A great deal of this scary material is apparently coming from one website, G-20 Meltdown. This website is described as an “umbrella group” for protesters, supposedly representing 67 different protest groups, although there is nothing on the website to show that this is so. The only indication that it might be is a list of organisations supporting the protests, but a disclaimer at the bottom of the list rectifies a previous ‘error’ which implied that these organisations were supporters of G-20 Meltdown. (This error has lead to some statements in newspapers implying that the Stop the War Coalition among others are in some sense affiliated to G-20 Meltdown, which I don’t think they are). And far from being run by hotheaded anarchists, the website is run by Camilla Power, an anthropologist based at the University of East London, a trade unionist, and a member of the CPGB. Another source for these scarifying articles is Chris Knight, cited as a member of the protest group ‘The Government of the Dead’. He is another CPGB member, and a professor of anthropology based at UEL. His frankly bombastic statements include the suggestion that the army and police might lose control of the City of London. If he were serious about this, he wouldn’t say such a thing either to the press or in any public forum where it could be accessed by police. Such statements, whatever the intention behind them, are foolish. They allow the press to imply that there is violence planned (there is not), and they give the police carte blanche to claim that the city is under extraordinary threat, thus mandating severe repression.
The question now is, who are Camilla Power and Chris Knight and why are they allowing themselves to be used to discredit the protests? Yes, there are sometimes young hotheads impressed by reading their first subversive books who think the best way to fight the power is to smash up a McDonalds, but this whole operation smacks of Cointelpro. Veterans of sixties and seventies leftist causes (civil rights, disinvestment of South Africa undsoweiter) say you could always tell the FBI or Special Branch infiltrants: they were the ones calling for violence and “radical” action, preferably as publically as possible.
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.
Unemployment has risen through the 2 million mark on the widest measure of joblessness while the claimant count has suffered its biggest jump on record.
The Office for National Statistics today confirmed that unemployment rose to 2.029 million in the three months to January – the highest in 12 years – a rise of 165,000 from the previous quarter.
The January figure was revised up sharply to show a rise of 93,500, up from the 73,800 reported a month ago. That means the claimant count has surged by around 600,000 in the past year.
Update: Here’s Labour’s Brian Iddon (Bolton SE) as James Purnell’s callous Welfare Reform Bill passed the Commons unopposed by the Tories or Libdems,on its third reading:
… told how he was handing over cash to a close family member to top up his jobseeker’s allowance (JSA) because it was “impossible to live on”. He said that were he not “almost doubling it” the person would not have a decent standard of living.
Should Labourhome run an annual awards ceremony for Labour politicians, activists and constituencies?
Yes
No
Oh, yes, yes, yes.
In addition to a couple of obvious awards, (twin Dinky toys to Prezza for Most Unlikely Blog Success, and a therapy gift certificate to Derek Draper for the Most Enjoyable Blog Meltdown) may I suggest The Mandy, an annual award of a magnum of Bolly for Grinding The Faces Of The Poor? I don’t think Iddon would win any such poll, being as he is so definitely off-message, but I bet Parnell’d be in with a very good chance.
Former Defence Secretary John Reid faced fierce criticism yesterday as it emerged the world’s largest security firm had won a huge contract from the Ministry of Defence weeks after taking him on as a consultant.
Mr Reid – who ran the MoD until May 2006 before resigning from the Cabinet while Home Secretary in June 2007 – was hired by G4S three months ago for £50,000 a year to offer ‘strategic advice’.
This week, it was awarded a four-year contract to supply private security guards for around 200 MoD and military sites across Britain in a deal thought to be worth tens of millions of pounds.
There was a time serving in government was seen as a duty to the country; now it’s something unpleasant you have to go through to make big bucks in the private sector by exploiting your old contacts.
