Is from jamie off from Blood and Treasure on how to best celebrate Ruth Kelly’s (ministry of not very bright ideas) proposed British Values Day:
…we should just maintain a very British frozen, embarrassed silence until the whole wretched notion curls up in a corner and dies.
[UPDATE: Ann Winterton’s bill was defeated yesterday, but there’s two more coming right along behind. This is not over by a long chalk.]
The Catholic church in Britain, buoyed up by the rise of the religio-fascist Pope Ratzo, the presence of some prominent Catholics in the UK giovernment and the huge influx of Catholic migrants, is getting way too big for its boots: it’s threatening, the 70 Catholic MP’s who don’t toe the church’s anti-abortion line with excommunication (though they insist not, that’s effectively what it is) and worse, should they even so much as abstain from voting on new legislation tightening abortion rules. Catholic MPs include Ruth Kelly, the Communities and Local Government Secretary, and John Reid, the Home Secretary. The head of LifeLeague, James Dyson, said the pressure group would “out” Catholic MPs who took communion and abstained on abortion measures.Aiding them in this profoundly undemocratic exercise are some of the most rabid rightwing nutjobs British politics can produce.
The leader of Scotland’s Roman Catholics yesterday questioned whether politicians who backed abortion should remain full members of the church, and also compared Scotland’s abortion rate to “two Dunblane massacres a day”. In a sermon marking the 40th anniversary of the 1967 Abortion Act, Cardinal Keith O’Brien attacked both the practice of abortion and pro-choice members of the Scottish parliament.
[…]
“I think it’s far beyond time that the present Abortion Act of 40 years ago was re-examined,” he said. “We are killing, in our country, the equivalent of a classroom of kids every single day. Can you imagine that? Two Dunblane massacres a day in our country going on and on. And when’s it going to stop?”
The Dunblane reference was just gratuitously unpleasant and ill behoved a cleric – but it proves that this is about poitics and power, not conscience. That a priest would commit such an offence to common decency as to use a tragedy and parents’ grief to make a political point says he is a political, not a spiritual man. But then the anti-abortion movement has never been spiritual or about the sanctity of life but about the subjugation of women – and that goes double for the Catholic church.
British Catholics are in an invidious position. Allegiance to the Pope is required for Catholics as a matter of doctrine and this allegiance extends to the Vatican, it’s cardinals and all of their doctrinal instructions. Those instructions are infallible as they come from God directly, Catholics are told: the church’s position is that temporal powers are are strictly limited by God and God’s instructions trump the state’s. The Pope speaks directly to God, ergo the Pope’s instructions trump the state’s because abortion is considered a spiritual, not a temporal matter.
However, I suspect that should anyone else from any other religion give their primary allegiance to another city-state and its leader ahead of their own nation and compatriots they’d be called traitors, with prominent Catholics like Ruth Kelly in the forefront of the name-calling, especially so if they were Moslem.
The church can obsfuscate about liege lords and loyalty as much as they want, but their own statements of doctrine say it’s so.
This puts many British Catholics in a very delicate and ambiguous position: their loyalty has been constantly historically suspect and this has more than once resulted in bigotry and violence, so much so that the church has had to become an underground, secret, and dare we say it, even a terrorist organisation at times. This state of affairs has formed the basis of much of the long history of anti-Catholic bigotry in England but we had begun to get over it, at least until the ascendance of Ratso to the papal throne and the subsequent empowerment of the worst of the right wing of the church.
Well, I do know what it is – but what the hell is does it mean? The new London 2012 Olympic logo:
It looks like nothing so much as a mutilated jigsaw, and I fail to see the symbolism in any part of it. Nothing about it says London, or Britain. or sport for that matter. If this is an indication of how the whole sporting enterprise (and the emphasis is on the enterprise, rather than the sport) is going to be run, we’re in for a disaster of epic proportions.
UPDATE: Someone who shall remain nameless to protect the guilty said earlier that it looks like Lisa Simpson giving a blowjob. Well, now you mention it…
UPDATE II: Looks like a groundswell is building already to junk the logo. Add your name to the ‘logo must go’ petition here.
[Query to afpers – is that the Jonathan Ellis sponsoring that petition? If so, for once we are in political harmony.]
