Wow, there's just so much wrong with in this so short sentence.
PEarl Harbour could have been avoided. THe US insulted, repeatedly, the Japanese ambassador, and broke off all diplomatic ties. Yes, Pearl Harbour happened, but yes, half the administration wanted it to happen, wanted it to silence the isolationist movement and move America into war. There's more to it, but you really need to look things up for yourself.
Please research your history before spouting shit, sir.
hahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahaha
you funny
dublin 1996 london 2000 dublin 2006 prague 2006 copenhagen 2007 london 2007 rotterdam 2009 london 2009 dublin 2010 belfast 2010 vienna 2014 amsterdam 2014 london 2018
and people going on about giving up "freedoms"... i mean.. if the government wants to track my passport, watch me on CCTV.. listen to my phone.... big fucking deal.. all they;ll see is that i do fuck all wrong, i talk a lot of shit and i go a crappy holiday to Spain every year.... if people arent breaking the law then whats the big deal about it all.... fucking freedoms... we've never been totally free since the days of cavemen for fucks sake...
"I feel that it does not behoove slaves to reason about freedom."
You may take your freedoms, what freedoms we percieve ourselves to have, lightly, and for granted, and disrespect their power to the individual. Luckily, mate, for our children, and for us, others do not.
Waych me on CCTv etc...umm..Innocent, until proven guilty, no?
How long do you think you can continue to drink your beer, get laid or tooted up on a weekend, have new phones, TVs, shitty but half decently paid job, to listen to the music you want, when you want, to say what you want, when you want, until they, the bastards that took away all the freedoms you took for granted, THAT YOU WILLINGLY SURRENDER, come for their pound of flesh, and drive you to fight a war the causes of which you should have cared for earlier, or into poverty and destitution once they have exhausted this world of all possible profit?
Do you think this is a one sided deal with devil here? For these freedoms you think you have, the freedom to get up and go to fucking work, to blow money on daft mullet and bleached haircuts, on bowling shoes and ripped fucking jeans and tattoos and smokes and SKY tv and football and all that other shit they blind you with, do you not ever think the overseers will want something in return?
This government lied to me once, a big fucking lie, that led us to war and the deaths of thousands.
I will never blindly believe them again. Why will you, chief?
The world's greatest empires progress through this sequence:From bondage to spiritual faith; spiritual faith to great courage; courage to liberty;liberty to abundance;abundance to selfishness; selfishness to complacency;complacency to apathy;apathy to dependence;dependency back again into bondage
'And in all the madness. Thought becomes numb and naive.
So much to talk about there's. Nothing for to say.'
EV 06
Tell you to pray while the devil's on their shoulder..
Laying claim to the take our soldiers save
Does not equate and, THE TRUTH'S ALREADY OUT THERE...
The world's greatest empires progress through this sequence:From bondage to spiritual faith; spiritual faith to great courage; courage to liberty;liberty to abundance;abundance to selfishness; selfishness to complacency;complacency to apathy;apathy to dependence;dependency back again into bondage
"I feel that it does not behoove slaves to reason about freedom."
You may take your freedoms, what freedoms we percieve ourselves to have, lightly, and for granted, and disrespect their power to the individual. Luckily, mate, for our children, and for us, others do not.
Waych me on CCTv etc...umm..Innocent, until proven guilty, no?
How long do you think you can continue to drink your beer, get laid or tooted up on a weekend, have new phones, TVs, shitty but half decently paid job, to listen to the music you want, when you want, to say what you want, when you want, until they, the bastards that took away all the freedoms you took for granted, THAT YOU WILLINGLY SURRENDER, come for their pound of flesh, and drive you to fight a war the causes of which you should have cared for earlier, or into poverty and destitution once they have exhausted this world of all possible profit?
Do you think this is a one sided deal with devil here? For these freedoms you think you have, the freedom to get up and go to fucking work, to blow money on daft mullet and bleached haircuts, on bowling shoes and ripped fucking jeans and tattoos and smokes and SKY tv and football and all that other shit they blind you with, do you not ever think the overseers will want something in return?
This government lied to me once, a big fucking lie, that led us to war and the deaths of thousands.
I will never blindly believe them again. Why will you, chief?
here, you need to take a chill pill
dublin 1996 london 2000 dublin 2006 prague 2006 copenhagen 2007 london 2007 rotterdam 2009 london 2009 dublin 2010 belfast 2010 vienna 2014 amsterdam 2014 london 2018
How long do you think you can continue to drink your beer, get laid or tooted up on a weekend, have new phones, TVs, shitty but half decently paid job, to listen to the music you want, when you want, to say what you want, when you want, until they, the bastards that took away all the freedoms you took for granted, THAT YOU WILLINGLY SURRENDER, come for their pound of flesh, and drive you to fight a war the causes of which you should have cared for earlier, or into poverty and destitution once they have exhausted this world of all possible profit?
Do you think this is a one sided deal with devil here? For these freedoms you think you have, the freedom to get up and go to fucking work, to blow money on daft mullet and bleached haircuts, on bowling shoes and ripped fucking jeans and tattoos and smokes and SKY tv and football and all that other shit they blind you with, do you not ever think the overseers will want something in return?
This government lied to me once, a big fucking lie, that led us to war and the deaths of thousands.
I will never blindly believe them again. Why will you, chief?
right... what 'freedoms' have the UK stripped of its citizens since 9/11... if you can supply me with a list of PASSED governmental decrees that affect my life then i'll start to listen...
your not a soothsayer... you have no crystal ball.. your vision of our future where we live in some facist state with no perceived freedom is just scaremongering... this kind of scaremongering holds no greater kudos or nobility than the one you are saying our government is doing.... just a different side of the coin.... but prosaic hyperbole aside... if the govt starts polices and procedures that directly affect my (and many millions of ordinary citizens) lives.. then i'll start a revolution... but asking me to put my stuff into a plastic bag to go on a flight is hardly enlisting me into some Krakow ghetto where i have to use gold fillings to buy bread
oh scary... 40000 morbidly obese christians wearing fanny packs invading europe is probably the least scariest thing since I watched an edited version of The Care Bears movie in an extremely brightly lit cinema.
Hey, im not the one falling for all this terror alert bullshit, scared to death of the big bad black bogeymen with the beards.
I am very chilled, and have great faith in the uncalculabe majority that is my good fellow man. Its the tiny percentage who control the guns, planes, aircraft carriers, nuclear weapone, bombs, missiles, CCTV cameras, the power to watch my bank accounts, to listen to my phone calls, to read my emails, to restrict my freedoms, and to make me pay fucking pay for it, that I'm scared of.
The world's greatest empires progress through this sequence:From bondage to spiritual faith; spiritual faith to great courage; courage to liberty;liberty to abundance;abundance to selfishness; selfishness to complacency;complacency to apathy;apathy to dependence;dependency back again into bondage
Does not equate and, THE TRUTH'S ALREADY OUT THERE...
Mulder is one great fucking lyricist
oh scary... 40000 morbidly obese christians wearing fanny packs invading europe is probably the least scariest thing since I watched an edited version of The Care Bears movie in an extremely brightly lit cinema.
some of thoose calling theirselves expert said germany can be eyesed of thoose people too (it´s just getting creazy).I don´t belive that ...never bec. i don´t know any reason...
Blair laid bare: the article that may get you arrested
In the guise of fighting terrorism and maintaining public order, Tony Blair's
Government has quietly and systematically taken power from Parliament and the
British people. The author charts a nine-year assault on civil liberties that
reveals the danger of trading freedom for security - and must have Churchill
spinning in his grave
By Henry Porter
Published: 29 June 2006
In the shadow of Winston Churchill's statue opposite the House of Commons, a rather odd ritual has developed on Sunday afternoons. A small group of people - mostly young and dressed outlandishly - hold a tea party on the grass of Parliament Square. A woman looking very much like Mary Poppins passes plates of frosted cakes and cookies, while other members of the party flourish blank placards or, as they did on the afternoon I was there, attempt a game of cricket.
Sometimes the police move in and arrest the picnickers, but on this occasion the officers stood at a distance, presumably consulting on the question of whether this was a demonstration or a non-demonstration. It is all rather silly and yet in Blair's Britain there is a kind of nobility in the amateurishness and
persistence of the gesture. This collection of oddballs, looking for all the
world as if they had stepped out of the Michelangelo Antonioni film Blow-Up, are challenging a new law which says that no one may demonstrate within a kilometre, or a little more than half a mile, of Parliament Square if they have not first acquired written permission from the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. This effectively places the entire centre of British government, Whitehall and Trafalgar Square, off-limits to the protesters and marchers who have traditionally brought their grievances to those in power without ever having to ask a policeman's permission.
The non-demo demo, or tea party, is a legalistic response to the law. If
anything is written on the placards, or if someone makes a speech, then he or she is immediately deemed to be in breach of the law and is arrested. The device doesn't always work. After drinking tea in the square, a man named Mark Barrett was recently convicted of demonstrating. Two other protesters, Milan Rai and Maya Evans, were charged after reading out the names of dead Iraqi civilians at the Cenotaph, Britain's national war memorial, in Whitehall, a few hundred yards away.
On that dank spring afternoon I looked up at Churchill and reflected that he
almost certainly would have approved of these people insisting on their right to
demonstrate in front of his beloved Parliament. "If you will not fight for the
right," he once growled, "when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will
not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the
moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a
precarious chance for survival. There may be a worse case. You may have to fight
when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish than to live
as slaves."
