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Tim Worstall asks: “Are We Still a Free People?“:
We have a Home Secretary who has been told by the courts that locking foreigners up and denying them their right to trial is illegal. The basic presumption is that one must either be tried and convicted, or be being held on remand while that process is put in train, for it to be allowable for the State to lock you up. His reaction on being told that foreigners have the same rights as natives was, quite amazingly, to remove that right for natives. Quite.
The most basic foundation of the relationship between citizen and state, that of the right to trial, Habeus Corpus and all the rest, has been altered. It is seriously proposed that the Home Secretary should be allowed to intern anyone at all, on no evidence that he has to reveal (and thus can be argued against), for as long as he wishes. We all know that miscarriages of justice happen, the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four being examples, even when there is an open system with judges, juries and the like. We’ll never know under the new system as no one will ever have to tell us.
Quite. The illiberal moves by this government are rather worrying.
The Civil Contingencies Act became law last Thursday in what can only be described as a blaze on non-publicity. This legislation, which represents perhaps the most serious threat to liberty in Britain since World War II, has put in place the legal tools for some future government to impose rule-by-edict.
It would be hard to overstate how grave this situation is.
If your political antennae have been sensitive to the undercurrents shimmering across the blogosphere, then you will have picked up the few postings alerting readers to the implications of the Civil Contingencies Bill. The dangers of this giant step towards authoritarianism have been publicised far more effectively both by David Carr and on Iain Murray’s personal weblog, The Edge of Englands Sword:
Lord Lucas has described the Civil Contingencies Bill as comparable to Hitler’s Enabling Act of 1933 which enabled him to transform Germany’s Weimar Republic into his own personal tyranny. I have now read it, and I have to say that he is not exaggerating.
Readers could argue that this is an invocation of Godwin’s Law and that, by quoting this passage, I have lost the argument. However, this opinion is that of Torquil Dirk-Erikson, “a noted Eurosceptic writer and learned silk”. However, in considering the passage of this Act, it should also be noted that the European Constitution has a section on ‘civil protection’ as one of the coordinating powers for the European authorities.
The Government wishes to push through an updated Civil Contingencies Bill in 2004. It does not mention the EU, but the draft EU Constitution includes ‘civil protection’ as an area for ‘coordinating action’ and the current Treaty mentions the topic vaguely. The Bill also enables the creation of arbitrary imprisonable criminal offences. It enables regulations that can delegate powers to anyone or confer jurisdiction on any court or tribunal. This could be an EU body, unaccountable to government or the people.
Although the draft Constitution gives us a veto on a European Public Prosecutor (the Government says it ‘currently’ sees no reason for one) Blair has said that he opposes permanent ‘opt-outs’ or being isolated in Europe. Although the amended Bill states that it will not change criminal procedure, the Government is happy for the EU to have over-riding powers to do this via the EU Constitution.
These developments happen at a time when the Government is trying to introduce universal ID cards and a ‘population register’, and has just announced a national database to carry information on all children, not merely those ‘at risk’ (Sunday Times, 25.7.04). Again there are worrying parallels with European developments. Amazingly, MI5’s website, which is listed in Preparing For Emergencies assures us that “the subversive threat to parliamentary democracy is now negligible”.
One giant step along ‘Chavez’ Blair’s road to a ‘managed democracy’.
Cross-posted to Samizdata.
The British government is advocating the vaccination of children against particular behaviours using the forthcoming array of pharmacotherapy vaccines. These would innoculate children against a host of behaviours that the government defines as anti-social: drinking, smoking, drugs, blogging and so on.
The article explains that “Doctors would immunize children at risk of becoming smokers or drug users with an injection” and that the program would operate in a way similar to the “current nationwide measles, mumps and rubella vaccination programme.” Further the authors reveal that “such vaccinations are being developed by pharmaceutical companies and are due to hit the market within two years.”
Developments like this are monitored by the Centre for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics, whose response was clear:
Richard Glen Boire, a legal scholar at the CCLE, believes that vaccinating children with “anti-drug” drugs would be “alarming and unlawful, and would signal the first time that neuropharmaceuticals were overtly used to enforce government policy.”
Aside from the human rights concerns, the UK plan raises serious health questions regarding the long-term effects of these drugs on the complex neurochemistry of the brain.
The CCLE warns that advances in the neurosciences will challenge the ability of individuals to maintain their cognitive freedom. Governments will redefine mental health to use drugs and other neurotechnologies in order to police and channel people’s behaviours.
(My thanks to Alex Ramonsky of the Entelechy Institute for alerting me to this issue).
If you are arrested, and the police take your DNA to run tests on it, and if the outcome of your arrest is either that no charges were brought against you or you were brought to trial and found innocent, it has been ruled that the state can retain your DNA records indefinitely regardless.
