UK Establishment: Stupid Buggers
You know that the government’s obsession with collecting data, controlling people and ensuring that New Britain is the most surveilled upon state in the world has gone too far when it leads to the possibility of terrorists and rapists and paedophiles being put back on the streets.
It has happened before, of course, when Charles Clarke was Home Secretary and thousands of prisoners were released to continue their crime sprees in Britain because it was too much bother to deport them, even though that was a condition of their release. John Reid failed to correct this government sponsored crime licence, but these were essentially errors of incompetence. The machinery of state grinding to a halt because nobody could be bothered to fill in the forms and post the letters.
In comparison, the apparatus of New Britain’s banana republic junta of politicians, police and any other penpushing jobsworths is a well-oiled machine.
To put you in the picture of how lowly in the establishment’s administrative food chain you can be and still have the authority to spy on other citizens, The Guardian offers this:
The commissioner’s [interception of communications commissioner Sir Paul Kennedy] report is as loud a wake-up call as this country has ever had about the creeping growth of modern big brother methods. He details how surveillance powers have been handed not just to MI5, GCHQ and the police but also to Revenue and Customs, the fire service, the prisons, the food standards authorities, the environment agency, health service trusts, the Post Office and councils. In all, he says, nearly 800 different bodies have access powers of some sort over our communications. More than 250,000 requests were made in the first nine months of 2007: an astonishing thousand new snoops every day of the year.
So, if you thought it was just mighty ministers and senior police who could open your letters and listen to your telephone calls and then only if you were a seriously suspicious terrorist suspect, forget it. The trolley collector at Tesco is probably scanning your emails this minute.
All of which might be fine if you subscribe to the view that this is needed to fight The War on Terror and you are convinced that any threat the government concocts is worth losing your freedoms over, but would you be happy if it meant real criminal being released from jail?
After it emerged that counter-terrorism officers probably secretly recorded MP Sadiq Khan’s conversations with a constituent - terrorist suspect Babar Ahmad - in the Buckinghamshire prison of Woodhill in 2005 and 2006, it has been claimed that prisoners’ conversations, perhaps with their legal representatives, are routinely bugged.
The problem is, this obsession with monitoring everything everyone does, whether they are still wandering the streets apparently freely or when they are imprisoned, could have severe legal implications, always assuming that New Briatin will remain governed by the due process of recognisable laws for a year or two yet.
Justice Secretary Jack Straw has so far mumbled and bluffed and obfuscated his way through this minefield with all the adroitness of a bull in a china shop.
The BBC has this:
Shadow home secretary David Davis said he was writing to the Justice Secretary Jack Straw demanding a full-scale investigation and said ministers must have been aware.
“It is inconceivable that this action has taken place without ministerial approval,” he said.
“Whilst there can be reasons for eavesdropping on legal meetings, it is such a serious infringement of people’s rights that there has to be a very good reason.
“It can put the trial at risk which means that serious crimes may go unpunished.”
Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne said if the latest allegations were true, fundamental legal procedures have been breached.
“We need an immediate inquiry into exactly what is going on.
“If that confirms these allegations, I think it’s the most astonishing and foolish policy that is going to prove to be totally counterproductive and quite calamitous.”
‘Furious reaction’
Senior British lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC said if the claims were true, they could lead to violent offenders being released.
“The end result… is that these cases will have to be brought back to court and in my view the courts will react with such fury as a matter of principle, those whose conversations were bugged will have to be let out,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
Labour MP Andrew MacKinlay said: “The only surprise I have is that people are surprised.
“I and others have tried to draw attention to the abuse of powers by senior police officers over recent years, often only to be mocked.
“In my view this indefensible situation arises from the cocktail of supine ministers and the total absence of any Parliamentary oversight of the security and intelligence services.”
One of the tricks which Nazi Germany used to keep the people cowed and terrified was to ensure that everyone, from children upwards, was informing on everyone else.
Expect the government and police to set up phone lines for you to do the same.
Oh, that one is already covered, apparently.