Churchill lived in far more testing times than ours, but he always revered the
ancient tradition of Britain's "unwritten constitution". I imagined him becoming
flesh again and walking purposefully toward Downing Street - without security,
of course - there to address Tony Blair and his aides on their sacred duty as
the guardians of Britain's Parliament and the people's rights.
For Blair, that youthful baby-boomer who came to power nine years ago as the
embodiment of democratic liberalism as well as the new spirit of optimism in
Britain, turns out to have an authoritarian streak that respects neither those
rights nor, it seems, the independence of the elected representatives in
Parliament. And what is remarkable - in fact almost a historic phenomenon - is
the harm his government has done to the unwritten British constitution in those
nine years, without anyone really noticing, without the press objecting or the
public mounting mass protests. At the inception of Cool Britannia, British
democracy became subject to a silent takeover.
Last year - rather late in the day, I must admit - I started to notice trends in
Blair's legislation which seemed to attack individual rights and freedoms, to
favour ministers (politicians appointed by the Prime Minister to run departments
of government) over the scrutiny of Parliament, and to put in place all the
necessary laws for total surveillance of society.
There was nothing else to do but to go back and read the Acts - at least 15 of
them - and to write about them in my weekly column in The Observer. After about
eight weeks, the Prime Minister privately let it be known that he was displeased
at being called authoritarian by me. Very soon I found myself in the odd
position of conducting a formal e-mail exchange with him on the rule of law, I
sitting in my London home with nothing but Google and a stack of legislation,
the Prime Minister in No 10 with all the resources of government at his
disposal. Incidentally, I was assured that he had taken time out of his schedule
so that he himself could compose the thunderous responses calling for action
against terrorism, crime, and antisocial behaviour.
The world's greatest empires progress through this sequence:From bondage to spiritual faith; spiritual faith to great courage; courage to liberty;liberty to abundance;abundance to selfishness; selfishness to complacency;complacency to apathy;apathy to dependence;dependency back again into bondage
The day after the exchange was published, the grudging truce between the
Government and me was broken. Blair gave a press conference, in which he
attacked media exaggeration, and the then Home Secretary, Charles Clarke,
weighed in with a speech at the London School of Economics naming me and two
other journalists and complaining about "the pernicious and even dangerous
poison" in the media.
So, I guess this column comes with a health warning from the British Government,
but please don't pay it any mind. When governments attack the media, it is often
a sign that the media have for once gotten something right. I might add that
this column also comes with the more serious warning that, if rights have been
eroded in the land once called "the Mother of Parliaments", it can happen in any
country where a government actively promotes the fear of terrorism and crime and
uses it to persuade people that they must exchange their freedom for security.
Blair's campaign against rights contained in the Rule of Law - that is, that
ancient amalgam of common law, convention, and the opinion of experts, which
makes up one half of the British constitution - is often well concealed. Many of
the measures have been slipped through under legislation that appears to address
problems the public is concerned about. For instance, the law banning people
from demonstrating within one kilometre of Parliament is contained in the
Serious Organised Crime and Police Act of 2005. The right to protest freely has
been affected by the Terrorism Act of 2000, which allows police to stop and
search people in a designated area - which can be anywhere - and by antisocial
behaviour laws, which allow police to issue an order banning someone from a
particular activity, waving a banner, for instance. If a person breaks that
order, he or she risks a prison sentence of up to five years. Likewise, the
Protection from Harassment Act of 1997 - designed to combat stalkers and
campaigns of intimidation - is being used to control protest. A woman who sent
two e-mails to a pharmaceutical company politely asking a member of the staff
not to work with a company that did testing on animals was prosecuted for
"repeated conduct" in sending an e-mail twice, which the Act defines as
harassment.
There is a demonic versatility to Blair's laws. Kenneth Clarke, a former
Conservative chancellor of the exchequer and home secretary, despairs at the way
they are being used. "What is assured as being harmless when it is introduced
gets used more and more in a way which is sometimes alarming," he says. His
colleague David Davis, the shadow Home Secretary, is astonished by Blair's
Labour Party: "If I had gone on the radio 15 years ago and said that a Labour
government would limit your right to trial by jury, would limit - in some cases
eradicate - habeas corpus, constrain your right of freedom of speech, they would
have locked me up."
Indeed they would. But there's more, so much in fact that it is difficult to
grasp the scope of the campaign against British freedoms. But here goes. The
right to a jury trial is removed in complicated fraud cases and where there is a
fear of jury tampering. The right not to be tried twice for the same offence -
the law of double jeopardy - no longer exists. The presumption of innocence is
compromised, especially in antisocial behaviour legislation, which also makes
hearsay admissible as evidence. The right not to be punished unless a court
decides that the law has been broken is removed in the system of control orders
by which a terrorist suspect is prevented from moving about freely and using the
phone and internet, without at any stage being allowed to hear the evidence
against him - house arrest in all but name.
Freedom of speech is attacked by Section Five of the Criminal Justice and Public
Order Act, which preceded Blair's Government, but which is now being used to
patrol opinion. In Oxford last year a 21-year-old graduate of Balliol College
named Sam Brown drunkenly shouted in the direction of two mounted police
officers, "Mate, you know your horse is gay. I hope you don't have a problem
with that." He was given one of the new, on-the-spot fines - £80 - which he
refused to pay, with the result that he was taken to court. Some 10 months later
the Crown Prosecution Service dropped its case that he had made homophobic
remarks likely to cause disorder.
There are other people the police have investigated but failed to prosecute: the
columnist Cristina Odone, who made a barely disparaging aside about Welsh people
on TV (she referred to them as "little Welshies"); and the head of the Muslim
Council of Great Britain, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, who said that homosexual practices
were "not acceptable" and civil partnerships between gays were "harmful".
The remarks may be a little inappropriate, but I find myself regretting that my
countrymen's opinions - their bloody-mindedness, their truculence in the face of
authority, their love of insult and robust debate - are being edged out by this
fussy, hairsplitting, second-guessing, politically correct state that Blair is
trying to build with what he calls his "respect agenda".
Do these tiny cuts to British freedom amount to much more than a few people
being told to be more considerate? Shami Chakrabarti, the petite whirlwind who
runs Liberty believes that "the small measures of increasing ferocity add up
over time to a society of a completely different flavour". That is exactly the
phrase I was looking for. Britain is not a police state - the fact that Tony
Blair felt it necessary to answer me by e-mail proves that - but it is becoming
a very different place under his rule, and all sides of the House of Commons
agree. The Liberal Democrats' spokesman on human rights and civil liberties,
David Heath, is sceptical about Blair's use of the terrorist threat. "The
age-old technique of any authoritarian or repressive government has always been
to exaggerate the terrorist threat to justify their actions," he says. "I am not
one to underestimate the threat of terrorism, but I think it has been used to
justify measures which have no relevance to attacking terrorism effectively."
And Bob Marshall-Andrews - a Labour MP who, like quite a number of others on
Blair's side of the House of Commons, is deeply worried about the tone of
government - says of his boss, "Underneath, there is an unstable
authoritarianism which has seeped into the [Labour] Party."
Chakrabarti, who once worked as a lawyer in the Home Office, explains: "If you
throw live frogs into a pan of boiling water, they will sensibly jump out and
save themselves. If you put them in a pan of cold water and gently apply heat
until the water boils they will lie in the pan and boil to death. It's like
that." In Blair you see the champion frog boiler of modern times. He is also a
lawyer who suffers acute impatience with the processes of the law. In one of his
e-mails to me he painted a lurid - and often true - picture of the delinquency
in some of Britain's poorer areas, as well as the helplessness of the victims.
His response to the problem of societal breakdown was to invent a new category
of restraint called the antisocial behaviour order, or Asbo.
"Please speak to the victims of this menace," he wrote. "They are people whose
lives have been turned into a daily hell. Suppose they live next door to someone
whose kids are out of control: who play their music loud until 2 am; who vilify
anyone who asks them to stop; who are often into drugs or alcohol? Or visit a
park where children can't play because of needles, used condoms, and hooligans
hanging around.
"It is true that, in theory, each of these acts is a crime for which the police
could prosecute. In practice, they don't. It would involve in each case a
disproportionate amount of time, money and commitment for what would be, for any
single act, a low-level sentence. Instead, they can now use an Asbo or a
parenting order or other measures that attack not an offence but behaviour that
causes harm and distress to people, and impose restrictions on the person doing
it, breach of which would mean they go to prison."
How the Asbo works is that a complaint is lodged with a magistrates' court which
names an individual or parent of a child who is said to be the source of
antisocial behaviour. The actions which cause the trouble do not have to be
illegal in themselves before an Asbo is granted and the court insists on the
cessation of that behaviour - which may be nothing more than walking a dog,
playing music, or shouting in the street. It is important to understand that the
standards of evidence are much lower here than in a normal court hearing because
hearsay - that is, rumour and gossip - is admissible. If a person is found to
have broken an Asbo, he or she is liable to a maximum of five years in prison,
regardless of whether the act is in itself illegal. So, in effect, the person is
being punished for disobedience to the state.
The world's greatest empires progress through this sequence:From bondage to spiritual faith; spiritual faith to great courage; courage to liberty;liberty to abundance;abundance to selfishness; selfishness to complacency;complacency to apathy;apathy to dependence;dependency back again into bondage
Blair is untroubled by the precedent that this law might offer a real live
despot, or by the fact that Asbos are being used to stifle legitimate protest,
and indeed, in his exchange with me, he seemed to suggest that he was
considering a kind of super-Asbo for more serious criminals to "harry, hassle
and hound them until they give up or leave the country". It was significant that
nowhere in this rant did he mention the process of law or a court.
