Saturday, December 12, 2009 

Weekend links.

You have to say, it's nice of Tony Blair to admit that he's a war criminal. Strange choice though to confess to Fern Britton, although she's probably less likely than someone else to get straight on the blower to the Hague. Madam Mioaw has more. Elsewhere my post from Thursday has been mirrored over on Lib Con, Lenin has a post from a Pakistani socialist on the continuing crisis there, both Craig and the Heresiarch have the latest on Justice Eady and his continuing desire to ensure that that we remain the libel capital of the world, Anton Vowl has some positive immigration stories, Paul Linford writes his weekly column on the pre-budget report, 5cc sees how the Mail reacts when one its pet myths is debunked, while lastly Dave Osler isn't impressed by the piss-poor class war.

In the papers, or at least their sites, the Graun has an interview with the outgoing prisons inspector, Anne Owers, Paul Lewis had a tête-à-tête with the filth for photographing the Gherkin, John Gray reflects on the decade past and the end of various dreams, Peter Oborne thinks Mandelson and Brown are at war again, Matthew Parris talks far too much sense in calling for a end to the fetishising of "Our Boys", Andrew Grice detects continuing jitters in the Cameron camp, Howard Jacobson doesn't believe in the joy of giving, Christina Patterson celebrates the kindness of strangers and Polly T advises against Cameron copycatting.

As for the worst tabloid article, we either have Amanda Platell continuing with yet another myth, that of the sponging teenage mother, or this simply classic Sun editorial wondering whether Simon Cowell can work his magic on the electoral process:

Is there a role for X Factor mastermind Simon Cowell here?

He inspires young people. He makes things interesting. He is a straight talker with a populist touch.


Unless he sets up his own party, for which the winners of his competition would stand, I don't think there's much chance of it happening.

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Friday, December 11, 2009 

Season's greetings from the UK Border Agency.

Sort of following on from yesterday's post, via OurKingdom and Jamie, this is the UK Border Agency's quite delightful Christmas card:


Nothing about locking up innocent children until their hair falls out, but perhaps that's on the back.

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Thursday, December 10, 2009 

The continuing scandal of child detention.

When Labour's best political boast is now more or less that they won't be as brutal as the Conservatives will, it's well worth remembering how the government treats some of the most vulnerable in society. Not content with having expanded the prison population to such an extent that as soon as a new wing or establishment is built it is almost immediately filled, it also seems hell-bent on continuing with the detention of those whose only crime is to be the children of asylum seekers who have had their application for refugee status rejected.

Not that the government itself has the guts to be personally responsible for their detention. Probably the most notorious detention centre in the country, Yarl's Wood in Bedfordshire, is run by SERCO. We used to have this strange notion that establishments like prisons shouldn't be run with a view to a profit being made, and that surely applies all the more to those where the "guests" have not committed any offence, but going by yesterday's pre-budget report, with the funding for prisons due to be slashed, it's one we're going to have get even more used to. In the last report on Yarl's Wood, the chief inspector of prisons Anne Owers noted (PDF) while Yarl's Wood should seek to improve the "plight of children" who were being held in the centre, they were "ultimately issues" for the UK Border Agency. That would be the same UK Border Agency where bonuses are being paid out, something defended by Phil Woolas, who claimed they were "risking their lives" in what they did.

It's doubtful though that the most recent initiative at Yarl's Wood took place on the orders of the UK Border Agency. The latest Private Eye (1251) reports on the opening of new classrooms for the detained children, which "local bigwigs" had been invited to attended. They were treated to the kind of welcome that royalty might have been, with one happy child detainee prompted to sing "Happy Birthday" to his mother, older prisoners dressed in blue gowns who sang "My Sweet Lord" and were given a complimentary mug and coaster set which was emblazoned with a logo featuring two smiling parents, two happy children and the legend "compassion, commitment and respect for all". While few dispute that the centre has improved significantly since SERCO took over the contract from Group 4, the prisons inspectorate's last report still criticised the healthcare available, the lack of activities provided and most of all the insufficient provision for children, one wonders if SERCO would do better to focus on the motif inscribed on the cups rather than just presenting it when the influential come to visit.

