28 days: List of names against extension
This will become a constantly updated list of public figures against extending the 28 days pre-charge detention period. Please mention those you think are relevant (with links) in the comments below.
All Conservative party members?
All Liberal Democrat members?
(There will be a separate post for Labour MPs)
Lord Goldsmith, former attorney general
“There needs to be a limit to this. And while any limit is arbitrary I thought that we were really in the right place with the decision the Commons ultimately took.” …He saw “no evidence to go beyond 28 days”. [The Guardian]
Ken Macdonald, director of public prosecutions and head of CPS
“It seems to us 28 days has been effective and has provided us with powers, supervised by the courts, that have been useful to us.” [The Guardian]
Lord Woolf, former lord chief justice
“I like very many other people have not been convinced by the case for increasing the period. … I would prefer, myself, to allow them to be charged and if, after they are charged, so that they know what they are facing, they are still subject to questioning, albeit in custody.” [The Guardian]
Jonathan Evans, head of MI5
He refused to say whether he backed the proposal and was described as “distinctly unenthusiastic” by one of those present. [The Telegraph]
Baroness Scotland of Asthal, QC
[The Times]
Vera Baird QC, solicitor-general
Also believes the case has not yet been made. [The Times]
Lord Falconer, former lord chancellor
Does not believe the government had made a coherent case for the extension, and that it would not be justifiable to extend detention beyond 28 days simply because further time was needed to investigate an individual suspect in a complex case. [The Guardian]
Parliament
Joint Committee on Human Rights and Commons Home Affairs Select Committee
[The Guardian]
In the news: The Home Secretary has admitted that there has not been one single case since 9/11 when police enquiries would have been aided by holding a terror suspect for more than 28 days.
Campaign to stop extension of 28 days detention
I am, like many others, alarmed at this government’s repeated attempts to extend the detention-without-charge period for more than 28 days. It is already the longest in the world. New Labour is becoming addicted to authoritarian legislation and we need to actively challenge that.
I’d like to start by exploring what part blogs can play in being part of a broader coalition to challenge the government on this issue.
We could start by collecting information that supports our cause.
- What are the alternatives to extending 28 days?
- Who opposes this extension and what have they said?
- Which journalists and commentators are also opposed?
- What other organisations are actively campaigning on this?
- What events are taking place to build support on challenging the government?
Any other ideas, readers?
I’ll soon start posting on each of the above. Please feel free to post any information that comes to mind in relation to the above points. As Henry Porter said this weekend:
How have we allowed this rolling putsch against our freedom? Where are the principled voices from left and right, the outrage of playwrights and novelists, the sit-ins, the marches, the swelling public anger? We have become a nation that tolerates a diabetic patient collapsed in a coma being tasered by police, the jailing of a silly young woman for writing her jihadist fantasies in verse and an illegal killing by police that was prosecuted under health and safety laws.
How indeed. Also worth reading is this article by Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty.
Two CDs or Not Two CDs – Updated
It’s a matter of only twenty-four hours on from Alistair Darling’s statement on the apparent loss of two CDs containing personal information, including NI numbers and bank account information, relating to 7.25 million families who claim child benefit (an estimated 25 million people in total) and yet it seems that an injection of common sense into this situation is already long overdue.
(Especially in view of the amount of overheated nonsense currently being spouted by blogging ‘expert’, Iain Dale, who really should have learned, by now, the folly of stepping outside the limits of your own technical knowledge and understanding. By contrast, Dizzy – who does know his [technical stuff] has some observations that are well worth reading)
Let’s start with the what – what has actually happened? – for which we’ll turn to this summary provided by the BBC:
continue reading… »
Are ID Cards dead?
As so many people have already pointed out, the loss of the UK’s child benefit database is a disaster for the government. The incompetence beggars belief. This data is so important it should be treated like the launch codes for a nuclear weapon – there is nothing indicating that people were taking it anything like that seriously.
Until the discs are recovered (if they ever are), it seems to me there will be little way of knowing whether they are or have been used for fradulent purposes, who has copied the information, where it might have been sent to, in what new formats. Of the 25 million people who have been put at risk, some are bound to be victims of identity fraud, by sheer law of averages. Each time one of them is it will make another negative headline – whether they were actually connected to these lost CDs or not. Iain Dale has also pointed out that some or all of the people exposed could, theoretically, sue the government (though they would, in effect, be suing themselves). The amount of negative publicity could be endless.
