… on TV programmes he (quite sensibly) does not watch. Her Majesty’s Government was actually doing something about Big Brother. Granting him more arbitrary power. The Telegraph’s legal editor explains:
[The Serious Crime Bill] allows judges, sitting without juries, to make orders which, if breached, would put us in prison for five years.
Two conditions must be satisfied before the court can make a serious crime prevention order. First, the judge must be satisfied that someone has been “involved in serious crime” – anywhere in the world.
To be “involved”, you do not have to have committed a serious offence, or even helped someone else to have committed it. All you need to have done is to conduct yourself in a way that was likely to make it easier for someone to commit a serious offence, whether or not it was committed.
And what is a serious criminal offence? Drug trafficking and money laundering, of course. But also fishing for trout with a line left unattended in the water. Depositing controlled waste without a licence. And anything else that a court considers to be sufficiently serious.
Read the whole thing here. The Bill itself is here. Observers of government will notice that it is, unusually for important legislation, being introduced in the Lords. I would welcome any theories why.
And another thing. Since it’s at least three days since the last piece of primary criminal legislation lowered itself to a squatting position on the statute books, I for one am delighted to see the government’s not resting on its laurels by declining to honour us with yet another example of its favourite displacement activity, viz. passing laws.
The trouble with this government is that it just cannot do enough for us.
Edward Lud is not joking, folks. The Police and Justice Act 2006 came into force on the 15th of January (Sunday), making small but significant changes to police bail and powers of detention and treatment of witnesses among other things.
Since that would have been at 1 minute past midnight, it is three-and-a-half days at time of posting. But the new Bill was formally rolled-out on Monday. The Home Office doesn’t work on a Sunday.
Yes that is the new name “prevention orders” – in order to “prevent crime” people can have their liberties denied.
Of course these people need never have actually committed a crime or even been charged with one – to be a considered a suspicious person (say you have been seen with people who are thought to have done bad things) will be enough.
Still, as Guy says, the media and government consider that there are far more important that the public should be concerned about – such as the latest antics on “Big Brother”.
If the “fairness” doctrine gets written into law in the United States (as many Democrats want) broadcasting will be same there.
A.B.C., C.B.S., N.B.C. and C.N.N. will all be declared “fair”, whereas Fox and some talk radio stations will be declared “unfair”.
So whenever the government (not just at Federal level – at the State and local level also) does something “progressive” that the elite approve of and the public might not – well the public will never get to hear about it.
The newspapers in the United States are almost all “liberal” (in the modern American sense of the term) so when there is a State or local story that the “progressives” think that the public might not “understand” it does not get printed (it gets the spike).
Many British newspapers are supposed to be conservative – but if one reads their news and current affairs coverage the amount of what in America would be called “school of journalism” stuff seems to increase every year. There are still newspaper writers with strong opinions that go against the “correct” political viewpoint, but their influence on such things as basic news coverage is in decline.
“But it is the liberal media who have defended liberties against the Bush Administration” – only on certain things, and even these things would be ignored if a Democrat was a President.
Would regular dealings with an organisation that was, at the time, being investigated for possible offences be sufficient grounds? It looks as though it should.
Why has every member of the Labour party not yet been served with a serious crime prevention order?
One could dream, but it is likely to be applied highly politically, the principal users being the secret police, SOCA, not the ordinary type. Judicial involvement is of little protective value where prosecutorial selection is the chief difference between “guilty” and “innocent” parties behaving in parallel perfectly ordinary ways, as some of the victims of the Serious Fraud Office have discovered. (Common law conspiracy to defraud, a serious offence, is a virtual crime. Its elements are present in almost every business transaction.)
The Guardian has picked up that there is also in the same Bill massive potential for “data-sharing” which extends the possibilities for guilt by association arising from errors coincidences and small world phenomena.
Nothing to worry about folks, it will only be applied to 30 or so Mr Bigs each year. There will be no mission creep, and the innocent will have nothing to fear.
