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.
Comment of The Day, on New Labour’s champion snout-trougher, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith:
nothappy
31 Mar 09, 12:22am (about 8 hours ago)
There is a theory that this is Jaqui’s exit strategy. And a sly one it is.
Possibly and most likely, if there is any justice or common sense left in the UK, the inquiries into her ‘second home’ scam aren’t going too well for her and the lawyers have informed her that she may well be open to criminal fraud charges being brought against her at the end of them…
. Either
So Labour wonks have cooked up this ’embarrassment’ (not her fault, you understand — her husband’s) so she does the decent thing and resigns asap… £116,000 + salary, perks and pension better off, with her reputation as the poor little wronged woman a la Tessa Jowell more or less intact. Far better for all concerned than the first criminal trial of a Home Secretary for the misuse of public funds scenario.
Either way, it’s not going to die down or go away, so get it over with and go, girlfriend.
It’s an ingenious theory, it fits the facts, and it’s certainly neatly Mandelsonian, but if so I don’t think he’s reckoned with Smith’s sense of entitlement to office.
On previous form Our Lady of The Embonpoint is beyond embarassment; she seems convinced that, having reached her level of incompetence, her mere holding of the office somehow then dignifies all she does, no matter how sleazy or dishonest. According to Polly Toynbee she’s even a victim of a new wave of puritanism. Oh, please.
No, I really doubt that the Home Secretary’d go even if her kids were to be dragged in – not that they’re not already. Imagine the crap those poor kids’re taking at school; everyone knows their Dad’s a wanker, even though most Dads are, if truth be told. But most Dads’ little pecadilloes aren’t front-page fodder.
Most parents, however hatefully self-righteous and grasping, would naturally want such an ordeal over as soon as possible – or at least you’d think so; yet Smith still refuses to resign, although it would seem the quickest way out of what must be excruciating for her children.
How is it humanly possible for a woman to be so placidly, stupidly bovine and yet so selfishly hard-faced and brazen at the same time?
I doubt she’d go even if it were to turn out it was one or both of the Smith-Timney offspring who actually watched the movies, and that Timney Sr.’d been taking the rap for one or both; something that might even seem a little noble, until you remember he’s her admin assistant and paid 40,000 pounds a year out of the public purse, in addition to her own annual 300,000 in salary and allowances – and he was responsible for processing the expenses claim. Duh.
What would be mildly amusing is if the diary evidence that Smith’s reportedly convinced will clear her of dishonestly fiddling the second home allowance to pay off her sister’s mortgage were to show she was actually at at home, for certain values of ‘home’, at the time the pron was rented, or even if the avowed antiporn campaigner turns out to have watched it herself.
But no, even then, even if the tabloids were to go totally paparazzi on the past sexual behaviour (there’s a lot happens at party conferences) of a woman who wants to police everyone else’s, and that of her family too, I still doubt she’d go.
She has no shame. If this is Mandelson’s exit strategy I think he’s got it wrong.
The news that Home Secretary Jacqui Smith’s husband (and 40 grand a year assistant) has been wanking on the British taxpayers, having charged his rental of satellite porn movies to the public purse, has moved someone in Guido Fawkes’ generally sleazy and unpoetic comments to compose an ode:
Anonymous says:
March 29, 2009 at 9:53 am
I spend my lonely weeks in London
Working for Gordon Brown
And crash out on my sister’s floor
Just as the sun goes down
On Friday nights I head back home,
My second home that is,
To spend some time with my true love
And get some married bliss
Dick’s waiting for me in Redditch,
Get me there driver soon
I want to lie in his strong arms
And go into a swoon
I want to collect his DNA
For my own database
I want to open my bursting blouse
And thrust them in his face
On Friday night when I got home
My second home that is,
Dick said he was all shagged out
And just gave me a kiss
On that fateful Sunday morning,
I read it in the press
Dick’s been watching some dirty films
And got us in a mess
It seems he’s been paying five quid
For “Dirty Debutantesâ€
Despite what’s bursting from my blouse
It’s not me that he wants
No Tarantino, no Scorsese,
No Bergmann, no Kubrick
You can’t beat old J Arthur
Says naughty, naughty Dick
Now I’m the two homes secretary
And hold the highest rank
But Dick he isn’t that impressed
He’d rather have a wank
Another Monday morning dawns
I’m heading back to town
The saddest thing is that I’ll be
Working for Gordon Brown
Oh Dick! Oh Dick! You stupid prick
I don’t mind pay to view
But you claimed it on expenses
And gave the press their cue
Next Friday when I come back home
My second home that is
I’ll be expecting rather more
Than just a friendly kiss
It could be just a ploy to entrap UK civil liberties activists into committing a crime.
