Saturday, February 28, 2009 

Weekend links.

All the big talk online is about the Convention on Modern Liberty. The Graun has an entire section on it, while Alix Mortimer is providing an essential commentary on the speakers. The Heresiarch also contrasts Philip Pullman with the completely blase attitude of David Aaronavitch.

Elsewhere we have the usual mixed bag. Paul Linford comments on the cancellation of prime minister question's and the very short suspension of usual hostilities, Chicken Yoghurt covers the cowardice and contempt of David Miliband and Jacqui Smith, Tim Worstall more than justifiably calls Frank Field a grotty little fascist, Anton Vowl notes the typical hypocrisy of the Mail, Neil Robertson (longlisted for the Orwell bloggers' prize, along with the Heresiarch, Alix Mortimer and Hopi Sen amongst others) identifies the ultimate conclusion of the utter lunacy of drug prohibition, and Hopi Sen drafts Gordon Brown's speech next week to both houses of Congress.

From the papers, Peter Oborne continues his fine form by declaring the Blair years the most morally squalid of recent history, Marina Hyde notes the staggering chutzpah of the super-rich in demanding tax breaks so they'll donate more to charity, Rory Bremner continues the liberty theme, and Deborah Orr quite rightly states that the blame game doesn't end with Fred Goodwin.

As for the worst tabloid article, we must first note something quite amazing: I agree with something Amanda Platell says in her usual customary submission, although I was always inclined to be rather sniffy about the way in which Jade Goody's husband has been treated by both the system and the press. Someone who would usually be regarded as an unrepentant yob who viciously attacked a 16-year-old with a golf club has instead been feted by the media and treated with kid gloves, first having his curfew lifted and now it seems likely to have his tag removed also. The perks of having a former racist who now happens to be dying as your wife. The winner though is Bel Mooney for her stomach-turning "personal letter" (a personal letter also published to over 2 million readers is quite a concept) to the Camerons, especially the open paragraph which makes reference to the snatched long-lens intrusive shot which the Daily Mail disgustingly splashed on its front page on Thursday, all feeling their pain while profiting from it.

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Friday, February 27, 2009 

Jacqui Smith's contempt for the rule of law.

Keeping with Jack Straw, he's got an article in the Graun today protesting bitterly at those of us daring to suggest that we might be sleepwalking towards a police state. He naturally brings up Labour's introduction of the Human Rights Act, which does indeed deserve some form of recognition; problem is that it hasn't stopped the government itself from repeatedly breaching it.

Pertinently, Andy Worthington provides an example of the state power which New Labour wields when it thinks no one will notice or care. Following last week's Lords ruling that Abu Qatada and two unnamed Algerians can be deported, the Home Office attempted to take advantage by claiming that this meant it could revoke the bail of the two men, as well as three others also accused of involvement with terrorism. They decided however not to inform their lawyers of this, and when they did they were gagged until yesterday, when they launched a challenge before the Special Immigration Appeals Commission. SIAC ruled that no further action should be taken against the men until next week, with a full hearing scheduled for Thursday.

This wasn't however good enough for the Home Office. The two Algerians, rather than being driven home as ordered were instead taken straight to Belmarsh - in direct defiance of SIAC's ruling. The other three men were picked up in raids on their homes. Presumably this was what the Home Office had planned to do - and went through with it regardless of the ruling.

Thankfully, in a subsequent ruling today SIAC decided that all of the men with the exception of one of the Algerians should be released under the prior decided conditions, although whether this has actually happened or not is unclear. It does however show just how Jacqui Smith views the opinion of the courts when they rule against her - with utter contempt, as also exemplified by the attempt to wriggle out of the ECHR ruling on the DNA database. As Worthington points out, the Magna Carta established that the king could not on his say-so imprison someone without his peers or the law agreeing; New Labour just cannot help repeatedly ripping the rule book to shreds.

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Rendition flashback.

Thanks must go to Mr Eugenides for reminding me of a post from 3 years ago which directly accused Jack Straw of lying:

Q 23. Unless we all start to believe in conspiracy theories and that the officials are lying, that I am lying, that behind this there is some kind of secret state which is in league with some dark forces in the United States, and also let me say, we believe that Secretary Rice is lying, there simply is no truth in the claims that the United Kingdom has been involved in rendition full stop, because we have not been, and so what on earth a judicial inquiry would start to do I have no idea.

This was part of his evidence to the Foreign Affairs committee on the 13th of December 2005, six days after a memo had been circulated, subsequently leaked to the New Statesman, that suggested "moving the debate" on about our involvement with rendition. Since then, it's subsequently turned out that we've been fully complicit in both rendition and torture, but it's well worth reminding yourself of just what a bunch of lying cunts some of our leading politicians are.

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Thursday, February 26, 2009 

The rabbit hole deepens.

In the last post on our involvement with extraordinary rendition, I asked just how far this rabbit hole went. It turns out that it goes even deeper with each passing week: the defence secretary John Hutton has now had to admit to parliament that fighters detained in Iraq had been handed to the Americans, who subsequently "rendered" them to Afghanistan, presumably to the notorious Bagram airbase.

Again, this isn't any real genuine surprise. Former SAS soldier Ben Griffin, who was discharged from the army after he refused to return to Iraq, was gagged by court order from revealing just how deep the policy went of turning over prisoners to the Americans, who subsequently sent them to prisons and detention facilities where torture was endemic. He was to claim that "hundreds" had been handed over in this way; Hutton for now, despite apparently referring to Griffin, is only admitting to these two instances, allegedly involving fighters associated with Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistani/Kashmiri group accused of being behind the attacks in Mumbai in November last year.

We ought to be clear: despite the claims that they were only sent to Afghanistan because there were no Pashtu speakers in Iraq to interrogate them, there have been few that have been transferred to Bagram for any other reason than to become acquainted with the "extended questioning regime" practiced there. That the men have not been released and are now entering their fifth year of detention, presumably without any charge or trial or much chance of either, is another detail that was conveninently overlooked.

As the human rights groups are now arguing, the only way to clear this up once and for all is for there to be a independent judicial inquiry, investigating all our alleged links to rendition and illegal treatment of detainees since the beginning of the "war on terror". Investigations by the Intelligence and Security Committee are no longer credible, as their perverse clearing of MI6 of involvement in extraordinary rendition in the case of Bisher al-Rawi and Jamil el-Banna showed. One thing is for sure, and that's there is a lot still to come out. This rabbit hole may well turn out to bottomless.

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Express-watch: It's the Muslims again.

It's an adage I've doubtless alluded to here before, but it's often been said that no news is a perfect opportunity to make it up. Apart from the topic which the two previous posts have mentioned, there wasn't much news about yesterday, and when you're a journalist on the Daily Express, creative news values are already something which you're more than familiar with. Half the time the Express's dubious news values and journalism aren't worth engaging with, especially when the editors of both the Express and the Star have been apparently instructed by Richard Desmond to go as far to the right as they can without disengaging the more liberal readers of the papers.

The screaming headline "BRITISH MUSLIMS ARE KILLING OUR TROOPS" does however deserve a response, mainly because of just how ancient the main sources for it are. There is no actual evidence provided that any British Muslim has killed a British soldier; rather it instead suggests that if anything, the opposite is the case. In any event:

Last week on a visit to Afghanistan, Foreign Secretary David Miliband was shown Taliban bombs containing British-made components. They had either been sent from Britain or brought from the UK by a home-grown recruit.

This was first reported in the Sun and probably elsewhere last Saturday. It proves precisely nothing: components of a bomb, especially the crude improvised explosive devices made by insurgents will inevitably come from all over the place, just as weapons are manufactured all over the world. The same fighters probably have some American-made guns, although they tend to favour older, more easily serviceable weapons. Likewise, it was revealed previously that a number of soldiers in Basra had been killed with American-made bullets from the same NATO sniper rifle. Drawing conclusions that this immediately proves that British Muslims are directly involved in putting together IEDs is taking things too far.

Tal­­i­ban fighters with Yorkshire and West Midlands accents have also been heard talking in intercepted communications, according to a security agency briefing.

This is even older. The Sun first screamed about Nimrods hearing British accents in February last year, in what was probably propaganda that also revealed that, err, we were listening in.

The former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, Brigadier Ed Butler, said: “There are British passport holders who live in the UK who are being found in places such as Kandahar.

“There is a link between Kandahar and urban conurbations in the UK. This is something the military understands but the British public does not."

All well and good, but Kandahar is in the neighbouring province to Helmand, and is regarded as one of the more stable cities, which the Canadians are currently in charge of. There are plenty of British passport holders who live in the UK that, believe it or not, have perfectly legitimate links with both Pakistan and Afghanistan. They're not automatically jihadists just because they're visiting those areas.

Last night Tory MP and former infantry officer Patrick Mercer, chairman of the ­Commons counter terrorism sub committee, said: “I am aware from the troops I have ­spoken to that there are British-born insurgents working and fighting with the Taliban. "The evidence is principally from intercepting their radio communications. But in Iraq ­British troops found bodies of insurgents and they were as certain as they could be that they were British.

So now we're conflating Iraq with Afghanistan in a desperate attempt to get at some direct evidence that British Muslims are killing British soldiers.

None of this is to deny that there probably are some British Muslims fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan, but that they most likely number in the tens or less rather than anything approaching three figures. Screaming that they're murdering our boys without providing anything approaching actual evidence is hardly likely to help matters.

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The finest press in the world part 94.

Major congratulations have to go to both the Daily Mail and Mirror for their tremendous scoop, obtaining long lens photographs of David and Samantha Cameron which both splashed on their front page. Doubtless if Paul Dacre and Richard Wallace had just suffered a bereavement they too would be delighted to find themselves staring out from the front of two national newspapers, with no apparent knowledge that they had been photographed. That the Mail declared when Princess Diana died that it would no longer purchase paparazzi shots is a rather instructive irony; no such concern for the leader of the opposition. It seems doubtful that the couple will make a complaint to the PCC about the papers quite disgracefully intruding into their grief, but a more prima facie example of invading private space is difficult to think of.

Likewise, further congratulations must go to the Sun, which has just paid out £30,000 in damages to Arunas Raulynaitis for their completely false story claiming he had ordered the passengers off his bus so he could pray. He had in fact been praying during his break, as he always did, only to find that he had been filmed doing so by a 21-year-old plumber who promptly sent the footage over to the newspaper. When Peter Oborne fully exposed the Sun's story as complete nonsense in his pamphlet about Islamophobia, the Sun's Trevor Kavanagh responded thusly:

This time, he [Peter Oborne] is making the argument that the British media is anti-Muslim.

He cites invented incidents which portray Muslims in a bad light and incite attacks fuelled by religious or race hatred.

...

The accusation that the media — with a few badly researched or unchecked stories — is fomenting race hatred is in itself a trivialisation.

A £30,000 worth trivialisation, it seems.

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Wednesday, February 25, 2009 

Ivan.

The incredibly sad death of Ivan Cameron has been one of those rare moments when everyday life rightly transcends bitter political divides and shows that whatever our differences, our common humanity, when it comes down to it, always shines through. It was more than appropriate that it was Gordon Brown who contributed what I'm sure will become the lasting tribute - the man who himself lost a daughter just 10 days after she was born delivering a truly heartfelt and moving message of compassion and empathy to a person whom it has long been clear he has little to no time for. To those who have in the past said that Brown can't do emotion, or that he even lacks the ability to recognise it or when it should be used, even if for political motives, it could not have been a better example of how, when it really matters, that he is more than capable of doing so.

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Tuesday, February 24, 2009 

A veto to protect himself.

The decision not to release the minutes of the meetings of the cabinet on the 13th and 17th of March 2003 is both unsurprising and wholly reflective of the entire New Labour approach to so-called open government. Ever since the request was put in under the Freedom of Information act in late December 2006 the government never had any intention of releasing the discussions and had throughout opposed doing so, yet it continued to go along with the pretence of there being a possibility that they would nonetheless be released if the continual appeals were granted. This illusion of accountability has long been held out, whether it be through the introduction of the FoI itself, the Human Rights Act or through continual promised inquiries on various things, yet at each time it has been thwarted. Nothing could be more indicative than this than to repeatedly hold out hopes only then to dash them at the latest possible opportunity.

All this said, it's never been exactly clear what was hoped to be gained from the release of these exact cabinet discussions, mainly because we already know reasonably well that there is little of any great interest in them, which is also why it's so perplexing that the government has refused to do so. We already have for instance Robin Cook's book on his resignation and its wider issues, where he went into some detail on the cabinet discussions leading up to the war, and the major disagreements and challenging of the policy all happened long before March 03. By then it was only Cook and Clare Short who were dissenting, and this is further backed up by the similar accounts in Alastair Campbell's diaries, flecked by his loathing and venom against Short. Short herself has said much the same thing, that there was little if any actual discussion of the legality of the war and the change in position by Lord Goldsmith. The real interest is what went on behind the scenes, with many alleging that Goldsmith was extensively lent on to change his opinion, even begged to do so. That he was malleable in his legal opinion was illustrated by his role in the BAE-Serious Fraud Office slush fund inquiry, which makes it even less unbelievable that he relented in the face of such pressure.

Instead the real reason for withholding the minutes might well be embarrassment, as others have also pointed out, regarding Blair's casual form of "sofa government", as it became known, where little was discussed and all the major decisions were left with Tony himself and his inner circle. Cabinet meetings instead became like a perverse version of "show and tell", individual ministers invited to inform the rest of the class of what they'd got up to since the last meeting, with little analysis or debate about the major issues. This is disputed in some quarters, but is certainly the picture that again leaps out from Campbell's diaries, only on rare occasions there being any dissent.

The arguments made by both Straw and the Tories, as well as the Blairite apologist Martin Kettle that the release of cabinet minutes would undermine the smooth running of government by making the confidential discussions which go on a matter of the public record are all false ones. The tribunal itself declared that this was an exceptional case, which is what it was. There is nothing more serious than the agreement to go to war and the discussion of the legal basis for that is of fundamental importance, even if it turns out that very little of consequence was actually said. The fear is that this would somehow lead to a free for all, with Kettle suggesting people would want to know the same about the discussions over the third runway for Heathrow, or that as a result they would say what people thought they wanted to hear rather than what they actually thought, putting all the real decisions completely behind closed doors and not where it will eventually come out. The former is a logical fallacy because the tribunal would obviously not subsequently go back on its word on lesser issues, and furthermore, the claim that the more important the discussion the more important the confidentiality is one that is designed to keep the public in the dark. Secondly, the idea that decisions and the real important discussions do not already occur behind closed doors and in the margins and corridors is laughable: Labour's first ten years in power was characterised by just that. One of Brown's few improvements has been that more decisions and debates do seem to have occurred in cabinet, or at least more of them have been leaked to the press, including the bust-ups and almost violent disagreements which have occurred. That this release would exacerbate the desire for complete secrecy is little more than a deflective measure.