He offers something new: not a police state but a controlled state, in which he seeks to alter radically the political and philosophical context of the
criminal-justice system. "I believe we require a profound rebalancing of the
civil liberties debate," he said in a speech in May. "The issue is not whether
we care about civil liberties but what that means in the early 21st century." He wants legislation to limit powers of British courts to interpret the Human
Rights Act. The Act, imported from the European Convention on Human Rights, was
originally inspired by Winston Churchill, who had suggested it as a means to
entrench certain rights in Europe after the war.
Blair says that this thinking springs from the instincts of his generation,
which is "hard on behaviour and soft on lifestyle." Actually, I was born six
weeks before Blair, 53 years ago, and I can categorically say that he does not
speak for all my generation. But I agree with his other self-description, in
which he claims to be a moderniser, because he tends to deny the importance of
history and tradition, particularly when it comes to Parliament, whose powers of
scrutiny have suffered dreadfully under his government.There can be few duller
documents than the Civil Contingencies Act of 2004 or the Inquiries Act of 2005,
which is perhaps just as well for the Government, for both vastly extend the
arbitrary powers of ministers while making them less answerable to Parliament.
The Civil Contingencies Act, for instance, allows a minister to declare a state
of emergency in which assets can be seized without compensation, courts may be
set up, assemblies may be banned, and people may be moved from, or held in,
particular areas, all on the belief that an emergency might be about to occur.
Only after seven days does Parliament get the chance to assess the situation. If
the minister is wrong, or has acted in bad faith, he cannot be punished.
One response might be to look into his actions by holding a government
investigation under the Inquiries Act, but then the minister may set its terms,
suppress evidence, close the hearing to the public, and terminate it without
explanation. Under this Act, the reports of government inquiries are presented
to ministers, not, as they once were, to Parliament. This fits very well into a
pattern where the executive branch demands more and more unfettered power, as
does Charles Clarke's suggestion that the press should be subject to statutory
regulation.
I realise that it would be testing your patience to go too deeply into the
Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, which the Government has been trying to
smuggle through Parliament this year, but let me just say that its original
draft would have allowed ministers to make laws without reference to elected
representatives.
Imagine the President of the United States trying to neuter the Congress in this
manner, so flagrantly robbing it of its power. Yet until recently all this has
occurred in Britain with barely a whisper of coverage in the British media.
Blair is the lowest he has ever been in the polls, but he is still energetically
fighting off his rival, Gordon Brown, with a cabinet reshuffle and a stout
defence of his record. In an e-mail to me, Blair denied that he was trying to
abolish parliamentary democracy, then swiftly moved to say how out of touch the
political and legal establishments were, which is perhaps the way that he
justifies these actions to himself. It was striking how he got one of his own
pieces of legislation wrong when discussing control orders - or house arrest -
for terrorist suspects in relation to the European Convention on Human Rights,
which is incorporated into British law under the Human Rights Act. "The point
about the Human Rights Act," he declared, "is that it does allow the courts to
strike down the act of our 'sovereign Parliament'." As Marcel Berlins, the legal
columnist of The Guardian, remarked, "It does no such thing."
How can the Prime Minister get such a fundamentally important principle
concerning human rights so utterly wrong, especially when it so exercised both
sides of the House of Commons? The answer is that he is probably not a man for
detail, but Charles Moore, the former editor of The Daily Telegraph, now a
columnist and the official biographer of Margaret Thatcher, believes that New
Labour contains strands of rather sinister political DNA.
"My theory is that the Blairites are Marxist in process, though not in ideology
- well, actually it is more Leninist." It is true that several senior ministers
had socialist periods. Charles Clarke, John Reid, recently anointed Home
Secretary, and Jack Straw, the former foreign secretary, were all on the extreme
left, if not self-declared Leninists. Moore's implication is that the sacred
Blair project of modernising Britain has become a kind of ersatz ideology and
that this is more important to Blair than any of the country's political or
legal institutions. "He's very shallow," says Moore. "He's got a few things he
wants to do and he rather impressively pursues them."
One of these is the national ID card scheme, opposition to which brings together
such disparate figures as the Earl of Onslow, a Conservative peer of the realm;
Commander George Churchill-Coleman, the famous head of New Scotland Yard's
anti-terrorist unit during the worst years of IRA bombings; and Neil Tennant,
one half of the hugely successful pop group Pet Shop Boys.
The idea of the ID card seems sensible in the age of terrorism, identity theft,
and illegal immigration until you realise that the centralised database - the
National Identity Register - will log and store details of every important
action in a person's life. When the ID card is swiped as someone identifies
himself at, say, a bank, hospital, pharmacy, or insurance company, those details
are retained and may be inspected by, among others, the police, tax authorities,
customs, and MI5, the domestic intelligence service. The system will locate and
track the entire adult population. If you put it together with the national
system of licence-plate-recognition cameras, which is about to go live on
British highways and in town centres, and understand that the ID card, under a
new regulation, will also carry details of a person's medical records, you
realise that the state will be able to keep tabs on anyone it chooses and find
out about the most private parts of a person's life.
Despite the cost of the ID card system - estimated by the Government as being
about £5.8bn and by the London School of Economics as being between £10bn and
£19bn - few think that it will attack the problems of terrorism and ID theft.
George Churchill-Coleman described it to me as an absolute waste of time. "You
and I will carry them because we are upright citizens. But a terrorist isn't
going to carry [his own]. He will be carrying yours."
Neil Tennant, a former Labour donor who has stopped giving money to and voting
for Labour because of ID cards, says: "My specific fear is that we are going to
create a society where a policeman stops me on the way to Waitrose on the King's
Road and says, 'Can I see your identity card?' I don't see why I should have to
do that." Tennant says he may leave the country if a compulsory ID card comes
into force. "We can't live in a total-surveillance society," he adds. "It is to
disrespect us."
Defending myself against claims of paranoia and the attacks of Labour's former
home secretary, I have simply referred people to the statute book of British
law, where the evidence of what I have been saying is there for all to see. But
two other factors in this silent takeover are not so visible. The first is a
profound change in the relationship between the individual and the state.
Nothing demonstrates the sense of the state's entitlement over the average
citizen more than the new laws that came in at the beginning of the year and
allow anyone to be arrested for any crime - even dropping litter. And here's the
crucial point. Once a person is arrested he or she may be fingerprinted and
photographed by the police and have a DNA sample removed with an oral swab - by
force if necessary. And this is before that person has been found guilty of any
crime, whether it be dropping litter or shooting someone.
So much for the presumption of innocence, but there again we have no reason to
be surprised. Last year, in his annual Labour Party conference speech, Blair
said this: "The whole of our system starts from the proposition that its duty is
to protect the innocent from being wrongly convicted. Don't misunderstand me.
That must be the duty of any criminal justice system. But surely our primary
duty should be to allow law-abiding people to live in safety. It means a
complete change of thinking. It doesn't mean abandoning human rights. It means
deciding whose come first." The point of human rights, as Churchill noted, is
that they treat the innocent, the suspect, and the convict equally: "These are
the symbols, in the treatment of crime and criminals, which mark and measure the
stored-up strength of a nation, and are a sign and proof of the living virtue in
it."
The DNA database is part of this presumption of guilt. Naturally the police
support it, because it has obvious benefits in solving crimes, but it should be
pointed out to any country considering the compulsory retention of the DNA of
innocent people that in Britain 38 per cent of all black men are represented on
the database, while just 10 percent of white men are. There will be an inbuilt
racism in the system until - heaven forbid - we all have our DNA taken and
recorded on our ID cards.
Baroness Kennedy, a lawyer and Labour peer, is one of the most vocal critics of
Blair's new laws. In the annual James Cameron Memorial Lecture at the City
University, London, in April she gave a devastating account of her own party's
waywardness. She accused government ministers of seeing themselves as the
embodiment of the state, rather than, as I would put it, the servants of the
state.
"The common law is built on moral wisdom," she said, "grounded in the experience
of ages, acknowledging that governments can abuse power and when a person is on
trial the burden of proof must be on the state and no one's liberty should be
removed without evidence of the highest standard. By removing trial by jury and
seeking to detain people on civil Asbo orders as a pre-emptive strike, by
introducing ID cards, the Government is creating new paradigms of state power.
Being required to produce your papers to show who you are is a public
manifestation of who is in control. What we seem to have forgotten is that the
state is there courtesy of us and we are not here courtesy the state."
The second invisible change that has occurred in Britain is best expressed by
Simon Davies, a fellow at the London School of Economics, who did pioneering
work on the ID card scheme and then suffered a wounding onslaught from the
Government when it did not agree with his findings. The worrying thing, he
suggests, is that the instinctive sense of personal liberty has been lost in the
British people. "We have reached that stage now where we have gone almost as far
as it is possible to go in establishing the infrastructures of control and
surveillance within an open and free environment," he says. "That architecture
only has to work and the citizens only have to become compliant for the
Government to have control.
"That compliance is what scares me the most. People are resigned to their fate.
They've bought the Government's arguments for the public good. There is a
generational failure of memory about individual rights. Whenever Government says
that some intrusion is necessary in the public interest, an entire generation
has no clue how to respond, not even intuitively And that is the great lesson
that other countries must learn. The US must never lose sight of its traditions
of individual freedom."
Those who understand what has gone on in Britain have the sense of being in one
of those nightmares where you are crying out to warn someone of impending
danger, but they cannot hear you. And yet I do take some hope from the
picnickers of Parliament Square. May the numbers of these young eccentrics swell
and swell over the coming months, for their actions are a sign that the spirit
of liberty and dogged defiance are not yet dead in Britain.
