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Ravenmoon
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Joined: 19 Feb 2007
Posts: 410
Location: Sheffield
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 Posted: Mon Nov 19, 2007 11:29 am Post subject: We must not tolerate this putsch against our freedoms |
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| Quote: | We must not tolerate this putsch against our freedoms
A few journalists and MPs are prepared to fight the government's sinister anti-libertarianism. More people should join them
Welcome to Fortress Britain, a fortress that will keep people in as well as out. Welcome to a state that requires you to answer 53 questions before you're allowed to take a day trip to Calais. Welcome to a country where you will be stopped, scanned and searched at any of 250 railways stations, filmed at every turn, barked at by a police force whose behaviour has given rise to a doubling in complaints concerning abuse and assaults.
Three years ago, this would have seemed hysterical and Home Office ministers would have been writing letters of complaint. But it is a measure of how fast and how far things have gone that it does nothing more than describe the facts as announced last week.
We now accept with apparent equanimity that the state has the right to demand to know, among other things, how your ticket has been paid for, the billing address of any card used, your travel itinerary and route, your email address, details of whether your travel arrangements are flexible, the history of changes to your travel plans plus any biographical information the state deems to be of interest or anything the ticket agent considers to be of interest.
There is no end to Whitehall's information binge. The krill of personal data is being scooped up in ever-increasing quantities by a state that harbours a truly bewildering fear of the free, private and self-determined individual, who may want to take himself off to Paris without someone at home knowing his movements or his credit card number.
Combined with the ID card information, which comes on stream in a few years' time, the new travel data means there will be very little the state won't be able to find out about you. The information will be sifted for patterns of travel and expenditure. Conclusions will be drawn from missed planes, visits extended, illness and all the accidents of life, and because this is a government database, there will be huge numbers of mistakes that will lead to suspicion and action being taken against innocent people.
Those failing to provide satisfactory answers will not be allowed to travel and then it will come to us with a leaden regret that we have in practice entered the era of the exit visa, a time when we must ask permission from a security bureaucrat who insists on further and better particulars in the biographical section of the form. Ten, 15 or more years on, we will be resigned to the idea that the state decides whether we travel or not.
Who pays for the £1.2bn cost over the next decade? You will, with additional charges made by your travel agent and in a new travel tax designed to recoup the cost of the data collection. But much of the money will go to Raytheon Systems, the US company that developed the cruise missile and which, no coincidence, has embedded itself in Labour's information project by supporting security research at the party's favourite think-tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research.
The odour that arises from the Home Office contract with Raytheon is as nothing compared to that created last week when the Home Secretary and Prime Minister used the announcement of the 'E-borders' scheme as well as increased security at shopping centres, airports and railway stations to create an atmosphere that would push MPs to double the time a terrorist suspect can be held without trial. It also helped to divert attention from the mess in another Home Office database concerning upwards of 10,000 security guards who may be illegal immigrants.
On detention without trial, no new arguments have been produced by Gordon Brown. He won't say how many days he wants and he won't answer David Davis, the shadow Home Secretary, who points out that all the necessary powers to keep people in jail after a large-scale attack are provided in the Civil Contingencies Act 2004.
To this, Brown replies that declaring a state of emergency would give terrorists 'the oxygen of publicity'. How does he square this absurd statement with the high alert being sounded by police, politicians and spies over the past two weeks, which has given the greatest possible publicity to the power of the Muslim extremists to change our lives?
The truth is that while his government limps, heaves and splutters with an incompetence only matched by its unearthly sense of entitlement, the Prime Minister has become fixated with this issue as though it were a virility test. So his chief Security Minister, Lord West of Spithead, who had voiced his doubts about raising detention without trial on Radio 4, was hauled into Number 10 to have his thoughts rearranged. Less than an hour later, he appeared like an off-duty ballroom dancing champion and adjusted his conviction as though it was no more than a troublesome knot in his very plump, very yellow silk tie. He will not resign of course. What is a mere principle placed against his recent elevation to the Lords and the thrilling proximity to power?
How have we allowed this rolling putsch against our freedom? Where are the principled voices from left and right, the outrage of playwrights and novelists, the sit-ins, the marches, the swelling public anger? We have become a nation that tolerates a diabetic patient collapsed in a coma being tasered by police, the jailing of a silly young woman for writing her jihadist fantasies in verse and an illegal killing by police that was prosecuted under health and safety laws.