With all this in mind, the decision not to publish is baffling. When there is little chance of there being anything in embarrassing or revelatory in the minutes, why are they should apparently scared of the consequences? The anger about the Iraq war has now long dissipated except amongst a distinct minority, directly correlated to the decline in the number of bodies in bags returning to Brize Norton. It's with a piece with the refusal to hold a full independent inquiry until every single British item is back home, when again the chief perpetrator has now left the building. Brown of course financed the war, and didn't speak out against it, and is therefore complicit, but few are going to throw the book at him on this rather than on other more pressing issues which he was and is at the direct centre of. Instead perhaps this is something to do with Straw himself: he is almost the last relic of the old regime left at the top directly associated with the war. The person who did his master's bidding then, and also instituted the FoI itself, is now very conveniently the person to slam shut the door of openness. They have never been held to account for Iraq, and now they want to ensure that at least while in power itself they never are. The old adage in journalism was to publish and be damned. This government is too cowardly to do the former and determined not to be the latter.

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Glen Jenvey fallout widens.

The fallout from the Sun's publishing of the claims of Glen Jenvey on its front page continues to grow - now Alan Sugar himself is starting legal action against the paper, claiming that its publication of the story put his security at risk, rather, it seems, than Ummah.com and its marauding Islamic fanatics with their letters of hate. It remains unclear exactly what Sugar is claiming, although it seems more than likely that he'll be after some sort of settlement, which when libelled in the past he has donated to charity. In any event, the Sun must be deeply regretting its incredibly poor journalism and how much it might potentially cost it, with both a PCC investigation and now a legal battle on its hands.

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Monday, February 23, 2009 

More on Qatada.

Andy Worthington has probably the last word for now on Abu Qatada in an excellent post calling for the introduction of intercept evidence.

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Grayling's Conservatives: somehow worse than New Labour.

For those of us who are now becoming resigned to the sad fact that there is very real little difference between Labour and the Conservatives, and that even on some measures Tory policies are incredibly, conceivably to the left of Labour's, it sometimes takes a speech like today's by Chris Grayling, the latest non-entity to fill David Davis's rightful position, to bring you back to earth with a bump.

Unsurprisingly, the issue is crime/law and order. Ever since the death of James Bulger, which New Labour at the time shamelessly exploited, just as the Conservatives today equally shamelessly claim that the country is broken, there has been a devastatingly destructive war on who can be seen to be tougher. This war has delivered in Labour's approaching 12 years in power over 3,000 new offences and over 80,000 now locked up in prisons which are bursting at the seams. This has came against the backdrop of what is an unprecedented drop in crime (PDF) (with only a very few rejecting both the British Crime Survey and police's separate findings), the reasons for which are not clear, although the influence of policy itself is probably relatively minor when compared to demographic changes, especially an ageing population and an increase in general prosperity, hence the concern about a rise as we enter what looks like being a lengthy recession.

At the same time as this drop, the coverage of everyday disturbances and random, violent, vicious attacks has increased exponentially. Violent crime, for example, according to the BCS, peaked in 1995 and has been falling ever since; paradoxically, the police have recorded, since the statistics changed in 2002/03 and became incomparable with the previous ones, that violence has increased by 25%, hence the terrifying claims by politicians (including Grayling) that violent crime has risen by something like 80%, which it may have done if you're reasonably selective with the specific police figures. By any reasonable measure, Labour has lived up to its promise to be tough on crime; it has failed miserably, however, to be tough on its causes. To be fair, one is reasonably easy while the other is reasonably difficult. No prizes for guessing which is which.

Grayling is intent on being both, but if he does indeed become Home Secretary, you can be sure that it'll be the former that he'll implement and the latter which he will disregard, if indeed the Tories' policies on curing our "broken society" don't in fact make things worse. In any event, he begins with an example:

Let me tell you a story about life in Britain today. It was told me by the father of a serving soldier, who will be risking his life for us in Afghanistan this spring.

He was home on leave and was out in his local town centre when he was the victim of an unprovoked attack from behind by two youths. He was able to hold them off and the police were called.

He was left badly bruised after what was a completely unpremeditated attack.

The two young men were arrested, but then extraordinarily they were let off with a caution.

That's life in Britain today.

A nation where we appear so used to a violent assault of this kind that police only deem it fit for a caution.

And where the incidence of an attack like this is routine and not a rare exception.


Well, no, it isn't really extraordinary. You can quibble, but we don't know the exact circumstances of what happened here: this may well have been a first offence for both men; first offences invariably result in cautions, and as the only injury they seem to have inflicted was bad bruising, this doesn't really seem that outlandish or outrageous. It may be to the victim, but in all of these cases either the police or the Crown Prosecution Service will have decided whether it was in the public interest or not to bring the matter to court; they decided it wasn't. Grayling can want every such incident to be prosecuted, but he might decide otherwise when the court system becomes even further clogged up, when the prison population rises, and by the effect it has on those who find themselves with a criminal record and automatically excluded from an increasing number of jobs for what might have been a completely out of character incident influenced by alcohol or drugs. This is why prison and prosecuting need to be incredibly carefully considered: to declare across the board that everyone who does something should automatically be charged and if found guilty sent to prison, with the exception of the most serious crimes, is to ignore the nuances and multiple reasons for the original offence.

The real cause for concern comes very early on, and sets the tone for the rest:

It's time we dealt with the wrongs against society - not just the rights of their perpetrators.

Fewer rights, more wrongs.


Doubtless Grayling just intends this as a flippant, populist remark, not intended to be taken as a statement of intent. Yet a time where few deny that we are facing an unprecedented reduction of liberty and where rights are being routinely curtailed at the expense of supposed security, this is a truly dangerous statement to make, and also seems to completely miss the current mood.

Next Grayling tries to paint a picture of a country disentegrating:

Another snapshot of a broken society.

Where antisocial behaviour is endemic.

Where violence has become a norm.

Where the offenders don't seem to give a damn.

Where carrying weapons is increasingly the norm.

Where families can be terrorised by teenage gangs.

Where pensioners are in fear of their safety from the troublemakers outside their houses.

Where too many communities are being disrupted by things that just shouldn't be happening.


On almost every one of these measures, the figures tend to suggest things are in fact improving; whether that continues during a recession is of course uncertain. This is of no concern to a politician who has a point to make, but such febrile exaggeration, which itself further scares people into imagining they will be victims of such behaviour, is unhelpful in the extreme. Grayling goes further by challenging the whole nature of what is defined as anti-social instead of criminal:

Worse still, many of the things that disrupt our society are now treated as almost a norm.

That's not good enough.

I call it crime - when somebody vandalises a bus stop - that's not anti-social it's criminal.


Indeed it is, and it's recorded as a crime.

When somebody shouts at an old person in the street and leaves them shaking and scared - that's not antisocial behaviour - that's criminal.

Err, no it isn't. As unpleasant as it might be, no crime has been committed, unless we intend to make shouting in the street an offence. What would the punishment be for committing this transgression?

When a teenager jumps on a car bonnet - that's not antisocial behaviour - it's criminal.

Not unless the jumping on the bonnet causes damage to the car - are we going to create a specific offence of jumping on a car bonnet to cover it?

This behaviour is far worse than being anti-social, it's anti-society.

And so Grayling adds even further to the Unspeak of political language. What exactly does anti-society mean? Can someone jumping on a car bonnet really be said to want to destroy society, which would be the presumed meaning of such a term?

The infuriating thing about Grayling's speech is that some of the analysis is spot-on - much of the passage about the causes of crime is accurate, although I would demure from his claim that it's a deep rooted issue affecting almost all of the country, which is bordering on being nonsense on stilts. It's just in the policy, which is of course crucial, where he falls completely down. He states that the government doesn't know what to do about it, but the truth is that no one does. He can only claim to know, without knowing what effect those policies he wants will in actuality have. He also, as previously noted, selectively uses crime figures to paint an alarming, inaccurate picture, such as here:

Violent crime is up almost 80% under Labour. Nearly 1.1 million violent crimes were recorded last year - half a million more than in 1998-99.

Robbery is up 27% under Labour.

Criminal damage is up past 1 million offences - that's nearly 3000 incidents each day.

There are over 400 serious knife crimes a week - 22,000 in one year.

Fatal stabbings up by a third.

Gun crime has nearly doubled under Labour - a gun crime was committed every hour in England and Wales in 2007-8.

Injuries from gun crime are up almost four fold.

And how has the Government responded?

By being soft on crime.


This is a page of diagrams and charts from the 2007/08 BCS which handily deals with some of these claims. The BCS, based on around 50,000 interviews, is regarded as more authoritative than the police figures which Grayling seems to be mainly relying on:

What then are Grayling's solutions? Almost uniquely a step in the wrong direction:

Letting people out of prison early - that's soft on crime

Since Gordon Brown came to power 47,000 people have been released on early release, including 9,000 convicted of violence against the person.

Nearly 1000 crimes have been committed by criminals who have been released early.


Grayling doesn't offer an alternative to letting them out on early release, presumably for the reason that there isn't one. We cannot build ourselves out of an overcrowding crisis, or at least not quickly enough. 1,000 crimes committed by over 47,000 released early in fact seems to be an incredibly low figure, going by the re-offending figures which suggest that over half re-offend. There is very little here about actual prison reform, which could have an effect on crime levels and help to increase genuine rehabilitation, but that doesn't make for as good rhetoric as being tough on crime will.

Rejects our calls for a presumption of prison for those carrying a knife.

Lets five out of six offenders convicted of knife possession off without a jail sentence.


Automatically sending thos caught carrying a knife to prison is probably the worst use of jail that could possibly be envisaged, and designed to further embitter those who carry it out of fear that just one time, who find themselves being made an example of in the very worst case of "sending a message". The less direct restrictions on a judge's personal discretion the better.

After a couple of old Blair quotes, we have something approaching Grayling's thoughts on what to do on targeting the causes of crime:

In true backstreet fashion, Gordon Brown took all four wheels off welfare reform back in the 1990s when he disagreed with Frank Field thinking the unthinkable. He left it on four piles of bricks for a decade, and only now have we persuaded them to start to be as radical as is needed. Even so, we've still only had words and not action.

Is there any evidence that Purnell's or the Tories' welfare reform will have any great impact on crime? Not much, unless you consider that it might in fact increase it when you effectively impoverish a distinct minority as may well happen, especially to the young people that Grayling previously proposed should form "chain gangs" if they couldn't find a job within 3 months or actively refused one. Prison looks attractive by comparison. Then there's a piece of evidence which directly contradicts the entire Conservative message on the "broken society":

Recent analysis suggests that around 2% of families - or 140,000 families across Britain - experience complex and multiple problems. When parents experience difficulties in their own lives, it can have a serious and lasting effect on both their and their families lives. The consequences of family breakdown can influence the rest of peoples individual lives and may also carry significant costs for public services and the wider community.

That 2% undoubtedly affects a far larger proportion than it actually makes up, but 2% does not a broken society make. Again though, that simply wouldn't make for effective rhetoric. 2% of our society is broken doesn't have the same ring to it.

The area which stands as a totem of Labour's failures to get to grips with the causes of crime is drugs.

UK drug abuse is the worst in Europe. A report by the UK Drug Policy Commission found that the UK has the highest level of problem drug use and the second highest level of drug-related deaths in Europe.

The UK is the cocaine capital of Europe. A report by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Addiction, which compared drug use in 28 countries in Europe, revealed that the UK has the highest proportion of cocaine users amongst adults and 15 and 16 years olds.

The UK has the third highest teenage cannabis use in the OECD.

Half of prisoners are drug addicts - some prisons report up to 80% of inmates testing positive for class A drugs on reception.

Drug offences are up 68% - there were 228,958 recorded drug offences in 2007-8 - that's more than 600 per day.


He states all this, but he doesn't ask why. Why are we so dependent on drugs, in comparison to the rest of Europe? Is it something wrong with our work-life balance? And then there's the whole message which this also gives: prohibition has comprehensively failed. It's time that we tried legalisation, yet that is completely anathema to the Conservatives, more so even than it is to the evidence-ignoring New Labour. Having addressed the causes, or rather listed them rather than addressed them, he cops out completely:

But tackling the causes of crime was a key part of my last job. If I am Home Secretary after the next election, my job is very simple - to be tough on crime.

A good soundbite, but a staggering lack of aspiration and ambition, those very things that government constantly wants to inculcate, for any politician.

We are then onto supposed concrete policies. A more sorry bunch could not be dreamt up, starting with some complete nonsense:

The first is to find a 21st century alternative to what would once have been a clip around the ear from the local bobby.

Plenty of teenagers stray off the straight and narrow sometimes.

But today there are no consequences when they do.


Really? No consequences whatsoever? Even if this were the case, shouldn't we be encouraging parents to put in consequences rather than relying on the law instead?

All too often if you look at the case of a fifteen or sixteen year old who is starting to commit serious crimes, you find a story of years of minor misdemeanours that have all too often gone unpunished.

That just can't be right.

I don't want to criminalise children - but I do want our police and our society to be able firmly to say No. Before those young people get used to flouting the law.

...

Ministers are now even proposing measures to move on ten year olds if they are causing trouble in the evenings. I don't think we should be shifting ten year olds out of their home areas - I think we should be sending them home to bed.

So I will instruct our police to remove young troublemakers from our streets altogether, not just move them on to disrupt a different street.

If police find young people doing something stupid out in their communities, I think we should give them the power, sometimes, to take them back to the Police Station and make their parents come and get them. For their own safety and protection as much as anything.

We're exploring the best way of making this possible but it's got to be the right thing in some cases.


This seems to be a recipe for ridding children and the young from the streets when no crime or otherwise has been committed, on the whim of the officers themselves. "Something stupid" - I can see that looking good in the legislation.

Our police should have powers to go straight to a magistrate and get an order against that troublemaker confining them to their homes for up to a month - except for during school hours. And if they break that curfew order they should expect to find themselves in the cells.

Grayling then doesn't want to criminalise children... except he does. He's talking about potentially "grounding" troublemakers, not potentially anyone who has ever committed any crime, with those who then break that order being sent to the cells. There is not just huge potential here for abuse and casual victimisation, but also again it's riding roughshod over parental responsibilities. They should be the ones grounding the child, not the courts, if indeed there are grounds to "grind" them in the first place. This is taking ASBOs and making them even worse.


In my own constituency, I've learned two lessons on tackling antisocial
behaviour from the local police.... that's when they've got it right.

A clash between two gangs of youths a few years ago was dealt with by thirty police, dogs and a helicopter overhead. The trouble has never been repeated.


