Civil liberties campaigners need to look at the bigger picture
The Convention on Modern Liberty has a packed agenda, and I hope it is an event which will lead to some real substantial action. Our liberties have been under attack like never before, yet so far the response has been woefully inadequate and timid, with a few notable exceptions.
But, the biggest problem is that everyone is busy fighting fires and few are standing back to wonder how the whole thing caught alight in the first place.
I’m the first to commend fellow campaigners for their extraordinary efforts, and my hat goes off to the campaigns against 42 days and, just recently, against the secrecy of MPs’ expenses (not strictly a ‘liberty’ issue, but a symptom of the same problem). However, there is no clear narrative being built up about what is really the problem.
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This crisis is not the Blitz
What’s going on right now is not the Blitz, and nor is it a national plague resulting from our laziness and incompetence. In some ways, the rhetoric of economic responsibility is reassuring; we are individually powerful enough to affect whether or not we sink or swim as a nation.
But what if you have no economic clout whatsoever? I certainly don’t. There is, in a practical sense, absolutely nothing you can do to stop or reverse the recession, other than trust Gordon Brown and James Purnell and their captain-of-industry mates – who helped cause this mess in the first place, which is rather important.
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Help keep Parliament transparent
Update MySociety point out that Parliament has withdrawn the debate on MPs expenses because of external pressure. Result!
Guardian reports:
Gordon Brown today made a dramatic retreat from plans to exempt MPs’ expenses from the Freedom of Information Act.
The surprise announcement during prime minister’s questions follows the overnight collapse of a bipartisan agreement between Brown and David Cameron, the Tory leader, to back a parliamentary order exempting MPs’ expenses from the act.
Introducing the Carnival on Modern Liberty
Much as I support the Convention on Modern Liberty, I am very conscious of the fact that there are two dangers inherent to an initiative such as this. The first is that all it leads to is talk and a thousand people sitting in a hall munching on sandwiches. Linked to that is the danger that all it leads to is despair; that the problem seems so big and so intractable that people simply end up withdrawing altogether.
It is crucial that the Convention leads to positive action by as many people as possible (I made some suggestions a couple of weeks ago – I’m sure you can think of others).
Our mission must be nothing less than a paradigm shift in how the general public perceives civil liberties.
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Christian refuses to drive ‘atheist bus’
A Christian bus driver said he was offended by a bus bearing the Atheist Bus slogan ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worry and enjoy your life‘ – and refused to drive it. His employer, First Bus, said that was fine and made allowances.
Among some atheist circles this is probably a controversial statement, but I have no problem with this. I think every liberal / tolerant society should accept the willingness of employers to make certain allowances for their employees if it’s not too much trouble.
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Do you “deserve” your rights?
Anyone who thinks our civil liberties will be any better protected by a Conservative Government should think again. Speaking in Bangor (the Northern Ireland flavour) on Friday, the News Letter reports Shadow Home Secretary Dominic Grieve saying:
… there is “a rights culture” which is “out of control”, not just in Ulster, but throughout the UK. It did not help that “the undeserving in society” can often use rights legislation for personal gain, he added.
The Conservatives, he suggested, intend to create a UK Bill of Rights which would have in-built safeguards to prevent those “whose own behaviour is lacking” from abusing the powers.
I’m used to people from across the political spectrum differentiating between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor when it comes to welfare but not when it comes to fundamental rights. This rhetoric even goes beyond the talk about Wrights and duties.”
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Join us at the Convention on Modern Liberty
Are you concerned about the increasing threat to our civil liberties from this government? Do you fear that our culture is becoming too accommodating of authoritarian sentiments? Do you worry about how much power the police are being given every day?
Do you want to fight for your liberties? Do you want to meet with others and get organised? Well, the time has come for that.
On 28th of February a group of people and organisations from across the political spectrum are holding the Convention On Modern Liberty across Britain.
This isn’t just about the triumvirate of big issues such as ID cards, CCTV and the DNA database (42 days is thankfully out of the picture now but still in the background). It also incorporates other issues such as collecting information on football fans, increasing police powers not just to snoop on us, but also on terrorism related legislation.
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Justice for Hich
Lib Con has picked up on the ongoing case of Hicham Yezza (Hich to his friends and supporters) on a couple of previous occasions in daily news round-ups, but events over the last few of weeks necessitate giving the story a bit more detailed coverage.
And we need your help in highlighting this.
In May 2008, Hich, an Algerian national who’s lived and worked in the UK for more than decade, was arrested at his office at Nottingham University’s School of Modern Languages under the Terrorism Act 2000, as was his friend, Rizwaan Sabir, a postgraduate student researching terrorism at the university’s School of Politics and International Relations.
