The Current Outlook

Police are to demand new powers to arrest protesters for causing offence through the words they chant and the slogans on their placards and even headbands.

Yes, I know I haven’t updated this in ages. I couldn’t be bothered. Anyway, I’m back now.

As for this: No, no, no, no, no, no! This idea is about taking away the right to be offensive. I demand this right. It is the right of all free-born British subjects. If a band of intolerant bigots want to shout ‘no gays here’, ’send the Pakis home’ or even ‘fuck the Queen’ who should take that away from them? Freedom of speech is about the freedom to hear things you disagree with. I’d much rather have that than a government forcing its own stupid opinions down my throat and stifling dissent.

Take this away and you take the teeth out of popular protest - whether you agree with their cause or not. Next they’ll be making all demonstrations and protests illegal.

What with me being hundreds of miles away, I can’t make it.

But I bring this to you from Tim Ireland over at Bloggerheads:

You are invited to attend Parliament Square in solidarity with Brian Haw tomorrow (Wednesday) morning at 11am ready for 11.30 (when Blair is due to drive past on his way to PMQs).

It is suggested that bells and whistles are used. Here’s why.

I am going to further suggest that, instead of being in Parliament Square (where police are sure to clamp down and round people up during this short period), you merely be in that general area with a *concealed* bell or whistle at the ready… and then let fly when Baby Blair’s motorcade goes past.

And, if anybody gives you any stick, remind them that:

1) SOCPA forbids the use of loudspeakers - *not* noisemakers.
2) SOCPA also fails to define what constitutes a demonstration.
3) So if they don’t get out of your face, you’ll be forced to have them arrested for demonstrating their ignorance.

Sharper CCTV images are needed so shots of suspected criminals can be matched to the proposed identity card database, a Home Office minister has said.

Now we begin to come to the real reason why the Home Office (and the Government) were so desperate in having their oh-so-precious ID Cards Act. They want to use CCTV with facial recognition and sharper images along with the Stasi database National Identity Register to spy on fundamentally innocent people while the detritus of society are allowed to continue their wrongdoing at their leisure. Quelle surprise!

The people who run this fucking country, honestly.

Families exiled from the Chagos islands in the 1960s and 70s to make way for a US Indian Ocean airbase have won a new victory in their long fight to return.

I’m glad that the High Court has come out on the side of justice and fairness once again. The Chagos Islanders have won a battle and they should savour their victory today. But they have not yet won the war.

(Via.)

Yes, yet another post about our much hacked-away at civil liberties. But most people who read this excuse for a blog like reading about this stuff.

Anyway, on with the story: two more threats to our personal freedom have appeared in the last few days.

The first one comes from The Times (thanks to Liberal England):

FOR 60 years the tinny jingle of Greensleeves that announced the arrival of the ice-cream van has been an indelible memory of childhood, but that sound may soon be removed from suburban streets. Health lobbyists have decided that ice-creams are too much of a danger to children’s health.

MPs and health officials are planning a series of measures across the country that are already forcing Mr Whippy and his helpers into meltdown.

Under an amendment to the Education and Inspection Bill to be put forward this week, local authorities will be given new powers to stop ice-cream vans from operating near school gates. The move comes as operators claim that they are already being forced out of business by an over-zealous health lobby.

I have visions of MPs from all the parliamentary parties thoroughly cheering this measure on. Yet another relatively harmless (and fun) part of British life will be axed in the fight for ‘health’ ‘n’ ’safety’.

On a very similar line to that last story comes this from the licensee newspaper-website Morning Advertiser:

Now smokers have been banned from Scotland’s pubs and drinkers are being told not to drink outside them - it appears pub pie and chip menus are next on the health hit list.

Plans are afoot to make licensees come up with a healthy eating commitment as part of their licensing conditions.

Lawyer Janet Hood was on the national forum advising the Scottish Executive on the new legislation.

So, not content with being the first country to introduce a smoking ban for all pubs, restaurants and bars in the United Kingdom, the good old boys and girls at the ever-so-reasonable Scottish Executive now sees it as its right to tell people what they eat when they go out. It makes me want to weep, so it does. If attitudes like this are a result of having a National Health Service, privatise the fucking lot. Choice is great. As long it’s only the choices the state wants you to have.

Longrider also has his say on this.

And these are but two stories I bring to you from contemporary Britain.

Is a digital television service allowing residents of a London borough to watch CCTV footage on their televisions a step too far?

I don’t much like the idea of CCTV cameras in general. I think they’re just a bit creepy, and a sign that people don’t trust other people. In the small town where I live the local council have introduced public CCTV in the last few months. It feels intimidating having those things with their various pan, tilt and zoom functions following you around. A year ago, a few local supermarkets, the petrol stations and shops seemed to have them. Now they’re ubiquitous. It feels like being watched.

If, and only if these pay-to-view cameras were situated in an extremely public area (like, perhaps, the town centre) I doubt it would cause too much damage. I suspect though that they will be used to spy on the neighbours. The old ‘everyone spying on everyone else’ springs to mind again. And although the article says that the service will use encryption I don’t believe that will prevent people from recording from it for too long.

We’ll probably end up like East Germany (I heartily recommend reading Stasiland, which is about the feared East German secret police, the Stasi) or something in a decade or two.

NO2ID, a cross-party group campaigning against the introduction of UK ID cards and the Stasi database are organising a mass passport renewal in May (traditionally the busiest month of the year for people wanting to renew their ‘external’ passports, hur hur!), so if you’re going to get it renewed, do it between 1-31 May 2006.