This article is taken from the current issue of Vanity Fair
Charged for quoting George Orwell in public
In another example of the Government's draconian stance on political protest,
Steven Jago, 36, a management accountant, yesterday became the latest person to
be charged under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act.
On 18 June, Mr Jago carried a placard in Whitehall bearing the George Orwell
quote: "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary
act." In his possession, he had several copies of an article in the American
magazine Vanity Fair headlined "Blair's Big Brother Legacy", which were
confiscated by the police. "The implication that I read from this statement at
the time was that I was being accused of handing out subversive material," said
Mr Jago. Yesterday, the author, Henry Porter, the magazine's London editor,
wrote to Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, expressing concern
that the freedom of the press would be severely curtailed if such articles were
used in evidence under the Act.
Mr Porter said: "The police told Mr Jago this was 'politically motivated'
material, and suggested it was evidence of his desire to break the law. I
therefore seek your assurance that possession of Vanity Fair within a designated
area is not regarded as 'politically motivated' and evidence of conscious
law-breaking."
Scotland Yard has declined to comment.
Enemies of the state?
Maya Evans 25
The chef was arrested at the Cenotaph in Whitehall reading out the names of 97
British soldiers killed in Iraq. She was the first person to be convicted under
section 132 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act, which requires
protesters to obtain police permission before demonstrating within one kilometre
of Parliament.
The world's greatest empires progress through this sequence:From bondage to spiritual faith; spiritual faith to great courage; courage to liberty;liberty to abundance;abundance to selfishness; selfishness to complacency;complacency to apathy;apathy to dependence;dependency back again into bondage
The Greenham Common veterans were arrested in April by Ministry of Defence
police after walking 15ft across the sentry line at the US military base at
Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire. Protesters who breach any one of 10 military
bases across Britain can be jailed for a year or fined £5,000.
Brian Haw 56
Mr Haw has become a fixture in Parliament Square with placards berating Tony
Blair and President Bush. The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 was
designed mainly with his vigil in mind. After being arrested, he refused to
enter a plea. However, Bow Street magistrates' court entered a not guilty plea
on his behalf in May.
Walter Wolfgang 82
The octogenarian heckled Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, during his speech to
the Labour Party conference. He shouted "That's a lie" as Mr Straw justified
keeping British troops in Iraq. He was manhandled by stewards and ejected from
the Brighton Centre. He was briefly detained under Section 44 of the 2000 Terrorism Act.
The world's greatest empires progress through this sequence:From bondage to spiritual faith; spiritual faith to great courage; courage to liberty;liberty to abundance;abundance to selfishness; selfishness to complacency;complacency to apathy;apathy to dependence;dependency back again into bondage
You know, I ALWAYS think of x files when I hear that line. You think Ed was a fan?
And all of the above I listed, is how these things start. Rome to Russia to Germany (Nazi) and beyond.
You remove the rights of people to protest and assemble peacefully, you remove the right to question government. You remove that right, then they can do wht they want. Like invade Iraq, for example.
And that reporter above, he got into a long email exchange with Tony Blair about the subject. Also on the Independent website. Its shockingly revelatory just how low we, the people, are in the eyes of Mister Blair, and just how little he knows of the subject he passes through law.
I hope the "decrees" above satisfy your curiosity sir !!
The world's greatest empires progress through this sequence:From bondage to spiritual faith; spiritual faith to great courage; courage to liberty;liberty to abundance;abundance to selfishness; selfishness to complacency;complacency to apathy;apathy to dependence;dependency back again into bondage
Why the hell are the Bank of England releasing the names and details of those arrested?
Have we lost all respect for the basis of our court system, innocent until proven guilty? No prejudice before hand, Habeas Corpus (sorry thats been rescinded for the war on terror)
If you believe this, then Id be worried that these men would not be getting a fair trial. How could they now? The Media has convicted them. Scotland Yard has convicted them. And now the Bank of fucking England!! (thanks Bridge...)
The world's greatest empires progress through this sequence:From bondage to spiritual faith; spiritual faith to great courage; courage to liberty;liberty to abundance;abundance to selfishness; selfishness to complacency;complacency to apathy;apathy to dependence;dependency back again into bondage
Enemies of the state?
1. Maya Evans 25
The chef was arrested at the Cenotaph in Whitehall reading out the names of 97
British soldiers killed in Iraq. She was the first person to be convicted under
section 132 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act, which requires
protesters to obtain police permission before demonstrating within one kilometre
of Parliament.
2. Helen John 68, and Sylvia Boyes 62
The Greenham Common veterans were arrested in April by Ministry of Defence
police after walking 15ft across the sentry line at the US military base at
Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire. Protesters who breach any one of 10 military
bases across Britain can be jailed for a year or fined £5,000.
Brian Haw 56
Mr Haw has become a fixture in Parliament Square with placards berating Tony
Blair and President Bush. The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 was
designed mainly with his vigil in mind. After being arrested, he refused to
enter a plea. However, Bow Street magistrates' court entered a not guilty plea
on his behalf in May.
3. Walter Wolfgang 82
The octogenarian heckled Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, during his speech to
the Labour Party conference. He shouted "That's a lie" as Mr Straw justified
keeping British troops in Iraq. He was manhandled by stewards and ejected from
the Brighton Centre. He was briefly detained under Section 44 of the 2000 Terrorism Act.
so... since the inception of all these "freedom" stripping policies... we have the above indiscretions... 3 examples of protesting ... i asked for the policies that have DIRECTLY affected me and millions of others like me.. i dont protest... its pointless, as i'd need to fly to London to do it... and i cant because some fucking nutballs have made it nigh on impossible for me to get there at the moment
1. She didnt obtain permission... just like she would have been arrested if she had tried to fish in a private lake without the required permit i absolutely guarantee that if she had applied for the demonstration licence she would have got it... she bore no threat, but she didnt follow the procedures in place.. had she done her "protest" would have been ok
2. They breached the Military base lines... they broke the law... you know how its illegal for me to punch people in the face... well its illegal to step onto military bases... and for a good reason... if we could claim "rights of way" through these places... well we could find things very useful to fire at people
3. The octogenerian was huckled out of the place by a couple of nightclub bouncers pretending to be MI5.. they were heavy handed and were quite rightly reprimanded for it... it was also an outside firm of security specialists who handled that wasnt it... hardly representative of the governmental stripping of freedoms is it... a chef proving a point, 2 old hippies and a 80 yr old bloke with a bad case of tourettes....
oh scary... 40000 morbidly obese christians wearing fanny packs invading europe is probably the least scariest thing since I watched an edited version of The Care Bears movie in an extremely brightly lit cinema.
maybe it´s bec. that other terrorist get nervous ...i´ve no idear ....or maybe bec. than people can see where the money of them came from
or maybe that they want to know if other people mention them somewhere ?
or maybe it is just punishment ...nobody knows just them...
Why the hell are the Bank of England releasing the names and details of those arrested?
Have we lost all respect for the basis of our court system, innocent until proven guilty? No prejudice before hand, Habeas Corpus (sorry thats been rescinded for the war on terror)
If you believe this, then Id be worried that these men would not be getting a fair trial. How could they now? The Media has convicted them. Scotland Yard has convicted them. And now the Bank of fucking England!! (thanks Bridge...)
this has been standard procedure for years... the names of accused rapists are handed out by police.. why not accused murderers... only kids have the benefit of secrecy when in court... why should these guys be any different..
i'm not saying they are guilty btw... i'm just saying they shouldnt be treated differently to other people... no special cases here
oh scary... 40000 morbidly obese christians wearing fanny packs invading europe is probably the least scariest thing since I watched an edited version of The Care Bears movie in an extremely brightly lit cinema.
this has been standard procedure for years... the names of accused rapists are handed out by police.. why not accused murderers... only kids have the benefit of secrecy when in court... why should these guys be any different..
i'm not saying they are guilty btw... i'm just saying they shouldnt be treated differently to other people... no special cases here
This is the Bank of England. Not the Police.
The world's greatest empires progress through this sequence:From bondage to spiritual faith; spiritual faith to great courage; courage to liberty;liberty to abundance;abundance to selfishness; selfishness to complacency;complacency to apathy;apathy to dependence;dependency back again into bondage
Isn't the Bank of England owned by the Rothschilds? That'd make sense.
I necessarily have the passion for writing this, and you have the passion for condemning me; both of us are equally fools, equally the toys of destiny. Your nature is to do harm, mine is to love truth, and to make it public in spite of you. - Voltaire
oh scary... 40000 morbidly obese christians wearing fanny packs invading europe is probably the least scariest thing since I watched an edited version of The Care Bears movie in an extremely brightly lit cinema.
i asked for the policies that have DIRECTLY affected me and millions of others like me.. i dont protest... its pointless,
Well if your nation attacking another illegally, that support of nations that indiscriminately murder others, that lying to you, the electorate, do not affect you, then that is your life. Good luck with that.
And good luck with the future where, you know, one day, god forbid, the goverment may just do something, passes a law, starts a war it can't get out of, that directly affects you, and you don't like it, and you cannot do anything about it. Maybe its even just putting up the price of beer, or cigarettes, or banning certian bands or singers or writers from publishing anti-war, anti-corporate material. If thats the sort of thing that DIRECTLY affects you that is.
See you at The Jury's bar...
The world's greatest empires progress through this sequence:From bondage to spiritual faith; spiritual faith to great courage; courage to liberty;liberty to abundance;abundance to selfishness; selfishness to complacency;complacency to apathy;apathy to dependence;dependency back again into bondage
I don't give a fuck what the police think they have the right to authorise, it is not in British Law, in any act of Parliament, that a private banking consortium can release details of suspected criminals to the world, less than 24 hours after arrests were made.
