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Government scraps sedition laws

by Newswire    
July 11, 2009 at 1:23 am

From a press release
Writers and freedom of speech campaigners today expressed relief that the Government has finally relented, and agreed to abolish the offences of seditious libel and criminal defamation. The Ministry of Justice’s move comes after a long campaign by free speech organisations, their advocates, and opposition politicians.
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Can liberalism be illiberal?

by Sunny Hundal    
July 2, 2009 at 6:06 pm

Phillip Blond, in response to Sunder Katwala, says:

My main point is a philosophical and historical one that liberty (which I believe in) is not produced from liberalism. Indeed my intellectual argument is that that pure liberalism or liberalism as first philosophy cannot produce liberty – indeed it produces an anarchic individualism that requires a surveillance state.

Thus liberalism produces the very thing it seeks to avoid: an authoritarian individual and an absolutist state. This is a serious point and to have it charactured as anti-liberal is either an inane misreading or an outright misrepresentation. In fact liberalism is not liberal at all.

Phillip Blond is the driver of the ‘Red Toryism’ project and recently left the think-tank Demos to found his own Progressive Conservatism project. So how would you respond to this view?
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The left needs to make a difference case for fairness

by Guest    
June 27, 2009 at 9:52 am

an article by Dan

There has been a lot of discussion of a new report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on attitudes towards tackling economic inequality (at Directionless Bones, Left Luggage, Sunder Katwala on CiF, Don Paskini at Liberal Conspiracy, and David Osler). Quoting Alderson at Directionless Bones, one of the key findings of the report is:

People didn’t seem to endorse the idea of ‘equality’ as a general principle as much as they endorsed ‘fairness’.

This is a point that several of the posts linked to above considered, and there has been a feeling that the left needs to find a new way to promote their view of the world to people (which traditionally is based on equality).
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Banning the BNP from classrooms?

by Neil Robertson    
June 24, 2009 at 9:05 am

I doubt this’ll work for everyone, but before deciding whether or not to support some new legislation, I like to set a few simple tests. First, the proponents would need to convince me that the problem they wish to address is important enough to require legislation, that only legislation could solve this problem and that the proposed legislation will actually work.

Next, you’d have to be pretty circumspect in ensuring that the ’solving’ of this problem wouldn’t then create a chain of unintentional negative consequences in the months & years to come, and that it doesn’t further restrict the liberty of people whose behaviours aren’t bothering or harming anyone.

By those standards, I’m not yet convinced by the recent call from the NASUWT to ban members of the BNP from the teaching profession.
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Top Stories – Thursday 18th June

by Newswire    
June 18, 2009 at 8:30 am

YET ANOTHER EXPENSES RESIGNATION

Kitty Ussher leaves the Government, as TheTelegraph’s Augean project continues…

NATIONAL
Governor seeks more powers for Bank of England
Belfast Romanians rehoused after race attacks
Terror law used to stop thousands ‘just to balance racial statistics’

INTERNATIONAL
Mousavi urges more demonstrations for Thursday
New financial rules in the USA too…
Cricket attacker arrested in Pakistan
British ambassador attacked for supporting gay march in Bulgaria

There are worse things than fiddling expenses…

by Unity    
June 3, 2009 at 5:30 pm

Thinking back over the last 18 months, few, if any, of the stories and issues I’ve written about either here or over at the Ministry have been prompted by a genuine and deep-seated sense of anger.

There was one story that I did cover, over at the Ministry, that did put me in just that kind of mood, a story that’s resurfaced over the last few days in several newspapers as what Charlotte Gore has dubbed “Too Stupid to Look After Baby” case – a headline that directly echoes The Sunday Times’  “Mother ‘too stupid’ to keep child” headline, which appears to have got the media’s ball rolling again.
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Second meeting: police still not listening

by Guest    
May 30, 2009 at 10:05 am

by Andy May and Guy Aitchison

Two months have passed since the G20 and the brutal police operation against protesters in the City of London. On Thursday Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) met for the second time since the operation to question Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson.