A Facebook Group a fan site, a website and an email being circulated suggest that recipients do just this by overwhelming the Home Office – since they plan to read all our mail and take dominion over everything we see and do online – with an influx of cc’d email on June 15th.
The general gist is ‘see how they like it up ’em in practice’:
“No government of any colour is to be trusted with such a roadmap to our souls”: Ken McDonald, former head of the CPS.
The government has unveiled plans for a private company to run a
“superdatabase” that will track all our emails, calls, texts, internet
use and so on. This is an immense infringement of civil liberties, not
to mention a major risk to our private data – but it won’t make us any
safer. The sheer amount of information that the Government intends to
collect will be impossible to analyse properly and will undoubtedly turn
up false positives while missing potential security threats amongst the
morass of spam emails and private chat.
Read more at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/dec/31/privacy-civil-liberties
So, for one day, we should send a message to the Home Office – “you want
to see our emails? Ok then, here they are then!”.
The date has been set for June 15th. However for legal reasons, please don’t go ahead with the protest of your own accord. Please enter your details below and we will keep you up-to-date from time to time – and you’ll get confirmation closer to the time that the protest is going ahead. Alternatively, you can become a fan at our Facebook page.
I can see a number of problems with this. To begin with something blindingly obvious – why on earth would anyone want to willingly subscribe to any potential ’round up the usual suspects’ list of political dissidents, whatever their politics? Perhaps the author(s) haven’t quite thought their plan through.
Or maybe they have. Maybe this is a uk.gov fishing expedition.”Please enter your details below”, “Please invite your friends if you have joined and spread the word!”, indeed. Well they would say that, wouldn’t they?
Which brings up another problem, forwarding incoming email ‘regardless of importance and content:
We do this by simply cc’ing or bcc’ing every email we send (and if you like, forwarding every email you receive), regardless of importance or
content, to public.enquiries at homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk.
That way Jacqui Smith and the Home Office will be able to see how
difficult it will be to get on with their actual work – keeping our
country safe – when they’re trying to monitor every harmless private
thing we say and do.
***Please invite your friends if you have joined and spread the word!***<
I really don’t think so.
It’s outrageous even to suggest forwarding received emails as a form of political protest. In doing so you’d be subscribing the identities of all those people who’ve emailed you to the same potential database of political dissenters as you, but by proxy. Nice.
Also politically yet not quite so technologically aware readers might take this to mean that they should send the entire contents of their in and outboxes, since forever – and virtually labelled ‘seditionist’ too – to Jackboot Jacqui on the 15th June. It does seem a foolhardy course of action to suggest, as does the idea to that we forward all the emails we send and receive only on the 15th of June, which is what I think was actually meant.
Of course what the (possibly somewhat naive) authors may have envisioned is just that protestors might perhaps register a disposable email account, use it at a few of the more interesting sites, sit back, watch the reconstituted pork product that pours into the inbox get cc’d to Jacqui. Voila, enough spam to supply police canteens for a century. What larks.
But whatever the authors actually meant, there’s no getting round the fact that what they’re suggesting their fellow citizens do by way of an act of supposed civil disobedience is to overwhelm the Home Office and other UK.gov network resources with traffic – otherwise known as a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) the organisation of or participation in which carries a hefty 10 year prison sentence under UK law.
Why would any activist, however naive and well-meaning, incite that others (albeit unknowingly) participate in conspiracy to commit a crime?
It all smells of entrapment to me.
Who is this ‘Martin’? Who registered the website? Where did this email originate? So far it’s not taking off that well there’s little I can find mentioned about it except on a libertarian/far-rightwing blog (which refers approvingly to the BNP), which inclines me just to say sod it, let them get themselves banged up and good riddance.
But I would hate for anyone who’s not an incipient nazi, who’s just concerned about civil liberties but who feels powerless to be heard, to take this as a legitimate call to action. I don’t trust it a bit.
Please don’t cc your email to Jacqui Smith on June 15th.
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.