If this doesn't seem strange, no fuck that, illegal, immoral, not what 'freedom' and 'democracy' are all about, then I don't what is.
The world's greatest empires progress through this sequence:From bondage to spiritual faith; spiritual faith to great courage; courage to liberty;liberty to abundance;abundance to selfishness; selfishness to complacency;complacency to apathy;apathy to dependence;dependency back again into bondage
And good luck with the future where, you know, one day, god forbid, the goverment may just do something, passes a law, starts a war it can't get out of, that directly affects you, and you don't like it, and you cannot do anything about it. Maybe its even just putting up the price of beer, or cigarettes, or banning certian bands or singers or writers from publishing anti-war, anti-corporate material. If thats the sort of thing that DIRECTLY affects you that is.
See you at The Jury's bar...
you're just promoting a different kind of fear.. this makes you no better than the people or authorities you are rebelling against :(
of course
oh scary... 40000 morbidly obese christians wearing fanny packs invading europe is probably the least scariest thing since I watched an edited version of The Care Bears movie in an extremely brightly lit cinema.
I don't give a fuck what the police think they have the right to authorise, it is not in British Law, in any act of Parliament, that a private banking consortium can release details of suspected criminals to the world, less than 24 hours after arrests were made.
its not NOT against the law either is it... the police would have sanctioned it as they wouldnt want the information to be detrimental to their investigations
so make our minds up here... do you want Freedom of Information or dont you...????
ALI, Abdula, Ahmed
Date of birth (DOB): 10/10/1980
Address: Walthamstow, London, E17
oh scary... 40000 morbidly obese christians wearing fanny packs invading europe is probably the least scariest thing since I watched an edited version of The Care Bears movie in an extremely brightly lit cinema.
you're just promoting a different kind of fear.. this makes you no better than the people or authorities you are rebelling against :(
of course
Its not fear im promoting, its information. Of what is happening, for real, here, today. These plots arent 'suspected', or 'imminent', they are real, and are happening to us. Our freedoms are not at threat from "Islamic Fascism", its at threat from neo-conservative Christian Ideology.
You said above about that woman not getting permission to protest, and she was acting illegally.
How can you not see that as wrong, or something worth fighting against?
Do you think they would have given her permission to continue that protest?
Asking permission from the people you want to protest against is not what democracy and freedom is all about mate. Well, it isn't to me.
Look at the new defintion of terrorism as laid down in the Terror Act. If you hand a political leaflet out, you can be classed as a terrorist. These things are now in law, and they are there for a reason. For a future where the freedom to speak out, to protest, is outlawed.
Did you know the Home secretary, now, under these new laws, if he sees fit, and only if he sees fit, can arbitarily declare martial law with no recourse to parliament, ie, to democracy, to us, the people?
If that's reasonable to you, then ok, good luck chief. Here's to the music...
The world's greatest empires progress through this sequence:From bondage to spiritual faith; spiritual faith to great courage; courage to liberty;liberty to abundance;abundance to selfishness; selfishness to complacency;complacency to apathy;apathy to dependence;dependency back again into bondage
Our freedoms are not at threat from "Islamic Fascism", its at threat from neo-conservative Christian Ideology.
i'm sorry... i dont subscribe to that view whatsoever... thats the kinda talk that neo-cons holed up in Idaho with their militias have... here endeth the debate
You said above about that woman not getting permission to protest, and she was acting illegally.
How can you not see that as wrong, or something worth fighting against?
Do you think they would have given her permission to continue that protest?
because it was within 1 mile of the houses of parliament... thats the law and she knew that... she decided to break it.. and she would have been given permission, absolutely... it wasnt a mass protest, it met the criteria in which she would have been allowed... i.e. it wasnt racist, homophobic, etc... it would have been a political error to not allow her.. as for her protest.. couldnt give a fuck about it anymore... apathy has set in and anger rises at the problems we have on our own shores... seeing homeless people beg on our streets, crime, poverty, etc, etc, etc all happening in the UK as we speak.. personally Iraq is a lost cause on me.. i just dont care, i do care a lot about our own problems however...
Asking permission from the people you want to protest against is not what democracy and freedom is all about mate. Well, it isn't to me.
thats true... but we can still protest... absolutely... i saw and walked with over 100,000 people in London last weekend calling for a ceasefire... they had no permits, but they walked peacefully up to no.10 and handed in the petition... all done and with no problems... policemen laughing and smiling along with peaceful protestors... it still happens.. you make it out (by using 3 paltry examples) that we are under some iron blanket and all dissent will lead to incarceration and political parties being banned and scottish people being made to live in ghettos and make bombs for war.... you paint a picture of a future that even Hieronymus Bosch would struggle to look at
oh scary... 40000 morbidly obese christians wearing fanny packs invading europe is probably the least scariest thing since I watched an edited version of The Care Bears movie in an extremely brightly lit cinema.
If you hand a political leaflet out, you can be classed as a terrorist. These things are now in law..
not true
offence of publishing, possessing or disseminating publications that indirectly incite terrorist acts or are likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing a terrorist act
hardly political leafles
oh scary... 40000 morbidly obese christians wearing fanny packs invading europe is probably the least scariest thing since I watched an edited version of The Care Bears movie in an extremely brightly lit cinema.
Comments
hahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahaha
you funny
"I feel that it does not behoove slaves to reason about freedom."
You may take your freedoms, what freedoms we percieve ourselves to have, lightly, and for granted, and disrespect their power to the individual. Luckily, mate, for our children, and for us, others do not.
Waych me on CCTv etc...umm..Innocent, until proven guilty, no?
How long do you think you can continue to drink your beer, get laid or tooted up on a weekend, have new phones, TVs, shitty but half decently paid job, to listen to the music you want, when you want, to say what you want, when you want, until they, the bastards that took away all the freedoms you took for granted, THAT YOU WILLINGLY SURRENDER, come for their pound of flesh, and drive you to fight a war the causes of which you should have cared for earlier, or into poverty and destitution once they have exhausted this world of all possible profit?
Do you think this is a one sided deal with devil here? For these freedoms you think you have, the freedom to get up and go to fucking work, to blow money on daft mullet and bleached haircuts, on bowling shoes and ripped fucking jeans and tattoos and smokes and SKY tv and football and all that other shit they blind you with, do you not ever think the overseers will want something in return?
This government lied to me once, a big fucking lie, that led us to war and the deaths of thousands.
I will never blindly believe them again. Why will you, chief?
Tell you to pray while the devil's on their shoulder..
Laying claim to the take our soldiers save
Does not equate and, THE TRUTH'S ALREADY OUT THERE...
http://www.mi5.gov.uk/
here, you need to take a chill pill
right... what 'freedoms' have the UK stripped of its citizens since 9/11... if you can supply me with a list of PASSED governmental decrees that affect my life then i'll start to listen...
your not a soothsayer... you have no crystal ball.. your vision of our future where we live in some facist state with no perceived freedom is just scaremongering... this kind of scaremongering holds no greater kudos or nobility than the one you are saying our government is doing.... just a different side of the coin.... but prosaic hyperbole aside... if the govt starts polices and procedures that directly affect my (and many millions of ordinary citizens) lives.. then i'll start a revolution... but asking me to put my stuff into a plastic bag to go on a flight is hardly enlisting me into some Krakow ghetto where i have to use gold fillings to buy bread
Hey, im not the one falling for all this terror alert bullshit, scared to death of the big bad black bogeymen with the beards.
I am very chilled, and have great faith in the uncalculabe majority that is my good fellow man. Its the tiny percentage who control the guns, planes, aircraft carriers, nuclear weapone, bombs, missiles, CCTV cameras, the power to watch my bank accounts, to listen to my phone calls, to read my emails, to restrict my freedoms, and to make me pay fucking pay for it, that I'm scared of.
Mulder is one great fucking lyricist
Blair laid bare: the article that may get you arrested
In the guise of fighting terrorism and maintaining public order, Tony Blair's
Government has quietly and systematically taken power from Parliament and the
British people. The author charts a nine-year assault on civil liberties that
reveals the danger of trading freedom for security - and must have Churchill
spinning in his grave
By Henry Porter
Published: 29 June 2006
In the shadow of Winston Churchill's statue opposite the House of Commons, a rather odd ritual has developed on Sunday afternoons. A small group of people - mostly young and dressed outlandishly - hold a tea party on the grass of Parliament Square. A woman looking very much like Mary Poppins passes plates of frosted cakes and cookies, while other members of the party flourish blank placards or, as they did on the afternoon I was there, attempt a game of cricket.
Sometimes the police move in and arrest the picnickers, but on this occasion the officers stood at a distance, presumably consulting on the question of whether this was a demonstration or a non-demonstration. It is all rather silly and yet in Blair's Britain there is a kind of nobility in the amateurishness and
persistence of the gesture. This collection of oddballs, looking for all the
world as if they had stepped out of the Michelangelo Antonioni film Blow-Up, are challenging a new law which says that no one may demonstrate within a kilometre, or a little more than half a mile, of Parliament Square if they have not first acquired written permission from the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. This effectively places the entire centre of British government, Whitehall and Trafalgar Square, off-limits to the protesters and marchers who have traditionally brought their grievances to those in power without ever having to ask a policeman's permission.
The non-demo demo, or tea party, is a legalistic response to the law. If
anything is written on the placards, or if someone makes a speech, then he or she is immediately deemed to be in breach of the law and is arrested. The device doesn't always work. After drinking tea in the square, a man named Mark Barrett was recently convicted of demonstrating. Two other protesters, Milan Rai and Maya Evans, were charged after reading out the names of dead Iraqi civilians at the Cenotaph, Britain's national war memorial, in Whitehall, a few hundred yards away.
