How will this terrorist attempt affect liberties?
The attempted terrorist attack by Nigerian national Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on Christmas Eve presents some major policy headaches for President Obama just when he was beginning to grapple with them.
It’s a given that airport security will tighten further to near-ridiculous levels, even though some number-crunching by blogger Nate Silver shows that a person could board 20 flights a year and still have less chance of being caught in a terrorist attack than being hit lightning.
The attempted airborne attack will instead impact other issues too. For a start it will raise complications again about trialling terrorists in civil courts rather than military courts. President Obama attracted a storm of criticism from the right when his Attorney General announced that one of the architects of the 9/11 attacks – Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – will face a civil jury in New York.
That issue is likely to come to the forefront as the trial begins. But Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s capture will also raise questions on whether he should be charged in a civil court or by a military commission as KSM initially was.
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Chris Grayling u-turns again, on home defence
It seem to have worked out for the cerebral and shy Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling, treading gingerly into the high profile area of the right to self-defence this week.
Perhaps a tiny amount of over-reach? Indeed Melanie Phillips thought Grayling had gone well over the top in ‘endorsing mob rule‘. David Blackburn of The Spectator thought it was populism at its worst, and The Times was equally unimpressed.
The Shadow Home Secretary may well have been angling for a Daily Mail headline. But Tories’ licence to kill a burglar may have been a little stark even for Grayling.
Rather predictably, all this meant that the Shadow Home Secretary in effect reversed his position within 24 hours.
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Italy begins crackdown on free speech
Millions worldwide have cheered the individual action of Massimo Tartaglia, the man who last Sunday whacked Berlusconi in the teeth. A divisive, dodgy, inflammatory right-wing Prime Minister got what he deserved, many commented online.
However, two days later, it’s important to make a cool-headed assessment as to what the blow landed on Berlusconi’s gob really means in the short to medium terms.
Until Sunday, Berlusconi’s coalition were showing their biggest cracks since their landslide election victory in April 2008. His hacking at the Italian constitution caused a series of unexpected rifts within his own coalition. By last week, one of his most senior and influential allies, Gianfranco Fini, was all but considered no longer part of Berlusconi’s coalition.
Most significantly, on Friday, Mr Casini, a former centrist partner of Berlusconi’s government, called for the formation of a broad ‘Republican front’ to finally defeat the billionaire Prime Minister.
And if you also take into account the spectacular sexual scandals that marred the Prime Minister throughout the summer, for the first time in years Silvio Berlusconi looked all but rock steady.
By Sunday evening, however, everything had changed.
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A further blow for ID cards?
Could you keep a £61 billion secret? Its not always easy, says Chancellor Alistair Darling in his interview with Mary Riddell for the forthcoming Fabian Review, extracted in today’s Telegraph.
He was, he says, “living on the edge for a while. There were many days when I knew that unless the Bank was making [covert] interventions [such as the secret loans of £61.6 billion to HBOS and the Royal Bank of Scotland], then literally banks would have had to shut their doors and cash machines would have been switched off.
People should be in no doubt that the world banking system was on the brink of collapse in October 2008 … It was [irksome] to have people sniping at the edges, saying: ‘You should have done this or that’ when I couldn’t disclose what I was doing. I couldn’t have said: ‘By the way, the banks are about to collapse, but I’m doing something about it’, because the very act of saying that would have been disastrous.
The interview was conducted just before the pre-budget repot. The newspaper finds enough significance in a passing comment on ID cards to make a ‘Darling signals death of ID cards‘ news story of it.
This is the entirety of Darling’s discussion of the issue.
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Immigration: the scandal of child detentions
When Labour’s best political boast is now more or less that they won’t be as brutal as the Conservatives will, it’s well worth remembering how the government treats some of the most vulnerable in society.
Not content with having expanded the prison population to such an extent that as soon as a new wing or establishment is built it is almost immediately filled, it also seems hell-bent on continuing with the detention of those whose only crime is to be the children of asylum seekers who have had their application for refugee status rejected.