Grayling is MP for the mean streets of Epsom and Ewell. That there was no repeat doesn't mean that it was the police action which halted it; it might well have been an isolated incident which was patched up regardless of it. This is hardly evidence-based policy making.

There is now a strong case to end Labour's twenty-four hour drinking regime. It has not created a continental café culture - it has just made things worse in many town and city centres.

Except this is the opposite of the truth, as John Band noted. We do have a drinking problem, but again we have to examine why that is rather than go back to ridiculous previous laws which failed just as much.

The third thing we need to do is to stop the ridiculous system of cautions that has built up even for serious offences.

Remember that young soldier, beaten up by local hoodlums.

Why did the police choose to caution the offenders?

Because issuing a caution means case closed - a tick in the box - a crime solved for the official figures to be sent to the Home Office.

And avoiding the danger that the Crown Prosecution Service will say - three young men, a fight - too difficult to prove so we won't bother.

That's just not good enough.


Some cautions are undoubtedly down to a lack of imagination or lack of belief that it's worth going through the rigmarole of a court case, but for the most part they are actually usually the right punishment. Politicians shouldn't second guess police into ordering them to not issue cautions - that's just as bad as Labour's myriad of targets. If the Conservatives want to free police to do their jobs as much as possible, then they shouldn't put other restrictions on them either.

The fourth change we desperately need is that oldest political of political chestnuts. More police on the streets. More bobbies on the beat.

May as well stop it here, as again, the evidence suggests that "bobbies on the beat" is an incredibly bad way of using police resources. Nick Davies wrote a whole series on this back in 2003 which effectively debunked the entire idea. It still though remains the simplest and easiest way to win press and popular support.

Grayling finishes with a flourish:

The Conservatives are the party of law and order - law and order based on common sense, strong families and communities and a system which places the victim above the criminal.

Labour has had eleven years and they have collectively failed - their musical chairs based system of Home Secretaries has left Britain a more dangerous, less civilised place to live in.


Two more nonsensical paragraphs would be difficult to come up with. Anyone who makes allusions to common sense should be considered suspicious, when "common sense" is often the actual inverse of it, just as how if you say the reverse of what you've just said it probably tells you it isn't worth saying. The idea though that Labour's lack of continuous Home Secretaries has somehow made the country more dangerous and less civilised is hilarious: more accurate is that they've made the country less civilised through their criminal justice policies; getting rid of the lot of them and not having one at all could have undoubted beneficial effects. One thing however is clear from this dire, dismal, predictable speech: Chris Grayling and the Conservatives have the potential to be even worse than New Labour.

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Saturday, February 21, 2009 

Weekend links.

Seems like an exceptionally quiet weekend, so let's keep this short and reasonably sweet. The BNP's council by-election victory in Sevenoaks is causing concern - but by some of the coverage you'd imagine they were on the edge of a major breakthrough. They are not - and are not even close to it. There are worries that they might be able to win a European parliament seat, due to how the Europe elections are based on proportional representation, but even if they do, there is so little coverage, even in the broadsheet press, of affairs in Brussels and Strasbourg that the only victory will be one of breaking into mainstream attention again. We of course need to engage with those who are sympathetic towards the BNP, and challenge the party's smears and lies, with the old tales about how the foreigners are stealing all the houses apparently being top of concerns in Sevenoaks, but going in the opposite direction only helps them further. Blairwatch comments further on the upcoming Euro elections.

Elsewhere on the blogs, Paul Linford provides his usual weekly article, this time on how Gordon Brown's authority is draining away, Sunny critiques the Civitas report on Islamic schools in typical fashion, while Shiraz Socialist asks if anyone will support the right for Fred Phelps to come here as they did Geert Wilders - I would, as would Rhetorically Speaking and the Heresiarch. Lee Griffin further notes Italy's dissent into authoritarianism, while Hopi Sen agrees that Brown should apologise - just not necessarily in the way that some want him to.

In the papers, Peter Oborne argues that this is a government in collapse, while Matthew Parris suggests that voters simply don't care any more. Deborah Orr writes on the Cambridge review into primary schooling, while Geoffrey Wheatcroft makes a point which ought to be obvious: that money and good judgement don't mix. Article of the weekend is undoubtedly Ben Goldacre's systematic destruction of the claims that British soldiers had seized £50m worth of heroin in Afghanistan, but it's well worth pointing out that Transform had already done exactly the same on Wednesday.

As for the worst tabloid article of the weekend we have a few contenders. One is the Sun's editorial comment on Jade Goody. It's worth quoting the whole nauseating thing in full and then comparing it against some previous comments from the Sun on the now sainted Goody:

LET’S all raise a toast to Jade Goody tomorrow as her dying wish comes true.

Clad in a gorgeous cream silk gown, Jade will become a bride and marry her devoted sweetheart Jack Tweed.

Tragically, there will be no anniversaries for Jade and Jack.

Death will part them too soon.

The wedding night Justice Secretary Jack Straw is letting them spend together may be one of very few they have as man and wife.

But tomorrow, Jade insists, is for joy not despair.

Amid the cake and champagne, the laughter and the kisses, Jade will know the special happiness that only a girl on her wedding day can experience.

By her side will be her proud young sons. Surrounding her will be the family, friends and celebs she loves the most.

The Sun’s warmest congratulations go to Jade and Jack on their marriage.

And Jade should be uplifted by the huge response to our Jade’s Legacy campaign, which aims to cut deaths from cervical cancer.

As Jade’s life moves towards its close, Britain has taken her more than ever to its heart.

When she walks down that aisle tomorrow, the nation will be by her side.


Also worth remembering is that her partner was in prison for a vicious assault on a man with a golf club - someone who would otherwise be derided in the Sun as a despicable yob is given the front page to declare his love, via Max Clifford, naturally.

That isn't the worst though. Another contender is the perennial favourite, Amanda Platell, who is livid about school children being asked to think about something. Such thought experiments can only lead to subversion and a destruction of our morals and values. Winner though for sheer hilarious hypocrisy is the Mail publishing an article by a former Cosmopolitan editor titled "Degrading, disgusting, and demeaning: I'm ashamed of modern women's magazines." That's also a perfect description of Femail, and here are some of its greatest hits.

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Friday, February 20, 2009 

Scum-watch: Pathetic apoplexy over Qatada's compensation.

It was to be expected that regardless of the level of payout, the Sun was bound to be outraged by the paying of compensation to Abu Qatada and the other men detained illegally at Belmarsh. Quite why it or anyone else is so surprised that the ECHR awarded compensation is a mystery: a more flagrant breach of both the right to liberty and a fair trial is difficult to imagine, regardless of the threat the men are said to pose. These norms and values are however ones which the Sun and some politicians have no intention of respecting when they are so apparently inimical to common sense.

The Sun's opening paragraph could hardly be more partisan:

A BARMY decision to award terror suspect Abu Qatada and eight others £75,000 for a “breach” of their human rights sparked outrage yesterday.

Barmy and most certainly not a "breach" then. You have to wonder how the Sun would respond to a British citizen abroad being detained without charge for over three years, or indeed to a British citizen not accused of links with terrorism being detained here for over three years without charge. One suspects that their attitude might well be entirely different. That Qatada is a "terror suspect" is irrelevant: he has the same rights as everyone else, and to suggest otherwise is part of where we've gone wrong in attempting to fight the terror threat. Those accused of links with terrorism are fundamentally criminals, and need to be declared as such, with normal criminal prosecution taken against them. That this is itself is controversial is partially why compensation has now rightly been paid out.

Naturally, comparisons with the victims of the 7/7 attacks are brought in:

Survivors of the 7/7 attacks on London in 2005 last night compared the handout to their own battle for compensation.

Jackie Putnam, 58, from Huntingdon, Cambs, suffered memory loss and trauma.

She said: “It seems the rules are there to protect the bad guys and the good ones get pushed aside. The suspects have won justice but there has been little or none of it for the victims of 7/7.”

Victim’s dad Mr Foulkes, of Oldham, Greater Manchester, added: “I despair when I hear of a decision like this, then I get angry because it rubs salt in the wounds.”


None of those given compensation have any link whatsoever to 7/7 to begin with, unless you can somehow make a case that they were inspired by Qatada, something I haven't seen made before. Equally, Putnam might well be referring to justice in the sense of bringing those other than bombers themselves involved to book, but if she's referring purely to compensation then there is no real comparison. Back in 2007 the government had already paid out over £3 million to the victims of the attacks, while another £12 million from a dedicated charitable relief fund had also been distributed, sums which put the total of £75,000 and £2,500 to Qatada into stark relief.

For some unfathomable reason, David Cameron also has to stick his nose in. His contribution would be hilarious if it wasn't both so dire and craven:

Unbelievably, taxpayers are going to have to pay him and other terrorist suspects thousands in compensation for detaining them.

It could have been more, but I resent every penny.


Taxpayers can directly blame Cameron for having to pay him compensation: while he was absent or abstained from the vote on the legalisation which introduced indefinite detention without charge, he subsequently voted in 2004 for the renewal of it. Also, why is it unbelievable? Does Cameron not think that detaining anyone without charge indefinitely is beyond the pale?

You have to shake your head at his sheer shamelessness.

He comes to Britain illegally — we let him stay. In the aftermath of 9/11 we detain him fearing he was planning something.

We say he can leave detention if he leaves the country. He doesn’t.

He drags us through appeals at our own courts and the European Court and we have to pay him for the pleasure.


It's about time we challenged this nonsense about him coming here illegally - by definition the vast majority of those who come here and subsequently seek asylum enter the country illegally, mainly because they have no legal way of doing so. His entry was on a false passport, and if we want to be really picky about it, it was a Conservative government which let him stay. He wasn't detained because we feared he was planning something - he was detained simply because of his links to terrorism. Likewise, why on earth would he leave detention when he's a Palestinian by nationality and so cannot return there, and also quite understandably doesn't want to return to Jordan where he faces potential mistreatment and an unfair trial. Nowhere else will take him, hence he's stuck here. He drags us through all his layers of appeal, as is his right.

This case was not even about whether he might be tortured if returned home — just that he might not get a fair trial by our standards.

Why should it be our responsibility and what should we do about it?


Actually it was about whether he might be tortured - just that the judges rejected that part of his argument, while the appeal court accepted he would not face a fair trial, a decision now overturned by the Lords. Does Qatada not deserve a fair trial "by our standards"?

First, we should have stronger border controls. A Conservative government will set up a dedicated Border Police force.

If dangerous people slip through, we should bring them to justice.


And will this border force stop those with false passports getting in and then claiming asylum? Of course not.

A Conservative government will tear up the Human Rights Act and replace it with a British Bill of Rights, so we can deal with human rights issues more sensibly.

It makes a mockery of human rights if we can’t protect ourselves against people who are out to destroy them for everyone else.


Will the Conservatives also then be withdrawing from the Council of Europe, and thus leaving the ECHR altogether? All the HRA does is institute the ECHR in British law; all tearing it up will do is mean those seeking justice will have to wait far longer before they receive it. We also have "protected ourselves" from Qatada, as the Lords judgement showed. The people who make a real mockery of human rights are those that deny they are both universal and that want to make it more difficult for the average person to seek recompense, which is exactly what the Conservatives' position will do.

On then to the Scum's incredibly poorly argued leader:

YESTERDAY was a humiliation for Britain.

We have been ordered by Europe to pay thousands to terror suspects such as Abu Qatada simply because we locked them up to keep our streets safe.

Note that throughout the Sun claims we've been ordered to do this by "Europe". The ECHR does not represent Europe: it is simply a European institution, one which we had a major hand in creating. The Sun's constant conflation of the EU with the ECHR is both misleading and almost certainly deliberate, designed to cause further apoplexy at unaccountable institutions when it simply isn't the case. It also wasn't a "humiliation": the real humiliation was that we were the only nation in Europe post 9/11 which felt that the threat to us was so serious that we had to abandon our own long-held values and liberties, while all the others got on perfectly as they had been, despite similar threats to them also. The idea that we locked up Qatada and the others to keep our streets safe is also ludicrous: if we'd really wanted to do that we would have prosecuted them, not detained them illegally and afterwards even allowed Qatada out on bail.

Worse, this disgraceful ruling means our money could well end up funding weapons to attack our own Forces in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Qatada and eight other extremists must be paid £75,000 between them in compensation and costs, rules Europe’s crackpot Human Rights Court.

Who is to say the money won’t be recycled into the back pockets of al-Qaeda?


Considering that four of those given compensation have already been deported, that Qatada is in prison and that the others are still on control orders, the chances of any of the money going on weapons to attack forces or to al-Qaida is incredibly slim to non-existent. Even if some did, I hate to break it to the Sun but £2,500 doesn't buy a lot of weaponry; it might barely cover a couple of decent guns. That al-Qaida and other terrorist groups have other rather more dependable sources of cash then those locked up over here is something of a understatement. The costs of course won't go to the men, but rather to their lawyers.

This is the lowest moment since Labour’s catastrophic decision to enforce European human rights laws in Britain.

We have to go cap in hand to a monster like Abu Qatada with a cheque from the very British taxpayers he wants murdered.


The lowest moment since the last lowest moment, obviously. The only thing catastrophic about the HRA to the Sun is that it potentially affects its business model, as we have noted in the past. If we didn't want to have to pay Qatada compensation, we shouldn't have acted illegally; it's pretty damn simple.

Europe’s human rights laws have made this country a laughing stock. We could be funding terrorists to buy guns to shoot our own soldiers.

Is that the third time in a very short article that the Sun's made the same argument? Hasn't that barrel been scraped enough? Do I really need to say again that "Europe's" human rights laws are as much our creation as anyone else's?

We can’t endure the shame of this any longer. We have to change the law.

Britain’s safety must come before pandering to Europe.


So, as previously stated, we're going to both abolish the HRA and withdraw from the ECHR, yes? The idea that we're pandering in any way to Europe is ludicrous: we're simply operating as every other democracy in Europe does, including the authoritarian likes of Russia, which is also signed up to the ECHR. The idea that we would withdraw from it while Russia stayed would make us the real laughing stock, a country which abandons its principles to fight a pathetic threat that has been ridiculously exaggerated. The Sun, as ever, only has its own real interest at heart.

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Thursday, February 19, 2009 

Even "terrorist suspects" deserved more.

It must have come as a great disappointment to the Daily Mail hacks that despite their predictions that Abu Qatada and the others illegally detained without charge at Belmarsh from 2002 to 2005 were about to receive hundreds of thousands of pounds in compensation from the European Court of Human Rights that the actual amount turned out to be a rather less outrageous £2,500, rising to over £3,000 for those detained longest. Even this miserly amount was condemned by the Conservatives as "horrifying", when the only thing horrifying about it was that it wasn't far far higher.

