- From across the pond, here’s what’s going to happen if you forget your ID card, assuming our dear government are allowed to have their way…
Category Archives: Civil Liberties
ID and unemployment
- State Opening of Parliament today – a good day to bury bad news, so keep your eyes peeled.Already, we have: UK unemployment at seven year high – see the Office for National Statistics for the full report.
Oh, there was also a handy “web chat” with the civil servant in charge of ID cards published late last night on the 10 Downing Street site. Lots of quality astroturfing, plus the priceless gem:
“ID Cards will reduce the threat of the Surveillance Society and help safeguard civil liberties”
Keep an eye on The Government Says today, chaps…
Bush and definitions
- The Bush administration uses unimaginative essay-writing technique #236: “It all depends on your definition of…”*sigh* Why must the world be run by such second-class minds? And why has this story been buried on a weekend (there’s nothing about it on the main pages of either the Washington Post or the New York Times, and the ever-handy Newsmap shows it’s receiving far less press coverage than a baseball game between the Detroit Tigers and St Louis Cardinals) when the midterms are less than a fortnight away? Surely “Vice President condones the torture of filthy foreigners” is a major vote-winner these days?
“All civilised people”
Home Secretary John Reid, in his speech to the Labour party conference in Manchester:
“It’s not Muslims versus the rest of us, it’s evil terrorists on one side against all civilised people on the other.”
Meanwhile, a couple of hundred miles north in Glasgow, immigration officials acting on the orders of Reid’s own department this morning launched another of their infamous dawn raids on the family of an asylum seeker.
Whether Azaddine Benai (who escaped during the raid) is telling the truth when he claims that, if returned to his native Algeria, “I’m going to get killed, not by gun, by knife to cut throat” is beside the point.
Can we really call ourselves civilised when this man’s wife and young children (aged 11 and 2 – the youngest therefore born and raised in Britain, as the family have been here for three years) are snatched out of the blue early one morning and transported to a detention centre?
Can we call ourselves civilised when both children need medical attention (the eldest being diabetic, the youngest awaiting an operation) and one has just started a new school year, yet are going to be deported tomorrow morning, allowing little time to gather supplies and belongings, let alone find legal aid and formulate a case for appeal?
The Home Office does not comment on individual cases.A spokeswoman said: “The government has made it clear that it will take a robust approach to removing people from the country where they have no legal right to be here.
“We examine with great care each individual case before removal and we will not remove anyone who we believe is at risk on their return.
“Removals are always carried out in the most sensitive way possible, treating those being removed with courtesy and dignity.”
Courtesy and dignity – a 7am raid on a young family, forcing the husband to jump from a first floor balcony in terror, leaving the wife and two young children surrounded by uniformed officials who then cart them off to a temporary concentration camp detention centre, prior to deportation with no time to build a legal challenge to the secretive and unilateral decision to remove them.
Something “all civilised people” can be really proud of…
The UK backs ditching “adequate” data protection
Sounds boring, eh? Especially when you find out that the EU, the most boring institution in the world bar the International Confederation of Accountancy and Algebra, is also involved.
However, following earlier outrage from the elected portion of the EU over plans to rubber-stamp the unilateral transfer of transatlantic air passenger data to US law enforcement agencies (visiting Auntie Flo in Toronto? Congratulations! You’ve won a CIA file with a bonus FBI record thrown in for free!), today MEPs will be voting on proposals to reduce the protection of our personal data that to date we have all (perhaps unknowingly) enjoyed.
Germany, Denmark, Spain, Ireland, Norway, Sweden and the UK all appear to support the removal of the current European Commission restrictions that data can only be exchanged with non-EU states if “an adequate level of data protection is ensured in the third country”.
This would, in turn, free up the powers that be (guided down this path at the request of the US by our own dear Tony Blair during last year’s UK presidency of the EU) to push even harder for the EU to approve the hand-over of detailed information on everyone who flies to North America from the EU when MEPs vote on the “EU/USA agreement on the use of passenger name record to prevent and combat terrorism and transnational crime, including organised crime” proposals tomorrow morning.