Not that the government itself has the guts to be personally responsible for their detention. Probably the most notorious detention centre in the country, Yarl’s Wood in Bedfordshire, is run by SERCO.
In the last report on Yarl’s Wood, the chief inspector of prisons Anne Owers noted (PDF) while Yarl’s Wood should seek to improve the “plight of children” who were being held in the centre, they were “ultimately issues” for the UK Border Agency.
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Even Dan Hannan opposes the ban on minarets
Is it still committing heresy to link favourably to right wing Tory MEP Daniel Hannan? Ah well, I was never going to be invited to the Cool Kids’ table anyway:
The decision by Swiss voters to outlaw the construction of minarets strikes me as regrettable on three grounds.
First, it is at odds with that other guiding Swiss principle, localism: issues of this kind ought surely to be settled town by town, or at least canton by canton, not by a national ban.
Second, it is disproportionate. There may be arguments against the erection of a particular minaret by a particular mosque – but to drag a constitutional amendment into the field of planning law is using a pneumatic drill to crack a nut.
Third, it suggests that Western democracies have a problem, not with jihadi fruitcakes, but with Muslims per se – which is, of course, precisely the argument of the jihadi fruitcakes.
Hannan’s last point is surely the most important. Whilst there may have been a few Swiss voters who voted for the ban solely out of aesthetic antipathy, I suspect they were somewhat outnumbered by people who voted because they are suspicious, wary or even scared of their Muslim countrymen.
If a number of amateur bloggers can speculate that fear of Muslims led to this vote, you can be pretty sure that Swiss Muslims have gotten the message, too. And therein lies the problem; othering often leads to more marginalisation, segregation, exclusion, distrust and bitterness than existed before. Those are pretty ripe conditions for political and religious extremism to fester, and so the proponents of the ban are actually succeeding in compounding a problem they supposedly wish to reduce. So they’re either dishonest or deeply daft.
I’m not going to claim that there’s some silver bullet for achieving greater social & cultural integration, and I’m not going to pass myself off as any kind of expert about extinguishing militant theism. But I do know that neither of those aims are going to be achieved by winning small-minded & petty restrictions on what religious buildings look like.
Against the ban on minarets
contribution by Left Outside
Swiss voters have supported a referendum proposal to ban the building of minarets. More than 57% of voters and 22 out of 26 cantons – or provinces – voted in favour of the ban.
In Switzerland a referendum on any new piece of legislation can be held if the sponsor collects 100,000 signatures from the citizenship in the 18 months following its introduction. The opposition Swiss People’s Party have earned the ire of the Government by introducing the Bill to ban Minarets this way. There democratic credentials of this referendum seem clear, after all this was no close run thing, more than 57% of voters and 22 out of 26 cantons voted “yes.”
Yet despite all this, banning one particular sort of building seems spectacularly undemocratic. When it is accompanied by a rise in Islamophobic violence, it seems down right authoritarian.
Guthrum over at Old Holborn is managing to do a great disservice to Libertarians everywhere by holding up this as an example of democracy in process.
Bizarrely he concludes with “The people told the Government, not the other way round” when in fact what has happened is the “the people told some other people to stop doing “that”.” Moreover, they told them to do it by co-opting the massive repressive potential of the state.
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Laws matter; politicians don’t
IT news site The Register has spotted the first person ever to be sent to jail for refusing to give the police the keys to their encrypted files under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.
Unsurprisingly, he’s not an extremist or a terrorist or any kind (neither white supremacist nor Islamist fundamentalist) – he’s just mentally ill with an odd relationship with society:
With a deep-seated wariness of authorities, he did not trust his interviewers. He also claims a belief in the right to silence – a belief which would later allow him to be prosecuted under RIPA Part III.
The end of the free internet in Britain?
contribution by by Charlotte Gore
If we can’t stop this, it’s beginning of the end for the net in Britain
That’s what Cory Doctorow suggests when reporting the news that Mandelson is seeking to use a back door to grant himself powers that grant him yet more powers to do just about anything in the interest of protecting Copyright.
