Revealed: Home Office communication on G20 Protests
contribution by Kevin Blowe
A week ago, I said on my blog that Home Office had received a Freedom of Information request asking for documents it held or produced between 1st and 8th April of this year that were either “briefings, notes, minutes, emails or letters prepared for ministers and senior officials concerning the 1 April 2009 G20 ‘financial fools day’ demonstration” or “memos, papers, emails, minutes or documents relating to either the 1st April 2009 demonstration at the Bank of England or Ian Tomlinson’s death”.
The Home Office website indicated that these were available “in hard copy only” so I requested them last Monday and, with surprising speed, they turned up in the post this week.
There are some 80-odd pages and they have been zealously redacted – in fact in one instance, a civil servant has decided to block out the name and contact details of Charlotte Philips, Head of News at the Independent Police Complaints Commission, even though this information is publicly available on the IPCC website.
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Conservatives and Libertarians – How do you spot the difference?
A little over a week or so ago, John Elledge sparked off a fair degree of consternation in libertarian ranks by making the all too common and, to an extent, understandable mistake of confusing genuine philosophical libertarians with those on the conservative right who’ve co-opted the term ‘libertarian’ as a a pseudo-intellectual fig-leaf for their belief in the merits of tax cuts and an unfettered right to air their bigoted opinions with total impunity.
John’s post prompted an interesting and, at times, heated debate in comments, one that included a rare off-Samizdata appearance by Perry de Havilland, along with a commentary by Bella Gerens (aka Mrs Devil) that’s well worth a look, but what neither provide – and to be fair I doubt that this was Bella’s objective – is a clear and readily digestible exposition of the central difference(s) between a libertarian ( or liberal, for that matter) and a conservative.
With libertarian ideas becoming more and more influential as many of us start to look beyond the established, and in many respects increasingly discredited, political order towards a ‘new politics’ of some description, it strikes me that there’s a need to bottom out this difference if we’re raise the level of debate above that of fighting of who’s most adept at burning straw men and that, in turn, brings me a couple of quotations from two of the great political antagonists of the late 18th Century which, as I see it, articulate exactly the kind of distinction we should be mindful of.
“He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from opposition; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach himself.” – Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
“Men are qualified for civil liberties in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their appetites: in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity” – Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
You may disagree, but as I see it those two short quotations more than adequately sum up the fundamental difference between the archetypal liberal/libertarian and conservative view of both liberty and, indeed, of human nature.
For Paine, liberty, and the rights and freedoms associated with it, is a universal principle and, as important, indivisible. Liberty is for everyone, irrespective of their station in life or their personal and/or moral character. It is natural right, albeit one that other liberal, and particularly, contractarian thinkers, who were deeply sceptical of the Lockean doctrine of natural rights, were able to derive by other means.
Universalism of this kind is the defining characteristic of classical, enlightenment, liberalism, in which both modern liberalism and libertarianism are, to varying degrees, rooted.
Burke, on the other hand, sets out the classical conservative position on liberty, and by extension on human rights, one that holds that civil liberties, in particular, should be dispensed to general population in to their moral rectitude and personal/collective character.
In the modern political idiom that principle is most frequently to be found in the populist political rhetoric that has more or less defined the public discourse on criminal justice since the introduction of the markedly universalist Human Rights Act. Whenever a contrast is drawn between the presumed ‘rights of victims’ or the ‘rights of law-abiding citizens’ and the ‘rights of criminals/terrorists’ then what you’re seeing is latter-day Burkean conservativism in action – and that is true irrespective of whether the individual invoking this heavily qualified view of liberty is an actual conservative or, as has frequently been the case in recent years, a minister in the current New Labour government.
In fact this is no less true when you find it reflected in Rosa Luxemburg’s famous, and endearingly pithy, critique of the kind of post-revolutionary Bolshevism that would eventually spawn Stalinism.
Freedom only for the members of the government, only for the members of the Party — though they are quite numerous — is no freedom at all. Freedom is always the freedom of dissenters. The essence of political freedom depends not on the fanatics of ‘justice’, but rather on all the invigorating, beneficial, and detergent effects of dissenters. If ‘freedom’ becomes ‘privilege’, the workings of political freedom are broken.
All of which explains, in part, why many on the left regard Stalin as a conservative rather than a socialist or Marxist.
So, it you’re at all unsure as to how to spot a Tory masquerading as a libertarian, just ask them whether they believe that victims of crime, or just plain old law-abiding citizens have different rights to criminals.
If the answer’s ‘yes’, then you’ve got yourself a Tory (or a cabinet minister).