On that dank spring afternoon I looked up at Churchill and reflected that he
almost certainly would have approved of these people insisting on their right to
demonstrate in front of his beloved Parliament. "If you will not fight for the
right," he once growled, "when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will
not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the
moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a
precarious chance for survival. There may be a worse case. You may have to fight
when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish than to live
as slaves."
Churchill lived in far more testing times than ours, but he always revered the
ancient tradition of Britain's "unwritten constitution". I imagined him becoming
flesh again and walking purposefully toward Downing Street - without security,
of course - there to address Tony Blair and his aides on their sacred duty as
the guardians of Britain's Parliament and the people's rights.
For Blair, that youthful baby-boomer who came to power nine years ago as the
embodiment of democratic liberalism as well as the new spirit of optimism in
Britain, turns out to have an authoritarian streak that respects neither those
rights nor, it seems, the independence of the elected representatives in
Parliament. And what is remarkable - in fact almost a historic phenomenon - is
the harm his government has done to the unwritten British constitution in those
nine years, without anyone really noticing, without the press objecting or the
public mounting mass protests. At the inception of Cool Britannia, British
democracy became subject to a silent takeover.
Last year - rather late in the day, I must admit - I started to notice trends in
Blair's legislation which seemed to attack individual rights and freedoms, to
favour ministers (politicians appointed by the Prime Minister to run departments
of government) over the scrutiny of Parliament, and to put in place all the
necessary laws for total surveillance of society.
There was nothing else to do but to go back and read the Acts - at least 15 of
them - and to write about them in my weekly column in The Observer. After about
eight weeks, the Prime Minister privately let it be known that he was displeased
at being called authoritarian by me. Very soon I found myself in the odd
position of conducting a formal e-mail exchange with him on the rule of law, I
sitting in my London home with nothing but Google and a stack of legislation,
the Prime Minister in No 10 with all the resources of government at his
disposal. Incidentally, I was assured that he had taken time out of his schedule
so that he himself could compose the thunderous responses calling for action
against terrorism, crime, and antisocial behaviour.
Government and me was broken. Blair gave a press conference, in which he
attacked media exaggeration, and the then Home Secretary, Charles Clarke,
weighed in with a speech at the London School of Economics naming me and two
other journalists and complaining about "the pernicious and even dangerous
poison" in the media.
So, I guess this column comes with a health warning from the British Government,
but please don't pay it any mind. When governments attack the media, it is often
a sign that the media have for once gotten something right. I might add that
this column also comes with the more serious warning that, if rights have been
eroded in the land once called "the Mother of Parliaments", it can happen in any
country where a government actively promotes the fear of terrorism and crime and
uses it to persuade people that they must exchange their freedom for security.
Blair's campaign against rights contained in the Rule of Law - that is, that
ancient amalgam of common law, convention, and the opinion of experts, which
makes up one half of the British constitution - is often well concealed. Many of
the measures have been slipped through under legislation that appears to address
problems the public is concerned about. For instance, the law banning people
from demonstrating within one kilometre of Parliament is contained in the
Serious Organised Crime and Police Act of 2005. The right to protest freely has
been affected by the Terrorism Act of 2000, which allows police to stop and
search people in a designated area - which can be anywhere - and by antisocial
behaviour laws, which allow police to issue an order banning someone from a
particular activity, waving a banner, for instance. If a person breaks that
order, he or she risks a prison sentence of up to five years. Likewise, the
Protection from Harassment Act of 1997 - designed to combat stalkers and
campaigns of intimidation - is being used to control protest. A woman who sent
two e-mails to a pharmaceutical company politely asking a member of the staff
not to work with a company that did testing on animals was prosecuted for
"repeated conduct" in sending an e-mail twice, which the Act defines as
harassment.
There is a demonic versatility to Blair's laws. Kenneth Clarke, a former
Conservative chancellor of the exchequer and home secretary, despairs at the way
they are being used. "What is assured as being harmless when it is introduced
gets used more and more in a way which is sometimes alarming," he says. His
colleague David Davis, the shadow Home Secretary, is astonished by Blair's
Labour Party: "If I had gone on the radio 15 years ago and said that a Labour
government would limit your right to trial by jury, would limit - in some cases
eradicate - habeas corpus, constrain your right of freedom of speech, they would
have locked me up."
Indeed they would. But there's more, so much in fact that it is difficult to
grasp the scope of the campaign against British freedoms. But here goes. The
right to a jury trial is removed in complicated fraud cases and where there is a
fear of jury tampering. The right not to be tried twice for the same offence -
the law of double jeopardy - no longer exists. The presumption of innocence is
compromised, especially in antisocial behaviour legislation, which also makes
hearsay admissible as evidence. The right not to be punished unless a court
decides that the law has been broken is removed in the system of control orders
by which a terrorist suspect is prevented from moving about freely and using the
phone and internet, without at any stage being allowed to hear the evidence
against him - house arrest in all but name.
Freedom of speech is attacked by Section Five of the Criminal Justice and Public
Order Act, which preceded Blair's Government, but which is now being used to
patrol opinion. In Oxford last year a 21-year-old graduate of Balliol College
named Sam Brown drunkenly shouted in the direction of two mounted police
officers, "Mate, you know your horse is gay. I hope you don't have a problem
with that." He was given one of the new, on-the-spot fines - £80 - which he
refused to pay, with the result that he was taken to court. Some 10 months later
the Crown Prosecution Service dropped its case that he had made homophobic
remarks likely to cause disorder.
There are other people the police have investigated but failed to prosecute: the
columnist Cristina Odone, who made a barely disparaging aside about Welsh people
on TV (she referred to them as "little Welshies"); and the head of the Muslim
Council of Great Britain, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, who said that homosexual practices
were "not acceptable" and civil partnerships between gays were "harmful".
The remarks may be a little inappropriate, but I find myself regretting that my
countrymen's opinions - their bloody-mindedness, their truculence in the face of
authority, their love of insult and robust debate - are being edged out by this
fussy, hairsplitting, second-guessing, politically correct state that Blair is
trying to build with what he calls his "respect agenda".
Do these tiny cuts to British freedom amount to much more than a few people
being told to be more considerate? Shami Chakrabarti, the petite whirlwind who
runs Liberty believes that "the small measures of increasing ferocity add up
over time to a society of a completely different flavour". That is exactly the
phrase I was looking for. Britain is not a police state - the fact that Tony
Blair felt it necessary to answer me by e-mail proves that - but it is becoming
a very different place under his rule, and all sides of the House of Commons
agree. The Liberal Democrats' spokesman on human rights and civil liberties,
David Heath, is sceptical about Blair's use of the terrorist threat. "The
age-old technique of any authoritarian or repressive government has always been
to exaggerate the terrorist threat to justify their actions," he says. "I am not
one to underestimate the threat of terrorism, but I think it has been used to
justify measures which have no relevance to attacking terrorism effectively."
And Bob Marshall-Andrews - a Labour MP who, like quite a number of others on
Blair's side of the House of Commons, is deeply worried about the tone of
government - says of his boss, "Underneath, there is an unstable
authoritarianism which has seeped into the [Labour] Party."
Chakrabarti, who once worked as a lawyer in the Home Office, explains: "If you
throw live frogs into a pan of boiling water, they will sensibly jump out and
save themselves. If you put them in a pan of cold water and gently apply heat
until the water boils they will lie in the pan and boil to death. It's like
that." In Blair you see the champion frog boiler of modern times. He is also a
lawyer who suffers acute impatience with the processes of the law. In one of his
e-mails to me he painted a lurid - and often true - picture of the delinquency
in some of Britain's poorer areas, as well as the helplessness of the victims.
His response to the problem of societal breakdown was to invent a new category
of restraint called the antisocial behaviour order, or Asbo.
"Please speak to the victims of this menace," he wrote. "They are people whose
lives have been turned into a daily hell. Suppose they live next door to someone
whose kids are out of control: who play their music loud until 2 am; who vilify
anyone who asks them to stop; who are often into drugs or alcohol? Or visit a
park where children can't play because of needles, used condoms, and hooligans
hanging around.
"It is true that, in theory, each of these acts is a crime for which the police
could prosecute. In practice, they don't. It would involve in each case a
disproportionate amount of time, money and commitment for what would be, for any
single act, a low-level sentence. Instead, they can now use an Asbo or a
parenting order or other measures that attack not an offence but behaviour that
causes harm and distress to people, and impose restrictions on the person doing
it, breach of which would mean they go to prison."
How the Asbo works is that a complaint is lodged with a magistrates' court which
names an individual or parent of a child who is said to be the source of
antisocial behaviour. The actions which cause the trouble do not have to be
illegal in themselves before an Asbo is granted and the court insists on the
cessation of that behaviour - which may be nothing more than walking a dog,
playing music, or shouting in the street. It is important to understand that the
standards of evidence are much lower here than in a normal court hearing because
hearsay - that is, rumour and gossip - is admissible. If a person is found to
have broken an Asbo, he or she is liable to a maximum of five years in prison,
regardless of whether the act is in itself illegal. So, in effect, the person is
being punished for disobedience to the state.
despot, or by the fact that Asbos are being used to stifle legitimate protest,
and indeed, in his exchange with me, he seemed to suggest that he was
considering a kind of super-Asbo for more serious criminals to "harry, hassle
and hound them until they give up or leave the country". It was significant that
nowhere in this rant did he mention the process of law or a court.