So, considering that our government is apparently so keen to overturn EU guidelines on protecting our privacy and to hand over various bits of private information to a foreign government (with no reciprocal handover of data on that country’s citizens) – and especially considering that once again they are sneaking this in via the less heavily scrutinised EU – how far can we really trust our dear lords and masters when they tell us that our details will be safe once on their various planned identity databases?
John Reid ignores the law
Erm… “John Reid will sanction the forced removal of up to 32 Iraqis today after telling the high court he would ignore any last-minute legal challenge to their deportation.”Yes, that’s right – the Home Secretary has announced that he will ignore legal challenges to his decisions.Yes, that’s right – the same Home Secretary who is in charge of the criminal justice system.
And that’s ignoring the issue of whether or not we should consider deporting people to a country plagued by indiscriminate daily violence and kidnappings, arguably in a state of civil war, with an inadequate policing and justice system, severely damaged infrastructure, which the Foreign Office advises against travel to, and which is so dangerous that previous deportations have had to sneak into the country on a roundabout route in chartered planes…
Hurrahs all round!
This sounds like it was fun. (Unlike this alternative protest…)
I particularly approve of protesting against the lack of hat wearing in public life – some blame the last few decades’ collapse of civil society and boom in crime on the welfare state, some on wishy-washy 1960s liberalism. Me, I blame the decline in hat wearing and the lack of well-groomed facial hair amongst today’s menfolk (and no, baseball caps and scraggly goatees most certainly do not count – a trilby or bowler coupled with a fine Kaiser Bill is very much the order of the day).
I would have joined Rachel, Justin, Tim, Davide and D-Notice, but my protest would have been that “Political protests are a waste of time and effort”. That and I had work to do this evening…
Nonetheless, I eagerly await post-match analysis from all involved – though Justin already has a few pics up here
Update: A couple of screengrabs – first of our Rachel with her “7/7 inquiry now” sign, second of our Justin with his “Legalise everything” one. Both times they’re on the left (fnarr fnarr) of my old friend, BBC London’s Gareth Furby (the chap who interviewed me during that St John Ambulance piss-up I set up last year):
What japes, eh?
Deport the innocent
Not guilty of taking part in a terrorist plot that never existed? Meh… Never mind – let’s deport the bugger anyway. To a regime known to use torture. That has already admitted that it plans to lock him up as soon as he arrives.(via that Worstall, who has more)
Methinks the lady doth protest too much
This could be fun – expose the inanity, and all entirely legally.(I’ve been in the wilds of Dartmoor for the last few days, by the by, and have picked up a lurgy – more later if my brain clears, nose ceases running, and throat stops feeling like some bugger’s running a cheese grater up and down the inside of the sodding thing)
Oh, come on… (again)
It’s bad enough when a teacher who supports the BNP gets sacked for their (decidedly repellant) political beliefs, despite no evidence that those beliefs were being propagated in the classroom. But suspending someone for being a right-wing Tory and writing an intermittently amusing but hardly either original or offensive article for a blog? Come off it…
The spectrum from Iain Dale on the right to Justin McKeating on the left are somewhat miffed (and Guido has the relevant correspondence here and here) – and so they should be.
It must be said that it’s getting increasingly tedious how often the word “thoughtcrime” springs to mind, but it’s becoming ever more common. We’ve got innocent Muslims being effectively accused of supporting terrorism because they’ve never taken to the streets with a placard stating “murder is wrong”, we’ve got people being arrested for wearing t-shirts bearing slogans slagging off the Prime Minister, and now people having their very livelihoods threatened for a bit of (vaguely) comic exaggeration.
Hell, I may disagree with this Inigo Wilson chap’s opinions – I disagree with most people’s opinions. But vindictively trying to get someone fired for an opinion expressed outside of the office and in their own time is significantly more offensive than anything contained in that article. He hasn’t broken the law, he hasn’t incited violence or hatred, and – most importantly – unlike those who have got him suspended he hasn’t harmed anyone.
The Muslim Public Affairs Committee, who I don’t think I’ve ever heard of before but who have orchestrated this little witch hunt, apparently aims to
“open an avenue for rational dialogue and re-education of the individual on the street regarding Islam and Muslims. The aim is make the all-too-common misrepresentation of Islam a thing of the past”
All very well and good – but considering that one of the most common representations of Islam is that it is intolerant of nonbelievers and far too quick to over-react when criticised, you’d think that they’d realise that by going to Wilson’s employers (who, lest we forget, have nothing to do with his article or with the Conservative Home blog on which it appeared) rather than to Wilson himself or his online publishers, they’ve just stirred up a wonderful bit of negative PR that makes them out to be just as intolerant and quick to take offence as the “Islamophobes” they want to “re-educate” always make them out to be.