It’s terrifying stuff that, if he’s successful, will cripple Britain’s technological progress. I use a programme called, “Drop Box” and it allows me to transfer files from my MacBook to my PC using the Internet. I don’t want such files to be publicly available because they’re my own personal private files.
But Mandelson wants these services to disable privacy modes so that Movie Studios can check I’m not stealing from them. Forcing us to make the contents of our online storage public is just one of the powers Mandelson wants to gift himself, unchallenged.
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Getting Labour’s prison record wrong
Having attacked Gordon Brown personally last week and came off the worst for it, this week the Sun seems to have decided to stand on surer ground, by attacking Labour on crime.
Problem is, it can’t seem to do so without telling some whopping great lies, as yesterday’s leader shows:
Prison policy, in particular, has become a joke. Early on, Labour decided not to build more jails and instead focus on alternatives to prison and early release for prisoners.
In 1997 the average prison population was 61,470 (page 4). The population last Friday was 84,593 (DOC), a rise in just 12 years of more than 20,300. I can’t seem to find any concrete figures on just what the total number of places available in 1997 was, but ministers themselves boast that they have created over 20,000 additional places, and the Prison Reform Trust agrees, noting in this year’s Bromley report that the number of places has increased by 33% since the party came to power (page 5).
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Ex-Soldier facing jail for handing in shotgun
From the file marked ‘sometimes the law is a complete and utter ass‘…
A former soldier who handed a discarded shotgun in to police faces at least five years imprisonment for “doing his duty”.
Paul Clarke, 27, was found guilty of possessing a firearm at Guildford Crown Court on Tuesday – after finding the gun and handing it personally to police officers on March 20 this year.
The jury took 20 minutes to make its conviction, and Mr Clarke now faces a minimum of five year’s imprisonment for handing in the weapon.
Unfortunately for Mr Clarke the weapon, which had been dumped over a fence into his garden in a black plastic bag, was a sawn-off shotgun, the possession or handling of which was made a strict liability offence with a minimum penalty of five years imprisonment by amendments to section 5 of the Firearms Act 1968 contained in the Criminal Justice Act 2003.
And so, simply by handing it in to a local police station, Paul Clarke left himself wide open to arrest, conviction and, when sentenced on December 11th, to a minimum five year prison sentence.
An alternative explanation for the likely circumstances of Clarke’s arrest is given here by ‘Brit Cop’ which seems plausible enough as an explanation of how and why Clarke finds himself in his current predicament.
It does, however, take the view the law is the law and must be obeyed without making any attempt to address the question of whether this prosecution, and likely sentence, is just and proportionate response to Clarke’s apparent offence, which appears to amount to not much more than that of being a bit of an idiot.
Jack of Kent is now covering this story in his usual incisive fashion.
The DNA Database fudge continues
One of the motifs of the past few months has been that politicians of all colours “just don’t get it”. Ironically, when it comes to the continuing debacle over the DNA database, you rather imagine that they did get it and now they’re utterly bewildered at how things have turned out.
Here, after all, is what ought to be a standard tabloid outrage scandal: because of the “unaccountable” European Court of Human Rights, the government is having to change its policy on keeping all the DNA profiles of those arrested but not charged indefinitely, potentially raising the spectre of the guilty getting away with their crimes. The Sun, that flag-bearer of social authoritarianism, did originally raise its voice, but has since barely made a peep about the S and Marper case and its implications.
For a government that has so often treated with contempt the concerns of civil libertarians, with the full connivance of the vast majority of the tabloid press, the Daily Mail only recently deciding that it’s time to join the other side, it must be wondering where all those who believe if they’ve got nothing to hide they’ve got nothing to fear have disappeared to.
