Labour in the dock (again)
Even in its (probable) dying days of power Labour is still being taken to task by the courts for railroading civil liberties under the pretence of protecting national security.
As the Guardian reports
The court of appeal has dismissed an attempt by MI5 and MI6 to suppress evidence of their alleged complicity in the torture and secret [...]
Taking Brown to task on child detention
An excellent piece at OurKingdom by Clare Sambrook, who takes apart Gordon Brown’s defence of the detention of the children of asylum seekers.
We believe that history will judge the administrative detention of children to be a moral stain on the reputation of this country, akin to slavery and child labour. One day we will [...]
Standing in the way of control orders
Of the various illiberal and authoritarian measures introduced by Labour in the last few years one of the most pernicious is the use of control orders against people who are suspected of terrorist activity. People subjected to control orders are effectively under house arrest - they have a curfew of up to 16 hours a [...]
A banker writes
No doubt by the time you read this I and my colleagues will be manning the barricades, creating makeshift shelters from upturned desks and filing cabinets in order to repel the rampaging hordes at our doors, at least if the combined wisdom of the media and the City of London police is to believed. As [...]
I won’t be beating my wife (well at least until 2012)
Justin at Chicken Yoghurt points out that Labour MP Tom Harris is compaining about the blogosphere not taking notice of the government’s decision to deny bailiffs the right to break into people’s homes and use force against them in order to recover debts.
Presumably it doesn’t occur to Harris that the reasons for this are
1. [...]
The Liberal Democrats’ “Freedom Bill”
While Labour continues to devise yet more illiberal policies and the Tories fail to convince that they will be an improvement, it is heartening to see that at least one of our major parties is making a firm and principled stand on the issue of civil liberties.
The Liberal Democrats have unveiled their “Freedom Bill” aimed [...]
Meanwhile on the domestic front…
…Labour shows no sign of losing its enthusiasm for knee-jerk illiberal legislation. Thanks to Section 76 of the Counterterrorism Act 2008 it is now illegal to take a photograph of a police officer ‘likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism’, a condition so ill-defined that it is bound [...]
The UK under fire on Human Rights
Following its recent embarrassment over the supression of intelligence relating to the treatment of Guantanamo detainee Binyam Mohamed the government is now coming under fire from all sides over its record on human rights, civil liberties and torture.
Firstly, the UK has received strong criticism from the International Commission of Jurists for undermining international law and [...]