I heard John Stalker on the radio talk about this, and he is dead set against it. As an old style copper, he belives that villains should be brought to court and convicted on the evidence against them. He did not say it, but he also knows that at the upper echelons of the state, amoral careerists conspire to destroy the lives of anyone who gets in their way. It happened to Stalker and his friend Peter Taylor, but in court the Crown’s case against Taylor was shown up to be a complete pack of lies. It would have been much easier to issue a NuLabor fatwa against them both without the tiresome necessity to seek outmoded legal mumbo-jumbo such as evidence.
Look guys, if Phony Tony says you’re a pretty straight kind of guy, then you are. Equally, if he decides you’re a villain, you must be. After all, he’s the Prime Minister, and it’s not as if he’s a crook is it?
And another thing. The same Bill is abolishing the old common law offence of “incitement” to commit a crime (which requires the prosecution to prove that you actually intended a crime to be committed) and replacing it with a new offence of “assisting or encouraging a crime”, which doesn’t. See ss39-41.
So MarkE says “regular dealings” with someone under investigation could be covered, he’s right on the money. If you know your service (e.g. car hire, or telephone service) is capable of being used for evil, and you believe your customer is a bad’un, you’d be very brave not to show him the door.
If it is in line with existing “money laundering” legislation, actual belief your customer was “a bad’un” (note how the language of status-crime creeps up on us) is not going to be necessary, it is going to be whether you “ought to suspect”.
Enforcement folks, Enforcement.
Who’s going to instigate and follow up this stuff?
Did I not read this week, that the agency that was to claw back the profits of crime is to be closed down, because , so far they’ve cost billions and “got back”
20 million or so (figures completely arbitory but you know what I mean).
Are these much different from Control orders of the type that has allowed a terrorist suspect to waltz out of the back door of a mosque to who knows (certainly not the Home Office).
Meanwhile a 25% drop of police on the streets cos they have to catch up with the paperwork.
My advice for a successfull future is to keep your assets a liquid as possible.
Keep moving around,
And commit as much crime as you feel like.
No-one will ever lay a glove on you.
Ah but if you have a house, a car , a job, a wheelibin with bugs in….
Prepare to be locked up!
THEY know where you live.
OK, I have a theory. You heard it here first.
This is a continuation of the fear-based election strategy – because we are due an election to weld the Government into place.
Not so much difference from Big Brother the TV show after all then: a display of brutishness to attract popular attention. The legislative channel is being clogged with legislation of a populist slant and such vileness that the opposition will oppose it – and can then be tarred as standing in the way of what the people want. As certified by people’s panels (TM A.Blair 2007).
It doesn’t matter that it doesn’t get through quickly. The longer the rotting carrion is exposed in the Lords the better. More fodder to attack the opposition parties for being soggy on terrorists, crimelords, foreigners and (all the other) chavs… Labour – under Blair – goes to the country in May (10 years) on a manifesto of surpassing legacy-class vileness, cementing the technocratic superstate, and with the annointed successor pre-announced. “I will step aside and allow [Gordon] to take over, with the popular mandate…” And this is the pretext for the election. Brown if he has consented is manacled into the cockpit of a government on autopilot. (Someone else would do, so he might as well.)
If Iain Dale is reading this perhaps he could remind his new friend (ho, ho) she doesn’t have to be hustled by the cheesy chancer. Refusing a dissolution would stop that plan.
I can’t bring myself to dress this up at all. It’s too depressing. So here goes.
Attention Britain:
You are boned.
That is all.
After reading section 7 (and digesting the implications of the rest of the SCPO stuff), I wondered whether the following might one day be uttered by a judge in one of these cases:
“I think your conduct was more likely than not to have facilitated a hypothetical serious crime in outer Elbonia and was probably not reasonable in the circumstances, ergo you can only communicate with home office approved individuals, observe a 7am to 7pm curfew, work for me at other times, and spend your weekends in this caravan here so that you don’t do it again and the public is protected. Oops, I see you’re the Home Secretary’s butler and he’s exempted all his staff from these orders, sorry about that mixup, you’re free to go.”
I hope he watched The Trial of Tony Blair on Channel 4 this evening, and was suitably chastised.