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Reforming English Libel Law
There is a growing consensus that English libel laws are not fit for purpose. The list of libel cases that seem to defy common sense grows longer every day. Bloggers are threatened by vindictive vested interests, and football fans on chat-rooms are bullied by their own clubs. Regional newspapers are intimidated into timidity, and publishers punt on commissioning the investigative journalism that is supposed to keep our democracy strong. Scientists who challenge the claims of alternative medicine are hit with writs.
And then there is the problem of forum shopping, or “Libel Tourism”:
Britain is a pariah state, shunned by its allies and exploited by the unsavoury. The state of English libel laws (Scotland’s provisions are a little better) is so embarrassing that a number of US states have enacted legislation to protect their citizens from our courts. London is the global centre of libel tourism. From Middle Eastern potentates to Russian oligarchs, the rich and powerful use our legal system to bully people who try to hold them to account.
That’s John Kampfner, former editor of the New Statesman and Chief Executive of Index on Censorship, introducing the Index/PEN report into English libel laws. The report is the result of a year long inquiry that took in the opinions of publishers, lawyers, journalists, novellists, NGOs and bloggers, and identifies ten challenges for libel reform.
First amongst these the problem of burden of proof, which in libel lies uniquely with the defendant. The report recommends reversing this, and requiring claimants to demonstrate falsehood and damage. We also recommend reducing damages in libel to £10,000 and establishing a low cost libel tribunal that would allow bloggers, and others of slender means, to defend libel actions without having to re-mortgage their children.
You can read the rest of our recommendations at www.libelreform.org, a new hub that will co-ordinate the campaign for libel reform, in collaboration with Sense About Science. We need to lobby MPs to sign an EDM calling form reform, and to pressurise both the Tories and Labour to join the Liberal Democrats and make libel reform a manifesto commitment. The campaign for libel reform has already attracted the support of writers such as Monica Ali and Andrew Motion, and makes bedfellows of newspaper editors Alan Rusbridger and Peter Wright. If you are fed up with the wealthy and big corporations using English laws to suppress free speech, then we urge you to join them, and sign-up to the campaign.
Tony Benn and the Tories: don’t go there
Tony Benn doesn’t hate the Tories anymore. That’s according to yesterday’s Sunday Times, anyway, which reports that these days ‘the veteran radical campaigner’ finds his views on issues such as civil liberties and Europe closer to those of the Conservatives than those of New Labour.
OK, the poor old sod is 84 and recovering from an operation on his prostate gland, which involves surgeons sticking scalpels into regions of the anatomy that make most men somewhat squeamish.
But for those who have critically admired his consistent advocacy of democratic socialism for three decades and more, this is as shocking as the first time you hear your nine-year-old daughter utter a grown-up cuss.
You can use those words in the playground if you have to, Tony, but I never, ever want to hear you say them in this house, do you hear?
But will do the Met police do something?
Friday last week the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) convened a new panel to talk about policing in the aftermath of the G20 protests fiasco.
We received three accounts of the meeting and are publishing excerpts from each.
Helen Lambert — Police State UK
“Today is all about listening to you – we’re not here to speak for the Met, nor to defend them,” said Victoria Borwick, chair of the MPA’s newly convened Civil Liberties Panel, opening this morning’s open meeting.
The scope of the meeting – an evidence gathering session on public order policing, and more specifically the G20 demonstrations in April – had been unclear to some. Many people had brought questions demanding immediate answers, but instead their concerns have been ‘noted’, with no clear idea if answers will be forthcoming.
It may seem late in the day for a data-gathering session on the policing of G20. Photos, video footage, eyewitness accounts and the Climate Camp Legal report have been publically available for months.
But did this morning achieve anything more than a collective airing of grievances? The reach of the Civil Liberties Panel remains unclear. All this evidence will inform a report on public order policing to be released at the end of this year. The Panel seems largely sympathetic to the experiences of protestors, but the whole MPA has to approve its recommendations. Even the MPA are not involved with day-to-day or disciplinary policing issues, and can only advise on the overall framework of policy. Implementing change is a slow and frustrating process, each stage of representation more distanced than the last.