As for the events leading to their arrest, it emerged, several days after they were arrested, that Sabir had downloaded an alleged Al Qaeda training manual from the website of the US Department of Justice, where it had been openly available since December 2001. Sabir obtained the document in question, which had already been extensively edited/censored by the US DoJ before publication, in order to use it in his research and had done nothing more with it than forward it to Hich for printing to save himself a few quid.
For this ‘crime’ both were arrested and held by the police for six days before being released without charge, at which point Sabir was free to return to his studies, while Hich was immediately rearrested on Immigration charges and, a mere three days later, made subject to a fast-tracked deportation order which was scheduled to be executed on June 1, a mere eight days after it was issued – and all this despite Hich having publicly declared his intent to fight the charges against him.
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Religion and politics: a different approach
It’s perhaps a comonplace on a basically secular site like this that religion and politics should be kept as far apart as possible – except, perhaps, when religious leaders say things about poverty or discrimination that we happen to agree with.
And it’s undeniably true that the track record of religions when they intervene in political life has, over the centuries, been remarkably poor. It’s as though there’s something about the exercise of power which is hostile to the central message of religion, that you should love your neighbour as yourself.
And yet this message is so obviously true, and so obviously represents a thing both perennial and urgent, that there will always be a yearning to unlock the puzzle and find a way in which at least those religious people who do hold that message to be central to what they do can engage fruitfully in the political arena.
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CIC: Can ‘community assets’ work?
This is the final post reviewing the last chapter of the Communities in Control White Paper launched by Hazel Blears recently.
Chapter 8 looks at how citizens can move beyond being consulted or holding officials to account, to how people can own and run services for themselves, either by serving on local boards and committees, or through social enterprises and cooperatives.
The first question I want to ask Hazel Blears when Hazel blathers on about the joys of handing community assets to the community to operate is: you mean the few assets that New Labour hasn’t allowed to be sold yet, Haze?
I mean really, people – this has not been the golden age of community, or community assets, exactly: swathes of housing stock moved to arms’ length management organisations, schools closed and ownership of new city academies handed to private sponsors, lidos closed, nursery schools shut and nursery places cut, etc, with Labour, Lib Dem and Conservative councils all cheerful offenders.
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Love-Bombing the Lib Dems
Something that my lovely fiancé has been predicting for a while has started to happen: Tory journalists are being worryingly nice to the Lib Dems. To some extent, this is function creep from Vince Cable’s elevation from third party economics spokesman
to all-knowing prophet of everything
. Only Robert Peston comes close to Vince’s level of respectedness on the economy now, and I don’t think that can be undervalued. But that isn’t a full explanation for what has been happening over the last few days. Tory journalists aren’t being grudgingly nice about Lib Dem politicians, they are actively lauding them. The Award-Winning Alix Mortimer spotted Quentin Tw… Quentin Letts doing it the other day, but what really brought it home to me was when we finally got around to watching the This Week Christmas Special tonight.
Take a look at the year in review segment. Try hard to weather Quentin discussing Gordon Brown’s buttocks (there has to be slash fiction in that) and wait for the final third, where they all discuss Clegg: both Letts and arch-Tory Nick Robinson are particularly nice – I nearly choked on my Blue Nun when Robinson (who was so horrendously misrepresentative of Clegg’s performance at conference) described him as Youthful, Charismatic, and looking increasingly likely to make a breakthrough
. But that’s not as worrying for me as agreeing with both of Letts’ points.
So why is this happening now? continue reading… »
The ‘inspiring’ David Blunkett
When Martin Kettle tells his friends & colleagues that he still ‘rates’ David Blunkett, they apparently react with shock, even surprise. Sure, he can understand why people didn’t like the ‘lapses of judgement’ which forced him to resign from the cabinet (twice), he can sympathise with people turned-off by his sneering arrogance and he even concedes that he might’ve been a little ‘populist’ when he was Home Secretary. But shouldn’t we forgive all this and welcome back a ‘genuine thinker’ who is ‘one of the most inspirational leaders that Labour has got’?
*Cue the sound of crickets*
This is Kettle at his most cloyingly euphemistic. When he admits to Blunkett’s ‘lapses of judgement’, he means that on one occasion he abused his power by giving his ex-lover a taxpayer-funded train ticket & speeding up her nanny’s visa application, and on another failed to disclose a potential conflict of interest and ignored three seperate requests to make himself accountable.
Nick Clegg is still unconvincing
A group Libdems, who wish to remain anonymous for now, are planning to set up a Compass style party pressure group from the left – annoyed by Nick Clegg’s increasingly energetic drive to push the party rightwards. They contend that most of the grass-roots are broadly to the left of its leader and want to represent that opinion more forcefully..
And not a moment to soon either, judging by Clegg’s recent speech on ‘Why I’m a liberal‘ to Demos. I have some quibbles with the speech.