If the answer’s ‘no’ and they go to explain that both have the same fundamental rights but that the criminal’s freedom to exercise those rights may be legitimately, and temporarily, constrained in order to protect the rights and freedoms of others, then you’ve got yourself a liberal or libertarian.
Simples.
What might a 21st century Libel Law look like?
I don’t usually do requests, but as libel law reform is a particular interest of mine and a subject I’ve blogged on previous occasions, I’m more than happy to rise to the challenge set by ‘organic cheeseboard’ in comments under Sunder’s commentary on yesterday’s events.
but for god’s sake could SOMEONE writing about this stuff PLEASE offer an idea of what those reforms might actually look like?
Fair enough, lets start with an internet specific reform which, as a blogger, is number one on my own shopping list of reforms, and a measure that we absolutely do want to import from our cousins over the the other side of the Big Pond.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Acy specifies simply that:
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
Under English libel law, at present, web hosting companies may treated as the publisher of, and held liable for, [allegedly] defamatory content published to their servers by a third party despite having had no absolutely part in in, or prior knowledge, of the that material’s publication. Likewise, bloggers and forum operators can be sued over comments, posted to their blog/forum by visitors, over which they will have had no control whatsoever unless they actively pre-moderate all such comments. continue reading… »
Carter-Ruck:0 Guardian: 1… but what next?
It is a happy thought that the finest legal minds at Carter-Ruck solicitors will have spent most of today explaining to the equally well-renumerated suits at Trafigura why their tried and tested writ happy playbook has overnight caused the firm even more reputational damage even than dumping that waste off the Ivory Coast and trying to avoid making any settlement for ages did.
And given how blogosphere versus mainstream media debates so often go around in circles while missing the point, it is good to see us all working together on the side of the angels this time.
So I not sure whether it is Carter-Ruck 0 Guardian 1 (own goal; blogosphere assist) or Blogosphere 1 Trafigura 0 but its pretty clear that they are lucky to get nil.
Now, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger tweets:
Now support BBC Newsnight which is being sued by #Trafigura and #carterRuck over toxic waste expose.
Good thinking! Let’s get those writs flying again. But at least we’re all watching closely now. But, more broadly, wouldn’t it be a good idea to use this enjoyable moment of consciousness-raising to think about how we might sustain our attention and sort out a few deeper issues out too. Others may have a range of ideas. Here are three modest proposals of my own:
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David Davis shows why we can’t trust Tories
John Harris reports from the Conservative Party conference:
Richards asked him if there was a specifically Tory story on civil liberties, at which point he went on about poppies, Churchill, and – once again cranking up the testosterone – the supposedly unreliable ways of lefties. “If we had relied on Guardian-reading vegetarians to defend liberty,” he reckoned, “we’d all be speaking German.”
You’ll remember that last year when David Davis decided to resign from his seat to re-fight it under the banner of civil liberties – many of those same “Guardian-reading vegetarians” decided to support him because they also cared for civil liberties (me included).
Many of us on LibCon were split because a sizeable contingent were of the opinion that you can never trust a Tory. I’m afraid they have been proven right.
Also, as someone said in the first comment:
More accurately, if we’d have relied on the Daily Mail’s 1930s editorial stance to defend liberty, we’d all be speaking German
(via Chicken Yoghurt)
EXCLUSIVE: David Cameron’s European ally supports “deeply homophobic legislation”
Over the past few weeks I have been collecting information from human rights to shed light on one of David Cameron’s allies in his new European grouping. This is the first of a multi-part investigation.
Despite the persistent criticism that it has allied itself with extremists, David Cameron’s Conservative Party now sits in the European Parliament with the European Reformists and Conservatives group (ECR), led by Poland’s Michal Kaminski – a man allegedly with a racist and homophobic past.
But so far it has gone unreported that another ally of the Conservatives in Europe has a much more serious and recent record of homophobia.
Valdemar Tomaševski, MEP from Lithuania, and member of the Tories’ Euro coalition, is on record as having branded homosexuality a “perversion”.
Not only that, I can now reveal for the first time that he also personally voted for a Lithuanian law that has been described as a harsher, more wide-reaching version of Britain’s Section 28.
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Questioning the BNP
Well, it’s happened. The BBC has announced that British National Party leader Nick Griffin MEP will appear on political discussion show Question Time on 22 October. Facing him (among others) will be Justice Secretary Jack Straw, a man believed by frequenters of far-right web forums to be a key part of the International Jewish Conspiracy.
I mention this partly because it will be interesting to see if Nick Griffin manages not to mention it when he faces Straw. Griffin, of course, is the author of the 1995 pamphlet Who Are The Mindbenders, which catalogues in some detail how Jewish (and in many cases “Jew-ish”) people control the media.