The moral of the story is, of course, that if you do not want the state to take your DNA and hold it on record forever because you simply do not trust the state or because you have the quaint notion that your body is your own property, then do whatever it takes to not get arrested, regardless of how confident you are that you can establish your innocence subsequently.
Lord Brown said the benefits of this procedure were so manifest and the objections so threadbare that the cause of human rights would be better served by expanding the police database rather than by reducing it.
Just as it has often been said that modern fascism is most likely to appear in the guise of anti-fascism, when some establishment figure like Lord Brown start taking about ‘human rights’ it is a fair bet that ‘human rights’ about to get trampled underfoot.
My guess is that it is only a matter of time before the police in some nations start taking samples of DNA from everyone, probably starting with all children under a programme with a name like ‘The Safe Children Act’ or something similar, probably with the ostensible reason of ‘protecting your child from kidnap by Paedophiles’ or some such drivel. I mean, after all, who could possibly object to that?
The state is not your friend.
A loyal reader sends in this ‘gem’ of a story… someone was arrested for sketching on the South Bank:
I spent four hours (having already been detained for three and a half) in a cell in Kennington police station wondering whether I might not be joining those in Belmarsh where Mr Blunkett could detain me without explanation and, in the interest of public security, refuse to divulge the alleged evidence. If the majority in this country need protecting, they had better ask who the enemies of democracy currently are.
Read the whole thing… Incredible but not surprising.
The Home Secretary has instructed the Humberside Police Authority to suspend the chief constable of Humberside, David Westwood. I have no views on the actual issue of David Westwood’s competence and whether or not he actually deserves to be suspended and ultimately sacked, but what is alarming is how Downing Street is centralising more and more decisions on local matters that have a huge baring on civil liberties.
Lawyers for Mr Blunkett are expected to ask the High Court, possibly on Tuesday, for an injunction forcing the authority to carry out his instruction to suspend the officer. This will be the first test of powers under the Police Reform Act 2002 and the Home Secretary will argue that suspension is necessary “for the maintenance of public confidence” in the force.
[..]
Colin Inglis, the chairman of the authority and the Labour leader of Kingston-upon-Hull told BBC1’s Look North: “The police authority is not a rubber stamp and if the Home Secretary expected a rubber stamp then that, I’m afraid, is not what he has got.
“The Home Secretary is not David Westwood’s line manager. David Westwood works for the police authority.
The issue is not “is David Westwood a good copper” but “do you want David Blunkett making those decisions?”. No prizes for guessing where I stand on that.
It is a long time since I have contributed anything to White Rose. And it is a long time since this article by journalist and novelist Alexandra Campbell appeared, in the Telegraph, on May 14th. Apologies on both counts, but better occasional contributions and late reports of White Rose relevant material than never, I hope you agree.
This article did not just appear in the Telegraph. It was also reproduced in full, in the “last word” slot, towards the end of the “all you need to know about everything that matters” magazine (i.e. lots of good bits from all the different British newspapers) The Week, of May 29th, Issue 462. That was where and (approximately) when I first read the piece.
Ms. Campbell, on the basis of vague CCTV “evidence”, was falsely accused of a crime, and it took a scarily long time for the system to stop persecuting her.
Concluding paragraphs:
“In theory,” said Mark, “it’s innocent until proved guilty. In practice, whoever makes the allegation first is believed.”
Now that we are all picked up on CCTVs up to 300 times a day, and can also easily be identified electronically through swipe cards (health clubs, the office, season tickets, etc), there is a real risk of someone linking you to a passing resemblance on a fuzzy CCTV image and making an allegation against you.
It had taken about eight months to get to this point of the inquiry and I was terrified of enduring months’ more worry before I was cleared, but the police followed up my brother’s statement quickly and dropped the charges. However, they told me that current policy is to leave fingerprints, pictures and allegations permanently on file.
Checking subsequently with the police press office, I find that “fingerprints may not be held for more than 42 days”, but I find it scary that nobody really seems to know. I suspect our civil rights are being chipped away all the time in the name of crime and terrorism prevention.
The whole thing, I discovered, was based on a breach of the Data Protection Act. Companies using CCTV are supposed to show images only to authorised people, such as the police. The supermarket involved should never have allowed the receptionist and the credit card victim to see footage on demand. The receptionist, himself in charge of CCTV, should have known this. He wasn’t even following his own company’s code of practice, which asks staff who are suspicious of members to take the matter to a manager first. But he has done nothing illegal.
