Religions > Atheism > OT: Now, it's even considered seditious to read my article
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Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"maff" |
| Date: |
02 Jul 2006 04:00:29 AM |
| Object: |
OT: Now, it's even considered seditious to read my article |
Now, it's even considered seditious to read my article
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1810937,00.html
The arrest of Steve Jago under anti-terror laws convinces me to support
David Cameron's plan for a home-grown bill of rights
Henry Porter
Sunday July 2, 2006
The Observer
The sign that Steve Jago held on 18 June in Whitehall carried a quote
from George Orwell. 'In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth
is a revolutionary act.' It comes from Nineteen Eighty-Four and it is
perhaps worth speculating what Eric Blair would have thought of a law
that allows a young man to be arrested for displaying a placard outside
Downing Street. He would certainly be astounded at the direction this
Labour government has taken and I suggest he would be troubled by what
followed in the police station.
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| User: "stoney" |
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| Title: Re: OT: Now, it's even considered seditious to read my article |
07 Jul 2006 12:42:58 PM |
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On 2 Jul 2006 02:00:29 -0700, "maff" <maff91@yahoo.com> wrote in
alt.atheism
Now, it's even considered seditious to read my article
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1810937,00.html
The arrest of Steve Jago under anti-terror laws convinces me to support
David Cameron's plan for a home-grown bill of rights
Henry Porter
Sunday July 2, 2006
The Observer
The sign that Steve Jago held on 18 June in Whitehall carried a quote
from George Orwell. 'In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth
is a revolutionary act.' It comes from Nineteen Eighty-Four and it is
perhaps worth speculating what Eric Blair would have thought of a law
that allows a young man to be arrested for displaying a placard outside
Downing Street. He would certainly be astounded at the direction this
Labour government has taken and I suggest he would be troubled by what
followed in the police station.
Mr Jago, who will appear in court in September on charges of mounting an
illegal demonstration prohibited by the Serious Organised Crime and
Police Act (Socpa ), was searched and found to have three copies of an
article from Vanity Fair.
Entitled 'Blair's Big Brother Britain', the article happens to be by me
and puts together much of what I have written in this paper. But this is
not really relevant. What matters is that one of the officers stated for
the record that he was showing the defendant these copies and described
them as 'politically motivated' material.
So, a piece of mainstream journalism critical of Blair's government was
used by the police as part of the reason to charge Mr Jago. That is to
say carrying any article that appears to the police to be 'politically
motivated' is now an act that may help to send you to jail or receive a
large fine. Just think about that for a moment.
What you have in your pocket - Private Eye, a newspaper clipping or a
well-thumbed copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four - may in any of the designated
areas created by Socpa and antiterrorist legislation be regarded as
evidence of criminal intent.
In a week when the US Supreme Court forced the Bush administration to
respect the Geneva Convention at Guantanamo and the High Court quashed
control orders on six terrorist suspects, it may seem eccentric to dwell
on this incident. Yet the behaviour of the police does seem to threaten
the basic liberty of people to read what they want and to carry it with
them where they like.
Obviously the police were groping around to support a charge against Mr
Jago because, under these new laws, it is never very clear whether
someone is demonstrating illegally or not. We shall see whether carrying
a quotation by Orwell in a designated area (such an Orwellian phrase) is
breaking the law. Would it make any difference if it was an extract from
Gordon Brown's excellent speeches about endogenous growth or Tony Blair
on education. Will Wordsworth do? Shakespeare?
Why did a march on Thursday by 100 businessmen protesting (rightly)
against the new extradition treaty with the US, which went from Pall
Mall to the Home Office and thus breached Socpa 's zone, attract little
police attention, even though they had not acquired the permission of
the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police? What is it that makes the
offence: the words on the banner, the smile on your face, the content of
your bag, the magazine you read, the absence of a tailored suit?
This is a bad law and it should be repealed. But let me note that there
are grounds for slight optimism on both sides of the Atlantic in the
area of rights. It is a victory for reason and due process that the
Supreme Court came down against Bush on Guantanamo, where the President,
as commander in chief, claimed the right to hold nearly 500 terrorist
suspects.
And, here, Mr Justice Sullivan's ruling in the High Court that
restrictions placed on six suspect terrorists were a breach of Article 5
of the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits detention
without trial, does assert the rule of law. There will be an appeal
heard this week, but it is difficult to see how the government's lawyers
can argue that the conditions the men are held in amount to anything but
detention without trial.
There are very complex issues surrounding the protection of the public
against terrorists. The government does have a responsibility but that
is not met by simply ignoring the law or introducing laws that remove
rights such as carrying a placard. David Cameron got it right in a good
speech last week when he said: 'We have seen much legislation that is at
the same time authoritarian and ineffective - legislation that fails to
protect our security but which, in the process, undermines our civil
liberties.' That's the point: so many of the government's laws are
simply futile.
He went on to mention Conservative opposition to the government's
attempt to criminalise religious hatred, to the Regulation of
Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa), trial without a jury and the 'draconian
powers' proposed in the Civil Contingencies Act. At last the opposition
is attacking the terrifying and generally unnoticed record of the last
nine years.
Even last week, the government was seeking to add to Ripa, the act that
allows official snooping of emails and the internet. Astonishingly, this
measure will extend these unscrutinised centralised powers to the
Driving Standards Agency, and yet only Simon Carr of the Independent was
there to cover the story, which Conservative MP Richard Shepherd said
afterwards represented another example of the drift into a 'controlled,
police state'.
Mr Cameron's speech was more than just a critique because he
successfully negotiated a path between utterly disparaging the Human
Rights Act and the need for entrenched liberties and rights, an
important balance to strike, given Tony Blair's and John Reid's skill at
portraying anyone who stands up for freedom as a reckless liberal.
His proposal that there should be a homegrown bill of rights that would
embed liberties in the British constitution, liberties that could not be
repealed or modified by parliament, is historic and brave, for it
challenges the supremacy of parliament, a cornerstone of our unwritten
constitution. One or two Conservative grandees are fussing about a
conflict that exists if, on the one hand, a Tory government abolished
the Human Rights Act and stayed in the European Convention on Human
Rights while, on the other, formulating our own bill of rights.
Mr Cameron will need to work out a formula that satisfies everyone. He
suggests that one answer may lie in a codified constitutional document
on the lines of the Basic Law in Germany, which sits comfortably
alongside European law at the same time as allowing Germans a domestic
guarantee of their rights.
But let's remember why we are discussing this. The major thrust of
Labour's attack against liberty has taken place since the Human Rights
Act became law. It has done little to protect us from the laws that
infringe our rights to privacy, communication without random
eavesdropping, assembly, protest, free speech, habeus corpus, punishment
without a court deciding the law has been broken and the general growth
of arbitrary powers, included in the Civil Contingencies Act.
Equally, we have not been able to rely on the gentleman's agreement of
the unwritten constitution that parliament would not attack our basic
rights. The bald fact is that parliament can no longer protect itself
from a power-mad executive and nor can it protect us. And that is why
David Cameron's proposal for a panel of jurists to begin drawing up a
document for public discussion should be welcomed by democrats of all
parties.
/end
--
Fundies and trolls are cordially invited to
shove a wooden cross up their arses and rotate
at a high rate of speed. I trust you'll
be 'blessed' with a plethora of splinters.
.
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