Anyone actively political in a way that’s embarassing or inconvenient to the Labour government is now, officially, a terrorist.
Happening in my home town now: some students in a shared house smoked dope, had some replica weapons, started getting interested in anticapitalism and antiracism/fascism, and engaged in a little light graffiti. They got raided for the dope and they’re now all in prison under the Terrorist Act.
Why are nonviolent potential student protestors and a 16 year-old schoolboy, who’ve yet (other than the graffiti artist) to even protest, let alone commit a known offence, being held as terrorists?
Apparently Devon and Cornwall police found “literature relating to political ideology†in the house. Oh, and knives.
If this is terrorism, we’re all fucked. I certainly would be if having “literature relating to political ideology†is what the police now characterise as terrorism.
Do I have to tell my children, quick, burn your copies of Naomi Klein and Malcolm X for fear of a knock by the plod? Were I in the UK and not on dialysis I would undoubtedly have been on my way to the G20 today to protest by any means necessary. It certainly could’ve been me or many people I know (none of whom are terrorists by any stretch of the imagination) arrested, our homes raided and lives deliberately ruined by politically motivated police, if that’s what makes you a terrorist.
These are trumped-up arrests on trumped-up evidence meant to politically intimidate legitimate protestors who do not agree with the government and to permanently label them (and anyone they know or associate with) as terrorists. It doesn’t matter that the students will probably be quietly released with no charges after the G20. Just the fact you’ve been arrested under the Act is enough to label you forever. You’re in the database now.
“Computers have also been seized for examination.” say Plymouth police. Yes, multiple computers with multiple users, not to mention multiple mobile phones, in 2 shared student houses. Since when have students been guilty of what their housemates read online or text to their mates?
But how very handy for the police to be able to hoover up who knows how many innocent yet politically inconvenient email or facebook friends or bloggers or LJ readers for Jacqui Smith’s handy little database of dissidents (if her husband hasn’t left the USB stick at Spearmint Rhino already).
I don’t know as yet whether any activists I know personally have been swept into the Terrorist Act’s net as a result of this blatant act of deliberate political intimidation – because the arrestees have yet to be charged, let alone named – but that’s hardly the point.
This is happening now, today, to mere schoolboys and student activists, and no-one who speaks out against the current form of government is safe from unjustified, politically motivated intimidation and imprisonment.
Ed “So What‘ Balls, Brown protege and current Education Minister, is trying to give himself the power to prescribe and proscribe what British children are taught by choosing what textbooks and testing regimes schools use:
Opposition MPs will attempt today to remove from the apprenticeships, skills, children and learning bill the clause that gives the secretary of state control of basic qualifications content. Guidance published alongside the bill says it could be used to specify “which authors’ works needed to be studied for someone to gain a GCSE in English”.
Ministers insist the power would be exercised only as a last resort, to preserve the teaching of Shakespeare, for example, if there was a suggestion it should be scrapped from the curriculum.
One of New Labour’s many, many flaws is its propensity to bring in legislation seizing central government control in areas over which government should have no purview. This centralist tendency is allied with the mistaken conviction that if you mean well, it’s OK to make yourself dictator.
But when dissenting voices are raised to point out the totalitarian nature of yet another sweeping power they’ve abrogated to themselves, we’re told by ministers “It’s OK, don’t worry. We’ll never use it except in a emergency”. Oh well, that’s all right then. But what’s an emergency? Balls doesn’t say.
The progress of Ball’s Bill fits the usual Labour pattern. First quietly insert a small, unnoticed clause deep in one of those sprawling, unreadable, government white papers. (Ensure the drafters are so overwhelmed with draft legislation they’ll let any old bollocks through – after all, it’ll be scrutinised in committee. Won’t it?)
Make sure the bill’s published on a ‘good day to bury bad news’. In committee and in debate draw the opposition’s attention to some other contentious clause, one you don’t give a damn about. ‘Here’s one I prepared earlier…’
Watch the media and the opposition chase off futilely after that hare, while your neat little power grabbing clause slips through all its committee stages unnoticed. The thumping government majority and general supinity of your MPs sees to that.
The resulting bill sent to the Lords is so voluminous and their time so taken with other, more pressing, interests these days that a complacent and complicit House either fails to spot the bait and switch or just doesn’t care and bingo, unprecedented power is all yours.
When you start exercising those powers and the electorate protest, just tell them it was democratically decided, so STFU.
Ball’s Bill purports to be creating a more independent and fair qualifications system; but this particular little clause would allow the government of the day to interfere in what’s taught in schools, colleges and universities, even down to the choice of books. Think what New Labour could do with that.