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Why is Jenni Russell praising Cameron Come Lately?
Jenni Russell has written an article attacking ContactPoint, the much maligned national children’s database that the government are still insisting on trotting out. The only problem is, she has written it as a piece of Tory hagiography.
We might be able to let her off the title – Another invasion of liberty. And only the Tories are alert – as a bit of subbing hyperbole. I’ve written enough articles for newspapers over the years to know this happens. But she can’t blame the sub for the final paragraph:
Labour will not reverse this; only the Tories might. They promise to review CAF database, ditch ContactPoint for a small, targeted database, and invest in strengthening people’s relationships instead. It’s depressing that Labour supporters who believe in liberties, privacy and humanity should find themselves having to cheer the Tories on this issue.
Megrahi vs Myra: who dies in jail?
There are prisoners, there are political prisoners and then there are politicised prisoners. In the latter category, we must place those whose crimes, real or alleged, attain such notoriety that the quotidian standards of the law are somehow suspended.
But if what you have done gets you on the front page of The Sun, forget about it. If you’re Ian Huntley or Levi Bellfield or Ipswich serial killer Steve Wright, the cry will go up that ‘life must mean life’. No home secretary – and frighteningly, we haven’t had a liberal in the post since Kenneth Clarke – is going to take the tabloid rap for letting you go.
Two prisoners to which the ‘they should die in jail’ argument has been applied are alleged Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi and indisputably guilty Moors Murderer Myra Hindley. They are both, in their separate ways, emblematic of the popular characterisation of something called wickedness.
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Open borders is the mainstream view
Philippe Legrain, author of Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them, is on the wireless tonight advocating scrapping immigration controls. What puzzles me, though, is the BBC’s description of this position as iconoclastic.
In truth, Philippe’s position is mainstream. What’s odd and extreme is the argument for immigration controls. Look at this from three perspectives.
1. The invisible hand. Perhaps the dominant strain in liberal thinking is the Smithian-Millian argument that liberty promotes aggregate well-being. Immigration controls are a denial of this. They raise the question. If a freedom as basic as the right to work where one chooses diminishes overall well-being, is there a consequentialist argument for any liberties at all? Of course, you can argue that immigration brings negative externalities. But I’m not at all sure these are any greater than the externalities created by many other market transactions.
An attack on the right of immigrants is an attack on the fundamental argument for a market economy. It’s a radical view.
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‘Big Brother Watch’ and Alex Deane
The Sunday Times yesterday carried news of a civil liberties campaign being launched by the TaxPayers’ Alliance in October.
TPA chief executive Matthew Elliott wants the campaign, called Big Brother Watch, “to become the central hub for the latest on personal freedom and civil liberty – a forum for information and discussion on something that directly affects British citizens in their everyday lives.”
In response, Spy Blog challenges many of the claims in Elliott’s article and asks:
Why exactly should Spy Blog, or anybody else who cares about these issues, support Yet Another Campaign Organisation rather than existing ones like:
• the NO2ID Campaign,
• Privacy International,
• GeneWatch UK,
• Open Rights Group
• the Foundation for Information Policy Research
• Liberty Human Rights.
Can the Met police change its stripes?
contribution by Helen
Last August, thousands of people camped out at Kingsnorth power station to protest against the continued use of coal power in the UK. There were eye-witness reports and video evidence that police abused stop and search powers, removed their badge numbers, employed sleep deprivation tactics, harassed journalists, arrested any protesters who tried to demand their legal rights, and engaged in unprovoked violence against peaceful protesters and their private property.
But the police were not meaningfully challenged by anyone with the authority to do so. In fact, it wasn’t until after events were repeated at the G20 protests in April 2009 that official questions were asked about the policing of dissent in the UK.
Early this year, cyber-liberties activist Cory Doctorow covered all this in the Guardian about Kingsnorth camp.
Ironically, the article was delayed due to an administrative error, resulting in its publication shortly after the G20 protests. It was already true, even before the same mistakes were made all over again: and in April, it could just as easily have been talking about the events earlier that month.
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The police and their tasers
The latest figures released on the use of tasers by police forces across the country are starting to look concerning. While the jump from 187 uses between October to December 2008 to 250 during January to March this year can be explained by how the Home Office allowed Chief Officers to decide when “specially-trained” units can be deployed with the weapons, it doesn’t explain why different forces are using them far more readily than others.
The most startling are the number of uses by Northumbria police, which since April 2004 has used tasers in one way or another on 704 occasions, 4 more than even the Met has. This is an astounding number, especially when compared to another force of similar size and with a similar urban environment, Merseyside, who also took part in the same trial as Northumbria and which has used them just 76 times in total.