In that, the ECHR seems to have decided to be cautious. In its ruling it even accepted the frankly bogus assertion from the government, used to justify the detention without charge for foreign "terrorist suspects" who supposedly couldn't be tried, that there was a "public emergency threatening the life of the nation". This country has only ever faced a public emergency threatening the life of the nation once, from 1939 up until 1944, when the possibility of the Nazis launching an invasion had drastically rescinded. The very notion that somehow the likes of Abu Qatada and the other detainees posed a threat similar to then was insulting in the extreme.

We really ought to set out in detail what the detention without charge or trial amounted to. It meant that someone (as long as they were a foreign national, or in Qatada's case, stripped of their asylum status so they could be designated as one) could be accused of being involved in terrorism, where either the evidence was inadmissable or too flimsy to be brought before a court, and on that basis locked up indefinitely in one our flagship highest security prisons. You were not allowed to know what the evidence was against you, in order to challenge it; your case was instead dealt with by a special advocate appointed by the court. In short, you could only really challenge your detention as a whole by arguing that there was no real threat to the life of the nation, and that therefore the derogation from article 5 of the ECHR was unlawful. This was what the law lords ruled in December 2004. The entire Kafkaesque situation had a devastating effect on the detainees' mental health, as could have been predicted; almost all of them were prescribed anti-depressants, another attempted suicide and Abu Rideh, one of the few to be named and also awarded compensation today, repeatedly harmed himself. He was last known to be seriously ill from a hunger strike in protest at his continuing restriction of liberty under a control order. A stateless Palestinian confined to a wheelchair, the idea that he posed a threat to anyone was always laughable. Yet he too along with the others was only given a small lump sum as the ECHR ruled that their treatment did not amount to inhuman or degrading treatment.

Alan Travis points out the staggering difference between payouts, mentioning that the ECHR had previously awarded £5,500 to a British man who had been unlawfully detained for only 6 days. Some of those held were kept in custody for over 3 years before being released onto the only slightly less onerous control orders. In some cases this amounts to just over £2 compensation for each day spent illegally in custody. Put it this way: if this had happened to British citizens, and not those accused of involvement in terrorism, regardless of the fact that none have ever had to face the accusations in an actual trial, they would have been looking at compensation in the tens, if not hundreds of thousands, as Qatada had initially demanded. The ECHR seems to have decided not to inflame the tabloids further than they already have been; politically wise perhaps, but cowardly in its own way.

Less cowardly was another part of the ruling, which has finally struck a blow directly against the process of the Special Immigration Appeals Committees, where those before them are routinely denied access to the evidence held against them, making it almost impossible for them to be able to adequately challenge it. The ECHR ruled that in some of the cases, although not in all, that this was constituted another breach of article 5. It's unclear what this means for the continuation of SIAC: the ECHR accepted that where more extended information had been provided to those detained without charge, that there had not been breach of the right to a fair trial. This most likely means that the government, rather than being forced to scrap what amounts to little more than a kangaroo court, albeit an independent one, will simply have to hand over slightly more information than it otherwise would have done. A partial victory it might be, but a welcome one nonetheless.

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Wednesday, February 18, 2009 

Abu Qutata?

The somewhat surprising decision by the House of Lords to overturn Abu Qatada's successful appeal against his deportation to Jordan is a faintly disturbing one. Qatada's appeal, although based on what he claims would be breaches of various articles of the European Convention on Human Rights, was only upheld on article 6, the right to a fair trial. The Special Immigration Appeals Committee, which hears evidence in secret and where the appellants are represented by special advocates, had already held that despite Jordan's undoubted deficiencies in its legal system, Qatada's deportation could only be thrown out if there was likely to be a "flagrant" breach of his right to a fair trial under article 6.

The law lords, in turn, have agreed with the initial decision and threw out the appeal court's ruling that SIAC had erred in not putting enough weight on the possibility that the evidence against Qatada was the result of torture. Lord Phillips, in the ruling, argues (paragraph 153):

I do not accept, however, the conclusion that he has derived from this, namely that it required a high degree of assurance that evidence obtained by torture would not be used in the proceedings in Jordan before it would be lawful to deport Mr Othman to face those proceedings. As Buxton LJ observed, the prohibition on receiving evidence obtained by torture is not primarily because such evidence is unreliable or because the reception of the evidence will make the trial unfair. Rather it is because “the state must stand firm against the conduct that has produced the evidence". That principle applies to the state in which an attempt is made to adduce such evidence. It does not require this state, the United Kingdom, to retain in this country to the detriment of national security a terrorist suspect unless it has a high degree of assurance that evidence obtained by torture will not be adduced against him in Jordan. What is relevant in this appeal is the degree of risk that Mr Othman will suffer a flagrant denial of justice if he is deported to Jordan. As my noble and learned friend Lord Hoffmann said in Montgomery v H M Advocate [2003] 1 AC 641, 649

“…an accused who is convicted on evidence obtained from him by torture has not had a fair trial. But the breach of article 6(1) lies not in the use of torture (which is, separately, a breach of article 3) but in the reception of the evidence by the court for the purposes of determining the charge".


The reason why this decision is so troubling is obvious: the Lords have not only ruled that they accept that the trial Qatada is likely to face in Jordan would not reach the standards we would demand under article 6, but also that it's additionally likely that the evidence against him is the product of torture, as he himself claims. This however does not still add up to what the Lords would consider to be a "flagrant" breach of article 6, which is the threshold at which deporting Qatada to Jordan would be unlawful.

Qatada is quite understandably taking his case to his last port of call, the European Court itself, where the ruling could quite possibly turn out to be another landmark, similar to Chalal vs United Kingdom. Nothing should as yet be ruled out, as the House of Lords ruling is in itself something of a surprise, and one which has been criticised by all the main human rights groups.

It has to be said that it is a horrifically difficult decision to have to make, one which Lord Hope authoratitavely comments on at the beginning of his own argument, something well worth quoting in full:

209. Most people in Britain, I suspect, would be astonished at the amount of care, time and trouble that has been devoted to the question whether it will be safe for the aliens to be returned to their own countries. In each case the Secretary of State has issued a certificate under section 33 of the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Immigration Act 2001 that the aliens’ removal from the United Kingdom would be conducive to the public good. The measured language of the statute scarcely matches the harm that they would wish to inflict upon our way of life, if they were at liberty to do so. Why hesitate, people may ask. Surely the sooner they are got rid of the better. On their own heads be it if their extremist views expose them to the risk of ill-treatment when they get home.

210. That however is not the way the rule of law works. The lesson of history is that depriving people of its protection because of their beliefs or behaviour, however obnoxious, leads to the disintegration of society. A democracy cannot survive in such an atmosphere, as events in Europe in the 1930s so powerfully demonstrated. It was to eradicate this evil that the European Convention on Human Rights, following the example of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 10 December 1948, was prepared for the Governments of European countries to enter into. The most important word in this document appears in article 1, and it is repeated time and time again in the following articles. It is the word “everyone". The rights and fundamental freedoms that the Convention guarantees are not just for some people. They are for everyone. No one, however dangerous, however disgusting, however despicable, is excluded. Those who have no respect for the rule of law - even those who would seek to destroy it - are in the same position as everyone else.

211. The paradox that this system produces is that, from time to time, much time and effort has to be given to the protection of those who may seem to be the least deserving. Indeed it is just because their cases are so unattractive that the law must be especially vigilant to ensure that the standards to which everyone is entitled are adhered to. The rights that the aliens invoke in this case were designed to enshrine values that are essential components of any modern democratic society: the right not to be tortured or subjected to inhuman or degrading treatment, the right to liberty and the right to a fair trial. There is no room for discrimination here. Their protection must be given to everyone. It would be so easy, if it were otherwise, for minority groups of all kinds to be persecuted by the majority. We must not allow this to happen. Feelings of the kind that the aliens’ beliefs and conduct give rise to must be resisted for however long it takes to ensure that they have this protection.


That's around as detailed and sound an argument against the tabloid case for kicking them out immediately that could possibly be made. It's therefore a shame that Lords have effectively ruled that both unfair trials and evidence obtained by torture, as long as both occur outside the countries which have signed up to the ECHR and as long as the breach is not deemed to be "flagrant" are in some way acceptable. It's true that this is not their argument, which is as legally sound as it could possibly be, but that is in effect what they have decided. It comes, as we have seen, at a time when our own connivance with torture is being exposed as never before, when questions are being raised about how deeply involved we have been during the initial stage of the so-called war on terror with almost routine breaches of international law. It gives the impression, however undeserved, that our own values concerning such practices are becoming more jaded and diluted just when the opposite should be the case.

Fundamentally, the extended legal drama concerning Qatada should not have ever even began. If Qatada is as dangerous as the government claims he is, and if he is indeed guilty of inciting racial hatred and radicalising Muslims as he is accused of doing, the question remains why he cannot be tried here. Similarly, we still don't know just how involved Qatada was with our security services, when there are claims in the public domain that he was a double agent, albeit one it seems who is still reasonably well respected within takfirist jihadist circles. If the evidence against him cannot currently be considered outside of closed sessions, then intercept evidence needs to be introduced, although it needs to be in any event urgently. Both of these things should have been considered and potentially implemented before we resorted to simply getting rid of him, back to a country with a poor human rights record that by our own courts' admission would not reach our own standards regarding a fair trial. Instead we seem to be making compromises regarding torture that we need not be. That is an indictment of our politicians, rather than our courts of law.

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Well, that went well...

You would be forgiven for thinking that the liquid doom trial accused just aren't meant to be found guilty of conspiring to murder by blowing apart airliners - just a day after their retrial began, the jury ends up being discharged for "legal reasons". We can only speculate as to why, as if it was only something affecting one juror they could possibly have been replaced, considering the very early stage the trial was at. As noted yesterday, the security services and government must really be hoping that it's third time lucky.

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Tuesday, February 17, 2009 

How low can we go?

It's quite quickly becoming apparent why the government has been so desperate to prevent the full details coming out regarding the torture of Binyam Mohamed, with it attempting to pass the buck onto the United States, claiming that to release the documents would threaten our intelligence links with that country - the truth now appears to be that we have been directly complicit in the torture of British citizens in Pakistan since after 9/11.

Allegations really don't come much more serious than those being made in today's Guardian, based on the testimony of an MI5 officer during the court case concerning the release of the documents last year. In what appears to amount to a "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" approach, MI5 officers questioned detainees that had been at the least ruffed up and at the worst tortured without expressing any concern for their well-being or bothering with such slight concerns as whether their detention itself was legal. This doesn't seem to have been an ad hoc approach, but rather one which was actively discussed and decided upon by security service lawyers and Whitehall officials. Moreover, in Mohamed's case it appears that MI5 actively cooperated with his rendition to Morocco, or at least knew it was going to happen, where he was brutally tortured, something which it has always denied, although it has previously admitted to giving information to the Americians which was subsequently used during his torture. To top all of this off, David Miliband actively solicited a letter from the US state department which confirmed his claim made to the judges in the case that if the documents were released, the US would stop intelligence cooperation. Miliband then in parliament directly contradicted himself, claiming that the US authorities had done nothing of the sort, which has itself prompted the case to be re-examined.

We did already know that our own intelligence services had been involved in the US programme of "extraordinary rendition", when the CIA helpfully temporarily disposed of Bisher al-Rawi and Jamil el-Banna, former associates of Abu Qutada, who were arrested and taken to Guantanamo after they left the UK for Gambia. We knew from Craig Murray that our government had no qualms whatsoever about using "intelligence" which had its source in the torture of opposition figures in Uzbekistan, and that the same practice was doubtless in place across the globe. These latest revelations though go beyond all that, into direct complicity with the active torture of British subjects and citizens in a third country, with MI5 and the government directly collaborating and discussing how such information should be used and whether it was legal or not. It's little wonder then just how far the government has gone in trying to stop these allegations from coming out: they are the kind which ought to result in instant sackings and resignations, in investigations and inquiries into how and why we decided that torture was fine as long a third party was doing it and those being abused were thought to be involved in terrorist activities. They are due to be investigated by both the parliamentary committee on human rights and the toothless and spineless intelligence and security committee, but neither is likely to get fully to the bottom of what seems to have gone on, and the latter especially has already been involved in a despicable whitewash of our role in rendition.

All this has come at the same time as an interview with the former MI5 head Stella Rimington, in which she warned that the government was directly exploiting and manipulating the terrorist threat in order to restrict civil liberties, a definitive report from the International Committee of Jurists, which investigates how post-9/11 human rights have been abused and sacrified in the name of security and finding terror, as well as making recommendations on how to recover from the current low ebb, and as the government seems to be determined to paint not just Muslims, but anyone with even slightly radical or controversial opinions as potential extremists, not to mention the retrial of the liquid bomb suspects. Anything Rimington says should be treated with caution, not just as an ex-spook but also because she was personally involved in the surveillance and infiltrating of any vaguely radical group during the 1980s, something which was never even close to being justified when most posed about as much threat to the British state as Timmy Mallett, but when a former agent denounces the way civil liberties are being abused, many do pay attention. Likewise, the ICJ report ruthlessly exposes just how low we have sunk in such a short space of time, while the government's latest "counter-terrorism strategy" illustrates vividly New Labour's apparent addiction to demonising those opposed to its own moral and political values rather than engaging and challenging them.

As the Heresiarch argues, we shouldn't kid ourselves that it's only in times of tension that governments and other state organisations try to exert their powers to the limit; it's what they do naturally. It's therefore ludicrous to imagine that an opposition party, however pure their values might be while out of power, would not do much the same once in it in order both to satisfy the traditional demands of the authoritarians and reactionaries in the press and to stay in government itself. It is however equally difficult to believe that the Conservatives or Liberal Democrats could possibly be any worse than Labour has been. How far, after all, does this rabbit hole go? We've had illegal war, complicity in torture and the suspension of habeas corpus. The only thing left for them to do seems to be to go in for targeted assassinations. After all, we've got to get on a level playing field with the Israelis somehow.

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It's deja vu all over again.

The retrial of the men accused of masterminding the liquid doom plot has duly commenced, not that you'd know it was a retrial because none of the news reports have deigned to mention that fact, which is curious in itself. Last time round the prosecution failed to convince the jury that the target for the bombings was to be transatlantic flights, to the disbelief of those who hadn't bothered to note that about the only evidence directly linking them to planes was the routes highlighted on a memory stick, along with diary notes written by one of the men which hinted at getting through security of some kind.

The biggest quandary concerning the retrial was whether new evidence would be introduced against the men, and while we can't tell what else the prosecution might yet have in store, the opening statement by Peter Wright QC doesn't seem to suggest that there will be. Still the prosecution is using the claim that the attacks could have caused deaths on a "unprecedented scale", when they know full well that the men hadn't even came close to actually assembling a viable device. The closest they had reached was the bomb-maker, Sarwar, apparently boiling down the hydrogen peroxide to the required dilution, but there is still a long way from there to exploding it on an airplane and successfully destroying it and killing all on board. Possibly new is the claim that others involved were overheard discussing targeting different flights from different terminals, but if it was left out the first trial that would be a remarkable oversight, and if it wasn't, it still wasn't enough to convince the first jury to convict.