SERCO can't however be blamed for children being detained in the first place. Report after report and expert after expert has now condemned the continuing snatching of families at dawn and months of waiting in what are very slightly more friendly prisons. The children's commissioner Sir Al Aynsley-Green called for the "inhumane practice to end" a few months back; the home affairs select committee found that no one was able to give an exact figure on the number of children held in a year, while an overview of their welfare was also not available; and most damningly, the journal Child Abuse and Neglect, in a study which featured 24 children from Yarl's Wood itself (PDF), found, unsurprisingly, that some were so stressed they had regressed to bedwetting and soiling during the day. Anxiety and depression had developed or re-developed in others, as had post-traumatic stress disorder, while most worryingly sexualised behaviour had come to the fore in others. The Royal Colleges of General Practitioners, Paediatrics and Child Health, and Psychiatrists, and the UK Faculty of Public Health are now all calling for the practice to end.

The case of Child M is an extreme one, but illustrates the system at its very worst. An 9-year-old from Iran, he was first imprisoned along with the rest of his family in the summer of 2008, being held for 52 days before being released. During his incarceration he had recurring nightmares, suffered from ringworm and his hair started to fall out. His family was detained again on the 17th of November, spending another three weeks in Yarl's Wood under the threat of imminent deportation, with Child M again suffering from a deterioration in his mental health, before finally being released again on Tuesday. It's impossible to know whether this again is just a temporary reprieve, but for Child M to undergo such a traumatic experience at the hands of the state twice, when such detention is hardly ever truly necessary (asylum seekers generally don't abscond, especially those with families) is unforgivable. No one it seems however is prepared to stand up for children who have committed no crime; as Mike Power suggested on Chicken Yogurt's post on Child M back in March, it seems to take a place where "socialism is entrenched" like Haringey for anyone other than the usual suspects to care.

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Wednesday, December 09, 2009 

The real "we are all in this together".

At one point during the pre-budget report, you had to wonder whether Alistair Darling, tired of the deliberately tedious nature of what he was delivering, had inserted a concealed joke just to see if anyone would notice. To be vulgar for a second, you suspect that there are plenty of people out there, politicians included, whom have paid money for old boilers in their time, although £400 seems a bit steep.

It was the one moment of levity in what was otherwise a tour de force in the completely expected, the responses also seemingly written weeks in advance and not updated to take account of any late changes. George Osborne, who courtesy of Steve Bell I now can't look at without seeing buttocks on his nose, did the now standard New Tory act of claiming this meant Labour had completely abandoned the aspirational, while the Daily Mail has somehow construed a pre-budget which hits more or less everyone in some way or another as class war.

If the Mail's right, then this is class war on all of the classes rather just the middle or the upper. While the additional increase in national insurance will affect anyone earning above £20,000 (the average wage before the recession being somewhere around the £24,000 mark) the freeze in public sector pay across the board, which will in effect be a cut in real terms, spreads the pain across the board. George Osborne ought to be pleased: Darling, with the tax on bank bonuses and freeze on the inheritance tax threshold is ensuring that we truly "are all in this together", something you doubt his own plans will accurately reflect.

Like when some papers and the Tories cried that the Queen's speech was nothing but pure politics, as if this was something new and terrible, Darling's effort today could be condemned in similar terms. Depending on your view, it could be cowardly, as it puts off almost all the big decisions until after the election; political, in that as it's more than likely that the Tories will then be the ones to pick up the pieces; and also the right thing to do, as cutting now in the way that the Tories propose, when the recession is not over and everyone is just assuming that growth will return in this fourth quarter, will just damage the recovery even further. It can also be all three of these things, which is the view I take.

In short, what was billed as being significant was nothing of the sort, or wasn't presented by almost anyone in those terms. The real significance was in the back of the documents which accompanied the speech as always (PDF), showing that the deep cuts are coming in the years to come, just unannounced, although everyone already assumes the worst. The battle is now over who can be the most optimistic in the public whilst being a pessimist behind closed doors, and the government has to hope that the gap in the polls can still be made up by portraying the Tories as the ruthless cutters of old. One suspects however that even with the Tory lead being reduced of late, the victory is still the Tories' to lose rather win.

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Tuesday, December 08, 2009 

The revisionism of Sir Ian Blair.

In general, once our great leaders and other betters resign from their positions of power, a strange thing tends to happen. Stripped of their main claim to fame, as it were, they become once again reasonable, even likeable human beings. This doesn't apply to the most controversial or divisive figures, such as Thatcher or Blair, who will doubtless continue to be either lionised or loathed until the day they die, but Major certainly, Michael Howard more recently and I confidently predict, Gordon Brown, will all eventually become mere mortals again that don't immediately invoke an almost atavistic sense of hatred.