I got mine renewed last autumn but if you haven’t got yours done yet you should get it done as soon as possible - passports are certainly not going to get any cheaper and the earlier you do it the more you’ll protect yourself from new ‘measures’ brought in by Tony Blair/the Government/UK Passport Service Identity and Passport Service.

Click the banner for more details.

British Identity

No doubt it will sell like hot-cakes. Go and have a look. One more hit will do the cause a tiny bit more good.

EDIT: Just a quick word to say that since I published this blog entry eBay UK have decided to erase the auction. Cheers Longrider.

Sorry for the absence of any posts over the past week or two. I’m still active. I just couldn’t be bothered. Every blogger has times like this. Time for a Bigoted Rant™. I haven’t had one of them in a good fair while, and, let’s be fair, it is good fun when you have enough time and enough bile to splat around all round the place.

Ahem.

Tim Ireland over at Bloggerheads has a link up to remind all you voters in next month’s English council elections exactly what to do: Don’t Vote Labour (because of Blair).

Personally I think this doesn’t go far enough. If the most fragrant Labour Party found another vacuous ‘actor’ to lead them (like, for example, David Miliband?) would everything be perfectly hunky-dory? All the fucking dangerous shite beautifully and lovingly-crafted Bills that NuLabour has so delicately and time-consumingly passed into law (see below), tried to pass into law or otherwise inflicted on people is OK and absolutely nothing more be need said about it?

Here’s a couple of examples for your edification:

Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 (which allowed the police to intern people indefinitely without trial, as happened in Belmarsh after the September 11 terrorist attacks)

Civil Contingencies Act 2004 (this Act, when invoked by a Minister of the Crown in an ‘emergency’ situation, would give the Government virtually unlimited power)

Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005 (this, amongst other things, gave the sweaty baboon Home Secretary the power to put people under indefinite house arrest without trial and place other unfortunates on ‘control orders’ - what on earth happened to the idea of jury trial?)

Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 (This Act was to set up a new police department, the new Serious Organised Crime Agency, called a secret police by some. Incidentally, check out their website: it reminds me more of a sci-fi film than a British police department! As well as settting up SOCA, this Act set up a half-mile protest exclusion zone around the home of Parliament, the centre of our democracy. Several people have already arrested for peacefully protesting, the first (and most notable) case being that of Maya Evans)

Identity Cards Act 2006 (the setting up of a compulsory ID cards scheme, backed up by a vast database known as the National Identity Register, which will basically track people throughout their lives and act as a dossier. This would make the Saudi Arabians, Chinese and North Korean dictatorships proud - this Register will hold more detailed information on innocent citizens than the likes of the infamous Stasi ever had! The good men and women at NO2ID could do with your support)

Terrorism Act 2006 (Blair dictatorially decided he wanted to give the police the power to hold people for three whole months. After a hell of a fight, he lost the vote and was forced to be satisfied with 28 days, a much longer period than any civilised country)

And then, after all that, you have the Walter Wolfgang debacle to take a look at. See exactly how the glorious Labour Party treats the people who dissent from the carefully-constructed smoke-and-mirrors spin.

Oh, and that reminds me, we have the nost wonderful anti-smoking legislation as well, but I won’t go into that right now. Well, OK. I will for a bit. This is yet another example of a parliament foisting illiberal legislation on people when a better idea would have been simply to let the market decide. I can’t wait to see how they plan to enforce this non-smoking legislation in dodgier pubs, bars and clubs. If they can’t stop people taking drugs, beating the shit out of each other and generally committing crime how on God’s Earth do they plan to stop people having a tab with their pint? Yes, we know, everyone knows - hell, much of the world knows that smoking perhaps isn’t the best thing in the world for you and it’s not particularly pleasant when someone is smoking right next to you but people don’t care. So why not leave them in peace, hm? Meanwhile, most people will just do their smoking at home, causing more harm to any children that they have.

OK, we’ve dealt with that. Now back to law.

If you’d like a local example of how some councils view peaceful protest, how about the way Haringey council treats peaceful ID card protesters? Not yobs or hooligans, just nice middle-aged people who felt strongly enough about something and decided to kick up a bit of a fuss about it. Surely in any healthy country that sort of thing would be welcomed with open arms? Not in the United Kingdom of 2006. And this current crowd of fuckers ruling over us Her Majesty’s ‘finest’ is perfectly fine with that.

Anyway, all of these Bills were simply forced onto the statute book without any proper scrutiny. Most amendments were simply rejected out of hand by the governing party and it was just forced through. This Government doesn’t like listening to people. Perhaps it’s autistic? Maybe it should get itself a diagnosis and then get the fuck off out of power?

And then we have the boringly-titled Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, also known as the ‘Abolition of Parliament Act’ and the equivalent to Adolf Hitler’s ‘Enabling Act‘. The LRRB will give the executive the power to amend or simply make up their own laws without any parliamentary oversight, though the Government claim that the Bill is simply ‘to cut red tape’. Fortunately, the press is gradually beginning to cotton on to this and with a bit of luck this plainly dictatorial and fascist Bill will be stopped in the Commons. I hope so, anyway.

And I haven’t mentioned Iraq once. Er…

Anyway, what was the point of all the bigoted ranting above? Let me think. Ah yes, I remember.

I think we came to the conclusion that a) The Labour Party is a vile, ever-decreasing band of festering cunts and b) that while revolution would be nice, it wouldn’t change very much.

Vote Labour? I’ll be leaving that up to you, dear reader, to make your own mind up about this one. It is your vote, after all. But they are desperate. All it needs is one bloody great whack and it could all change. A bit. I think you’ve probably got a pretty good idea of what my position on the whole matter is, though.

A special website has been set up. To oppose the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill currently making its way through The United Kingdom Parliament. It’s called Save Parliament. Link to it on your blog. That is all.