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Power 2010: Will it work?
Power 2010 is asking people to come up with ideas for the democratic and political reforms that are needed in Britain. You can submit them here, the deadline is November 30th.
These ideas will then be considered by a panel of citizens chosen at random, and the five ideas that they like most will become the ‘Power 2010 pledge’, which Power 2010 will try to get politicians to sign up to in the run up to the next General Election.
There’s been a lively discussion about these plans, here, here and here. I think the principle of the campaign is a good one, but have some questions:
1. How can we get ideas from a sufficiently wide range of people?
The campaign seems very orientated towards getting responses from politically engaged people who read and write blogs (it is possible to submit ideas via e-mail, by post or at public meetings – venues to be confirmed). The panel of citizens also need to have the chance to consider ideas from a much wider range of people – those who don’t have computers, people who don’t vote or follow politics closely, people from all parts of the UK. Maybe one way to achieve this would be to hold the public meeting in areas where there have been low levels of responses, in partnership with local community groups. Instead of London and Manchester, why not go to places like Rhyl, Sunderland and Glossop?
A campaign based on ideas from bloggers who don’t like party politics is too narrow a base to build a popular campaign on, and a personal reflection is that most of the ideas highlighted so far are not ones which I can imagine leading to the creation of a credible pledge.
2. How will the top five ideas will be chosen?
I like the idea of getting a panel of randomly chosen people to evaluate the ideas, but what are the safeguards to ensure that (a) they don’t choose some really off-the-wall ideas, while at the same time ensuring that (b) the organisers don’t end up “fixing” the discussion. For example, if the panel chose ‘take the vote away from all immigrants’ as one of its top five, would Power2010 really campaign on that?
3. Why would any politician sign up to the pledge?
For this whole exercise to be successful, it needs to gain the active support of a significant number of candidates standing for election. Some might sign it because they happen to agree with the proposals, but to win over people who are unconvinced, Power2010 needs credible threats ‘x number of people will not vote for you if you oppose this’ or incentives ‘you will be more popular/have a better reputation/get access to more funding and volunteer help if you sign up’. What’s the plan to make these threats or incentive credible?
*
Some critics of Power2010 have suggested that the whole exercise is a waste of time, with significant opportunity costs. I don’t agree with them, because I think a range of different progressive campaigns and campaigning techniques are worthwhile (it is not as if we know of any particular way of campaigning which is so amazingly effective that everything else should be abandoned). I’m particularly interested to see how the citizens’ panel idea works.
At the same time, I think that, overall, us lefties and liberals put too many resources into ‘insider’ campaigns such as think tanks and lobby groups which spend their time talking to the small minority who are already politically engaged, and not enough into grassroots community organising which mobilises more people to join us and get involved. Hopefully Power2010 will be able to reach out further and mobilise more people to get involved and campaign for change.
Cameron’s Lithuanian ally: Children need protection from ‘evil’ of homosexuality
Last month on Liberal Conspiracy I exposed how the Conservatives have allied themselves in the European Parliament with Valdemar Tomasevski, a Lithuanian MEP who has described homosexuality as a ‘perversion‘, and who voted in his national parliament earlier this year for a draconian new law banning public discussion of homosexuality.
Today, on Left Foot Forward, Will Straw publishes striking new evidence of Tomasevski’s homophobia:
David Cameron’s Lithuanian partner has revealed his homophobic views in an email to Left Foot Forward. Valdemar Tomasevski MEP – leader of the ‘Electoral Action of Poles in Lithuania’ and a member of David Cameron’s alliance of far right Europeans – describes homosexuality as an “evil” from which children should be protected and says “we cannot allow these people to claim … that homosexuality is normal.”