All of which raises the question of what happens if this trial also ends in the jury failing to be convinced that planes were the target. Only three of the men were previously convicted of conspiracy to murder, Ali, Sarwar and Hussain, while all the others had already pleaded guilty to plotting to cause a public nuisance. Will the state keep trying until it gets the result it wants, be satisfied with the doubtless lengthy sentences still to be handed down, or go with imposing control orders? All of these options have the pitfall of exposing the initial certainty of all involved that this was the terror plot to end all terror plots as fraudlent. Despite all the survelliance of the men, the following and the huge amount of evidence sifted through, is there really nothing that conclusively links them to blowing up airliners? If so, it will be just another case of hyperbole and exaggeration about "the threat" designed to cause even greater fear in the general public, with the ban on liquids on airliners, which has always been ridiculous, even more absurd. This jury may yet convict, and the security services and the government must be desperately hoping that they do.

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Monday, February 16, 2009 

Exploitation by both sides.

Perhaps it's partially down to the Press Complaints Commission feeling the pressure after last week's Media Standards Report, which was rather intemperately responded to by both the outgoing head Christopher Meyer, and by its director, Tim Toulmin, who called it "deranged" while also claiming that the public are "pig-sick of regulation", which seems to suggest that he isn't exactly keeping up with current events, but in any event the PCC has announced that it is launching its own investigation into possible payments by both the Sun and the People to the parents of Alfie Patten, the 13-year-old at the centre of the storm concerning his apparent parentage of a child with his 15-year-old girlfriend.

The paying of the parents of a minor for material on them is explicitly forbidden by the PCC's code - except when it's decided that doing so is in the public interest. It's quite apparent that the Sun did indeed pay Patten's parents for last week's exclusive, not bothering to deny it when asked for a comment, stating that they "absolutely believe [the story] to be in the public interest". As for whether the People did, it seems unlikely that they would have been welcomed otherwise with open arms into Patten's mother's house, or that he would have been frog-marched in to answer the hack's questions, obviously incredibly uncomfortable with the situation.

Key will obviously be whether the newspapers can make a respectable argument for there being a public interest in the story, hopefully beyond the natural prurient interest. Doubtless the broken society will be invoked, the rareness of the situation, despite some columnists attempting to make out that this is happening every day of the week, and that in itself it has spawned a debate about sex education and how to prevent teenage pregnancies. Knowing the spinelessness of the PCC, I can't see any other ruling than that the public interest has indeed been served.

Sometimes though, even when such reports are arguably in the public interest, that doesn't necessarily mean they should be published. Already the story has spawned perhaps predictable claims that Patten, who looks 10 at the most rather than 13, is not the father, with two other teenagers claiming to also have slept with the child's mother. That these claims have been reported completely seriously, with those making the allegations being named, which will doubtless do plenty for their self-aggrandisement, is disturbing enough: nothing seems more inclined to break up any long-term relationship between father and mother than such rumours. Little thought has also so far gone into how those who are already struggling with getting used to the idea of being parents at such a young age will be affected by their being splashed on the front page of the biggest selling newspaper in the country, let alone how they feel about their sex lives being discussed almost pornographically. We also have no idea whatsoever on how the money which has changed hands will be used - one hopes that it will go towards the child's upbringing, but as there only seems to have been one side paid, and that indeed the money seems to have gone to both Patten's mother and his estranged father, that is also in doubt.

This blog tries not to moralise or come across as too sanctimonious, but this sad tale has all the hallmarks of only two sides profiting, that of the media, with the Sun already boasting of how their exclusive broke their previous records for online hits, and the parents, those who abjectly failed to prevent this situation from developing in the first place. Neither seems to have the interests of the children, for that is after all what they are, foremost in their minds. Patten in the photographs, holding and looking over the baby, looks absolutely bewildered, as numb and overwhelmed as you'd expect a 13-year-old looking at his first-born in the glare of the flashing lights to be. The odds on him remaining in contact with his child, let alone developing a proper relationship with either her or the mother, must be slim, especially in the full glare of the media spotlight. Those of us who are almost double his age have enough trouble with the latter on its own without even considering the prospect of additionally becoming a parent in the bargain. Exploiting such a situation for money and notoriety, as both sides appear to have done, is wrong, regardless of whether the public interest has been served or not.

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Saturday, February 14, 2009 

Weekend links.

No overall theme again this week, except for one story we shall leave until last. On the blogs, as good a place to start as any is those discussing other blogs, with both A Very Public Sociologist and BenSix examining the piss-poor LabourList, which in the words of Jamie Sport, "is little more than a big sign saying this is why you shouldn't vote Labour". Dave Osler asks what makes a great political pamphlet, Lee Griffin talks truancy, Tom Freeman takes on the Times over their criticism of the Lloyds takeover of HBOS, the Heresiarch commemorates the 20th anniversary of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, Lib Dem David Howarth is brilliant on prisons, BenSix (again) mocks the Mail over its hysteria about "persecuted" Christians and Alix Mortimer is horrified by the latest anti-terror proposal to make women suspicious of brown people by showing sinister films in hairdressers. Eric Allison also attacks the Tories' latest piece of opportunism, this time ringing the outrage bell about prisoners, shock horror, reading "unsuitable" literature.

As for the papers, there's not much of quality but for three articles: Jonathan Steele on Afghanistan, 20 years after the Soviets withdrew while looking at our own involvement, Peter Oborne, who is utterly wasted at the Mail, tackles Jacqui Smith's expenses, and Andrew Grice notes Labour is still terrified about the ghosts of old returning to haunt them.

Left till last for the worst tabloid pieces is predictably the nonsense being spouted about a 13-year-old fathering a child. Most amusing is the pique at the prospect of Alfie and Chantelle getting benefits in the Sun, which presumably has already paid a vast sum to their parents to obtain their story. Even more hilarious are these lines in the leader, which points the finger everywhere except at itself:

Then we must consider how our fashion industry sexualises children.

Stores are full of flirtatious clothes aimed at little girls.

Is it responsible for shops to target sexy bras and knickers at children of eight?


Ah yes, the "fashion industry" sexualising children. It's nothing to do with the media being overflowing with sex, is it, such as the newspaper which features a topless woman on its third page every day, certainly not. As per usual though, the Sun is a beacon of sanity compared to the Daily Mail, which yesterday had Melanie Phillips spitting tacks, and today has veteran worst comment piece winner Amanda Platell doing much the same, while its leader blames, naturally, the liberals. Platell's piece is instructive of how on a case by case basis it decides how to allot blame to either parents or the state, depending on their whim at the time:

I know there are those who will pour scorn on Alfie's head. Doubtless, he's not the sharpest pencil in the box. But the blame for this whole sorry episode lies elsewhere - and I don't mean with his 15-year-old 'girlfriend', Chantelle.

For their predicament is testament to the moral collapse that is the true legacy of a liberal establishment that has imposed its own values - or rather, lack of them - on the British people for the past four decades.


So while when Allison Pearson blamed the mother when her daughter was murdered, something she had no control over, Platell this time round blames the "liberal establishment" when the parents themselves had far more of the blame, should we wish to apportion it, to share. Platell at least puts this moral collapse down to four decades worth of "liberal" policies, unlike the Conservatives who predictably screamed about the broken society, even when the BBC rather shot them down by noting that the number of under-16s giving birth over the past decade has declined. Deborah Orr in the Independent is a voice of sanity, noting how incredibly rare such a situation is, and then skewering all involved:


The concern should not be only about the wisdom of the families involved, but about a media culture that is no better at preserving the innocence of childhood than the individuals it seeks to criticise.


Indeed.

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Friday, February 13, 2009 

Scum-watch: More heartlessness over Binyam Mohamed.

The Scum continues its shamefully heartless low-level campaign against Binyam Mohamed returning from Guantanamo:

AN AIR ambulance will bring Guantanamo Bay terror suspect Binyam Mohamed to Britain — at taxpayers’ expense.

Foreign Secretary David Miliband also sent a medic to treat Mohamed, who is on hunger strike.

The Ethiopian — whose right to live in Britain expired five YEARS ago — was set to arrive yesterday, but was too ill.

Perhaps we should charge the doubtless extravagant cost to the United States, considering they were the ones responsible for Mohamed's unlawful detention for the past five years. Suggesting something similar though would expose the Sun's long-term position: that it has never so much as once called for the closure of the Cuban camp and has opposed the return of every single British citizen and resident from there. It even went so far as to sneer at the concern raised about the conditions by comparing what was meted out to Daniel Pearl:

Whilst much of the media huffed and puffed about “bad conditions” in Guantanamo Bay, these very same terrorists were preparing to slit Daniel’s throat.

No Geneva Convention for Daniel. No orange suits in the Cuban sun.

Instead, these evil brutes filmed his murder on video and sent it to the Americans.


Likewise, when Moazzam Begg was returned it printed the following leader column:

IF you live in the Birmingham area, it’s possible you have a new neighbour who turned up in the past few days.

His name is Moazzam Begg and he’s one of the freed Guantanamo Four.

The legal papers on Begg released by the American Justice Department make disturbing reading.

America says Begg has received “extensive” terrorist training in al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, including how to use AK-47 rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.

He was armed and prepared to fight American and allied troops, the documents state.

Begg denies this and claims he took his wife and children from Birmingham to Afghanistan to open a school in Kabul.

In a sworn statement, his wife claims they wanted to live in a society that was safe for their family.

Afghanistan, under the rule of the evil Taliban, safer than bringing up children in the Midlands?

Unbelievable, isn’t it?

Almost as unbelievable as the fact that, for political reasons, terrorist suspects are walking our streets.

Not a single one of the returned former Guantanamo detainees has been charged with any offence in this country, nor is there any indication that any have returned to any variety of Islamic militancy. Some might say the Sun is just being cautious, defensive, especially considering how some of them were to find themselves in American custody. Others might be inclined to believe that the paper finds nothing whatsoever wrong with "bad people" being locked up without charge or any chance of a fair trial, and that therefore to return these "bad men" to this good country is an outrage. There is however something astonishingly low about complaining about the cost of sending an air ambulance to care properly for a man who is quite clearly seriously ill, regardless of what he's accused of. Such basic humanity seems to be beyond the Sun's conscience, though:

AN air ambulance and a doctor have been sent by the Government to bring dangerous Guantanamo suspect Binyam Mohamed back to Britain.

Labour say we have no option but to take him back.

But laying on a private jet stinks.

Will they send a Rolls to the airport?

How should we have got him back then? Stuck him on a commercial flight from Havana and let the Sun's fearless journalists quiz the desperately ill man about how he's going to kill us all eventually but to begin with is just going to steal our benefits? The attempt at wit which is asking whether they'll send a Rolls to the airport is beneath contempt; far more likely is that they'll send another ambulance, but to consider that might again cause a few pangs of conscience.

Meanwhile, this is happening:



From the woman they wished would slither back under a rock to "the tragedy we all feared" in just more than 24 months.

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Thursday, February 12, 2009 

Sleepwalking towards a police state.

Such has been the casual but persistent dilution of liberties since New Labour came to power, it's become all too easy to scream about the coming police state, with the argument always focused on the dichotomy between security and liberty, that at times it's been rather swept under the carpet whether at times Labour has specifically intended to reach the position we're currently at. There's no doubt that they have encouraged and abetted, for example, the world's largest number of CCTV cameras, while there is not a single scrap of evidence that they even begin to prevent crime, even if they personally have not been behind the huge increase.

Likewise, when they introduced section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, they may not have intended that the police would routinely abuse it and use it as a power to stop and search when the other applicable authorisations could not be justified, but they must have known full well that whenever the police are given a new power to detain, search or arrest, that it takes a great deal of restraint for them not to routinely use it for purposes for which it was not intended.

With this in mind, it's incredibly easy to be greatly cynical about the new offence created in the latest and greatest "Counter-Terrorism" Act. Contained in section 76 is the criminalisation of "[E]liciting, publishing or communicating information about members of armed forces etc", which you would imagine ostensibly is intended to stop individuals, such as those convicted of plotting to kidnap and behead a Muslim soldier, from compiling information on potential targets, whether it be home addresses or photographs of soldiers themselves. That alone is contentious; what is even more contentious is that this covers not just members of the armed force and the intelligence services, but also humble police constables.

It's rather difficult not to connect this directly to what has become more than just individual, jumped-up officers of the law asking members of the public what they're doing when they're seen taking photographs of almost anything, as has become almost routine for some whose simple pleasures including taking pictures of buildings, or even getting a camera out in the vicinity of children. While this does not directly cover that, what it will directly cover is the photographing of police officers, which has also become something of a point of concern, with those photographed routinely demanding that such pictures be deleted, even going so far as to confiscate the devices if they're digital and doing it for them. This has been especially noted on demonstrations, where ironically there are now almost always dedicated teams of officers, known as Forward Intelligence Teams, who film and take photographs of everyone, regardless of whether there is even the slightest likelihood of violence or the breaking of the law. FIT was originally set up to monitor football crowds for hooligans; now those exact same methods are used to do little more than intimidate peaceful protesters.

In response, the likes of FIT Watch have been set up to give the officers a taste of their own medicine. It could be argued that the archives of FIT Watch could be used by those with less salubrious methods to target officers for far more than just tit for tat gestures, but the chances of this seem to be negligible. Rather, what section 76 does is simply put into law what the officers have already been unofficially practising for some time.

The consequences of this could not potentially be more serious. It essentially means that anyone who comes across an instance of the police abusing their powers and manages to record it can have their evidence destroyed with next to no powers of appeal. It will further empower officers to intervene with photographers regardless of what they are doing. It in effect gives carte blanche to the police to stop anyone from recording almost anything, with the excuse being they themselves might be the ones being targeted. Furthermore, because of the vagueness of the legislation, which is almost certainly deliberate, it's up to the police and the courts themselves to intrepret when there was a breach. It's a recipe for completely disempowering the individual while empowering the authorities of the state to do almost whatever they feel like, with little sanction for appeal.

I've long argued that rather than this country becoming a police state, as some have in the past seriously suggested, what we have instead become is an incompetent surveillance society, built on the false idea and justification that surveillance equals security. Section 76 however moves us on from there: it puts not just the armed forces and the security services but also the police force almost completely above the law, able to control anyone who dares to question their authority through the camera. Richard Thomas, the information commissioner has long said that we are sleepwalking into a surveillance society; we now in fact appear to be sleepwalking fully towards that long feared but prophesied police state.

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Wednesday, February 11, 2009 

The war on drugs marches on.

