Taking Liberties

[pozorvlak]

On Saturday I went to see Taking Liberties, a documentary about the incredible assault on civil liberties that has been taking place under New Labour¹. Lest we forget: the various Terrorism Acts of 2000, 2001, 2005 and 2006 and the Criminal Justice Act 2003 which have brought in detention without trial for progressively longer periods, given the police extensive powers to stop and search, reduced the scope of the double jeopardy rule, and which have been used against everyone except terrorists (especially to intimidate protestors); the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 which hugely extends the police's powers of arrest and makes it illegal to demonstrate within 1km of Parliament without obtaining prior permission; the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act 2006, often compared to Hitler's Enabling Act², which would have made it possible for government ministers to write laws without Parliamentary approval; and, of course, the Identity Cards Act 2006, which establishes a database which will track every citizen's every interaction with any branch of the Government. And let's not forget their collusion with the CIA's torture Extraordinary Rendition programme.

Go and see the film. Then drag all your friends along to see it. Give copies of the DVD to all your relatives for Christmas. Then get out there and protest and vote while you still can. A word of warning: ten years of Blair's anti-freedom agenda crammed into 100 minutes makes for a pretty intense film.

The next day, I was in the audience for an edition of Question Time with the ludicrous title "Scotland After the Bomb". I ended up sitting at the far end of the row, and didn't get to ask any questions, but here's what I'd have liked to have said:

• So, Mr Scotland Office Guy, if you'd like us to protest peacefully rather than be terrorists, why did your government pass the Terrorism Acts criminalising protest? Does your lot actually recognise the distinction?
• Why does everyone assume that "suicide bomber" implies "Muslim"? Suicide bombing was invented by Christian militias in Lebanon, and first adopted on a large scale by the predominantly Hindu Tamil Tigers.
• How, exactly, are ID cards meant to help at all with terrorism? Are you planning on asking the guy in the burning Jeep for his driver's license?
• To the people who asked if pulling out of Iraq would reduce the rate of domestic terrorism: ignoring nonsense like the ricin plot that never was, there have been three terrorist attacks in Britain in the last two years, with a total death toll of around 50. How are you meant to even measure a decrease in a rate that low? The important question is whether pulling out would reduce or increase the violence in Iraq, where (according to one of my fellow audients), people are dying at a minimum rate of 1600 a month.
• Most importantly of all: why the hell are we getting so het up over a couple of idiots with some propane, who aren't even bright enough to Google for "high explosive manufacture", and who were foiled by a baggage handler?!

¹ Though it started before then, it gathered pace substantially under Tony Blair. And shows no sign of getting better under Brown.
² Blah blah Godwin's Law blah. The LRRA/Enabling Act comparison is appropriate, even if the Blair/Hitler one isn't.

Comments

[r-e-mercia.livejournal.com]

What amazes me is how little resistance there has been to this legislation. It's as if people don't really care that the potential now exists for the government to do seriously horrible things to us, and yet remain within the rule of law.

Sigh.

I presume you have come across Statewatch already? If you haven't then their website is worth a look.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

I think it's largely because it's being done by Labour, who are (in most people's minds, at least) meant to be the good guys. And they've been pretty canny with their media spin. But yeah, it's odd, especially given that there has been lots of outcry over Iraq, climate change, globalisation, etc - maybe people don't have enough attention to devote to everything?

Statewatch - no, I hadn't. Thanks!

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Though I think the really amazing thing about this Government is how shameless they are. Consider: over a million people march against the Iraq war, the largest demo in history, and they carry on as before. They've survived (or rather, "refused to go as a result of") cash for honours, the David Kelly mess, the various corruptions of David Blunkett, extraordinary rendition, the Foot and Mouth epidemic, and lots of other things that I've forgotten because I can only hold so much scandal and outrage in my head at one time.

[half-of-monty.livejournal.com]

(I think) according to Alistair Campbell's diaries, Blair would have gone if he'd lost the parliamentary vote on the war. So we should have been lobbying our MPs rather than marching.