And neither have I. But while I struggle to have my records deleted from police files, he has drifted on and cannot, so far, be contacted. Nobody knows if he made the allegation out of boredom, spite, or genuine, if misplaced, civic-mindedness. It’s Kafkaesque, said friends. It’s a joke, said others. But it wasn’t fiction and it wasn’t funny. I was actually very lucky.
I might not have been able to prove where I was. If I’d been a lawyer, police officer, accountant or worked in financial services, my career and livelihood would also have been on the line, and if I’d been a celebrity, the story would have been splashed all over the papers before it was disproved. If the allegation had been connected to terrorism, I would have been jailed immediately.
I used to think that if you didn’t break the law, you had nothing to fear from it. Now I know that if this can happen to me, it can happen to anyone.
Unpersons alerted us to the news that from today British police may legally and against the will of any law-abiding subject, take DNA samples and fingerprints from any arrested person without that person having even been charged with committing a criminal act.
We can but echo the good Unpersons concerns:
The law now leaves British police officers free to help Blunkett establish one of the most ambitious and truly disturbing elements of the British police state that he has slowly but surely been working to create over the last few years. In a country where the state can take over half of your income, charge you expenses when it wrongly imprisons you – yet fail to defend you after it has crushed the right to self-defence, send parents to jail for not sending their children to state day-care centres schools, steal your property because ‘you couldn’t possibly have earned that much money without selling illegal drugs’ whilst slowly handing over control to a foreign power, attempt to dictate what you eat ‘for your own good’ and generally treat its citizens as its troublesome children one has to wonder to what extent we already live in a police state.
This has not been a good week.
Blair is a liar. But of course the notion any politician does not utter more than the occasional porkie pie is a very uncontroversial one. But as I said in the wellspring of lies yesterday, one can but marvel at the bare faced effrontery of it when our political masters stand up and state something is true when any person not wilfully blind (or David Blunkett) can see it is patently untrue just by reading a few newspapers or one of several thousand blogs and websites.
Mr Blair said political objections had been removed and the only obstacle now was technical. He made clear he wanted the project to “move forward” as soon as it was feasible.
He risked antagonising civil rights campaigners by claiming they no longer objected to the idea, which would see each citizen required to buy a computer-readable card that would record personal details.
Risks antagonising? Civil rights campaigners no longer object to the idea? Excuse the French, but, what the fuck? Blair is a bare faced liar. The only other alternative to that is that he is so ignorant of goings on outside the cloistered world of 10 Downing Street as to be completely deluded.
I will try my damnedest to refuse to get an ID card and I will openly declare that I do not have one when the sun rises on that evil day. I urge as many people as possible to not just resist but to do so openly when the time comes. They will try to make it very difficult to live without one so we must make the system unworkable by using whatever civil disobedience and intelligent resistance is needed. Do not cooperate with your own repression. Time to get creative, people. Time to get angry.
Cross-posted from Samizdata.net
A new nationwide police agency, the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) has been created in Britain.
The creation of a new “British FBI” to combat organised crime, with informants being offered reduced sentences to snitch on their gangland bosses, was given unanimous support in the Commons today – despite a controversial raft of new powers.
The home secretary, David Blunkett, told MPs he was in favour of allowing intercept material – bugged phone calls and emails – to be used as evidence, pending a review which would report back in June.
And he would also, for the first time, force professionals such as lawyers and solicitors to cooperate with police enquiries into organised crime, even if it meant betraying client confidentiality.
And thus people will simply stop asking for legal opinions just in case their shyster runs off to the police in order to cover their rear ends and thereby ensuring a steadily increasing climate of fear, distrust and uncertainty. The Blair-Blunkett government are nothing less that populist authoritarians.
It takes a lot to amaze me, but Blunkett has done just that.
WHAT do you give someone who’s been proved innocent after spending the best part of their life behind bars, wrongfully convicted of a crime they didn’t commit?
An apology, maybe? Counselling? Champagne? Compensation? Well, if you’re David Blunkett, the Labour Home Secretary, the choice is simple: you give them a big, fat bill for the cost of board and lodgings for the time they spent freeloading at Her Majesty’s Pleasure in British prisons.
On Tuesday, Blunkett will fight in the Royal Courts of Justice in London for the right to charge victims of miscarriages of justice more than £3000 for every year they spent in jail while wrongly convicted. The logic is that the innocent man shouldn’t have been in prison eating free porridge and sleeping for nothing under regulation grey blankets.
This is insane. The state locks someone up unjustly and then demands payment for room and board? This is the true face of the people who have power over us. It is actually evil.
If this astonishing development does not cause the mother of all political storms both in Westminster and society at large, then Britain as a society has clearly become so inured to authoritarianism and arrogance by its rulers that we must be past the point of no return. Blunkett must go. Now!
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