Let us assume, then, that this Labour government is toast, and that we can expect a Conservative government in 2010 at the latest. What does it mean for ID cards?
continue reading… »
“The children are our future,” claim identity thieves
Still, on the plus side, another 25 million people have just realised that ID cards are what’s known in the trade as a Very Bad Idea.
Is the Left Totalitarian?
The thesis that the left is totalitarian or tends to create totalitarian situations has a respectable pedigree. F. A. Hayek afterall argued that socialism was a road to serfdom, and Karl Popper suggested that state planning, based on the ideologies of Plato, Hegel and Marx led ultimately to totalitarian government.
This thesis is the ultimate refutation of the idea that in some way leftwing concerns with equality can be accomodated alongside any concern for liberty: the suggestion is that the left tends to wish to create the best society, irrespective of the views of those people living in it. Rightwing blogs tend to argue that the left for instance wants to create a tolerant society, and do that with the blunt instrument of the law, proscribing what people can and cannot say and ending up with a situation in which free speech no longer exists.
Is there any truth in these ideas? Obviously the left can become totalitarian and there are parts of the left which are totalitarian in the UK today- very minor parts like the communist and trotskyite parties of the far left. So incidentally can the right, clerical dominion is nothing if not totalitarian in its ambitions. But there is something more going on here- and that is the equation of economic liberty with liberty tout court.
An equation that the libertarians amongst us are eager to make- if that equation isn’t true then the argument that the left is neccessarily totalitarian collapses like a house of cards. The issue therefore is whether economic aid transferred by collective consent from the top of the socio-economic pyramid to the bottom is totalitarian.
continue reading… »
Call in the Pledges
The NO2ID campaign is calling in the PledgeBank pledges:
The Identity Cards Act 2006 is now law, and – despite growing opposition, significant delays and rising costs – the new Prime Minister shows no sign of calling a halt to the National Identity Scheme. In 2008, the government intends to pilot fingerprinting and to issue the first ‘biometric residence visas’ to non-EU foreign nationals as a precursor to registering British Citizens.
The legal powers to do these all these things will shortly begin to be applied. Now is the time to call in the legal defence fund part of the pledge.
So, that’s £10 from everyone, please. It should add up to about £110,000 in the campaign coffers.
continue reading… »
Smoking’s no different: mind that (power) gap
Blackpool, Blackpool, everywhere, nor any drop to… This time, drinking over here, Hamish Howitt, pub landlord:
“I’m not pro-smoking just pro-freedom. “Having a pint and a cigarette in a pub is one of the last great enjoyments left for the working classes. “
You have to like the cut of his mainsail. It makes you wish he was right, but alas he’s 180 degrees wrong. Calls to liberty – working class or otherwise – are spurious on this one. As much as hard hats on a building site, or breathing apparatus down a mine, smoking legislation is about workplace safety. I suppose any staff who object to a pub pea souper could always work somewhere else. Your average Victorian mill owner would have agreed.
Tell that to the student working off his overdraft, or the single mum who needs employment that fits round school hours, or the 50-something asthmatic roadie who’s plain forgotten how to do anything else. Or any number of other constructs a hack-philosopher might invent. Can any of these make a meaningful choice, a free weighing of the alternatives, before selecting their place and conditions of work? That we don’t always have a real choice is a cornerstone of left thought; it’s all about the power, stupid. Asking: “Who has it; who doesn’t; how does that change things” is what separates liberals from the ‘I want, I want, it’s soooo unfair’ breed of prep-school ‘libertarians’. (That’s a misnomer, of course; these chaps are nowhere near as concerned about liberty as they are about property.)
In any case, there’s nothing special about private property that gets us off our obligations to each other. This is no more a case of liberty at threat than are the Control of Asbestos at Work Regulations 2002. You’re not allowed to poison your staff, not even minimum-wage workers. There’s an easy, costless way to internalize your externality: get off your backside, take three paces to the door and smoke outside. You could use the exercise.
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