Another person to whom this doesn't apply is Tony's namesake, Sir Ian Blair. At one point in the distant past I wondered whether Blair wasn't actually the best we were likely to get, despite being such an utter scaremongering tit; as it turns out, I was completely wrong, and Sir Paul Stephenson has, despite the G20 police riots, been the archetypal safe pair of hands. Blair though, despite having been forcibly retired, is determined that he shouldn't be remembered as the man in charge when a Brazilian was shot by his officers and who didn't learn of the fact he wasn't the man they thought he was until the following day despite even his secretary knowing, and is instead attempting to put together a revisionist account of his own time as chief commissioner at the Met. Not about Jean Charles de Menezes - he's clearly lost that battle - but rather of his role in cheerleading for up to 90 days detention without charge for terrorist suspects.

First, he attempts to draw a hardly conclusive historical parallel:

"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both," said Benjamin Franklin. Nearly a century later, Abraham Lincoln would disagree: "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew." That essential conflict remains alive today.

This is hardly comparing like with like. Lincoln faced the biggest catastrophe a nation state can - a civil war. In such circumstances, when the life of the nation can be conclusively said to be under threat, emergency procedures and laws which would never otherwise be considered as proportionate may well be vital. We at the moment face a tiny band of extremists who can be more than successfully contained using the normal powers of the criminal justice system, who pose no threat to life as we know it whatsoever. New threats do pose new problems, but while the threat may be new, the actual danger posed is relatively limited compared to those we have come through in the past.

After the fall of communism, the west believed it had won. Despite what we now know to be al-Qaida-inspired attacks in the US, East Africa and the Gulf, many supported Francis Fukuyama's theory that history had ended. The 2001 attacks on the twin towers suddenly revealed it had not. As the Balkan conflict had indicated, older conflicts were resuming, not with the left-right mutually assured destruction of the cold war but an asymmetric struggle in an age of global communication.

It would be unfair to suggest that this is Blair attempting to be the intellectual. When he says "many" supported Fukuyama's much quoted but rarely examined in detail treatise that history had ended, it's unclear whether he realises that Fukuyama was one of the original neo-conservatives who believed that the end of the Soviet Union was the perfect opportunity to massively extend US influence and power without anyone having the temerity or power to interfere. History had only ended, in Fukuyama's view, in that both democracy and neo-liberal economics had triumphed and were now the only realistic options for mankind. That nations which disagreed with this view could then have democracy and neo-liberal economics imposed on them by force already suggested that this was hardly the end of history, but then Fukuyama himself has since changed his mind, and is even now espousing "realistic Wilsonianism" as an alternative to the less benign neo-conservative he once identified with.

What we do not know is what happens next: whether the last decade will prove an aberration; whether or not al-Qaida will be marginalised and fade into history. There is no doubt that the centre of al-Qaida has suffered many setbacks: those of its leaders who survive are in hiding. However, the group's inspiration and its message remain vibrant, resonating across continents and borders. It can reach not only its adherents but also the lonely and the unbalanced, using new methods of communication, trumpeting the many causes of anger and despair in the world, suggesting new dreams of fulfilment, offering new tools of attack and searching for more, including radiological and chemical weaponry.

So the question is whether, echoing Lincoln, "our case is new". If it is, then it may be better to risk being at the mercy of the state than at the mercy of the murderously inclined. At the very least, it would be useful to hear the arguments of those who believe or believed that we must "think anew and act anew".


Except none of what Blair lists is new, nor are we unable to adapt to it. He also presents the classic false dichotomy: we need neither be at the mercy of murderously inclined or at the mercy of the state. The current limits on detention without charge, which is what Blair is leading to discussing, do not put us at the mercy of the murderously inclined, but extending the limit further may well be putting the innocent at the mercy of the state.

By 2006, Britain had twice been attacked by suicide bombers and the plot to blow up airliners had been uncovered – a plot described by the trial judge as "the most grave and wicked conspiracy ever proven within this jurisdiction". We believed that we could not properly investigate these crimes within the period then available for detention.

Strange that Blair doesn't additionally list the case of Dhiren Barot, which he formerly described as a "true horror". Barot planned to construct a dirty bomb using smoke alarms, a crime so terrible that his handlers decided not to bother funding his fantasies. It's also instructive that Blair uses "believed" rather than "knew" or "expected", as those crimes were indeed investigated within the period then available for detention. The 21/7 attackers were dealt with successfully under the 14 days then available, while the "liquid bombers" were charged on the 28th day. Since then, anything longer than two weeks has not been needed in any terrorist investigation.