There’s plenty of new-style coppers who have that kind of old-fashioned, unrealistic belief that the police are to enforce the law and faithfully obey their oaths of office. What an ignorant notion that is. Such silly people.
The problem is, there are just enough in the ranks who care more for making each individual case even at the expense of the Constitution (or similar UK restriction on police powers) than they do about the harm caused to the country by each unreasonable search or wrongful arrest. And just enough people who want that next promotion just enough that they’ll go heavy-handed on people who are bothersome but not actually criminals.
This is why I think UK cops should all be armed. (Stay with me here!) It’s not just the officer-safety aspect, although that’s important to me. It’s not just my belief that every peaceable adult has the right to protect his life and to arm himself with the means to do so effectively. But each working day, I have two pistols on my person and an AR-15 in my car. That’s a VERY powerful reminder of George Washington’s statement that “Government is not reason. It is not eloquence. It is force. Like fire, a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”
And that’s what many in government don’t understand: the state has the power to deprive people of their freedom or even their lives to enforce its laws. We can argue no end about whether it has the right to do so, but that argument isn’t relevant. The state has that power, and too many people in government don’t understand the chain of events that can lead from, say, a non-payment of property tax or a mortgage, all the way to a violent death. (That exact incident happened in the central US in the 1980s: a farmer was delinquent on one or the other. A court issued an order to the sheriff to take the property and remove him. He fired on several deputies, and was killed in the process.)
I just think too many people in power don’t understand the possible consequences of their actions. My experience has been, the less that the possibilty of violence is a part of one’s consciousness, the less appreciation they’ll have for these consequences.
I don’t have any suggestions about what to change. I’m hoping that the Messiah will work that out for us.
jdubious: Yes, we are.
Unfortunately most people are still sleepwalking, cannot see how its going to affect them personally… until its too late that is, they would rather ignore what going on around them and sit like dummies watching big brother..(Link)
If you’re not likely to commit a crime or inadvertantly assist in the commission of a crime you have nothing to fear.
So come on, everyone, chin up, you can still sleep peacefully in your beds. Afterall, the government only has your best interests at heart, it is poor Tony who can’t sleep at night, lying awake wondering if he has anticipated every potential danger that could befall his beloved subjects.
I hope he watched The Trial of Tony Blair on Channel 4 this evening, and was suitably chastised.
Yes, that’s the most depressing thing of all. There’s no shortage of criticism, even hatred, of the PM. But it is almost all focussed on the things that have done little (if any) long-term harm to this country: a (mistaken, in hindsight) war, and a (blameless, in my view) fondness for the rich and glamourous. Of his rape of the constitution, revolution in the conduct of public affairs, massive re-regulation, fiscal insanity, and relentless authoritarianism we hear next to nothing from the shallow media establishment that commissioned that limp pseudo-satire.
I am acquainted with a very devout Christian lady who insists on trusting everyone she meets until she is proved wrong (sadly this happens frequently). I used to think her naive and often foolish, but probably harmless.
I need to reconsider, because she is now almost certainly also criminal.
Guy’s last comment (on the real harm Mr Blair has done being ignored by broadcasters and other such people) is, sadly, only too true.
As far as I can tell, the Serious Crime Bill would require everybody who voted in New Labour to be given such an order.
…further, I do wonder if such a bill is in itself illegal to put forward considering the content is so against our constitution. It would be…delicious if those who drafted and put forward the bill wer themselves arrested:
Melchett: Unhappily Blackadder, the Lord High Executioner is dead.
Edmund: Oh woe ! Murdered of course.
Melchett: No, oddly enough no. They usually are but this one just got careless one night and signed his name on the wrong dotted line. They came for him while he slept.
Edmund: He should have told them they had the wrong man.
Melchett: Oh he did, but you see they didn’t, they had the right man and they had the form to prove it.
Edmund: Te. bloody red tape eh ? And the bad news ?
The Commons are likely to pass it, just like they have nearly every other totalitarian measure. It takes time to organise resistance in the Lords.
Perhaps the Govt hopes that some of the illiberal measures will slip through without the Lords being alerted?