UPDATE III: Oh dear. It didn’t take long for the ‘leet ‘shoppers to start having a go. From b3ta:
This is going to run and run, if you’ll excuse the pun…
UPDATE IV
And indeed it is running and running. The latest is that the animated logo ad causes epileptic seizures. Oh dear….
Anyone who’s studied any law knows that a functioning legal system is not just about the laws themselves – they’re just words on paper – but also about the people who make and administer them, and their motives for doing so.
If you want to know just how badly political self-interest has perverted Brirish law and just how deep the depths that New Labour has dragged our formerly much-admired legal system to are, you’ve only read this morning’s Independent and its revelations that Attorney General Lord Goldsmith did an Alberto Gonzalez and enabled the torture and murder of detainees by British personnel, ignoring his own army’s senior legal advice in the process, caring little whether British troops committed or would be prosecuted for war crimes.
Lying us into a war with his flip-flopping legal opinions – and probably blackmailed into it by a desperately-sucking-up-to-Bush Tony Blair threatening to reveal his adultery – wasn’t enough; he also allowed himself to be bullied by the known drunk and abuser, then Secretary of Defence (and now Home Secretary, at least for a while, heaven help us), that loathsome, meddling Scot John Reid, into setting aside the Human Rights Act when dealing with Iraqi prisoners.
Good enough for us Brits but not for the ragheads, apprently, being as they are by New Labour’s lights lesser humans.
Cue the beatings, hoodings, torture and murders from the licensed pyschopaths we’ve been training in our foot regiments. They should’ve been kept under tight control by their senior officers, that’s what senior officers are for – but the officers were ordered not to by Goldsmith.
From the White House to No. 10 to Goldsmith to Iraq and Afghanistan – nothing negates the indivual responsibilty for those horrendous acts of violence but those who gave the orders, and those who gave the spurious legal figleaf for them to so so, are the truly guilty.
Goldsmith, like so many of the lawyers British and US government is afflicted with is careerist, weak, self-interested scum. He sold his country’s honour, such as it was, for the sake of position; the price was the maimed and the damaged and the tortured and the dead of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the prospect of violence cascading down the generations; but it seemed a price worth paying to him to be Attorney General, and cheap at that.
How big a hypocrirte is he?
Believe it or not, from 1998 until his appointment as Attorney General, Goldsmith was co-Chairman of the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute and he was the Prime Minister’s Personal Representative to the Convention for the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. Alberto Gonzales at least has the excuse of being an unqualified hick real estate lawyer way out of his depth.
Goldsmith has no excuse whatsoever.
Yes, he’s scum, though that really doesn’t do the depth of my contempt justice.
How much further is the authoritarianism of New Labour going to be allowed to go before it’s put a stop to, and who is going to do it?
And now Whitehall even wants to put litter=droppers on the DNA database.
Are they crazy? Yes. Crazy like a bunch of technofascists. It’s not just the sweeping powers being given to police that we need to worry about, either:
Civil liberties groups are warning that the details of every Briton could soon be on the national DNA database, raising fresh concerns of a ‘surveillance society’. Controversial plans being studied by the government would see the DNA of people convicted of even the most minor, non-imprisonable offences, such as dropping litter, entered on the national database.
That rather puts the lie to those New Labour supporters insisting that all is for the best in the best of all possiible worlds – people like well-padded journo and ‘cultural critic’ Mark Lawson, whose asinine assertion in the Guardian on Friday that datamining is nothing to worry about, really, is one of the reasons we’re in this mess.
A commenter put it better than I ever could:
Markson
May 25, 2007 8:08 AMWow, the writer is exceptionally naive, especially in a world that has witnessed what the Bush administration has done with data mining. No one is paranoid to fear that governments may use Google’s vast search database to turn it on its citizens, just as Bush used AT&T to spy on Americans (w/o warrants mind you) and the Chinese government has used Yahoo to arrest a dissident.
This Pollyanna belief that because there are laws against such behavior in democracies that mortals won’t break those laws or the public will rise up is foolishly dangerous. There is no greater example of that folly than the United States where Bush has succeeded on destroying constitutionally protected rights in an unprecedented fashion and the public is apathetic (either being ignorant of the scale or believing that it’s scope is limited and accurate).