Partly because the moral panic about Ecstasy has long since died away, and partly because it was well-known that Jacqui Smith and the Home Office would reject any suggestion whatsoever that the drug should be downgraded to Class B, the publication of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs' report on the harm associated with the drug, and the predicted refusal to accept their advice to downgrade it have been rather underwhelmingly reported. This is a shame, because it's quite clear that when compared to the decision to upgrade cannabis to Class B, the refusal to downgrade Ecstasy is just as outrageous and contemptible.

The problem with our drug laws only gets more and more obvious as the years go by. The Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 is the root of all the problems: it is, to use the horrible cliche, not fit for purpose. The prohibition of drugs has not stopped their use; it has rather only increased it, enriched the criminals that sell them and made it even more difficult to treat those who become addicted. The key problem though is that the 1971 act is blanket prohibition masquerading, with the involvement of the ACMD, as a harm reduction strategy when it is nothing of the sort. This fiction is kept up by the three separate classes of drugs, with the most dangerous and most harmful in Class A, with the least harmful but still illegal in Class C. The classification system is however completely and utterly broken; it has the more or less completely harmless magic mushrooms in Class A, alongside the also relatively benign LSD and Ecstasy, while cigarettes which kill hundreds of thousands across the world every year, is in none of the categories. Likewise, alcohol, which can cause untold misery and precipitates violence, is also completely legal.

Both should of course remain completely legal; if individuals want to slowly poison themselves, especially with tobacco and nicotine, then they are perfectly entitled to do so as long as they don't harm others at the same time. Our liberated attitude towards tobacco and alcohol is in sharp contrast to that towards cannabis, which although can cause harm, as heavy use suggests that it can induce psychosis, as well as having similar effects on the lungs when smoked to tobacco, remains illegal and demonised by the popular press. Ecstasy is arguably even safer than cannabis: the ACMD report and David Nutt's previous article which compared MDMA use in harm terms to horse riding, both argue that the main danger when using the drug is that users become either dehydrated, from drinking too little while dancing, to becoming too hot, or more rarely, develop hyponatraemia, where too much water is drank, which notably was the actual cause of death in the case of Leah Betts. MDMA itself is only toxic when taken in very high doses, which is rare. It's also not addictive, there is little concrete evidence as yet that it has long-term side effects, although some studies have suggested there may be memory problems in later life, and unlike cocaine, heroin or indeed alcohol, it tends not to lead to violence among those who take it; quite the opposite, in fact. The other main cause for concern is directly associated with its illegality: it's impossible to know what else is in the pill other than MDMA, or indeed whether there is any MDMA in what you've bought at all, or whether it might instead contain its sister, MDA, or other substances. If anything, the levels of MDMA in the pills has declined over time: the pills which became exceptionally popular due to their intensity during the early 90s, named "love doves" after the dove stamped on them, have long gone, as have the similarly well-remembered initial "Mitsubishis", stamped with the car company's logo, from the late 90s. MDMA "powder", which is regarded as more likely to be purer, has increased in popularity as a result.

Compared to the insanity which is the Class A status of magic mushrooms, or Psilocybin mushrooms to give them their proper name, Ecstasy's status looks reasonably rational. That something which grows perfectly naturally of its own accord is illegal is a mind-twister by itself; when you consider that the number of people who have died as a result of taking shrooms numbers between 0 and 10 despite evidence that they have been used since before the earliest recorded history makes it even more ludicrous. The only thing that's going to damage someone from taking magic mushrooms is what a bad trip might do to their psyche, and even then most will get over it with no problems whatsoever.

The government itself knows that once the debate has moved on from the hysteria to the actual scientific evidence regarding harm, the blanket prohibition on drugs is now fast becoming completely untenable. This is why it has withdrawn from so much as bothering to argue their case regarding the softer drugs, and was doubtless ecstatic to be helped along regarding cannabis by the useful idiots in the press that claimed that the cannabis of today was 20 or 30 times stronger than before, when this was demonstrably not the case. Instead, it's had to settle on "sending a message"; it was sending a message that smoking cannabis was unacceptable by raising it to Class B, while emphasising the dangers of the new ultra-strength skunk, just as it is now sending a message that taking Ecstasy is unacceptable by keeping it in Class A. Ever since the initial moral panic over heroin in the 1960s, the press has helped with the idea that most drugs are unpredictably deadly, while public opinion has also stayed in much the same position, supporting prohibition and most recently the raising of cannabis back up to Class B.

The ACMD in essence completely wasted its time in bothering to review Ecstasy, because the government had already made plain and clear that regardless of what their review said, Ecstasy would stay in Class A, as Transform made more than clear in their submission to the ACMD (PDF). At least the policy on ecstasy has been consistent: the downgrading of cannabis, which was in line with the ACMD's recommendation, was then overturned once the government decided that to upgrade it again was politically expedient, regardless of their scientific analysis. If the members of the ACMD had something resembling guts, they would resign en masse, as after all, what is the point of an advisory council which delivers independent advice based on a review of the all the relative literature and evidence if that evidence is going to be completely disregarded because it doesn't fit with the government's pre-defined policy? Instead, David Nutt apologised to Jacqui Smithover his comparison of the dangers of Ecstasy and horse riding after she disgracefully criticised him in parliament. His article ruthlessly exposed the stupidity inherent in our current policy towards drugs, and also ruthlessly exposed our government ministers as being just as stupid, and just as cowardly in the face of the ignorance but deafening noise of the tabloid press. Evidence-based policy has never been such a contradiction in terms.

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Cowardice over Wilders.

The decision to bar entry to Geert Wilders ought to be completely baffling, but is instead indicative of the general cowardice which we have come to expect from the Home Office. Wilders is, above all, a crashing bore: someone who thought there was a need to physically connect passages from the Koran with terrorists and fundamentalists, as if the correlation were not already so obvious. Fitna was the sort of film which the average YouTuber can better and which still gets voted down, such was both its amateur production and message. You don't like Islam, and especially not the extremists; we get it.

Wilders is in fact typical of the majority of the European far-right: despite their own contempt for free speech, or freedom of thought, they pose as martyrs being persecuted for saying the unsayable. In Wilders case he actually is being persecuted, or rather prosecuted for just that: he's set to be tried for his anti-Islam sloganising and general bullheadedness. The irony is that Wilders himself believes that the Koran should be banned for being a "fascist" book, the man from the "Freedom" party who wants to deny religious freedom purely because of his own bigoted views.

The obvious response to those who want to hang themselves on their own personal cross is to deny them the opportunity to do so. All Wilders wanted to do was to visit the House of Lords, which was to show his film, and then take part in discussion about it. The Home Office claims that Wilders' mere presence would be enough to "threaten community harmony and therefore public security", when such a claim is clearly abject nonsense. It's quite apparent that it's not Wilders whom the Home Office is scared of, but rather of the protests his presence might well attract. Whether it fears a repeat of the Dutch embassy protests or not, this is clearly an excuse rather than anything even approaching an actual reason. Wilders himself meanwhile can add a further notch of self-satisfaction to his belt.

Rather than showing any sign of "Dhimmitude", as the jihadist watchers love to throw about, it instead shows New Labour's own authoritarian stance on where the boundary between freedom of speech and the freedom to offend and abuse lies. The government talks of challenging extremism in all its forms, but by taking such a provocative stance and banning Wilders from visiting it has only inflamed the situation far beyond what it would otherwise have been. Despite Lord Ahmed's claims that temporarily stopping the showing of Fitna in the House of Lords was a victory for the Muslim community, it seems highly doubtful that few if any would have turned up to protest against his visit: he just simply isn't worth bothering with. Wilders can now instead further boast of how he's banned from another European country which in his eyes is abandoning its values in order to appease its unruly minorities. The sad reality is that New Labour never had any values to abandon in the first place.

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Tuesday, February 10, 2009 

Butt out.

When it comes to Islamic extremism and eccentricity, few can quite measure up to such sane and well-balanced individuals as the likes of Omar Bakri Muhammad, the bearded, NHS-style spectacles wearing sheikh who went not denouncing pop songs is paying for his daughter's breast enlargement operation, or the even more zany David Myatt, or rather Abdul-Aziz ibn Myatt, who went from leading Combat 18, the violent far-right sect, to converting to the most radical shade of Islam and berating the "kuffar". Neither however seems to be as inwardly conflicted as Hassan Butt apparently is.

You might recall that Butt, along with Ed Husain, was one of the few who made the journey from being Islamists to becoming almost instant fixtures on our TV screens, giving their insights into how extremism could be tackled. Like Husain, Butt had been involved with Hizb-ut-Tahrir, the Islamic political party that advocates the re-establishment of the global caliphate, but was most well known for being the spokesman for Al-Muhajiroun, itself a split from Hizb-ut-Tahrir, led by the aforementioned Bakri. Butt's claims, as time went by, became ever more outlandish and potentially serious: not only did he claim that he had sent those he recruited in this country to train with al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but he finally also said that he had been personally involved with the bombing of the US consulate in Karachi in 2002, an attack blamed on al-Qaida. This eventually culminated in his arrest last year, and the police demanding access to the notes behind the book that Husain was working on with the journalist Shiv Malik.

Butt however, it seems, was a fantasist, a liar who loved attention who kept ratcheting up just how deeply he had been involved within the jihadist movement. With the police investigating his potential links with the Karachi bombing, as well as his claims that he was a recruiter, he admitted to them that he made most of the stories up, going so far as to fake his own injuries to give the impression that other violent extremists wanted him dead for what he was revealing to the media. Not that this was the first time that Butt had been arrested on suspicion of his involvement with terrorism: he was also picked up in 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2007, each time being released without charge, presumably for lack of evidence.

Butt's admittance that he was a liar though doesn't even begin to answer the far more interesting associated questions. It's beyond doubt both that he was Al-Muhajiroun's spokesman and that he was a radical Islamist, familiar with the ideology and willing to chew the fat with journalists far before his alliance with Malik, as an interview in Prospect magazine shortly after the 7/7 bombings but before Butt apparently renounced his jihadist outlook shows. Are his claims then to have renounced Islamism credible at all? Could this indeed have been all a front, designed to take the pressure off him while behind the scenes he continued with his involvement with the successors of Al-Muhajiroun? In court he claimed that this was not the case, and that although he had never been an active jihadist, he could indeed be accurately described as a radical. It's also true that he had relationships with at least three now convicted terrorists; apparently untrue was that he met Mohammed Siddique Khan, ringleader of 7/7, while it's unclear whether he knew the two British men who carried out the suicide bombing in Israel, although Husain in his book suggests that he had met Omar Khan Sharif through his own involvement with HuT.

Whatever the truth, Butt succeeded in duping not just Shiv Malik, but also Newsnight's Richard Watson, with the programme featuring him heavily during its own investigations into Islamic extremism in this country. He made waves over the pond too, appearing on 60 Minutes on CBS in 2006, after which a rather prescient Adrian Morgan questioned whether Butt had genuinely renounced radical Islam, saying that his stories simply didn't add up. It will doubtless also be a further embarrassment to Husain himself, who came under fire recently from those who had been up till then highly supportive, after he warned that the conflict in Gaza was radicalising youth and that the government's position was not helping. Husain had spoken of Butt going into hiding because of his new work helping to "deradicalise" youth in Manchester, while Butt himself on Newsnight had derided the idea that foreign policy had any role in terrorism, with similar articles in both the Observer and the Mail.

At its heart, Butt's is a case of someone exploiting the media for telling them what they wanted to hear: first that he was a recruiter who wanted to send young British Muslims to fight their countrymen in Afghanistan, then that he had turned his back on his old ways and that to blame foreign policy for terrorism in this country was to "do their work for them", when the real problem was Islamic theology itself. There is of course more than a little truth in that, but to ignore completely the role of foreign policy was always madness; the madness which some, such as this government and the pro-war left wanted to hear, with their ciphers in the press also delighted by it. Butt's fantasist ways shouldn't automatically discredit the likes of the Quilliam Foundation, set-up by Husain and another former HuT leader, Maajjid Nawaz, as it's clear they are also part of the solution, but it reminds us that where there's money to made and fame to be had, there will always be those prepared to embroider their stories to get to the centre of attention.

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Monday, February 09, 2009 

Why does lack of trust not equal lack of sales?

One of the most ponderous and unanswered questions concerning the British media is why, when survey after survey suggests that journalists, especially of the tabloid ilk, are trusted only slightly more than estate agents, the papers that lie the most to their readers continue to be the ones that are the most successful. Last month Edelman found that just 19% trust newspapers in this country, while the latest survey, this time for the Media Standards Trust, found that national newspapers were the least trusted of six institutions and organisation. The police, supermarkets, the BBC, hospitals and banks were all more highly trusted, although they did come second, behind the banks, when asked which should be more strictly regulated.

Historically, it's true that while newspapers may have been founded with the best of intentions, their owners were far less principled. The barons, for the most part, only had making money as a side interest; their first concern was propaganda and the status that owning a newspaper brought. This only changed when the barons gave way to the grocers, and now, in the form of Richard Desmond, and arguably before him Robert Maxwell and Conrad Black, the asset-strippers. Others might add the Barclay brothers, considering their current cuts at the Telegraph, to that list. Rupert Murdoch combines both making money with propaganda, the losses on the Times more than subsidised by the other sections of his empire and by the profits made by the Sun and News of the World. Murdoch's own contempt for accuracy in contrast to money-making could not be more exemplified than by his order that the presses should keep rolling when the Sunday Times printed the Hitler diaries, despite their exposure as a hoax.

It's also true that throughout their history newspapers have been criticised both for their intrusions into privacy, their salacious content and their downright lies. Only once though has a scandal and the complete contempt for accuracy directly resulted in a huge drop in circulation, when the Sun more or less lost 200,000 sales overnight after splashing, ironically, with "THE TRUTH" on its front page. Those 200,000 sales lost in Liverpool after their coverage of the Hillsborough disaster have also never returned.

It's with that in mind that we ought to be careful in suggesting that things now are worse than they have ever been, as few can honestly live up to the excesses of Kelvin MacKenzie's reign whilst editor of the Sun. Likewise, on the political front, it's also true that campaigns now are nowhere near as distorted as they once were, when popular papers of both left and right seemed to do battle to outdo themselves in their respective smears on Conservative and Labour alike. 1992 was the last real time that such partisanship potentially had an impact on the result itself, although the Sun's own claims that it "won it" for the Tories are highly dubious. Newspapers have always exaggerated their ability to influence their readers to vote a certain way; most, after all, read a newspaper that plays to their own prejudices or at least shares their own politics.