1. Socialism. Clegg starts early by comparing liberalism to socialism. This is, politically, a rather fatuous comparison to make since Labour doesn’t even come close to adhering of socialism, regardless of what the inbreds who hang around Guido Fawkes comments section actually say. New Labour is the party looking to part-privatise Royal Mail remember? Even Thatcher didn’t go that far. It looks like a silly straw-man argument to start with, but I think there’s a reason why he’s doing it (which is the last point).
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Where does capitalism go from here?
David Cameron was right to call the bankers to account earlier this week. But his ‘day of reckoning’ does little more than tinker with the problem. As the recession hits home, we need a national debate about how we build a new kind of pro-social economy.
It is the tax payer who has stood between capitalism and its self-inflicted collapse. With credit frozen and the banks unwilling to lend, the government is being pushed toward the role of sole lender. Capitalism has been rescued by people’s taxes and it will be dependent on them for its survival. It’s time for capitalism to be made accountable to democracy, and it’s time for democracy to renew itself and make itself fit for the challenge.
This is the great challenge of our time and it will shape our society for future generations.
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Libel progress at Commons
You may have noticed the announcement earlier this week of a joint inquiry in to libel by Index on Censorship and English PEN. The issue of the unfairness of UK defamation laws has been exercising us for some time, and we’re not the only ones.
Today saw an adjournment debate at the House of Commons on the subject of libel laws, featuring contributions from Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat and UKIP MPs.
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No election update (move along please)
Let’s try to keep this brief – and sorry to be boring. But I don’t want to have to shoot myself.
Another not too bad poll for Labour (ICM in The Guardian) confirms the trend in public opinion back towards the government. That does capture the initial public response to the political debate over the economic crisis. But I doubt the polls – good or bad – will tell us too much about future voting intentions for some months yet.
So stand by for a few pre-Christmas days of February election speculation – with silly season written all over it.
Why? Three things.
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CIC: Why don’t more people get into politics?
If this whole business of debating the CLG white paper, ‘Communities In Control’ is starting to make you feel like you’re losing the will to live then take my sincere advice and steer clear of the Chapter (7) on ‘Standing For Office’.
The chapter kicks off by pointing out that women, ethnic minorities and under 25’s are heavily under-represented on local councils as elected members compared to broad population demographics, after which we discover that bears really do shit in the woods and that they suspect that the Pope may possibly be a Catholic.
The proposed ‘solution’ for this problem is a Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic Women Councillors Taskforce, which already exists, and all usual nonsense about training, mentoring, shadowing, networking and outreach events that gets thrown in the pot by the government devoid of genuinely innovative thinking.
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CIC: How to complain to councils
All this week, Liberal Conspiracy will finish reviewing the Communities in Control White Paper launched by Hazel Blears recently.
Chapter Six of the Communities in Control White Paper is entitled “redress” and details proposals about what should happen when the public aren’t happy with a service.
The chapter’s introduction starts with the suggestion that the country is not in the bad old days of “wait of many weeks for a phone to be installed” and follows up with three statistics, one in five people complain to their council every year, only 34 percent of those people are happy with how that complaint is dealt with but 55% of people believe this service is better than what they receive from the private sector.
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CIC: Toying with elected Mayors
All this week, Liberal Conspiracy will finish reviewing the Communities in Control White Paper launched by Hazel Blears recently.
The purpose of Chapter 5 is to outline “how people can hold officials to account through new powers of petitioning, and ways in which we will establish more visible and accountable local leaders by encouraging more powerful elected mayors”.
Their intention is to raise visibility of existing scrutiny functions, particularly Overview and Scrutiny Committees (OSCs), and encourage councils to consider new approaches to scrutiny. Ways this could be done include having large scale public forums or making committee meetings more accessible by moving them out of the town hall and into the community and having webcasts.
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CIC: Are petitions the way forward?
All this week, Liberal Conspiracy will finish reviewing the Communities in Control White Paper (link corrected) launched by Hazel Blears.
Chapter 4: Having an Influence, deals with the enhancement of the right to petition and also discusses ways to encourage electors to vote. But it covers a lot of other things too.
The chapter also tells us what this is not about.
We are not proposing government by petitions, nor are we suggesting that the role of elected representatives in taking difficult decisions should be undermined. But, we do believe that stronger petition powers will enable more people to have their voice heard and help elected representatives do their jobs better.
This is at least clear cut.
Frankly, this chapter should have been at least two, or probably three or four separate sections. It tries to cover too many topics under the catch all heading ‘Having an Influence’ and even the introductory paragraph does not, at least in my view, do justice to the depth and breadth of the subject matter.
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» Obama is right to slam BP – and why capitalists should too
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» Blog Nation: what would you like to see discussed?
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