Which really is the right way round, because listening to the people should be more about listening to the elected representatives of the majority of the people, than to those specific people who got their arses in gear for a nice day out in London. cf. Countryside Alliance march etc.

Though rather annoying because your voice is modified by who your MP is and what your neighbours think etc etc anti-first-past-the-post-blather.

Right, paper 3. Going now. Tarra.

[r-e-mercia.livejournal.com]

Wasn't Evan Harris against the war anyway? I think he was on one of the coaches which STW organised to go up to London, if memory serves correctly...

Now, of course, there's a framework in place to provide that such a march would not be allowed to happen, should the government not want it to do so.

[half-of-monty.livejournal.com]

IS there? Even outside the 1 mile exclusion zone? Didn't know that. Scary.

[r-e-mercia.livejournal.com]

Sorry - didn't phrase that well. Was referring to the problem that the march went within the exclusion zone. Which I,um, sort of see as the point of a protest march.
Actually it might be that the licence-granting hoops people have to go through now may well mean that a large march could be prevented altogether, but I've not looked at the legislation. Will do that when I've a little time to spare...in August perhaps...or next Januray.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Quite. And I live in a constituency where they'd elect a bag of flour if it put on a red rosette. And my MP seems to have no mind of her own.

[r-e-mercia.livejournal.com]

Glad to be of some help there. Remind me to have a chat (rant) with you about civil liberties stuff when I see you this summer...

I suspect that the main reason why there hasn't been an outcry is that there is just too much stuff coming out of Whitehall for people to take it all in (where do you start your objections??).
Also a lot of the reforms are extremely technical - you have to have a very good grasp of constitutional law to be able to even begin to see what the concrete consequences might be... and most people (also most journalists) are not that hot on constitutional law!
Another reason could well be that a lot of people think "ah well, we need these reforms to lock up the bad guys. I am not a bad guy. Ergo I will be fine, the bad guys will be locked up, I win!" Which is fine in the short term, though not if you take into account the fact that there have been hundreds of new offences created over the last ten years, so the definition of "bad guys" has already started changing.

[johnckirk.livejournal.com]

maybe people don't have enough attention to devote to everything?

The Onion did a piece on that a few years ago:
Nation's Liberals Suffering From Outrage Fatigue

[half-of-monty.livejournal.com]

Am I right in thinking that the house of lords does provide some resistance? All that there is? While the general public bay to have it dismantled, neutered, or generally filled with politicians?

Not that I know much about the subject, but I take a rather `if it ain't broke' attitude to the house of lords. What think you, who may know the first thing?

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

That's pretty much it. The House of Lords have provided opposition to some of the worst excesses, but there's a limit to what they can do, with the threat of the Parliament Act hanging over them. That's one reason for an elected or appointed HoL, I suppose: still, I think the quality of debate and oversight would drop substantially. Also, the Law Lords have struck down some stuff as incompatible with the Human Rights Act (ask r_e_mercia for this bit), but again, there's a limit to what they can do.

Is the public really clamouring for the Lords to be reformed? Do people really care? Or is it just the Labour party? I dunno. I'm with you on "if it ain't broke", by the way.

[totherme.livejournal.com]

The Lords issue is one that makes me ponder... Before I started thinking about it, I was pro-democracy on principle, and by extension anti-Lords and vaguely republican... But when I started thinking about the lords as an anti-reactionary-politics device that shook my axioms up a bit. If I'm in favour of the unelected lords enforcing some kind of constitutional sanity, then do I really trust the general public to vote sensibly as much as I thought I did?

I find the whole thing quite confusing :)

pozorvlak: You might have a bit of fun thinking of it in terms of waterfall vs agile development methods. Does democracy work? Well, if we could specify what we wanted from government in the first place (some kind of formalisation of "to act in the interests of the people" or something), then there'd be no need to test that democracy achieved that, because we could just run the specification. The situation we're in is an agile one - we have no choice but to have a "good enough" working model, and we're engaged in a debate about which patches to apply. It's confusing though, because the terms of that debate often seem to assume that we know what we want the final product to do - that we have a specification. We don't - we're exploring the design space with a live demo. We can hope that the ecosystem that demo exists in is one that will exert evolutionary pressure in the direction of the ideal system we didn't know we wanted - but there's no guarantee of that. For all we know, the only stable state in the system might be some kind of ultra-totalitarianism.