Impunity For State Sponsored Death Squads
As Homer Simpson said: “Mmm, doughnuts, is there nothing they cannot do!”
As Jacqui Smith might have said: “Mmm, the War on Terror and anti-terror legislation, is there no end to repressive legislation we cannot squeeze unnoticed onto the statute book under the guise of being tough in the War on Terror?”
Apparently not. Now, even coronors courts are to become the emasculated playthings of the Home Secretary, where proceedings may have to be conducted in secret and without a jury or access by anyone other than Jacqui Smith or her successors, not for reasons connected with national security, but purely on whim and diktat, despite the fact that this little piece of spiteful deviousness to curtail even more freedoms is stuck onto ant-terror legislation.
The Joint Committee on Human Rights said:
“On first inspection we find this an astonishing provision with the most serious implications for the UK’s ability to comply with the positive obligation in Article 2 (of the) ECHR [European Convention on Human Rights] to provide an adequate and effective investigation where an individual has been killed as a result of the use of force, particularly where the death is the result of the use of force by state agents.”
The legislation would mean that if anyone was killed by agents of the New British state or any other country or, in fact, under any circumstances in which the Home Secretary felt that she or he was entitled to interfere for no given reason, then nothing connected with a possibly unlawful killing would ever enter the public domain.
Andrew Dismore MP, the Labour chair of the Committee [Joint Committee on Human Rights], said: “We are seriously alarmed at the prospect that under these provisions, inquests into the deaths occurring in circumstances like that of Jean Charles de Menezes, or British servicemen killed by US forces in Iraq, could be held by a coroner appointed by the Secretary of State sitting without a jury.
“Inquests must be, and be seen to be, totally independent and in public to secure accountability, with involvement of the next of kin to protect their legitimate interests.
“When someone dies in distressing, high-profile circumstances their family need to see and feel that justice is being done, and where state authorities are involved there is a national interest in accountability as well.”
According to The Daily Mail:
Helen Shaw, co-director of Inquest, a pressure group which works with bereaved families, said: “The public will find it difficult to have confidence that these coroner-only inquests, with key evidence being suppressed, can investigate contentious deaths involving state agents independently.”
The group said the proposal could even affect the inquest into the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, the innocent Brazilian shot dead at a Tube station in 2005.
So, let’s say your son or daughter worked for the state as a civil servant on sensitive issues to do with something like growing vegetables. He or she is then run over and killed by a drunk driver who happens to be a senior policeman.
An inquest is then held in secret with only the coronor and the Home Secretary privy to the details of the case. It is announced later that your child was passing secrets to a foreign power and was killed while attempting to cross a busy road when drunk and high on drugs. The driver of the vehicle involved is receiving grief counselling and will be awarded massive compensation.
So, what are you going to do about it, eh, scum?
Jack Straw: The Usual Suspects
Oh, how grand it all once sounded. What a farting little damp squib it has all become.
Once upon a time, we were going to have vast Titan prisons dotted all across this proud land of ours. They were going to be so vast that they would have to be registered as separate countries. Anyone who sneezed the wrong way would be interned in one for the rest of their lives.
Britain would take in prisoners from other countries, like poor people used to take in other people’s washing, and George Bush and the CIA would always have a friend in New Britain for dumping the kidnap victims of extraordinary rendition. In fact, they were going to have to build a new runway at Heathrow just to cope with the extra traffic.
New Britain, in the fevered and power-crazed dreams of New Labour, would become a land less in the image of The Chronicles of Narnia and more like The Chronicles of Riddick. Vast armies of jackbooted stormtroopers would strut around town centres and simply arrest one tenth of the inhabitants and lock them in a Titan prison without charge or trial for 999 days.
Then, of course, reality intruded into the adolescent dreams of the weakling and intellectually stunted rulers of Albion. The fighting talk and grand designs collapsed into mumbled excuses and the wreckage of bitter little psychopathic nightmares.