He offers something new: not a police state but a controlled state, in which he seeks to alter radically the political and philosophical context of the
criminal-justice system. "I believe we require a profound rebalancing of the
civil liberties debate," he said in a speech in May. "The issue is not whether
we care about civil liberties but what that means in the early 21st century." He wants legislation to limit powers of British courts to interpret the Human
Rights Act. The Act, imported from the European Convention on Human Rights, was
originally inspired by Winston Churchill, who had suggested it as a means to
entrench certain rights in Europe after the war.
Blair says that this thinking springs from the instincts of his generation,
which is "hard on behaviour and soft on lifestyle." Actually, I was born six
weeks before Blair, 53 years ago, and I can categorically say that he does not
speak for all my generation. But I agree with his other self-description, in
which he claims to be a moderniser, because he tends to deny the importance of
history and tradition, particularly when it comes to Parliament, whose powers of
scrutiny have suffered dreadfully under his government.There can be few duller
documents than the Civil Contingencies Act of 2004 or the Inquiries Act of 2005,
which is perhaps just as well for the Government, for both vastly extend the
arbitrary powers of ministers while making them less answerable to Parliament.
The Civil Contingencies Act, for instance, allows a minister to declare a state
of emergency in which assets can be seized without compensation, courts may be
set up, assemblies may be banned, and people may be moved from, or held in,
particular areas, all on the belief that an emergency might be about to occur.
Only after seven days does Parliament get the chance to assess the situation. If
the minister is wrong, or has acted in bad faith, he cannot be punished.
One response might be to look into his actions by holding a government
investigation under the Inquiries Act, but then the minister may set its terms,
suppress evidence, close the hearing to the public, and terminate it without
explanation. Under this Act, the reports of government inquiries are presented
to ministers, not, as they once were, to Parliament. This fits very well into a
pattern where the executive branch demands more and more unfettered power, as
does Charles Clarke's suggestion that the press should be subject to statutory
regulation.
I realise that it would be testing your patience to go too deeply into the
Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, which the Government has been trying to
smuggle through Parliament this year, but let me just say that its original
draft would have allowed ministers to make laws without reference to elected
representatives.
Imagine the President of the United States trying to neuter the Congress in this
manner, so flagrantly robbing it of its power. Yet until recently all this has
occurred in Britain with barely a whisper of coverage in the British media.
Blair is the lowest he has ever been in the polls, but he is still energetically
fighting off his rival, Gordon Brown, with a cabinet reshuffle and a stout
defence of his record. In an e-mail to me, Blair denied that he was trying to
abolish parliamentary democracy, then swiftly moved to say how out of touch the
political and legal establishments were, which is perhaps the way that he
justifies these actions to himself. It was striking how he got one of his own
pieces of legislation wrong when discussing control orders - or house arrest -
for terrorist suspects in relation to the European Convention on Human Rights,
which is incorporated into British law under the Human Rights Act. "The point
about the Human Rights Act," he declared, "is that it does allow the courts to
strike down the act of our 'sovereign Parliament'." As Marcel Berlins, the legal
columnist of The Guardian, remarked, "It does no such thing."
How can the Prime Minister get such a fundamentally important principle
concerning human rights so utterly wrong, especially when it so exercised both
sides of the House of Commons? The answer is that he is probably not a man for
detail, but Charles Moore, the former editor of The Daily Telegraph, now a
columnist and the official biographer of Margaret Thatcher, believes that New
Labour contains strands of rather sinister political DNA.
"My theory is that the Blairites are Marxist in process, though not in ideology
- well, actually it is more Leninist." It is true that several senior ministers
had socialist periods. Charles Clarke, John Reid, recently anointed Home
Secretary, and Jack Straw, the former foreign secretary, were all on the extreme
left, if not self-declared Leninists. Moore's implication is that the sacred
Blair project of modernising Britain has become a kind of ersatz ideology and
that this is more important to Blair than any of the country's political or
legal institutions. "He's very shallow," says Moore. "He's got a few things he
wants to do and he rather impressively pursues them."
One of these is the national ID card scheme, opposition to which brings together
such disparate figures as the Earl of Onslow, a Conservative peer of the realm;
Commander George Churchill-Coleman, the famous head of New Scotland Yard's
anti-terrorist unit during the worst years of IRA bombings; and Neil Tennant,
one half of the hugely successful pop group Pet Shop Boys.
The idea of the ID card seems sensible in the age of terrorism, identity theft,
and illegal immigration until you realise that the centralised database - the
National Identity Register - will log and store details of every important
action in a person's life. When the ID card is swiped as someone identifies
himself at, say, a bank, hospital, pharmacy, or insurance company, those details
are retained and may be inspected by, among others, the police, tax authorities,
customs, and MI5, the domestic intelligence service. The system will locate and
track the entire adult population. If you put it together with the national
system of licence-plate-recognition cameras, which is about to go live on
British highways and in town centres, and understand that the ID card, under a
new regulation, will also carry details of a person's medical records, you
realise that the state will be able to keep tabs on anyone it chooses and find
out about the most private parts of a person's life.
Despite the cost of the ID card system - estimated by the Government as being
about £5.8bn and by the London School of Economics as being between £10bn and
£19bn - few think that it will attack the problems of terrorism and ID theft.
George Churchill-Coleman described it to me as an absolute waste of time. "You
and I will carry them because we are upright citizens. But a terrorist isn't
going to carry [his own]. He will be carrying yours."
Neil Tennant, a former Labour donor who has stopped giving money to and voting
for Labour because of ID cards, says: "My specific fear is that we are going to
create a society where a policeman stops me on the way to Waitrose on the King's
Road and says, 'Can I see your identity card?' I don't see why I should have to
do that." Tennant says he may leave the country if a compulsory ID card comes
into force. "We can't live in a total-surveillance society," he adds. "It is to
disrespect us."
Defending myself against claims of paranoia and the attacks of Labour's former
home secretary, I have simply referred people to the statute book of British
law, where the evidence of what I have been saying is there for all to see. But
two other factors in this silent takeover are not so visible. The first is a
profound change in the relationship between the individual and the state.
Nothing demonstrates the sense of the state's entitlement over the average
citizen more than the new laws that came in at the beginning of the year and
allow anyone to be arrested for any crime - even dropping litter. And here's the
crucial point. Once a person is arrested he or she may be fingerprinted and
photographed by the police and have a DNA sample removed with an oral swab - by
force if necessary. And this is before that person has been found guilty of any
crime, whether it be dropping litter or shooting someone.
So much for the presumption of innocence, but there again we have no reason to
be surprised. Last year, in his annual Labour Party conference speech, Blair
said this: "The whole of our system starts from the proposition that its duty is
to protect the innocent from being wrongly convicted. Don't misunderstand me.
That must be the duty of any criminal justice system. But surely our primary
duty should be to allow law-abiding people to live in safety. It means a
complete change of thinking. It doesn't mean abandoning human rights. It means
deciding whose come first." The point of human rights, as Churchill noted, is
that they treat the innocent, the suspect, and the convict equally: "These are
the symbols, in the treatment of crime and criminals, which mark and measure the
stored-up strength of a nation, and are a sign and proof of the living virtue in
it."
The DNA database is part of this presumption of guilt. Naturally the police
support it, because it has obvious benefits in solving crimes, but it should be
pointed out to any country considering the compulsory retention of the DNA of
innocent people that in Britain 38 per cent of all black men are represented on
the database, while just 10 percent of white men are. There will be an inbuilt
racism in the system until - heaven forbid - we all have our DNA taken and
recorded on our ID cards.
Baroness Kennedy, a lawyer and Labour peer, is one of the most vocal critics of
Blair's new laws. In the annual James Cameron Memorial Lecture at the City
University, London, in April she gave a devastating account of her own party's
waywardness. She accused government ministers of seeing themselves as the
embodiment of the state, rather than, as I would put it, the servants of the
state.
"The common law is built on moral wisdom," she said, "grounded in the experience
of ages, acknowledging that governments can abuse power and when a person is on
trial the burden of proof must be on the state and no one's liberty should be
removed without evidence of the highest standard. By removing trial by jury and
seeking to detain people on civil Asbo orders as a pre-emptive strike, by
introducing ID cards, the Government is creating new paradigms of state power.
Being required to produce your papers to show who you are is a public
manifestation of who is in control. What we seem to have forgotten is that the
state is there courtesy of us and we are not here courtesy the state."
The second invisible change that has occurred in Britain is best expressed by
Simon Davies, a fellow at the London School of Economics, who did pioneering
work on the ID card scheme and then suffered a wounding onslaught from the
Government when it did not agree with his findings. The worrying thing, he
suggests, is that the instinctive sense of personal liberty has been lost in the
British people. "We have reached that stage now where we have gone almost as far
as it is possible to go in establishing the infrastructures of control and
surveillance within an open and free environment," he says. "That architecture
only has to work and the citizens only have to become compliant for the
Government to have control.
"That compliance is what scares me the most. People are resigned to their fate.
They've bought the Government's arguments for the public good. There is a
generational failure of memory about individual rights. Whenever Government says
that some intrusion is necessary in the public interest, an entire generation
has no clue how to respond, not even intuitively And that is the great lesson
that other countries must learn. The US must never lose sight of its traditions
of individual freedom."
Those who understand what has gone on in Britain have the sense of being in one
of those nightmares where you are crying out to warn someone of impending
danger, but they cannot hear you. And yet I do take some hope from the
picnickers of Parliament Square. May the numbers of these young eccentrics swell
and swell over the coming months, for their actions are a sign that the spirit
of liberty and dogged defiance are not yet dead in Britain.
