The Last Days of Labour - a manifesto

By this time next year, the UK will have had to have had a general election. For Labour to avoid defeat will require take the biggest turnaround in British electoral history. This lot shows not the slightest sign of being up to it. We must, therefore, assume these are the last days of Labour. Few governments were blessed with so much good will at the start, and what did we end up with? Iraq, the construction of a police state, national bankruptcy, and a political culture based on lies and corruption.

So here is a programme for the next year to restore some honour to the name that once graced a great political party:

“We the Labour Party in Parliament would like to apologise for the many disappointments we have caused you. We know that it is very late, but we wish to make what amends we can in the time we have left. This our programme for the next year:-

1. A completely elected upper house of Parliament
2. Proportional representation for the House of Commons
3. Dropping of Identity Cards
4. Restoration of a progressive tax system so that the richest pay the highest rate
5. All Parliamentary select committees to be elected by secret ballot
6. An immediate full, public and INDEPENDENT inquiry into the Iraq War and its origins
7. Repeal of all legislation stripping you of your civil rights
8. The referendum on the Lisbon Treaty that we promised
9. A written constitution”

Labour MP’s – for once in your lives, just do the right thing. What have you got to lose?

A bonus for the taxpayer + decline and fall of Ronan Point

Maybe we, the people, are getting a bonus for a change. Yesterday Jack Straw, the alleged “Justice Secretary”, dropped his plans for secret inquests that might have allowed the government to suppress the truth about incidents like the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes.

Mr Straw, of course, is rather hobbled at present after it was revealed that he had charged us taxpayers double the amount of council tax he was actually paying on his second home. With so many of Mr Straw’s “Labour” colleagues under a cloud, let’s hope they’re all feeling a little abashed. After Iraq, years of systematic destruction of our civil liberties, the invention of 3,000 new crimes, 24 hour drinking, super-casinos etc, “a period of inactivity from you would be most welcome”, as Clement Attlee, a real Labour politician, might have put it.

On this day....41 years ago, a section of a brand new 23-storey block of flats called Ronan Point in East London collapsed. One couple in their sixties were awoken by a dreadful ripping sound as their bedroom wall fell away, and they found themselves lying in bed two feet from an 80 foot drop.

It was caused by a gas leak and explosion on the 18th floor. Miraculously, only five people were killed, but the accident raised severe doubts about the industrial building system used at Ronan Point. The block was repaired and people were moved back in, but in 1986, it was demolished. For the full story, see The Disastrous History of London.

The language of priorities

The clocks are striking thirteen. Knowing that its time is running out, Labour is racing to complete its key project before it’s ejected from power – the creation of a police state in Britain (see my blogs of Jan 17, 22, Feb 17, 19, and March 15). Labour can’t afford to provide decent pensions for the Gurkhas or compensation for Equitable Life investors who saw their life savings go down the drain, and we may all have to wait until 70 for our state pensions.

But finding money to build a police state? Not a problem. £2 billion is going to be blown on the project to snoop on every email we send, every phone call we make, every website we look at, providing, in the words of a former director of public prosecutions, “an unimaginable hell house of personal private information. It would be a complete read-out of every citizen's life in the most intimate and demeaning detail." (I have just re-read 1984. Most instructive.)

Even David Blunkett now thinks ID cards are a bad idea, but Labour remains quite happy to spend at least £5 billion on them. Independent assessments reckon the cost will be up to £20 billion. In addition every one of us will have to shell out at least £30 for our cards, and unlike MPs’ chocolate bars, bath blugs, pet food, Chinese rug repairs, Tudor-style beams etc, the cost presumably will not be reclaimable from the taxpayer.

But why is Labour so fixated on destroying our democracy? I know they’re a pretty fifth-rate, incompetent bunch, and I know that their only guiding principle is to get favourable headlines in right-wing tabloids and try and make the Tories appear “soft”, but I do remain puzzled at their sheer fanaticism. Is it that they are so consumed with self-loathing over the lies they told about Iraq and the crimes they committed there that they feel like Macbeth:

“I am in blood stepped in so far that should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o’er”

Or is there something I’ve missed? Can anyone explain?

Police state on track

So many of Labour’s pet schemes are crumbling. The economy is in ruins, Iraq is such a disaster that all the government can do is keep quiet about it, and hope that no one remembers they promised a full, independent inquiry once British troops have been removed.

So it’s good to be able to report that one major project is on track, if not, knowing Labour, on budget – turning Britain into a police state. I blogged on Labour’s new “snap a policeman, go to gaol” law on Feburary 17. One Labour minister, a Mr Vernon Coaker, has been busily assuring the National Union of Journalists that Labour only wants to ban us from taking photographs in “special circumstances”.

It might be “on the grounds of national security, or there may be situations in which the taking of photographs may cause or lead to public order situations or inflame an already tense situation....Additionally, the police may require a person to move on in order to prevent a breach of the peace or to avoid a public order situation or for the person’s own safety and welfare or for the safety and welfare of others.” Are you sure you’ve drawn that broadly enough, Vernon?

It might not, for example, include the case of a Manchester man who was taking pictures of sewer grates - really. But at least he was imprisoned for two days as a suspected terrorist, had his home and computer ransacked, and his DNA taken and kept on file. http://www.boingboing.net/2009/03/03/manchester-man-arres.html

Now one brave former senior police officer has spoken out against Labour’s decision to allow the police to arrest and handcuff anyone suspected of any offence however minor. David Gilbertson says police have used their new power against people not wearing a seatbelt, dropping litter, climbing a tree,or building a snowman. You can sign his petition against this extraordinary attack on our civil liberties at
http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/PowersofArrest/

Building a police state - 2

If you wanted to take a picture of a policeman, Sunday would have been a good day for it – in fact, the last good day. From now on if you photograph one of our friendly coppers, you could find yourself sent to gaol for 10 years. It’s all part of a new law presented by Labour as essential to – you’d never have guessed – the War on Terror. Oh sorry, the alleged Foreign Secretary David Miliband has told Labour MP’s they mustn’t call it that anymore.

Still, lighten up you might say, Labour would never use the law to prevent, for instance, the exposure of wrongdoing by a policeman, or to arrest a harmless tourist who didn’t understand that Britain was now a police state. Oh no? Opposition MP Damian Green had his offices searched by anti-terrorist police for exposing inconvenient truths about the Labour government, an 80 year old Auschwitz survivor who dared question Jack Straw was silenced under anti-terrorist legislation, and anti-terrorist laws have been used by police to question 7,000 trainspotters just in the North-East of England! God knows how many have been stopped over the whole country.

I could go on. No wonder even Dame Stella Rimington, former head of MI5, now thinks it’s all getting out of hand, and has protested at the way Labour is stoking up people’s fears in order to destroy our civil liberties. Mind you, our MP’s must have kicked up a hell of a stink when that “snap a bobby, go to gaol” law was going through Parliament. Funnily enough, I don’t remember hearing a peep out of them.

A result!

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?

INTERESTING BLOG. Witty and stimulating thoughts on music, art, language and liners at http://www.speaktheculture.net/blog/

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.