Is it simply that the fear of terrorism has stunned us? The threat is genuine and the government is right to step up some security measures, but let us put it into perspective by reminding ourselves that in the period since 7/7, about 6,000 people have been killed on our roads. And let's not forget the bombings, assassinations, sieges, machine-gunning of restaurants and slaughter that occurred on mainland Britain during the IRA campaign. We survived these without giving up our freedoms .
Or is there some greater as yet undefined malaise that allows a sinister American corporation to infiltrate the fabric of government and supply a system that will monitor everyone going abroad? I cannot say, but I do know that an awful lot depends on the 40 or so Labour MPs needed to defeat Brown's proposals on pre-trial detention. They should be given every encouragement to defy the whips on the vote, which is expected within the next fortnight
It is important that the press has moved to the side of liberty. The Daily Mail, which I wrongly excluded from the roll of honour last week, attacked Jacqui Smith for 'her utter contempt for privacy' and warned against the travel delays and inevitable failure of another expensive government database. And Timothy Garton Ash, who has so far stayed above the fray, wrote in the Guardian last week that 'we have probably diminished our own security by overreacting, alienating some who might not otherwise have been alienated'. Labour MPs should listen to these voices.
The Prime Minister is found of quoting Churchill, so I will again: 'If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only precarious chance for survival.'
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0%2C%2C2212831%2C00.html |
All for your own safety of course,can't have those nasty bogeymen getting you can we 
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"The people will believe what the media tells them they believe." George Orwell |
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uselesseater
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Joined: 21 Sep 2005
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Location: Leeds
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| Posted: Mon Nov 19, 2007 11:42 am Post subject: |
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Well who are the MPs and Journalists who are banding together against this?
Can't believe Brown trys to pull the 'oxygen' of publicity argument. Fascism really is farcicle sometimes.
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Mark Gobell
On Gardening Leave
Joined: 24 Jul 2006
Posts: 4529
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| Posted: Mon Nov 19, 2007 1:07 pm Post subject: |
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The Observer article was written by Henry Porter.
From the comments section at the Guardian, Peter Tatchell wrote:
| Quote: | Another fine article by Henry Porter, arguably Britain's most articulate defender of our hard-won freedoms and the foremost exposer of the (Labour!!!) government's relentless strengthening of the state at the expense of the citizen.
People who are interested may wish to watch my recent interview with Henry, where he discussed the massive erosion of our liberties and debunked the government's feeble justifications: |
and linked to his interview with Henry Porter here:
http://doughty.gdbtv.com/player.php?h=2489cb63fd657c5d52787d2de80cc732
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The Medium is the Massage - Marshall McLuhan. |
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wepmob2000
Trustworthy Freedom Fighter
Joined: 03 Aug 2006
Posts: 431
Location: North East England
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| Posted: Mon Nov 19, 2007 2:42 pm Post subject: |
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More of the same from the Times, apologies if I've missed this being quoted elsewhere.
| Quote: | November 17, 2007
Fortress Britain, a grotesque thought
We face overzealous security in our daily lives, and are governed by a Prime Minister in a flap
Janice Turner
These days it seems simple-minded to get excited by travel. My thrill at a jaunt to New York, sans kids, sans duties, to see friends, to thrash that hilarious 48p dollar ? and by absurd good fortune not, for once, penned in cattle class ? ended at the revolving doors of Terminal 4.
How plain fun-sucking, how utterly boring is the security procedure that grows more ornate with every foiled plot. Yes, I packed my bags myself.
Nope, no one could have tampered with them. (Does anyone answer otherwise? What happens if they do?) The shuffling 45 minutes, even in “Fast Track”, where you divest yourself of coat, belt, wobble on one leg unzipping boots (thanks, Richard Reid), get fleetingly felt up, worry they will confiscate your deadly eyebrow tweezers again, but they only take your bottle of water (thanks, allegedly, Rashid Rauf et al) within sight of WHSmith on the air-side, where you will immediately buy another...
Like high-security prison inmates we submit in silence, avoid eye contact, fear some misjudged funny will land us in a private suite where rubber gloves will be snapped on
Background
Bags to be screened at railway stations
BAA counts the cost of tough airport security
Haven't we heard it all before?
Brown improves his anti-terror act, but ID cards could ruin it
and our holiday cancelled. Of course, it's a whole lot better than being blown up, and as the plane swung landward from the Eastern Seaboard, I was grateful I'd minimised my chances of being aboard a passenger missile.