Think what the BNP could do; but Labour MP’s don’t seem to have thought beyond the end of their control-freak noses.
This passage of this clause would mean that any political party who can do the maths and target the correct marginal constituencies successfully could, quite legally, dictate exactly what children are taught at school. The potential for political interference in education that an unpopular and discredited political party elected on a minority of the popular vote (or even with an unelected Prime Minister at the helm) might have on education of coming generations doesn’t bear thinking about, does it?
Let us also not forget that under Labour school attendance is compulsory, with prison the sanction for parents whose children do not attend. I’d write ‘Imagine if a fascistic party had these powers…’, if it weren’t so horribly close to the truth.
Yet Labour politicians individually and severally will protest loudly and volubly from the comfort of their John Lewis sofas to all available media platforms should their left wing credentials or democratic bona fides be questioned.
“Who us? Stalinist? But.. but… apartheid! Free Nelson Mandela! Some of my best friends are freedom fighters… Up the miners!”, supported by a high-pitched chorus of “But we’re nice! We’re on Twitter!” from the younger, slightly more photogenic Fabian wing.
Yet these putative soft left-wingers voted to give any future government powers any wannabe Stalin would envy.
Oh, but they’ll only use these powers ‘in an emergency’ say Labour – but it was Labour who gave themselves and any future government the power to decide what an emergency is.
One of the first bills passed in this way, the Civil Contingencies Act, was passed, we’re told, in response to 911 and other bomb attacks, although such a massive all-encompassing piece of portmanteau legislation had to have been in preparation for some time before.
It allows the government of the day to declare an emergency (it decides exactly what an emergency is), to suspend democracy, to override normal checks and balances and all local democracy and to rule by fiat. Is this is the type of emergency Balls means? Ball’s Bill, like the Civil Contingencies Act, is a license for totalitarianism.
If only out of self-preservation, has no-one in this bloody government ever stopped to consider how another less nice minority-elected government a few years down the road might use such potentially repressive powers against them? Has it never, ever occurred to anyone in the Cabinet or the Commons that Labour and its supporters might well find themselves on the receiving end one day? Apparently not, which inevitably leads one to wonder why it is they feel so invulnerable.
I suspect it’s the success of power grabs like the Civil Contingencies Act, and now Ball’s Bill, that support such complacency. With all-sweeping acts like that in their collective back pocket they can just declare an emergency if it all goes to shit, and let El Gordo and the executive reign unopposed for ever, while they continue to draw a comfortable stipend for doing precisely nothing. No wonder they’re smug.
The Opposition Tories say they will oppose this bill as written, as do the Lib Dems. They said that about the civil Contingencies Bill as well, and again about Parnell’s draconian welfare reform bill with its unprecedented interference into the autonomy of the individual .
But they can’t resist the lure of unlimited future power either. This week Parnell’s legislation passed the Commons, with Lib Dem and Tory support – and I expect Ball’s Bill will do exactly the same.
When unswerving loyalty to the Labour party line, blank-faced botoxed arrogance and breathtaking cynicism is desperately required, who can an embattled PM call? Hazel Blears, obviously:
We need people standing for office, not carping on the sidelines These playground taunts and placard-waving add to the cynicism surrounding politics, says Hazel Blears
Perhaps public opinion is finally getting through to No 10 and the penny is beginning to drop that people aren’t exactly what you’d call happy.
“…he turns his fire on consultations (which he claims are rigged) and citizens’ juries (which he says “are used to lend a sheen of retrospective legitimacy to decisions already taken”). Rigged consultations and faked citizens’ juries? Surely this would be the stuff of front-page exclusives, if only there was any evidence to back it up. But in the absence of evidence, we must assume this is simply prejudice dressed up as assertion. Imagine if cabinet ministers voiced their opinions without any evidence base.”
Oh my. “Imagine if cabinet ministers voiced their opinions without any evidence base.” Where to start with that one? Iraq? The dodgy dossier? ID cards?
I’ve always felt a certain sick fascination for the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, and it’s not just our physical resemblance; those who know me will also know that I could so easily have become her, which is a horrible thing to have to face about oneself.
There’re some women I’ve met in life that I automatically felt like taking a running punch at; usually they’ve been minor civil servants -‘computer says no’ – or bossy jobsworth admin droids; not that I’ve ever actually punched anyone, but the urge is there, as it is every time I see or hear Blears.
(Turns out Blears was yet another a local authority solicitor before being in government. There’s a surprise.)