As The Guardian puts it:
Jack Straw today appeared to back away from plans to build a new generation of 2,500-person “Titan” jails after criticism from the chief inspector of prisons.
The justice secretary told the Today programme there was no “definite” intention to build the Titan jails and the government would take further soundings before making a final decision.
“We are not definitely going to go ahead with them. That’s the default setting. But we want to wait and see what people say,” Straw said.
What language is he using there? It looks superficially like English, but it makes no sense. “We are not definitely going to go ahead with them. That’s the default setting. But we want to wait and see what people say.” You may not definitely be in danger of sprouting long green hair from your nostrils, but it could happen.
Is this ‘wait and see what people think’ idea going to be new government policy? Perhaps Jack Straw should pass that on to Jacqui Smith. Everyone thinks that her idea for 42 day plus internment is a bad idea, but she is hell-bent on going ahead with it anyway.
Probably the best thing will be to just call a halt to new legislation until the next election, when you will really see what people think.
Now for the bit where we see what people are really like when they have fantasies about being tough guys after watching too many Arnold Schwarzenegger films, but are actually just cringing little bedwetters.
Again from The Guardian:
Straw was speaking in response to the publication of the annual report from the chief inspector of prisons, Anne Owers, in which she said the plan to build Titan jails ignored evidence that smaller prisons worked better than larger ones.
The justice secretary said he did not have planning permission for any Titan jails and it was never his plan to build “large warehouses as they have in the US and France”.
There you have it. You know the bloke who built the extension on his house without planning permission? It would seem he has more guts and greater control than Jack Straw.
You would think that an administration which pushes through new laws by the back door every day, even when there are sufficient existing laws could wriggle its way round that one.
However, there is nothing quite like the utter scale of stupidity of politicians. It could almost be called Titan. There should be some law to prevent them from speaking until someone with a real brain, living in the real world has stepped in to check whether what they are saying really makes sense.
Oh, look! The Chief Inspector of Prisons has done just that. (From another Guardian article).
In her annual report, Anne Owers criticises by implication successive home secretaries for the record 80,000 prison population in England and Wales.
“That crisis was predicted and predictable, fuelled by legislation and policies which ignored consequences, cost or effectiveness, together with an absence of strategic direction,” she says.
Owers argues that the emergency measures the government has adopted to meet the overcrowding crisis, including the use of police cells, prison ship plans, and the conversion of former army camps, will do nothing to enhance safety or reduce reoffending. “On the horizon loom the Titans - 2,500-strong prison complexes, flying in the face of our, and others’ evidence, that smaller prisons work better than large ones. They may be more efficient, but at the cost of being less effective,” she warns.
Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust, said: “This is as clear and stark a message as is possible for ministers to hear from an independent chief inspector of prisons. The strain is telling - we need a fundamental rethink on the purpose and use of prisons.” [...]
“It is game, set and match to the Prison Service,” said a Whitehall source.
So, once again, the government and its troupe of ministers does not come out of this looking like Titans of intellectual credibility or administrators of competence and capability. It is like they want their world to be grand opera, only to find that it is nothing but an advertising jingle.
More like a bunch of snivelling lickspittle pipsqueaks with dreams beyond their station.
UPDATE:
Jack Straw may be having cold feet over this nonsense, but his master, Gordon Brown of the massive brain and fallible moral compass, wants to speed full steam ahead with any idea that sounds as macho as this one.
No dithering, no incapability and no thought as to whether it is really a good thing or just political posturing of the worst order. Titan prisons will go ahead. Naturally, if they had been called pixie prisons or pipsqueak prisons, Gordon Brown would be less bothered.
You have to think of the soundbites to come and try to keep a straight face.
The Guardian says:
Gordon Brown confirmed today that the government would go ahead with plans to build new 2,500-person “Titan” jails in spite of criticism from the chief inspector of prisons.
The prime minister spoke just a few hours after the justice secretary, Jack Straw, appeared to suggest that the government was having second thoughts about the initiative.
So, no U-turns and no lack of communications at the pinnacle of power.
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