[half-of-monty.livejournal.com]

Is the public really clamouring for the Lords to be reformed? Do people really care?

Pretty much everyone I've talked to on the issue (which I suppose are those people who do care) think it's dreadful shameful undemocratic corrupt unfair etc. I think the attitude is that, since it's undemocratic, it goes without saying that it has to go.

As if (most democratic system)=>(best system) anyway. Look at the world. Oh dear, am I heading towards an argument in favour of first past the post? Can't have that.

The corruption is a problem, but the chamber still works. Indeed I'd claim that corruption towards getting into the House of Lords is FAR less important than the funding system of (eg) US presidential elections (aside from relative amounts) of power, that is. For once you're in the Lords you can act according to your conscience and knowledge without having to play to a populist audience / corrupt sponsor, but certain US political parties want to continue to attract big oil donors.

Er, sorry, whitter. Am saving sentence - and - coherence arranging ability for paper 3, which needs all I can get. (Paper 2 pretty much ready for submission!)

[r-e-mercia.livejournal.com]

One of the problems with the "!!! undemocratic" argument is that if the HL were to be reformed in line with the HC, it would be reformed along the lines of a non-perfect democracy anyway. We shouldn't kid ourselves that party politics is a particularly great form of democracy, especially not in two party elections (more so where the two main parties appear almost indistinguishable).
I rather like the French system, where they have some party voting and some PR.

[half-of-monty.livejournal.com]

I don't believe in a perfect democracy. It's like the holy grail, or like knowing position and momentum of a quantum particle at the same time. You can have local maxima (and obv should make changes to try to attain them) but the mathematical flaw in the `perfect democracy' concept is that there isn't a well-defined total ordering. (Oh but I wonder whether it's a complete partial order - I suppose that comes down to whether local maxima actually exist).

Whitter whitter oh look a paper to write....

[r-e-mercia.livejournal.com]

Perhaps democracy in any form is an inherently non-perfect idea.

But I stick with the argument that the sort of democracy the UK has at the moment has rather a lot of drawbacks.

Possibly I just don't like people very much. Oh dear.

[half-of-monty.livejournal.com]

Was I rambling rather? Soz. Think I'm incoherent here, try my maths!

Perhaps democracy in any form is an inherently non-perfect idea.

That was what I was trying to say.

But I stick with the argument that the sort of democracy the UK has at the moment has rather a lot of drawbacks.

As was this - so aim for the local maxima by improving features of our system, rather than trying to impose from on high a `perfect democracy', cause it doesn't exist.

[r-e-mercia.livejournal.com]

Yarr.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

The trouble is, though, that most of your friends are (I'm guessing) left-leaning academic types, who are probably not very representative on the subject of House of Lords reform.

[half-of-monty.livejournal.com]

Quoi? You mean some people aren't left-leaning academics??

Who'd've thought it?

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Being the child of Conservative-voting military types gives one a slightly broader perspective on these things, I find :-)

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

BTW, have you read Freakonomics? Apparently the effect of campaign finance on actual election results is fairly minor - which makes it all the sadder that it can be used to buy politicians so easily.

And both the major US parties are in hock to big business: the Republicans are just less quiet about it.

[half-of-monty.livejournal.com]

Oh Duncan has it, so I might.

While I have no particular desire to stick up for the Democrats, I think they have a better record of just fielding fabulously wealthy candidates? Eg Clinton, and thingy-who-might-run-next-time-who-isn't-Hilary-or-Obama.

Simple way to save democracy from big business: only mult-billionaires may become president. Ho hum.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Sorry, are you saying that the Presidents Bush weren't fabulously wealthy?