At the first meeting the Met showed no signs of having taken on board the serious and widespread criticism of their actions. At times they actively mis-represented what had taken place to spin themselves out of trouble. So it was with a fair deal of scepticism that myself and Anna Bragga of Defend Peaceful Protest went down to City Hall to put our case to the Met once again.
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Cameron promises sweeping parliamentary reforms

by Newswire    
May 26, 2009 at 4:13 am

The Guardian today features an article by Cameron promising sweeing reforms of Parliament. An accompanying story states:

In a broad-ranging article in the Guardian, Cameron declares that he would trim back the powers of the prime minister and boost the role of parliament to win back public confidence.

Here are those reforms in brief:
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Meeting to support Simon Singh today

by Newswire    
May 18, 2009 at 8:53 am

A meeting to support writer science Simon Singh will be held today in central London, in advance of his libel case against the British Chiropractic Association.
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Sweet dreams, harsh realities

by Neil Robertson    
May 17, 2009 at 11:45 am

Like his fictional counterpart in West Wing, Barack Obama embodied the highest hopes of his liberal supporters, distilled their idealism into bumper sticker slogans and sold a rhetoric of change which promised a clean break with the failures of the past.

But barely 100 days in to his term in office, a growing number of his supporters are seeing a President so straightjacketed by the actions of his predecessor that he’s even continuing those policies he once renounced.
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Mummy, what’s a Sex Pistol?

by Septicisle    
May 16, 2009 at 2:50 pm

I don’t know a lot about art, but I know what I like. You can’t help but think that’s exactly what four supermarkets thought when they saw the cover art for the Manic Street Preachers’ new album, Journal for Plague Lovers, above. 15 years on from the release of their opus, The Holy Bible, the vast majority of the lyrics for which were written by Richey Edwards, who went missing less than a year later, the band have finally had the courage to return to the remaining lyrics which he left behind for them.

Appropriately, they decided upon using a painting by the artist Jenny Saville, who also provided a confrontational cover for the THB, a triptych of an obese woman in white underwear. The art for JFPL is undoubtedly striking; it’s also quite clearly one of the best album covers in years.
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A Campaign to Clean Up Westminster

by Sunny Hundal    
May 16, 2009 at 11:50 am

While there has been a lot of anger and condemnation expressed about MPs expenses, and quite rightly too, there is less agreement about how we take this forward. The outrage over expenses is, to my mind, a proxy for wider annoyance and disenchantment with Westminster.

So the question is: can we capture use the anger and energy out there and channel it towards a wider agenda? There’s a lot of people already thinking about this and I went to one meeting yesterday where some people are planning to do exactly that.

But two questions are key. First, what should be the agenda and list of demands? How would you like to see Westminster changed? Secondly, what would be the vehicle to push through broader change?
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Introducing Magna Carta 2.0 – our way forward

by Anthony Barnett    
May 13, 2009 at 9:30 am

You want to know where we go from here? We need a new Magna Carta. Sunny recently said he wanted “an insurgency to take our rights back from the state”. This now includes our right to honest government, though I think we always knew that. The emphasis needs to be on achieving this.

In February the Convention on Modern Liberty in London and across the UK showed a clear public concern with the threat of authoritarian power and a hunger to debate and confront it in an intelligent and democratic way. Guy Aitchison, Clare Coatman and Tom Ash are, from today, launching Magna Carta 2.0 with the aim of taking the spirit and intelligence of the day to the country.
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Help with legal challenge to kettling

by Stuart White    
May 12, 2009 at 10:00 am

News just in that the Climate Camp is trying to move forward with a legal challenge to the police kettling at Bishopsgate on April 1. As I argued in an earlier post, there is good reason to think that the kettle at Bishopsgate was illegal even if the Law Lords’ decision in the Austin case earlier this year is good law. There is a strong case that the kettle in question did not meet the tests of reasonableness and proportionality which the Law Lords laid down.

