In Saturday’s blog, I wrote about the way in which Labour’s attacks on our civil liberties were slowly but surely turning us into a police state, and I contrasted our MP’s relaxed inaction in the face of this threat with their enthusiastic hyperactivity when it comes to stopping us finding out about their expenses.
What do you know? Yesterday Gordon Brown announced he was shelving this latter plan. Even Disaster History blog doesn’t normally get results this quickly! But typically Labour has managed to seize defeat from the jaws of victory. Was the government dropping the idea because it had seen the light and realised it was outrageous to try to hide MP’s expenses from the rest of us who pay for them? No. The problem was that opposition parties were refusing to support the cover-up, grumbled the PM.
FACT. Labour’s Deputy Leader, Harriet Harman, was once legal officer for the National Council for Civil Liberties (now Liberty). What is she doing supporting the authoritarian changes I wrote about on Saturday?
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Showing posts with label liberty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label liberty. Show all posts
Thursday, 22 January 2009
Saturday, 17 January 2009
Police state - a disaster in the making
Reasonably free societies do not turn into police states overnight. It is a journey of many steps. We have already taken some. Cardinal de Retz said back in the 17th Century that of all the emotions, none clouds the judgment so much as fear, and fear – especially fear of terrorism - has been the main weapon used, wittingly or unwittingly, by Labour to move us along the road to tyranny.
Labour has created something like 3,000 new crimes, and imprisoned tens of thousands more British people. “Anti-terrorism” legislation allows people to be locked up for longer without trial, and it has also been widely misused against, among others, a leading opposition MP, a Holocaust survivor who dared to question what the then Foreign Secretary was saying, and a staggering 7,000 (!) trainspotters.
More steps are planned – like identity cards, logging everyone’s emails, and holding inquests in secret. Our MP’s meanwhile do not bother to scrutinise much of this destruction of our liberties, allowing the government to use so-called secondary legislation to bypass the increasingly irrelevant House of Commons – for more details see
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/henryporter/2009/jan/14/statutory-instruments-parliament
Thank God our MP’s have time for much more important matters, like making sure we can’t find out about their expenses.
We can still stop and reverse the drift to a police state, but if we don’t take the opportunity now, one day it will be too late.
Labour has created something like 3,000 new crimes, and imprisoned tens of thousands more British people. “Anti-terrorism” legislation allows people to be locked up for longer without trial, and it has also been widely misused against, among others, a leading opposition MP, a Holocaust survivor who dared to question what the then Foreign Secretary was saying, and a staggering 7,000 (!) trainspotters.
More steps are planned – like identity cards, logging everyone’s emails, and holding inquests in secret. Our MP’s meanwhile do not bother to scrutinise much of this destruction of our liberties, allowing the government to use so-called secondary legislation to bypass the increasingly irrelevant House of Commons – for more details see
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/henryporter/2009/jan/14/statutory-instruments-parliament
Thank God our MP’s have time for much more important matters, like making sure we can’t find out about their expenses.
We can still stop and reverse the drift to a police state, but if we don’t take the opportunity now, one day it will be too late.
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