Civil Liberty

Of course we must do something about the fact that only 5% of reported rapes end up in convictions. Of course:

The worst day of Paul Haslam’s life began at 3.30am with a loud knock on the door from the police. They told him he was being arrested on suspicion of rape, and took him to Charles Cross police station in Plymouth.

There, he was questioned about what had happened the previous evening, when he had spent the night with a girl he had known for only a short time. He knew he had done nothing wrong, but he did not know how he could prove it.

Later that day Mr Haslam was released without charge. Three weeks later he received a letter telling him that no further action was being taken. By then he had lost his job and had to tell his family about the arrest.

Mr Haslam, 30, had hardly thought about that day nine years ago until he read in his local newspaper this week that the woman who made the false allegation against him had since done the same thing to seven other men.

Gemma Gregory left a trail of disrupted lives across the city of Plymouth. A judge gave her a 12-month suspended jail sentence for perjury for her latest false accusation and ordered her to undergo psychiatric treatment.

No woman would ever accuse a man of rape if it hadn\’t actually happened now, would they? A simple system of accusation and conviction should be suitable, don\’t you think? For we must always listen to the voice of the victim. This insistence upon evidence is simply so patriarchal, testament does, after all, share the same root as testes.

Seumas Milne talks sense?

Indeed he does.

Whatever next? Polly reads an economics book?

Shocking really:

The law lords have delivered a major blow to the Government\’s anti-terror policy, ruling that stringent control orders should be watered down so that suspects will be able to wander free for half of the day.

That people who have been convicted of no crime should be free to wander the streets! What is this? A free society or something?

Err:

Gordon Brown is planning to put the opposition parties on the spot by doubling the time that terrorist suspects can be held without charge from 28 days to 56 days.

I thought he said he was going to extend them, not curtail them?

Hmm. Looks like they\’re actually serious about this:

Yesterday, we announced plans for a British Bill of Rights and Responsibilities which will build on the Human Rights Act (HRA), with a clearer description of our responsibilities.

Err, whose responsibilities is that my dear Lord Chancellor? Do you mean your responsibilities to us? Or, as I suspect, our responsibilities to you? The latteris, I\’m afraid, bollocks.

You see, a Bill of Rights is not about what we must do for you, it\’s about what you, the Government, the State, may not do to us, the citizenry. As the history of the 20th century shows us, the greatest danger to the pursuit of happiness, to life and liberty, is the State. As indeed it was before that, which is why ou forefathers spend so much time and effort it limiting the things it could do to those who constitute it.

So can we please get this very straight, right now? We owe you no duties. You are our servants, hired for a limited time to do what must be done collectively and with the power of compulsion that only the State has. The obvious temptations of the joy of exercising that power of compulsion mean that what you may do to us is limited by a Bill of Rights. Stick with that and we\’ll be fine. But it is you that owes us the duty, not us you.

So we\’re going to get lots more liberty from El Gordo. Aren\’t we lucky little boys and girls?

Gordon Brown has set out to jettison Labour\’s reputation for authoritarianism with a pledge to "open a new chapter" on civil liberty in Britain.

A new chapter? How delightful! What is it that we\’ll get?

New rights of protest. This will mean watering down laws – introduced just four years ago – that ban any unauthorised protest within one kilometre of the Palace of Westminster.

Is that a new right? Isn\’t it, rather, simply the resumption of an old one? One that was taken away four short years ago?

New rights of access to public information by extending the Freedom of Information Act to companies carrying out public functions, such as private prisons.

How lovely: now, who wants to bet that at the same time as FoI is extended, it\’s also tightened? To make it more difficult to find out things but from a larger group of people?

Entrenched freedoms of the press to carry out investigative journalism.

Sorry? We already have freedom of the press don\’t we? Freedom of speech, of association? But there\’s another matter here. By "entrenching" the freedom of one group to do something then you\’re marking them off, making them someone special. That\’s something that traditionally we don\’t do: we don\’t say that as a "registered journalist" (for there must be some method of divining who is "Press" and who is not if there are to be privileges) you have legal rights greater or different than anyone else. I\’ll guarantee you that whatever freedoms are entrenched will not extend to bloggers: it\’ll be only those on the register. And of course, by controlling those who are on the register there is thus control over the system.

New rights against invasion of property after it emerged there are 250 laws allowing state agents to enter a home.

Worthwhile, of course: but the simplest measure would just be to insist that outside the emergency services everyone else must hav a warrant. Let the magistrates decide.

Mr Brown said he would not compromise the security of the nation and there would be tougher counter-terrorism laws before Christmas.

Aaaaah…there it is. The other shoe. We get back some fraction of what has been stolen from us at the same time as more is taken.

We\’re rednecks, rednecks
And we don\’t know our ass from a hole in the ground
We\’re rednecks, we\’re rednecks
And we\’re keeping the niggers down

Now your northern nigger\’s a Negro
You see he\’s got his dignity
Down here we\’re too ignorant to realize
That the North has set the nigger free

Yes he\’s free to be put in a cage
In Harlem in New York City
And he\’s free to be put in a cage on the South-Side of Chicago
And the West-Side
And he\’s free to be put in a cage in Hough in Cleveland
And he\’s free to be put in a cage in East St. Louis
And he\’s free to be put in a cage in Fillmore in San Francisco
And he\’s free to be put in a cage in Roxbury in Boston
They\’re gatherin\’ \’em up from miles around
Keepin\’ the niggers down

We\’re free to be tried twice for the same crime, we\’re free to be tried without a jury, we\’re free to be incarcerated without trial, we\’re free to be subjected to house arrest without trial, we\’re free to have a barcode stamped on our forehead, we\’re free of the right to silence, we\’re free to be jailed for a t-shirt saying "Bollocks to Blair", we\’re free to be watched by 4.5 million cameras, we\’re free to have our money, our homes, taken without being convicted of an offense, we\’re free to have to prove our innocence instead of having our guilt proved, we\’re free to be extradited without evidence….

They\’re gatherin\’ \’em up from miles around
Keepin\’ the British down

Fuck \’em. Hang them all.