Why is it that in modern Britain the consensus seems to be that to prove your opponents wrong about you, you have to go and do precisely what your opponents accuse you of? Say the government are cutting down on civil liberties, they deny it before cutting down on civil liberties; depict muslims as violent in some cartoons, they deny they are violent before issuing death threats; accuse the Tories of having no real policy alternatives, they deny it before issuing a pamphlet with no real policy alternatives; say the Home Office is useless, they deny it before sacking the Home Secretary and announcing the Home Office is useless.
Like Inigo Wilson’s article, this is hardly an overly original or amusing observation, but Christ, it’s pathetic…
Update: Having said all that, I have a moderate amount of sympathy for this take on the matter.
Ukraine, Eastern Europe, Blogs, ID Cards
Somewhat busy…
Neeka has a roundup of Ukraine news responses in the wake of President Yuschenko teaming up with ex-President Yanukovych (the guy who supposedly poisoned him). Surely the Orange Revolution is dead? Is this simply yet another temporary alliance, a last-minute cop-out, or another sign of Yuschenko’s slow fall from power?
It’s not just Ukraine, though. The rest of eastern Europe’s also decidedly unstable. So where’s the next Vaclav Havel, and what’s he going to write about?
Talking of writing, more on blogging as a waste of time from the Economist.
Oh, and as much as I’m getting bored by the civil liberties thing, this can’t be ignored (even if the story is a load of rubbish, as I suspect):
“Gordon Brown is planning a massive expansion of the ID cards project that would widen surveillance of everyday life by allowing high-street businesses to share confidential information with police databases.”
Meanwhile, over in the Times, another ID story that might explain the Brown one, if true:
“Tony Blair�s identity card scheme could make up to �11 billion in �profits� for the government by imposing a range of additional charges on the public, a confidential Home Office memo claims.”
Then again, if Blair’s staying for at least another year, as the Sunday Telegraph claims, maybe Gordon won’t be held responsible when it’s too late to backtrack on the bloody things…
And now off to Fruitstock to listen to a load of bands I’ve never heard of and probably get pickpocketed… If you want more linky goodness to keep yourself occupied, check out the latest Britblog Roundup.
ID
As the all-powerful ID card scheme faces possible delays, would you look at that? “News” emerges that “Organised fraudsters tried to steal more than half a billion pounds from the government’s tax credit system in 2005/06″. So as doubts about the desirability of a government scheme touted to tackle fraud begin to become widespread and public, the government releases alarmist figures to support the need for a government scheme to tackle fraud? Well blow me – you could knock me down with a particularly fragile feather…
The Biometric Information Roadshow
Ever heard of that? Me neither, and – like the majority of UK political bloggers – I’m a geek about these things.
A google search turns up nothing, yet here’s a report from Morley Today, the website of the Morley Observer & Advertiser, a wee rag from up north as far as I can make out, which seems to suggest that the government is spending yet more of our money on a low-profile propaganda trek around the country. So low-key, in fact, that they’ve brought out the utterly anonymous Joan Ryan, MP for Enfield North and apparently the Under-Secretary of state for nationality, citizenship and immigration.
Ryan was apparently appointed, with little fanfare, on 6th May, and has an overwhelming number of really rather important responsibilities, including:
ID cards
the Forensic Science Service
refugee integration
E-borders
extradition and judicial cooperation
the Criminal Records Bureau
Home Office research and science
improving regulation
design and green issues
In other words, technically she’s in charge of ensuring all those nasty foreign criminals are deported, providing internet security for the entire country, using the latest forensic techniques to track down criminals and terrorists, helping immigrants become acclimatised to the British way of life, keeping track of everyone who’s committed a crime in this country, and every single research project in the Home Office (even though these were all put on hold last week for no apparent reason), as well as implementing the single most complex and expensive IT project in history with the ID cards scheme.