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MI6 and collusion over torture
One of the more cutting criticisms made by the Joint Committee on Human Rights last week was that while the head of MI5 had no problems in talking to the media, he seemed to regard it as an unacceptable chore to have to appear in front of a few jumped-up parliamentarians.
This week the head of MI6, “Sir” John Scarlett appeared on a Radio 4 documentary into the Secret Intelligence Service, where he naturally denied that MI6 had ever so much as hurt a hair on anyone’s head, or more or less the equivalent, as Spy Blog sets out.
This would of course be the same MI6 that passed on information to the CIA regarding Bisher al-Rawi and Jamil el-Banna which resulted in their arrest in Gambia and subsequent rendition to Guantanamo Bay, and indeed the same MI6 which along with MI5 interviewed Binyam Mohamed while he was being detained in Pakistan, where we now know he was being tortured.
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We need to tolerate the extremists
David Cameron packed what he himself described as ‘a really trashy novel’ for his 10-day holiday in France. By contrast, my choice to read on Brighton beach last week was rather more serious.
Ed Husain’s ‘The Islamist’ is controversial autobiographical account of the author’s involvement with the Islamist far right in Britain, and ends with a call for some of the organisations at that end of that spectrum to be subject to suppression by the state. Tony Blair is berated for offering such a pledge in 2005 and then not making good on it.
That line of thinking probably appeals to quite a wide range of opinion. It is unlikely that the English Defence League and Casuals United – the self-professed football hooligans who staged a demonstration against Muslim extremism in Birmingham on Saturday – have drafted anything resembling a detailed statement of coherent political philosophy. But no doubt they would favour a ban on Hizb ut-Tahrir and Al Muhajiroon.
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No sense in extraditing Gary McKinnon
Today Gary McKinnon failed in his attempt to avoid extradition to the US where he could face a sentence of up to 60 years.
Last week Labour MP Andrew MacKinlay resigned after his party voted for McKinnon to be extradited. One of just 10 Labour MPs to vote against the Government, MacKinlay said: “I was really frustrated by the vote last week. Many of my colleagues had expressed their sympathy for Gary McKinnon. But when the crunch came, they just went tribal and followed the diktats of the party.”
A Glasgow-born systems administration, in 2001 and 2002 McKinnon hacked into 97 US military and NASA computers, which the American authorities claim resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage, and left 300 computers unusable.
But McKinnon hacked the US computers because he was looking for evidence of UFOs. As well as being a self-confessed “nerd”, McKinnon has been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism. Simon Baron-Cohen, professor of developmental psychology at Cambridge University has described McKinnon’s condition as making him incapable of understanding normal social behaviour, helping to explain why he committed his crime.
That the Government voted to extradite McKinnon is not only depressing in itself: it illustrates fundamental problems with the present administration. After all, why on earth are our esteemed leaders in favour of extradition?
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You are being watched
Surveillance, it seems to me, comes in two categories differentiated by purpose; that is, all surveillance efforts will fulfill one, or both in some mixture, of two purposes. The first is the easiest, and the most etymologically obvious: surveillance is investigative.
A typical example of such surveillance work would be a phone tap. You initiate a phone tap to find out things you didn’t know before; it is an investigative tool. But it is worth noting that this investigative function for surveillance is effective precisely in so far as it is covert; a subject aware of observation behaves differently.
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The marginalisation of dissent
contribution by Kumi Naidoo
Since the 9/11,terror attacks in the USA and the subsequent ill-conceived and ill-named War on Terror we have witnessed an erosion of democracy, human rights and civil liberties.
In long-standing democracies as well as newer and emerging democracies there has been a growing marginalisation, suppression and in some cases repression of dissenting voices. This has manifested itself in many different ways. The hardest to measure are the levels of self-suppression in a climate of fear.
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The News of the Screws is screwed
At the weekend the News of the World was unequivocal in stating the the phone hacking story was almost completely baseless. In an act of extreme chutzpah, it even called on the Guardian to practice what it preached when it said that “decent journalism had never been more necessary”.
All eyes were then on the Commons culture committee yesterday, where first Tim Toulmin of the Press Complaints Commission, then Nick Davies and Paul Johnson, Guardian News and Media’s deputy editor, were to give evidence. Toulmin hardly did the PCC any favours. It seems remarkably relaxed by the allegations made by the Graun, as it has been from the beginning.
Davies then did the equivalent of setting the session alight.
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Meet the prisoners
There are 83,000 people currently incarcerated in England & Wales. Of that number, I’d wager all the money in my pockets that not one of them grew up wanting to do this.
Like us, they will have grown up dreaming impossible things; fantasising about future fame or heroics; quietly relishing the adventures of adulthood.
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» 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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