The amount of money required to run a Presidential campaign in the US these days is fabulous. You can run your own campaign if you're Ross Perot, or Bill Gates or someone. You can't if you're a mere multi-millionaire like Clinton or Kerry.

Thingy-who-isn't-Clinton-or-Obama: do you mean Al Gore?

[half-of-monty.livejournal.com]

I don't think the Bush's fund their own campaigns, they just get their fabulously wealthy buddies to do it for them?

Al Gore isn't a billionaire, is he? I think I may have meant Bloomberg, in which case as it says I was out of date. I'm a bit vague on US candidates though.

Didn't Bill Clinton at least partially fund himself? I remember, when he was first elected, people talking about this as a good thing and me thinking what a perculiar good thing it was to be able to fund your own campaign. Mind you that was donkeys ago. Am actually working as you can tell so won't wikipedia that for now.

[half-of-monty.livejournal.com]

Aha, am confusing Bill Clinton with Ross Perot, who self-funded in the same campaign (and did extremely well for an independent candidate). That was it.

Well, it was 92, I can't remember everything!

[r-e-mercia.livejournal.com]

Yes. Well, they have declared that the law is incompatible with the HRA, which usually leads to the law being changed.
The Parliament Act isn't that much of a threat in realpolitik terms - it's a very drastic action which is only used very sparingly. What is much more of a threat is changing the composition of the HL so that it becomes stocked with Yes-Men.
It's odd to think that when I was interviewed for college, and was asked what element of the UK constitutional set-up I would like to change, I replied immediately "abolish the HL!". I couldn't imagine wanting to do that today.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

OK, interesting about the Parliament Act. The "stocked with Yes-men" problem is something that I've been worried about for some time.

[totherme.livejournal.com]

It's like playing chess with a someone who understands the rules but not the strategy. The various terrorism acts just took a few insignificant pawns off the board - the king hasn't been directly threatened yet. Of course, if someone in government did decide to "do seriously horrible things", then the positions formerly occupied by those pawns might turn out to be significant.

It's interesting - the reason the people in government are in government is because they've already demonstrated that they're far better at that kind of political strategy than the average bloke. So what hope is there of the large collection of average blokes that are the General Public of keeping the government in check?

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Well, a lot of people devoting a bit of time each have a lot more total attention span than a few blokes plotting and scheming the whole time. But then you run into problems of communication, Brooks' Law and so on...

I like the chess analogy very much. The people who have been directly threatened by the changes in the law have so far been mostly activists or Muslims - both minority groups who don't have much public sympathy. Pawns, as you say.

[r-e-mercia.livejournal.com]

First they came for the communists...

[totherme.livejournal.com]

I wonder if there's a good way to mobilise lots of people devoting a bit of time each to do what we want...

The default situation seems to be that lots of people devoting a bit of time each will spot most things - but they'll also get worked up in a small way about a lot of random conspiracy nonsense too. Because there are so many false positives, people tend to ignore everything that hasn't either already convinced a critical mass of people, or been championed by an individual in a position of power... What we end up with is a body of people who see only those things that are obvious to everyone, rather than seeing everything that's visible to someone.

Perhaps something like digg for politics would change that. I'm not sure :)

[totherme.livejournal.com]

I think the traditional solution might be to rely on Champions, btw. Pretenders to the throne once upon a time, and "the opposition party" more recently. The public seem to rarely if ever self-mobilise, but rather wait around for a figurehead to direct them to where most of them wanted to go anyway...

[half-of-monty.livejournal.com]

Though, on the other hand - how long before we get `audient' in the OED?

[r-e-mercia.livejournal.com]

That would be lovely, we should lobby the OED chap who used to be a light entertainer.

[sable-veins.livejournal.com]

Why can't you just lie down and take it like a decent reader of the London Times? All this pro-Moslem piffle is political correctness gorn mahd! It's quite simply a fact that most terrorists are Islams, most Islams are feared, and that fear leads to Dark Side.