Tomasevski’s anti-gay beliefs were set out in an email to Straw after Left Foot Forward requested an English translation of a Lithuanian interview appearing on the MEP’s website. The email, which also describes Tomasevski’s opposition to almost all abortions, says:
“I accept existence of homosexuals – we are tolerant state. But homosexuality is also a very good example of the wrong understanding of tolerance. We have to respect every human being, including those who experience sexual attraction to the same-sex.
But we cannot allow these people to claim and explain even to children at kindergarten that homosexuality is normal and encourage people to become homosexuals. Those who talk about tolerance should understand that and respect the constitutional right to protecting children from evil.”
A Whiff of the Branding Iron
Perhaps the most perceptive commentary I’ve ever read on the subject of public school education came not from an educationalist or politician but from what I suppose could be called a ’socialite’. She said, in an otherwise typically fatuous interview, that the problem she had with public schoolboys was that their education gave them such a ‘gloss’ on their character that it could take ten years to realise just how stupendously thick they really were.
I’ve had my suspicions about the Tory’s Shadow Justice Minister, Dominic Grieve, for some time. Since, in fact, the publication in the Telegraph of a commentary on the always fractious subject of crime statistics in which he claimed that:
The BCS is a poor measure of violent crime. It does not count homicides, rapes and multiple assaults and excludes some of the most vulnerable victims of violence, including the homeless, elderly people in care homes, students in digs and until this year children.
Much of what he had to say is, of course, untrue.
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Will Tories delay Human Rights Act repeal?
The Conservatives may not complete the repeal of the Human Rights Act and the introduction of a new British Bill of Rights in their first term in office if they were elected to government. And it is also becoming increasingly difficult to work out what substantive difference the policy would be intended to make.
“I would like to think we could do it in the course of a parliament”, shadow Justice Secretary Dominic Grieve tells Joshua Rosenberg in an interview for his Standpoint magazine column.
Perhaps the more important part of the policy is that Britain will not pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights – so British citizens will keep the right to appeal to Strasbourg. (Tory Eurosceptics like to grumble about this, but in doing so they are usually appealing to the public’s inability to tell the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Union apart).
More broadly, he makes it perfectly clear that Britain will not pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights. We will not be able to send people to countries where they will be tortured, he promises. Whatever else happens, individuals alleging breaches of their human rights will still be able to take the British government to the European Court in Strasbourg
And so the new “British Bill of Rights” will seek to protect the convention’s rights British law, to prevent British citizens having to go to Strasbourg to protect those rights. Rather as the Human Rights Act has sought to do, it seems to me.
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We’re marching against Islamists
contribution by Shaaz Mahboob
I was a little shocked – and delighted – to find Inayat Bunglawala announcing that he is going to organise a counter-demonstration to Anjem Choudary’s group Islam4UK, which is planning to call for the implementation of their version of sharia law at a rally on Saturday 31 October.
My organisation, British Muslims for Secular Democracy (BMSD), had been working closely with likeminded British Muslim and non-Muslim democrats in planning a demonstration to coincide with Anjem’s anti-democracy march and protest against freedom.
Last week a Facebook group was also set up to float the idea and ignite people’s interest. We had planned to make a formal announcement on Monday, but it makes sense, in the circumstances, to bring that announcement forward.
Our counter-demonstration is based on our belief in, and commitment to, those liberal values that define the British state, including legal and constitutional equality for all, equal rights for women and minorities, and religious freedom, including the right to be free of faith. We are turning out to defend all of these virtues of a secular democracy that Islam4UK so despises and daydream of taking away from the British public.
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» Why don’t MPs pay back tuition fees instead of increasing ours?
» Obama is right to slam BP – and why capitalists should too
» Why does Phillip Blond see civil cohesion as a security issue?
» So what if the Labour candidates went to Oxbridge?
» Last night’s Labour hustings: will it get interesting or turn to torture?
» It’s now down to Ken to win London for Labour
» The Labour people need
» Blog Nation: what would you like to see discussed?
» The Labour leadership’s token contender.. and it’s not Diane Abbott
» In defence of these fraternal nominations
» Is this the end for the socialist left?
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