But how much of this are we prepared to endure in the name of forestalling terror? This week the Prime Minister announced that, in effect, Britain is to become one colossal Terminal 4: baggage checks at the 250 busiest railway stations, searches at cinemas, souped-up security at schools... Is this the future, lining up to unzip your bag at each store as you Christmas shop on Oxford Street? How we will all enjoy (young brown-skinned men in particular) being frisked and questioned. With 4.2 million CCTV cameras ? and the Government calls for more ? we are the most watched people on earth, soon we will be among the most controlled. What a result for our ragged band of death-cult Islamists to steal what they most loathe about us: our freedom.
These days I find my mind playing a morbid game. It's called “If I was a terrorist...” Just as during a teenage Agatha Christie phase I'd attempt to plot the perfect murder, I try to imagine the most effective atrocity. At the opening night of the London Film Festival, I mused that you would maim a few thousand, paralyse the global movie industry, kill a few infidel American starlets. A high-speed train could be spectacular. Tate Modern or Selfridges would obliterate tourism. Or stroll into Terminal 4 with a couple of exploding suitcases and slaughter the shoeless legions waiting to be X-rayed. After that we'd all be forced through new security antechambers before we even entered the airport. Another hour on the world's journeys.
In a recent (eventually abandoned) novella, Martin Amis created a high-ranking al-Qaeda character responsible for inventing “paradigm shifts” in terrorist thinking. Amis notes that the tactic of 9/11 was obsolete within 71 minutes, lasting between American 11 hitting the North Tower to the rebellion aboard United 93. Amis said he found it reassuringly hard imagining other such paradigm shifts: dynamiting the San Andreas fault; introducing rabies to Central Park.
But it strikes me that, although this would make less dramatic fiction, huge imaginative leaps are not required. If I was a terrorist... I'd bomb Tesco in Tunbridge Wells or a random primary school assembly in, say, Cardiff. The number of deaths might be modest, but the banality of the act would engender more forcefully than some metropolitan trophy crime a horror that no one, anywhere, is safe. Which, of course, is true.
So what is the use of securing 250 railway stations when Britain has 2,500? Protect the busiest and terrorists will divert to the branch lines. One of the failed 21/7 bombers detonated at Goodge Street, a fairly minor Tube stop, only teeming when Sofa Workshop holds its sale.
Train checks would mean untold extra hassle, for ultimately no greater safety. And, besides, Hasib Hussain blew up a No 30 bus.
Since Dunblane, most schools have card swipes and entry phones. Yet at 3pm, the school gates open, parents mill about chatting in playgrounds: is this just inviting a British Beslan? Will we all have to resort to the measures taken by high-risk schools, such as Jewish primaries, where parents take turns at morning security detail? But more depressing still is the notion that we will have to structure our cities, commission our public spaces, around the unknown, unquantifiable threat of terror.
Already Whitehall and Westminster are blighted by concrete barriers and bollards. But now underground car parks in new buildings will be banned: lots more land to be squandered, then, on sprawling parking lots. No cars allowed to drop off outside shopping centres: how will that work for the elderly and disabled? No glass in the public areas of buildings: uglified bunkers for shopping malls. But then if none of this is retroactive, the bombers can still bung their bags of nails and hydrogen peroxide below the National Theatre or ram-raid Sainsbury's East Dulwich or shatter any number of dazzling hotel atria.
So if, as Gordon Brown says, “terrorism can hit us anywhere”, then what is the point? Where is the benefit in a mentality at once paranoid and supplicant? If a former iron chancellor is hoping to turn into an armour-plated premier, to create a vision of imminent threat that he alone can protect us from, he is failing. These new measures don't make him rock-like and brave but weak, flappy and overreactive. The term “helicopter parent” is used to describe the obsessively risk averse, who hover over their children, terrified they will bump heads, scratch legs, wander an inch out of sight. We don't need a helicopter PM.
But if this is just about creating a fearful hunger for authoritarianism to justify the extension of the 28-day detention limit, in turn so Labour can appear tougher on terrorism than the Tories, if Britain is to be made a citadel in the name of party politicking, it is an unspeakable shame. We have learnt to evaluate risk, to be vigilant, to exist with the constant possibility of random horror. Just don't expect us to live for ever more in Terminal 4. |
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/janice_turner/arti cle2886293.ece |
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