This article is taken from the current issue of Vanity Fair
Charged for quoting George Orwell in public
In another example of the Government's draconian stance on political protest,
Steven Jago, 36, a management accountant, yesterday became the latest person to
be charged under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act.
On 18 June, Mr Jago carried a placard in Whitehall bearing the George Orwell
quote: "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary
act." In his possession, he had several copies of an article in the American
magazine Vanity Fair headlined "Blair's Big Brother Legacy", which were
confiscated by the police. "The implication that I read from this statement at
the time was that I was being accused of handing out subversive material," said
Mr Jago. Yesterday, the author, Henry Porter, the magazine's London editor,
wrote to Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, expressing concern
that the freedom of the press would be severely curtailed if such articles were
used in evidence under the Act.
Mr Porter said: "The police told Mr Jago this was 'politically motivated'
material, and suggested it was evidence of his desire to break the law. I
therefore seek your assurance that possession of Vanity Fair within a designated
area is not regarded as 'politically motivated' and evidence of conscious
law-breaking."
Scotland Yard has declined to comment.
Enemies of the state?
Maya Evans 25
The chef was arrested at the Cenotaph in Whitehall reading out the names of 97
British soldiers killed in Iraq. She was the first person to be convicted under
section 132 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act, which requires
protesters to obtain police permission before demonstrating within one kilometre
of Parliament.
The Greenham Common veterans were arrested in April by Ministry of Defence
police after walking 15ft across the sentry line at the US military base at
Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire. Protesters who breach any one of 10 military
bases across Britain can be jailed for a year or fined £5,000.
Brian Haw 56
Mr Haw has become a fixture in Parliament Square with placards berating Tony
Blair and President Bush. The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 was
designed mainly with his vigil in mind. After being arrested, he refused to
enter a plea. However, Bow Street magistrates' court entered a not guilty plea
on his behalf in May.
Walter Wolfgang 82
The octogenarian heckled Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, during his speech to
the Labour Party conference. He shouted "That's a lie" as Mr Straw justified
keeping British troops in Iraq. He was manhandled by stewards and ejected from
the Brighton Centre. He was briefly detained under Section 44 of the 2000 Terrorism Act.
You know, I ALWAYS think of x files when I hear that line. You think Ed was a fan?
And all of the above I listed, is how these things start. Rome to Russia to Germany (Nazi) and beyond.
You remove the rights of people to protest and assemble peacefully, you remove the right to question government. You remove that right, then they can do wht they want. Like invade Iraq, for example.
And that reporter above, he got into a long email exchange with Tony Blair about the subject. Also on the Independent website. Its shockingly revelatory just how low we, the people, are in the eyes of Mister Blair, and just how little he knows of the subject he passes through law.
I hope the "decrees" above satisfy your curiosity sir !!
http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/financialsanctions/sanctions060811.pdf
Why the hell are the Bank of England releasing the names and details of those arrested?
Have we lost all respect for the basis of our court system, innocent until proven guilty? No prejudice before hand, Habeas Corpus (sorry thats been rescinded for the war on terror)
If you believe this, then Id be worried that these men would not be getting a fair trial. How could they now? The Media has convicted them. Scotland Yard has convicted them. And now the Bank of fucking England!! (thanks Bridge...)
so... since the inception of all these "freedom" stripping policies... we have the above indiscretions... 3 examples of protesting
1. She didnt obtain permission... just like she would have been arrested if she had tried to fish in a private lake without the required permit
2. They breached the Military base lines... they broke the law... you know how its illegal for me to punch people in the face... well its illegal to step onto military bases... and for a good reason... if we could claim "rights of way" through these places... well we could find things very useful to fire at people
3. The octogenerian was huckled out of the place by a couple of nightclub bouncers pretending to be MI5.. they were heavy handed and were quite rightly reprimanded for it... it was also an outside firm of security specialists who handled that wasnt it... hardly representative of the governmental stripping of freedoms is it... a chef proving a point, 2 old hippies and a 80 yr old bloke with a bad case of tourettes....
or maybe that they want to know if other people mention them somewhere ?
or maybe it is just punishment ...nobody knows just them...
this has been standard procedure for years... the names of accused rapists are handed out by police.. why not accused murderers... only kids have the benefit of secrecy when in court... why should these guys be any different..
i'm not saying they are guilty btw... i'm just saying they shouldnt be treated differently to other people... no special cases here
This is the Bank of England. Not the Police.
Isn't the Bank of England owned by the Rothschilds? That'd make sense.
The police would have authorised it
Well if your nation attacking another illegally, that support of nations that indiscriminately murder others, that lying to you, the electorate, do not affect you, then that is your life. Good luck with that.
And good luck with the future where, you know, one day, god forbid, the goverment may just do something, passes a law, starts a war it can't get out of, that directly affects you, and you don't like it, and you cannot do anything about it. Maybe its even just putting up the price of beer, or cigarettes, or banning certian bands or singers or writers from publishing anti-war, anti-corporate material. If thats the sort of thing that DIRECTLY affects you that is.
See you at The Jury's bar...
I don't give a fuck what the police think they have the right to authorise, it is not in British Law, in any act of Parliament, that a private banking consortium can release details of suspected criminals to the world, less than 24 hours after arrests were made.
If this doesn't seem strange, no fuck that, illegal, immoral, not what 'freedom' and 'democracy' are all about, then I don't what is.
you're just promoting a different kind of fear.. this makes you no better than the people or authorities you are rebelling against :(
of course
its not NOT against the law either is it... the police would have sanctioned it as they wouldnt want the information to be detrimental to their investigations
so make our minds up here... do you want Freedom of Information or dont you...????
ALI, Abdula, Ahmed
Date of birth (DOB): 10/10/1980
Address: Walthamstow, London, E17
ALI, Cossor
DOB: 04/12/1982
Address: Walthamstow, London, E17
ALI, Shazad, Khuram
DOB: 11/06/1979
Address: High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire
HUSSAIN, Nabeel
DOB: 10/03/1984
Address: London, E4
HUSSAIN, Tanvir
DOB: 21/02/1981
Address: Leyton, London, E10
HUSSAIN, Umair
DOB: 09/10/1981
Address: London, E14
ISLAM, Umar
DOB: 23/04/1978
Address: High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire
KAYANI, Waseem
DOB: 28/04/1977
Address: High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire
KHAN, Assan, Abdullah
DOB: 24/10/1984
Address: London, E17
KHAN, Waheed, Arafat
DOB: 18/05/1981
Address: London, E17
KHATIB, Osman, Adam
DOB: 07/12/1986
Address: London, E17
PATEL, Abdul, Muneem
DOB: 17/04/1989
Address: London, E5
RAUF, Tayib
DOB: 26/04/1984
Address: Birmingham
SADDIQUE, Muhammed, Usman
DOB: 23/04/1982
Address: Walthamstow, London, E17
SARWAR, Assad
DOB: 24/05/1980
Address: High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire
SAVANT, Ibrahim
DOB: 19/12/1980
Address: London, E17
TARIQ, Amin, Asmin
DOB: 07/06/1983
Address: Walthamstow, London, E17
UDDIN, Shamin, Mohammed
DOB: 22/11/1970
Address: Stoke Newington, London
ZAMAN, Waheed
DOB: 27/05/1984
Address: London, E17
Its not fear im promoting, its information. Of what is happening, for real, here, today. These plots arent 'suspected', or 'imminent', they are real, and are happening to us. Our freedoms are not at threat from "Islamic Fascism", its at threat from neo-conservative Christian Ideology.
You said above about that woman not getting permission to protest, and she was acting illegally.
How can you not see that as wrong, or something worth fighting against?
Do you think they would have given her permission to continue that protest?
Asking permission from the people you want to protest against is not what democracy and freedom is all about mate. Well, it isn't to me.
Look at the new defintion of terrorism as laid down in the Terror Act. If you hand a political leaflet out, you can be classed as a terrorist. These things are now in law, and they are there for a reason. For a future where the freedom to speak out, to protest, is outlawed.
Did you know the Home secretary, now, under these new laws, if he sees fit, and only if he sees fit, can arbitarily declare martial law with no recourse to parliament, ie, to democracy, to us, the people?
If that's reasonable to you, then ok, good luck chief. Here's to the music...
i'm sorry... i dont subscribe to that view whatsoever... thats the kinda talk that neo-cons holed up in Idaho with their militias have... here endeth the debate
because it was within 1 mile of the houses of parliament... thats the law and she knew that... she decided to break it.. and she would have been given permission, absolutely... it wasnt a mass protest, it met the criteria in which she would have been allowed... i.e. it wasnt racist, homophobic, etc... it would have been a political error to not allow her.. as for her protest.. couldnt give a fuck about it anymore... apathy has set in and anger rises at the problems we have on our own shores... seeing homeless people beg on our streets, crime, poverty, etc, etc, etc all happening in the UK as we speak.. personally Iraq is a lost cause on me.. i just dont care, i do care a lot about our own problems however...
thats true... but we can still protest... absolutely... i saw and walked with over 100,000 people in London last weekend calling for a ceasefire... they had no permits, but they walked peacefully up to no.10 and handed in the petition... all done and with no problems... policemen laughing and smiling along with peaceful protestors... it still happens.. you make it out (by using 3 paltry examples) that we are under some iron blanket and all dissent will lead to incarceration and political parties being banned and scottish people being made to live in ghettos and make bombs for war.... you paint a picture of a future that even Hieronymus Bosch would struggle to look at
not true
offence of publishing, possessing or disseminating publications that indirectly incite terrorist acts or are likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing a terrorist act
hardly political leafles