Blears is robotically loyal, rigidly self-righteous, endlessly on message, teeth-clenchingly perky and, most of all, smug; an overpromoted local functionary, but with posher handbags, a damned sight more power and even more self regard than your usual local authority Queen Bee. But a democrat she is not, for all her carefully demotic YouTube videos and vlogs.
‘Labour is about winning elections’ says Blears. Here she is grinning away at the Fabian Society while laying out her plan for achieving New Labour’s thousand year reich, which is to throw money at southern marginal seats like South Thanet and Hove and allow a few thousand voters in unrepresentative areas decide who runs the government, entirely in order that she and her party stay in power, as she says in the video, ‘for years to come’:
Sounds pretty damned cynical to me, not to mention profoundly undemocratic .
First seeing that video and then reading Blears’ article again the depth of denial and mendacity and the sheer political corruption expressed by Blears in her attack on Monbiot leaves me almost speechless.
The paper’s commenters are well up to the task of responding though so I’ll let one do it for me:
chekhov
simonw
06 Feb 09, 1:12am (about 9 hours ago)
The reality is that people don’t get elected unless they sell their soul to a political party. Toadying to the loathsome and swallowing your principles only comes easily to the chosen few. For every Morris or Short or Cook, there’s a Mandelson, and we all now know which ones survive. Guts are not principles.
True, the ends may justify the means, but look what ends they are. The Iraq War, the 10p tax band, the routine fingerprinting of children, RIPA, collusion with torturers, the BAe scandal, ‘loans’ for peerages, the greedy, irresponsible madness of PFI (viz. Metronet), the Civil Contingencies Act, and the Met’s shoot-to-kill policy. And they’re just the highlights. Twelve years in power and just a few more foxes to show for it.
I can, oddly enough, imagine what happens if cabinet ministers voiced their opinions without any evidence base. I was in Hyde Park to demonstrate against the consequences of the dodgy dossier, along with a million or so others. We peacefully reminded you that war was wrong. You ignored us. And responded with the smokescreen of collective cabinet responsibility and the tenuous approval of your legal advisers. All very convenient. Monbiot, on the other hand, has no such smokescreen, and still people seem to want to read what he writes.
You want practical ideas? How about a reformed House of Lords? How about funding for after-school activities? How about 3 million new houses? How about progressive taxation (and, while we’re at it, not advising town halls to rack up council tax by three times the rate of inflation while pensioners’ incomes are falling)? How about a strategic transport plan that doesn’t change when an airline chief sneezes? How about an ethical foreign policy that doesn’t involve selling weapons to bad people? How about an education system that doesn’t force children to choose their careers when they’re 12? How about a joined-up government that doesn’t both open pubs all day and try to abolish happy hour? How about running the country instead of outsourcing it to tax-haven multinationals?
I may be sceptical, but I’m not a cynic. Or not enough of a cynic to suggest the even more practical idea of buying a sack of cement and making yourself an overcoat. I’m no trade unionist, either. I don’t rely for power on a political party that relies on me for money. But I vote, I engage and I’m angry. Like millions of other voters. Who are continually told they are wrong and irrelevant and cynical.
Shame on you, Blears.!
Quite, and let’s not forget the complicity in and the condoning of torture while we’re at it.
I shudder even to consider I might’ve become like that odious woman had I stayed in the law and in the Labour party.
Here’s Tony Benn, (nee Viscount Stansgate), the last doughty remnant of the Christian socialists, giving a BBC newsdroid merry hell on the subject of moral cowardice and giving in to Israeli bullying:
He’s right, they’re scared – though I must admit if I had that shrieking Zionist harpy Phillips in my ear every five minutes I’d be scared too. I’d also change my phone number.
Facteiousness aside very little has been made – as yet – of the current BBC Director General, Mark Thompson relationship with the Israeli government or of his 2005 visit to Israel at governmental expense.
This cosying-up to a foreign leadership (and such a politically rabid one as that) is something a BBC DG has never done before, presumably on the grounds that it would compromise BBC impartiality and neutrality.
Of course the cosy tete a tetes he had with Ariel Sharon and sundry other Israeli political notables, those couldn’t possibly affect his impartiality or appear to impute an appearance of impropriety at all, no sir.
The Los Angeles Times columnist JONAH GOLDBERG calls for a re-evaluation of fascism. He argues that by using the word as a synonym for anything that is undesirable, we are blinded to the examples around us of real fascism from both Left and Right wing governments. Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning is published by Penguin.
New? WTF? Someone at the beeb was wilfully misinformed.
Either that or Justin Webb’s been given editorial control. He must’ve met the Pantload on the Koolaid aisle in Safeway.