One of the explanations for the continuing sharp fall in trust is that trust across the board is declining. The British Journalism Review's collection of polls actually showed that last year trust in red-top journalists went up from 7% to 15%, a completely inexplicable rise, while trust as a whole only went up in leading Conservative politicians and people who run large companies, also inexplicable. That survey, which distinguished between journalists on the red-tops, middle-market, and the up-market papers, found trust of 20% in the former and 43% of the former. All were behind BBC, ITV and Channel 4 journalists.

Why then, when so many don't apparently trust a word of what they're reading, do they continue for the most part, even when we take into consideration falling sales, mainly explained for reasons quite different to falling trust, to buy the likes of the Mail and the Sun? Is it because they completely ignore most of the news coverage and especially the political reporting, and only focus on the sport and the features, is it macohism, or is that they don't really care about whether the newspaper they read tells the truth or not? Some of it might well be down to most newspapers' complete refusal to be self-critical or so much as suggest that they might get it wrong, except when they're forced to: after all, both Paul Dacre and Rebekah Wade recently gave defiant speeches in which they directly attacked those critical or cynical of where the newspaper industry is going, while Dacre unleashed an assault directly on Nick Davies' Flat Earth News, even if not naming it, one of the most critical books in years on the press, with the added sting that it was written by an industry insider, even if from the Guardian, probably the most critical and cynical newspaper on the wider press.

Fundamentally, the main issue is not trust in the press, but accountability. The same press which widely has taken to assailing the BBC for every slight misdemeanour is far less accountable than the publicly-funded broadcaster, yet this never enters into the discussion when the BBC so openly self-flagellates. As today's report by the Media Standard Trust points out, the Press Complaints Commission is more or less a direct cabal of the press itself, something which on almost any other industry regulator would be completely unacceptable. Its powers when it comes to imposing sanctions on those that breach its code are little more than a joke: often corrections and apologies are featured in derisory positions in the paper, far back from where the original ran. For every complaint which goes to adjudication, hundreds of others are either completely rejected or "resolved", which often means that nothing more than a note on the PCC website is posted to suggest there was ever an issue. Reading it is another of my incredibly boring pastimes: often there are potential scandals, especially those regarding intrusion into grief, in my mind amongst the most serious of the abuses which the press routinely involves itself in, which are never so much as mentioned again. Both the Mail and Mirror recently removed articles from their sites, wrote letters of apology and made donations to charity after their intrusive coverage of the death of a Preston teenager, but no one would have known that such serious action was taken to make amends unless they too perused the PCC site regularly. Surely the most serious omission which would go some way to reassuring the public would be if, like Ofcom, the PCC could impose financial penalties or full, front page apologies in the cases of the most serious breaches of the code; this though would defeat the whole purpose of the PCC, which was never meant to be an independent regulator with teeth but to be one which could prevent the government from having to introduce either a privacy law or another quango of dubious independence, to give the veneer of there being some sort of body which could provide redress.

The Media Standards Trust report concludes that without reform of the PCC there will be an even further decline in standards and that the freedom of the press itself is likely to further suffer. As we have seen however, it takes an error on the level of the Sun's Hillsbrough coverage for there to be anything resembling a public outcry; the coverage of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, probably the most recent example we have of a significant and extended period of libellous and indefensible journalism with its consequences being well-known, didn't have anything like a similar effect. It takes something on the scale of the Mirror publishing fake photographs of alleged mistreatment for its editor to be sacked, while Andy Coulson eventually left his position after the Clive Goodman affair. Notably, in both examples both have since gone on to greater things: Morgan becoming a celebrity in his own right while Coulson is now David Cameron's chief spin-doctor. The inference is obvious: only in banking can you both get away with more while there being a higher public desire for reform. The only difference is the rewards available.

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The British Cissy Party.

Thanks to my signing up some time back on the British National Party's website to argue with some knuckle-dragger that was linking here, I now get sent their irregular newsletter. Its usual content is banal in the extreme: the latest tales of where the Fuhrer himself and his "Truth Truck", or as it's otherwise known, the liar lorry, have visited this week in the multicultural hell-hole that is our fine country. Last week they were ecstatic about the Lindsey strikes, lying about how they had been given a warm welcome which in reality equated to them being told to go forth and multiply. This week they're outraged by a headteacher phoning up one of their local election candidates:

When BNP candidate for the Swanley by-election, Paul Golding, received a call from the Head Teacher of Swanley Technology College, he expected an adult conversation regards the election but instead found himself subjected to a tirade of anti-BNP hatred.

The Head Teacher in question, Julie Bramley, subjected Mr. Golding to a five minute ear-bashing during which she derided the BNP as "racist", "ignorant" "narrow-minded" and accused us of feeding on people's "insecurities" and "anxieties". She stated that Britain wasn't "full-up" with immigrants and that our people are not treated like second-class citizens.

Taken aback by this astonishing display of political intolerance from a so-called liberal, Mr. Golding ended the call. Nevertheless, we recommend that BNP E-News readers email Mrs Bramley and politely point out the terrible problems of immigration and multiculturalism and demand that she desist from attacking candidates in elections and concentrate on her job as a Head Teacher.

For a bunch of rough tough political realists the BNP really are a rather precious bunch, aren't they? This tirade of anti-BNP hatred, this astonishing display of political intolerance, known to the rest of us as statements of the bleeding obvious. While Julia Bramley's email inbox is probably already full to bursting with well-written, literate and polite criticisms of her vicious assault on a shocked, shy and retiring political animal, you might just want to email her as well with something approaching support: headteacher@swanley.kent.sch.uk

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Saturday, February 07, 2009 

Weekend links.

Must read of the weekend is undoubtedly the interview with Sharon Shoesmith in the Guardian, which has naturally polarised opinions. To me it's an indictment of a government which gave in to one of the nastiest press campaigns in years, to others it will be a self-pitying whine from a woman who has accepted no responsibility whatsoever despite her position as head of children's services in Haringey. Extended thoughts from myself on the Sun's involvement and the effect it had on the mental health of Maria Ward and Shoesmith are on the Sun Lies blog.

Elsewhere, there is again little overall theme in the papers and on the blogs, so we have something of a miscellany. Five Chinese Crackers has an excellent piece on the "politically correct" changes to the Drunken Sailor song by Bookstart, which is incredibly reminiscent of the nonsense a couple of years back about a playgroup singing "baa baa rainbow sheep" rather than "black sheep", which was nothing to do with political correctness but everything to do with swapping words in songs to encourage learning and creativity. Similarly on the tabloid outrage front, Anton Vowl has a copy and paste guide to writing BBC scandal stories, in the aftermath of the Carol Thatcher "golliwog" affair, which I did intend to write about but decided not to because it's quite clear that the BBC simply cannot win whatever it does when newspapers are quite clearly dedicated to its destruction. Sim-O also has an instructive screen grab from the Mail, while Daily Quail provides his usual fine satire.

Elsewhere, Socialist Unity and Shiraz Socialist comment further on the Lindsey wildcat strikes, Chris Dillow challenges Sarkozy over his claim that the VAT cut has not worked and David Semple interviews Sunny Hundal on Liberal Conspiracy's campaign on the HFE bill. In the papers, Peter Oborne considers the Tories' funding and Deborah Orr covers the rather neglected misery of Kyrgyzstan.

As for the worst tabloid article, the Sun is continuing its dishonest and heartless campaign against Binyam Mohamed returning here, scaremongering about how he'll be free to "roam" the country. Considering none of the other Guantanamo detainees that have returned here have ever been charged with any crime and that all have apparently returned to their lives as normally as possible, it seems unlikely he either will pose much a threat, especially considering the claims that months of hunger strike have left him close to death. Winner though is the veteran Amanda Platell, who decides that Channel 4's "Boys and Girls Alone" is proof of how the "destruction of traditional family values by a liberal state, and its cult of selfishness, has caused untold damage to our children’s happiness and chances of leading fulfilling lives." Quite clearly she's never read Lord of the Flies.

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Friday, February 06, 2009 

For once, the punishment fits the crime.

It's good to see that good sense has prevailed in the case of Robert Holding, the 72-year-old milkman who also supplied his elderly customers with cannabis resin as a sideline, with Judge Lunt suspending the custodial sentence, despite him warning that he was likely to go to prison. The ostensible reason is that Holding's wife, who has Alzheimer's, has gone into a care home and that in an "act of mercy", the judge suspended the sentence so he could continue to visit her. It would however be nice to think that perhaps he was influenced by some of the reporting of the case, with even the right-wing virulently anti-drug papers taking a quite apparent dim view of him being sent to prison for trying to help people with their pains, however misguided. Further evidence to his "crime" being purely to help was that he was selling the drug at well below street prices, making more money on his milk round itself. If all dealers were so publicly spirited, the war on drugs would be even more of a clusterfuck.

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Scum-watch: Heartless obfuscation.

The Sun has major form in repeatedly playing down the abuses conducted in the name of the "war on terror". In probably the most despicable instance, it called the beating to death of Baha Mousa in Iraq a "so-called crime", even after one soldier had been sentenced to prison for admitting his role in his death. It almost completely ignored the Abu Ghraib scandal, and has printed hardly anything whatsoever about extraordinary rendition. Only a couple of weeks ago it denounced David Miliband for daring to suggest that the use of the phrase "war on terror" had been unhelpful and even counter-productive. It's therefore not much of a surprise to know that it doesn't want Binyam Mohamed, the last British resident at Guantanamo Bay, to return to this country. It's the obfuscation involved in its argument that really rankles:

LET’S concentrate on the undisputed facts about Binyam Mohamed, the Guantanamo terror suspect who claims he was tortured.

FACT: Mohamed, an Ethiopian, sought asylum here in 1994 and was allowed to stay till 2000.

FACT: In 2001, after converting to Islam, he disappeared to the Taliban badlands of Afghanistan, saying it was to kick a drug habit.

FACT: In 2002 he tried TWICE to fly to Britain from Pakistan on a false passport bearing the picture of another man.


To begin with, Mohamed naturally only "claims" that he was tortured. Presumably whoever wrote this leader then assumes that Mohamed, who had his penis repeatedly slashed with a razor while he was in Moroccan custody and has the scars to prove it, something that MI6 has admitted they might have helped with due to their providing information about him to the Americans, did so himself as an alternative to masturbation. Likewise, it's a fact that Mohamed was a resident here, even though he was not an actual citizen. On these grounds David Miliband has already requested his release. Also a fact is that while Mohamed did travel to Afghanistan, although what exactly the "Taliban badlands" are is anyone's guess, he went to Pakistan after 9/11. The last "fact" seems to be completely irrelevant: as long as Mohamed was a resident here and his presence was perfectly legal, that he was travelling on a false passport is neither here nor there.

Now, it is thought, the Government is preparing to let Mohamed return.

Arguments continue about whether his alleged confessions were made under duress by security agents trying to stop terrorist atrocities.


These arguments are only occurring in the Sun's mind: no one else disputes that Mohamed was tortured. Why else was he flown from Pakistan to Morocco, then Afghanistan and finally to Guantanamo if it wasn't for the purpose of extracting information from him through mistreatment? Were these in fact just holiday trips disguised as torture sessions? Similarly, the idea that these were by security agents desperate to stop "terrorist atrocities" is both a joke and a disgraceful semi-justification for what is both a crime and completely counter-productive.

But one fact is certain: We DON’T want him back.

Err, except that isn't a fact: that's a statement. It's also one that shows the true heartlessness of the Sun: this is a man that has been viciously tortured, not convicted of any crime and whose detention and abuse we have connived with, and yet the Sun would still have him turned away from the country which he called home, presumably to waste away as he is currently doing in Guantanamo. The paper, as always, only believes in justice for those it deems acceptable.

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Thursday, February 05, 2009 

The boys are back in town.

A warm welcome then to the newest member of our blogging brethren, Alastair Campbell. Speaking as we were of psychological operations, the sudden adoption of the web by so many of yesterday's men, whether they be Derek Draper, John Prescott or now the person most destructive of our politics in modern times seems to show just how terrified New Labour are of losing power. As the cliché goes, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and even when those who once held it have the left the stage, they still want their successors to continue to wield it, for good of us all, obviously. The biggest quandary is how they possibly think their re-emergence, even if only into the online world, will help Labour rather than harm it even further.

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Scum-watch: More anti al-Qaida psy-ops.

On occasion, you fail to see the wood for the trees. Doing my daily pathetic trawl of the Sun's website, I came across Tom Newton Dunn's exclusive "Al-Qaeda in gay rape horror" and just dismissed it as the typical Sun nonsense which isn't worth bothering with or challenging. The excellent jihadica though has joined together the dots:

I would not normally bother with this kind of nonsense were it not for the fact that it sheds light on the recent reports about AQIM’s alleged plague experiments, covered previously on Jihadica. Both stories were broken in the West by The Sun, and both stories relied on Algerian security sources. We are most likely dealing here with an anti-al-Qaida psy-op, and a very poor one at that.

Which I also had covered and dismissed as most likely being complete and utter nonsense. I didn't however note that the story had been officially denied by the Algerians and also the WHO, despite a separate report appearing in the equally authoritative Washington Times claiming that it had been the result of a failed weaponising attempt.

It is indeed, as jihadica suggests, a very poor psy-op. The idea that al-Qaida and its connected franchises have to rape their recruits in order to shame them into becoming suicide bombers is completely absurd; there are, as Iraq and Afghanistan have sadly made all too clear, more than enough willing "martyrdom seekers" without them having to descend to such tactics. This isn't to discount the idea that, like with many other organisations, especially ones where young men spend plenty of time together and are encouraged to become fraternal brothers, even those who thelogically consider homosexuality to be abhorrent, that such relationships might develop, but it doesn't seem very likely. There have been cases where young teenage boys have been suicide bombers, but they still seem likely to be the products of madrasas and careful personal radicalisation rather than sexual abuse.

The Algeria connection does however seem to be the key. Perhaps borne out of the fear that al-Qaida in the Islamic Mahgreb is growing in strength, these stories seem to be meant to further demonise them and nip in the bud any support both within Algeria and the outside world for them. Likewise, the idea that al-Qaida is running out of recruits, as "experts believe", is nonsense. In Iraq maybe, where the jihad has fallen on hard times, mainly as result of the other insurgent groups joining the Awakening councils having became tired of the Islamic State of Iraq's brutality, and where the routes which the foreign fighters came in on have been closed, but elsewhere the Taliban is growing in strength, as is the insurgency in Somalia, both now more favoured among jihadists than Iraq.

Again, we have to question why these stories are being passed to the Sun if indeed they are anything approaching accurate. It seems simply that the Sun's being given them both because they'll print them and because no one else with any sense or with an authority they want to keep will. As we saw with the plague story, none of that bothers the rabid jihadist watchers, or the Muslim-bashers who are inclined to take such accounts at face value, and that may be all that matters.

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Wednesday, February 04, 2009 

New Labour's moral cowardice and collusion with torture.

