claimed to not know that the FBI was planning to arrest a Democratic representative who was storing eighty grand of bribe money in his freezer.

Gordon Brown is clearly a fascist wannabe, and it would be even worse for Boris Johnson to have been privy to this. Hopefully most people will hear about this.
.
absurd thought -
God of the Universe says
arrest innocent MPs

for just doing their jobs
exposing failed policies

.
absurd thought -
God of the Universe says
be a violent leftist

attack conservatives’ homes
you brown-shirt NAZI FASCISTS

.
absurd thought -
God of the Universe thinks
Marx was NOT an idiot

keep believing and HOPING
that communism WILL WORK

.
All real freedom starts with freedom of speech. Without freedom of speech there can be no real freedom.
.
Philosophy of Liberty Cartoon
.
Help Halt Terrorism Today!
.
USpace

.

This was the honourable and noble stance to take!

After all we Civil Servants were supposed to be beyond politics.

So I just went with the truth instead…

They have been utterly useless as an opposition.

What appears to be a quite obscure common law offence is being used increasingly in ways that I find troubling.

As G.K. Chesterton said…

“I had thought of calling the next sort of superficial people the Idealists; but I think this implies a humility towards impersonal good they hardly show; so I call them the Autocrats. They are those who give us generally to understand that every modern reform will “work” all right, because they will be there to see. Where they will be, and for how long, they do not explain very clearly. I do not mind their looking forward to numberless lives in succession; for that is the shadow of a human or divine hope. But even a theosophist does not expect to be a vast number of people at once. And these people most certainly propose to be responsible for a whole movement after it has left their hands. Each man promises to be about a thousand policemen. If you ask them how this or that will work, they will answer, “Oh, I would certainly insist on this”; or “I would never go so far as that”; as if they could return to this earth and do what no ghost has ever done quite successfully — force men to forsake their sins. Of these it is enough to say that they do not understand the nature of a law any more than the nature of a dog. If you let loose a law, it will do as a dog does. It will obey its own nature, not yours. Such sense as you have put into the law (or the dog) will be fulfilled. But you will not be able to fulfill a fragment of anything you have forgotten to put into it.”