Exactly.
Mark Lawson and media figures like him are overprivileged, overfed over-insulated tossers who need to get out of North London or Bow or wherever the latest middle-aged trendoid meedja hangout is now and then. Lawson’s horribly representative of a technologically and politically illiterate cadre of journalists who were in bed with Tony (and now with Gordon) and who just flat out don’t see what’s happening. By minimising the threat Lawson and his ilk are actually enabling it.
When government authoritarianism is combined with ID cards and a DNA database and supplemented by commercial datamining, any remaining civil liberties, any claim to being private individuals that we have, is gone. Forever.
The information may be all about us, but it isn’t ours any more: even our thoughts are regularly monitored and sold.
What’s not sold is seized: in the UK the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act allows the government to seize and sweep broad swathes of information about us from companies and data providers, basically on spec (and it’s about to get worse). In the US the Patriot Act and National Security Letters serve the same purpose.
The wall between commercial and governmental data mining is now so flimsy all it will take is a enough hot air from a determined politician to blow it down completely.
Now they want our DNA too.
Soon we will all cease to be private individuals and become the property of the state, with no aspect of our lives left unmonitored, unsurveilled or uncontrolled, not even our genes. By 2010 every UK ‘citizen’ is to have a biometric ID card, the information on which is to be collated with what’s already held by government.
Liberty claims that, per head of population, the UK has five times as many people on the DNA database as any other country. The government estimates that even if the database is not expanded to include the details of minor offenders, some 4.5 million people will still be on it by 2010.
The expansion of the database is prompting fears that people from ethnic minorities are being stigmatised. According to research by the Liberal Democrats, under the existing system within three years the details of more than half of all black men will be on the DNA database
Almost 40% of the male black population, many of them children, have their DNA on criminal file, despite their having never been charged or convicted of any crime.
Oh, and just in case you though this apparent discrimination was accidental, the biometric ID cards are being brought in for foreigners first.
Guess who’ll be constantly asked to produce their ‘foreigners’ ID papers? You can bet that they sure as hell won’t be white and they won’t be foreign either.
Not content with seizing our DNA, the New Labour government’s latest wheeze is that children – even in the womb – are to be identified by social services departments as being ‘at risk of future criminal behaviour’.No only that, they’re proposing that not just hard data but gossip and speculation about us should be shared amongst government departments:
UK Proposes Department of Precrime
It seems the Blair government’s attacks on civil liberties will continue even during the PM’s farewell tour. The Times today has printed a leaked plan from the Home Office violent crime unit which if true is almost beyond belief.
The proposal is to force frontline public sector workers to report people they merely think might one day commit a violent offence. This speculation will then be collated by a national agency and shared amongst a range of bodies such as local authorites and the police.
The proposal includes terms like “sufficiently concerned” which sound good. However if staff have a statutory duty to make such reports then they will obviously cover themselves by reporting more rather than less. Remember that we’re not just talking about specially trained personnel. We’re talking about anyone in the public services who comes into contact with us.
If this monstrous scheme goes ahead it will in effect create a national database of gossip, hearsay and uninformed speculation – some of which will undoubtedly be malicious. Once on the database you’ll probably never get off. An unfounded accusation could follow you for the rest of your life.
And of course data, like that from Sure Start and other arms-length, semi-privatised or outsourced agencies, goes right into the ‘caring services’ pool.
It’s called the multi-agency approach, but it’s authoritarianism by stealth. Cemtral government is leeching off public service workers’ best efforts to help people. The people on the ground may have the best will in the world, but when a government is hell-bent on social control and has the means to do it, good people get crushed.
But it’s going to take principled people in the public services like that to fight this: only if the public and civil service unions refuse to play ball with New Labour, refuse to go along with and to implement these mad dictatorial schemes, do we have any chance of escaping a future that’s very scary indeed.
If civil servants decide to use their power they could bring the country to a standstill – and they could easily put a spoke in any scheme the government thinks up to oppress the populace, because after all they’re the ones who have to implement it.
But Will thay? How likely is that to happen? I don’t know. I wish I did.