With the demise of the Bush administration, some of us were dearly hoping that not just would there be distinct policy changes, but that those who know where the bodies are buried would be quickly into the offices of investigative hacks across the world to lay bear just how deeply involved at the highest levels the Americans were with their client torture regimes. It could yet be the case that instead of going to the likes of Seymour Hersh, they've decided to write books, or that the exposes could be yet to come, but for now it looks as if loyalty is still winning out.

Such loyalty also still seems to be in evidence in our own dead men walking. Yesterday's nauseating press conference between David Miliband and Hillary Clinton, full of deeply unconvincing talk of just how special the special relationship is, if indeed you can consider abusive relationships where one partner is completely domineering over the other to be in any way special, was instructive of just how little the substance has changed. Yes, Obama's signed the papers to close Guantanamo within a year, and the CIA's system of black sites used to additionally hold "terrorist suspects" has gone the same way, but the last thing the administration is interested in doing is actually opening up the books and coming completely clean about how the Bush administration operated and how quickly the Americans went from decrying torture to actively practicing it and colluding even more directly with allies that do the same.

It is however difficult to know for certain whether David Miliband is telling the truth when he claimed to Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones that if he released documents detailing the treatment of Binyam Mohamed, the last British resident detained at Guantanamo, that the US would in response be forced to withhold intelligence from our own security services. The BBC is reporting that Miliband is claiming there were no threats - just that the confidentiality of the documents meant they could not be released. While doubtless the US would be extremely peeved to say the least about information being released that would confirm they colluded in the torture of Mohamed while he was in Morocco, this still seems unlikely to genuinely stop intelligence sharing: it is after all a two-way street, and besides, such intelligence is pooled between all the major security agencies. Information would continue to go to the French and Germans for instance, who could then still pass it on to us if they were so inclined. This was why the Saudi threat over the BAE corruption inquiry was so unconvincing: even if they stopped sharing intelligence data with us, the Americans would have passed it on.

The comparison with the Serious Fraud Office investigation into the Saudi-BAE slush fund is apposite because of what it tells us about the completely craven nature of our government while at the same time being wholly convenient because it means they can do what they also wanted to do regardless. In both cases, we were and are effectively being blackmailed; Prince Bandar even seemed to be directly threatening us with a terrorist attack if the inquiry into his alleged corrupt behaviour was not stopped. Likewise, the supposed American threat to stop intelligence cooperation means that we don't have to expose our own security services, who have long hilariously claimed to be whiter than white, as the true charlatans and collaborators in torture that they are. It's not even as if we don't already know that we rely on intelligence from foreign countries where torture and worse is routinely used: Craig Murray after all was forced out as ambassador to Uzbekistan after he demanded that MI6 stop using "intelligence" which was the fruit of torture of regime opponents.

Furthermore, the Intelligence and Security Committee has already noted that information which MI6 supplied to the Americans on Binyam Mohamed was almost certainly used in his torture in Morocco. In the usual understated, insulting style with which the ISC deals with such outrages, this was "with hindsight, ... regrettable". The ISC has always been utterly useless, far too weak to even begin to hold the security services to account, but their complete wide-eyed believing that MI5 and MI6 themselves didn't know that the US had been mistreating prisoners until the Abu Ghraib scandal broke was beyond a joke. That the government is suggesting that they should investigate again is the biggest cop-out imaginable, and needs to be vigorously resisted.

For while ostensibly today's ruling was about the United States' involvement in rendition and abuse of prisoners, it was also about our own unhappy role in it. We know full well that other former prisoners at Guantanamo ended up there because of how our own security services acted, just as we know that MI5 and 6 were involved with Binyam Mohamed during his detention in Pakistan, and as is alleged, with others detained in Pakistan who were tortured by the ISI. We're meant to believe that such meetings were social visits, where agents of our security assets were only concerned with how they were being treated, not with further interrogation or to see whether they had been broken by their jailers. While America undoubtedly has the most questions to answer about its tactics in the war on terror, we too have been complicit in the abuses and still refuse to even countenace the release of the slightest insight into just how deep the collusion went, even when a man's future might well be at stake. We might yet have to wait for the fall of New Labour before the Obama adminstration becomes confident enough to air the previous incumbent's dirty linen in public.

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Tuesday, February 03, 2009 

The Lindsey refinery protests and the political implications.

The general disarray over the Lindsey protests and the wildcat strikes in solidarity on the wider left is indicative of the general malaise which has fallen upon those who should, in a recession caused by allowing capitalism to run completely rampant, be reaping the benefits. Here is a cause which is clear - supporting workers who want to work, the same workers so often slandered as lazy and more content with sponging on benefits, but who are being denied jobs because of the absurd vagaries of outsourcing across continents, combined with corporations taking advantage of rulings at the European Court of Justice.

There was certainly initial cause for concern, it must be admitted. The appropriation of the xenophobic "British jobs for British workers" slogan, stolen by Gordon Brown from the far-right, itself illegal under European law, suggested that these protests might not have been to demand jobs but instead the first public rumblings of discontent over New Labour's open door immigration policy's effect on the ordinary British worker. There were indications that the protests, rather than being union organised, were the first signs that the British National Party was effectively starting to make headway amongst those more likely to be union members than members of the far-right. These, thankfully, seem to have been misplaced: the BNP were sent packing from Lindsey yesterday, despite their lies about being welcomed, and another site has quickly been exposed as a BNP front. Even more encouragingly, another site which seems to be directly linked to the protesters, bearfacts.co.uk, seems to be far more representative of the protesters' position: militant, and unrelentingly left-wing, with clear demands.

The socialist left, always divided, has been getting its ideological knickers in a twist. The Socialist Workers' Party, always wanting an idealised working class rather than the one we have in reality, quickly denounced the apparent nationalist sentiment and appealed for international working class solidarity. While there is something in this argument, considering the movement of construction workers across borders, this ignores the key facts in this dispute: that the workers in Lindsey were depending and expecting that these jobs would be available to them, when Total's outsourcing meant they didn't even get a look in. This was what sparked the protests, not that foreign workers were being employed in a fair process. The Socialist Party seems to be the only political grouping with representation on the unofficial strike committee, and unsurprisingly are fully behind the action, stressing that this is aimed at company bosses, not at foreign workers themselves.

At the other extreme, the response by the Labour party has been completely dreadful. Whether because Brown has been spooked by his ridiculous, ill-thought out slogan coming back to haunt him, or because organised labour is something which the Labour party had hoped it had cowed, his idiotic statement that the strikes were "not defensible", before going on to claim that he had meant something completely different from the words that had emanated from his mouth at the party conference in 2007 showed just how bankrupt his thinking on the recession has become. His pledges of retraining are too little too late and completely miss the point when there are jobs here that no one needs to retrain for but which they have no chance of filling. That Mandelson, the architect and espouser of completely relentless free trade with no regards whatsoever for the consequences for ordinary workers barely disguised his contempt while dismissing the protests on the grounds that there must "no return to protectionism", as if workers protesting for jobs were demanding isolation and self-sufficency, was no surprise.

Labour's woeful attitude can only be contrasted with the Conservatives' apparent rediscovery of moral or ethical capitalism. While this will always be a contradiction in terms, David Cameron's positioning of his party as being more likely to tame economic policy than Labour is welcome, however shallow the actual substance is behind it. We should be under no illusions that many Conservative policies, such as on welfare, inheritance tax and the "broken society" are inherently reactionary, but we really are starting to edge towards the time where it becomes impossible to be even slightly content with the status quo any longer. Their immediate response at the time of Brown's "British jobs for British workers" remark was to challenge it and show it up as both xenophobic, unworkable and unimplementable, and while they too denounce the strikes, they have been far more receptive than their supposed left-wing opponents have been.

Derek Simpson's proposals for resolving the protests and the solidarity strikes are a good start, but they are only that. While the unions cannot because of the anti-trade union legislation take formally part in the secondary action, they could be doing so much more to put pressure on Labour to challenge the European Court of Justice rulings at the very least. As Lenin points out, Labour's stance from the very beginning has been to provide opt-outs from European legislation which protects workers on the continent but which leaves those here as some of the most vulnerable and easy to be sacked, all to the delight of the CBI and the right-wing press. Whether it's the 48-hour working week or the chapter of fundamental rights, our politicians have long kept rights from British workers which others can take for granted. Polly Toynbee is also right to point out that unions, contrary to the myth and the way any strikes are now covered, are becoming ever weaker, with fewer strikes than ever before.

One of the main fears was that the recession would cause an already cruel country to become even harsher, more selfish and introverted, individuals left blaming each other or the entirely wrong people for their hardship. Instead, as the strikes have shown, despite initial misinterpretations, working class solidarity is still alive and well and capable of causing great political discomfort. The challenge now is to turn this solidarity into a campaign movement which fights for all workers, regardless of nationality, to be given a fair chance of employment and extended rights across the board. That will be much more difficult even than turning up at 5:30am outside a refinery in driving snow.

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Monday, February 02, 2009 

Have we got tax for you.

It is, as the Guardian's leader on the subject suggests, rather easier to target benefit fraudsters and those without access to good lawyers than it is to investigate tax avoidance. The paper knows this from bitter experience: it last year accused Tesco of avoiding corporation tax to the tune of £1bn, only for it to discover after publication that it had mixed up corporation tax with stamp duty land tax, and that the real sum avoided was far less. The paper quickly admitted its mistake, but not before Tesco, running straight into the arms of Carter-Fuck, had issued not just a libel writ but also a claim for malicious falsehood, although Justice Eady, the bête noire of the tabloids, subsequently threw it out.

The other reason for the Guardian to be extra careful when reporting on tax affairs is that it has also publicly admitted to be involved in avoiding tax itself, or rather that its parent company, the Guardian Media Group, has admitted such. This came about through GMG's alliance with Apax Partners, a private equity group, when it purchased the magazine publisher Emap. Quite rightly, some are therefore suggesting hypocrisy on the Guardian's part to be so apparently outraged about tax avoidance when the newspaper itself also does it. In the paper's defence, it's one of the few companies that has openly admitted some of its tax arrangements, although how much of this was in relation to the Tesco affair is unclear, while Richard Murphy, of Tax Research UK, examined all the other large media groups and found that the Guardian paid the largest percentage of corporation tax of the lot. As Richard Brooks also points out, it would be far worse if the paper's own tax arrangements stopped it from investigating "the tax gap", or even worse, if it affected its stance on it. Hypocrisy can be alleged, but it seems doubtful that the News International papers will be investigating tax avoidance any time soon, just as the Sunday Times every year mysteriously excludes Rupert Murdoch from its rich list.

Richard Brooks' involvement is one of the signs of how seriously the paper is taking its investigation, presuming of course that Brooks is the same Brooks that also works for Private Eye and who has been one of the heirs to Paul Foot's throne. That Private Eye subsequently discovered that Tesco was indeed avoiding corporation tax, as the paper had alleged, doubtless helped.

Undoubtedly, as we plunge head first into a recession, the tax receipts, taken for granted during the boom, become ever more important and should become ever more scrutinised. Peter Mandelson's famous quote, that New Labour was relaxed about people becoming filthy rich, often leaves out its second half, that this was fine as long as they paid their taxes. Half the reason why it was left off is not just so it can be used to beat Mandelson and Labour with, but also because the government itself became fabulously relaxed about companies and the individuals behind them not paying their fair share of tax. The Treasury might each year during the budget plug a few of the loopholes which are discovered by the bean-counting firms and mercilessly exploited, but the real tale, as always, was shown in the honours list, which year after year was resplendent with the burghers of industry who saw it as their duty, both to shareholders and themselves, to reduce their tax burden. Probably the most egregious example was the knighthood awarded to Philip Green, the man behind the Arcadia group - this was despite him taking £1bn out of the company to pay himself, which he funnelled to his wife in Monaco, therefore avoiding having to pay any tax whatsoever. The other gob-smacking incident was the selling off of tax offices to the company Mapeley, which is based in the tax haven of Bermuda. According to the National Audit Office's report on the deal (PDF), this saved Mapeley in the region of £55 million that the taxpayer would otherwise have had paid back to into the public purse.

The completely secretive nature of the deals, as well as the highly complex nature of the avoidance schemes exists not only between the companies and those that draw them up, but also between HMRC and the companies. HMRC, possibly out of embarrassment, possibly out of the desire to keep the missing taxes due a secret, refuses to give a figure for how much they're being left out of pocket each year, although estimates range wildly from between £3.7bn to over £20bn. Part of this secrecy is because HMRC deals directly with many of the companies over exactly how much tax they intend to pay - individuals such as Mohamed al-Fayed have long had agreements with HMRC over the exact figures. This is of course in stark contrast to how other taxpayers who get into arrears are treated, and to how the aforementioned benefit fraudsters are subject to the equivalent of a 10 minutes hate every so often. Both rip off the public purse, but only one enters the public eye, while further establishing the idea that most of those claiming to be sick are in fact not.

Some will console themselves with the idea that although undoubtedly avoiding pay your dues is a bad thing, that the money would just be squandered anyway. The argument would be a lot less alluring if this government wasn't so determined to do the equivalent of pouring money straight down the drain, as it continues to do on the various disastrous IT projects, on ID cards and on the Olympics, to name but a few such schemes. At the same time, there are always other things which many of us would like to see extra money going towards, not least at the moment a more generous benefits scheme for those temporarily out of work, or additional funding for retraining. It could be used to pay off the extra debt we're taking on more quickly, so as not to mortgage another generation of ordinary workers. As could be expected, it has been those ordinary workers, such as those protesting outside Lindsey and walking out in solidarity across the country, regardless of the involvement of the far-right and the nature of some of the slogans used, that are now being hit hardest when it was unrestrained global market fundamentalism which created the mess and which has been bailed out. The least those responsible can do is pay their fair share - and closing down the tax havens and the avoidance schemes has to be one of the conditions of the recovery and subsequent re-regulation.

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Incidental football interlude.

While we're all becoming experts on bankers and their capacity for losing money, another bubble which has so far continued to fail to burst has been the football one, or at least that involving Premier League clubs. Managers down the years have paid extortionate prices for players who have overnight apparently turned rubbish, but surely the worst deal in recent memory has to be Liverpool's purchase of Robbie Keane for £20.3 million, a total which he was never worth a fraction of, only to sell him back to Tottenham 6 months later for £12 million. Keane comprehensively failed to win a place in the team, not helped by deciding to go to a club managed by someone notorious for his whims, inexplicable substitution decisions, and downright illogical squad rotation. A loss of £8,000,000 might not be so bad if Keane had not gone back to Spurs, but like a dog that has to go back to his basket eventually even if he's befouled it, return like the prodigal he has. In effect, it was a loan deal in which Spurs have ended up at least £5 million better off, once "add-ons" have been taken into account. That's the kind of killing that the bankers would have demanded a bonus for.

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