However, the Climate Camp needs money to mount the legal challenge:

‘We really, really, need to raise £40,000 quickly to challenge the kettling. It may seem a lot but we think we can do it – small amounts from lots of people will get us to this target. See the Camp Donate page to donate to the Legal fund. Please tell all your friends and rich aunties.’ Relevant links are here (Legal Team) and here (Donations). Let’s give generously!

cross-posted from Next Left

How can we trust police intent now?

by John Q Publican    
May 10, 2009 at 5:05 pm

“Liberal Democrat Tom Brake says he saw what he believed to be two plain-clothes police officers go through a police cordon after presenting their ID cards. Brake, who along with hundreds of others was corralled behind police lines near Bank tube station in the City of London on the day of the protests, says he was informed by people in the crowd that the men had been seen to throw bottles at the police and had encouraged others to do the same shortly before they passed through the cordon,” reports the Guardian today.

I really hoped that the assault on Ian Tomlinson had been an accident. It wasn’t. I really hoped that the police medics had not been engaged in violent assaults: they had. I really hoped that the police medical teams had been provided to care for the injured; in fact protesters were explicitly refused help, by medics, while bleeding. I really hoped that the police had not been targeting legal observers and arresting them, harassing them, stealing their recording equipment, defacing their notebooks. All of these things were happening.

But now there is much more.
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Guilty, until proven guilty

by Guest    
May 9, 2009 at 2:31 pm

Post by: Denny
In December last year, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the current legal framework for the UK DNA database was a violation of fundamental rights. The judges said they had been “struck by the blanket and indiscriminate nature” of the government’s powers to take and keep DNA samples from anyone arrested (including those who are subsequently released without charge, or found not guilty in court).

This ruling does not seem to have concerned our government a great deal.
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Demos draws a line in the sand by embracing liberals

by Sunny Hundal    
May 7, 2009 at 10:10 am

The think-tank Demos today publishes a new pamphlet titled ‘The Liberal Republic’ to cement its move from being of the centre-left under Catherine Fieschi to its new liberal axis under Richard Reeves. He is a biographer of John Stuart Mill.

As if to politically underscore that point, it also announces that Tory MPs George Osborne and David Willetts will join the board. Pah!
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Geert Wilders’ great plan to save the west

by Sunny Hundal    
May 6, 2009 at 11:19 am

I recently wrote about the Dutch MP Geert Wilders being slammed by the right-wing lobby group Anti-Defamation League, but forgot to put his comments in context. The Dutch MP made an acceptance speech for the Freedom Award he was given by the Florida Security Council in Miami.

And Geert Wilders certainly believes in ‘freedom’, because he advocates a ten point plan to Save Western Civilisation:
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Open borders, not just amnesty, for migrants

by Alan Thomas    
May 5, 2009 at 2:42 pm

Yesterday there was a rally in central London called by the Strangers Into Citizens campaign, a coalition with an apparently bedazzling array of backers from the unions, parliament and from (largely religious) community groups.

Its aim was to call for a one-off “earned amnesty” for migrants who live and work in the UK without legal status, and who have been here for over 4 years. But there is a sting in its tail.

The campaign argues that there is a strong case for such a legal change.
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Patriotism, the BNP and being a publican

by John Q Publican    
May 4, 2009 at 6:30 pm

To “serve and protect” is a phrase famously associated with police officers in certain high-profile cities in America but it’s also a phrase I associate with the job of landlord. It’s a pun first made to me by the landlord at my local down in Southampton mumble years ago. The pub was a tiny Victorian establishment with a 2-barrel brewery that was visible through a glass panel behind the bar, so you could drink your Sweet Sensation [1] and watch the next batch brewing. I was told “Our job is to serve drinks and protect peace of mind. The brewer sells beer: the landlord sells happiness.”

I am tired of being told I’m a leftie, which I’m really not; but I’m equally tired of the assumption that if I were, I must ‘hate Britain’. That’s very Yankee thinking; that any progressive view or compassionate view or inclusive view is anti-patriotic.
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