It’s quite a portfolio – has John Reid got anything left to do? And what about her supposed boss, Immigration Minister Liam Byrne – what does he get up to all day?
Still, Joan seems to be just the sort of Labourite they need to pimp this ID nonsense to the ignorant masses. Although she’s only spoken in six debates in the last year (595th out of 646 MPs) – and apparently only once in both 2003 and 2004 – she’s attended 93% of Commons votes (23rd out of 644 MPs). You’ll doubtless be unsurprised to learn that she was strongly in favour of all of the most controversial Blairite legislation, from the anti-terrorism nonsense through ID cards, foundation hospitals, student top-up fees and the Iraq war inclusive.
But still, what is this “Biometric Information Roadshow” and why is there so little information available about it? Well, after some digging, apparently it was launched in Manchester back in September, and offers some wonderful attractions:
“Members of the public will be able to have their irises and fingerprints recorded”
Yay! Sign me up! Where do we get our barcodes tattooed? Forehead, or back of the neck?
But still – if their aim is to improve recognition of the benefits, why so little promotion? Why such a no-mark MP fronting the thing? Are they beginning to doubt their little scheme, or is this a new approach, attempting to convert us all one at a time (and harvesting our biometric details in a fun and informative way as they go, naturally)?
How much effort would it have been to set up a page on the Home Office’s website for those of us unfortunate enough to have missed this lovely roadshow? How are ignorant refuseniks like me (not that it did me much good) going to come around to seeing the benefits of this massively expensive and unnecessary new instument of state control – sorry, valuable tool for tackling fraud, terrorism and organised crime – if there’s no readily-accessible information about it? Why do I have to rely on stumbling across a link to a story in a local newspaper from a town which I couldn’t point to on a map to find out about a government information initiative about an important topic that will affect us all?
Busy weekend…
As if by magic, as England get booted out of the World Cup and the country basks in a heatwave, all sorts of New Labour unpleasantness has bubbled to the surface once more, the stench cunningly hidden by the reek of booze-addled mourners. (Note to Blair: Beckham resigned as Captain in a timely manner in order to enable his successor plenty of time to settle into the job before the next major tournament… Hint hint…)
So, this weekend has seen rumours of another 1,000 troops being sent to Afghanistan, where “we face defeat” – just the most prominent of a vast array of stories which would tend to suggest (as if we didn’t know already) that the government is staggering around grasping for a purpose like a Blunkett without his dog.
So, why has the Home Office suspended all research projects? Dsquared was on the case, ready to trawl through the dross with an army of volunteers, but “Research Thursday” was cancelled without fanfare or prior warning.
“A spokesman said: ‘There’s a pause while we reaffirm what the department’s main objectives are. Research has got to feed into policy and we want to do research into high-priority areas.’”
These high priority areas are, it would appear, likely to include finding ways of removing protection from government whistleblowers, providing further justification for again rejecting calls for a proper inquiry into the 7/7 attacks, changing public perceptions that Blair has failed on crime (note to the Home Office – it’s easier to be “tough on the causes of crime” if you, erm, actually do some research into what those causese might be), changing businesses’ perception that the government will always sacrifice their interests to those of the United States, finding ways to overturn the centuries-old right to trial, getting over yet another defeat in the Labour heartland, hiding the ridiculousness of the utterly barmy (yet strangely sinister) protest exclusion zone, finding excuses for deportation tactics so harsh that even former Home Secretary Jack Straw thinks they’re a bit off, and coming up with yet more excuses for holding any and all of us for 90 days without trial, courtesy of Gordon Brown.
Expect more anti-terror nonsense throughout this week in the run-up to the anniversary of the 7th July attacks on Friday, as Gordon tries to show us how tough he is and the rest of the government continue to try and make excuses for the utter lack of any progress in protecting us from swivel-eyed maniacs with bombs.
What, you don’t seriously think you’re any safer now than you were this time last year, do you? Of course you aren’t. It is still just as easy to smuggle a load of bombs onto the underground, a bridge, a bus, a train etc. etc. etc. as it was on the 7th or 21st July 2005.
Because no matter how many draconian, high-profile measures they put in place supposedly to prevent another attack, no matter how many armed police they put on the streets, no matter how many people they lock up just in case, preventing another attack is impossible. Just look at Israel.