We proposed an equivalent of the system of "investigative detention" used in Europe – a rolling series of detention periods of up to seven days at a time, granted by increasingly senior members of the judiciary, with prisoners legally represented at each judicial hearing and throughout police interviews. This was necessary, we said, owing to the growing need to intervene in internationally constructed plots at a very early stage, given the scale of al-Qaida ambitions. At such early stages it was difficult to distinguish main conspirators from lesser players, there were language barriers and problems with encryption. We suggested an outer limit of 90 days.

Now this really is open revisionism - the up to 90 day period was never once described as the equivalent of the system of "investigative detention" used in Europe, probably because it isn't an apposite comparison, as the legal systems in which investigative detention is used differ from our own. The judicial nature was only ever used as a fig leaf - only the boldest judges are ever going to openly disagree with the police when they say they need more time to potentially prevent a terrorist attack. Even with the extra time, the police have still consistently failed to distinguish main conspirators from lesser players, with at least three men involved in the liquid bomb plot released without charge after the full 28 days. One of those tried in that case was cleared of any involvement after the second jury trial. Problems with encryption could have been got round used already applicable laws. Even in retrospect, Blair fails to conjure up anything approaching a convincing case.

It seemed to us that this was like bird flu: when that threatened, the public were entitled to hear from the chief veterinary officer, now they should hear from the police. But no: commentators of all stripes said this was the police being political. It was not. It was the police being the police, talking about policing. We should not be seen as street butlers, silent until spoken to.

Except this doesn't even begin to reflect what Ian Blair was doing when it came to discussion of 90 days. He wasn't just suggesting what was needed, or telling the government what he thought was necessary, leaving it to them to make the case, he himself was actively campaigning for the change, as did other officers. The Tories told at the time of the 90 day vote of MPs being contacted by their local chief constables urging them to rebel against the Tory whip and support the government. Again, it's also not an apposite comparison: the chief veterinary officer acts directly as an adviser; the chief commissioner of the Met is in charge of the police, who uphold the law, not actively attempt to make it up as they go along, a very good reason for them to be directly separate from it. It's also the case that the police will always claim that they need new powers regardless of whether they do or not; anything that makes their job easier and which gives them more authority is to be welcomed. It is the politician's job to resist it. The connect between the two Blairs became so close that the dividing line became indistinct. Neither saw this as a problem, and that in itself was worrying.

Still, much of this now feels like the ghost of Christmas past. Gone is the unrelenting paranoia of the terrorist threat; now we instead have the economic threat, much more real and much more damaging than the terrorist threat ever was. Whether we will feel the same way about our upcoming overlords as we now do about our previous ones may well depend on what happens tomorrow.

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Monday, December 07, 2009 

Preventing Terrorism at Home - The View from Ground Zero.

A late contender for post of the year, this superb treatise on local racism, the decay and depression of outer-city housing estates and with it the potential for extremism, also contains a paragraph that gives me heart that permanently pulling up the tabloids on their bullshit, however many times you repeat yourself, is worth it:

The impulse to segregate was compounded by the messages that seemed to reinforce the idea that the treatment in Southmead reflected the mood and views of the rest of Britain. "Hundreds of thousands of migrants here for handouts, says senior judge". "Britain paying migrants £1,700 to return home BEFORE they've even got here" "The violent new breed of migrants who will let nothing stop them coming to Britain" These headlines were just three of many that were printed in the Mail, a right-wing daily during my time in Southmead. I don't usually take much notice of the headlines in the Sun and the Mail unless they are truly shocking, but in Southmead the headlines seemed to have an impact on the treatment we received. The level of low-level hostility from adults seemed to be directly linked to the content of the headlines. More outright hostility from younger adults and children followed a day or so later.

Do go and read the whole thing.

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If one word could sum up the decade, what would it be?

Gosh, that's a hard one isn't it? Best I can come up with is six letters, begins with f and ends in d. Surely a much more difficult challenge would be describing the decade at length (more than 50 words) whilst using as few expletives as possible. The only bright spot that we're coming towards the end of the "noughties", as no one is calling it, is that the next decade can't possibly any worse. Can it?

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Shorter Grauniad editorial.

We're all going to die, and it's going to be YOUR fault.

(I voted Green at the last two European elections. I believe in the climate science. I just don't believe for a second that the Copenhagen summit, even if it agrees radical enough limits, will actually ensure that those limits are then actually kept to. It's also not this generation that will be responsible; it will be the last generation, as they are still after all the ones in control. We'll sleepwalk towards the +2C rise and there's little to nothing we can do about it except start adapting now.)

(The Heresiarch also has a similar view.)

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