Britannia Radio

In the first piece Simon Jenkins,  who has not been my favourite 
columnist on political matters  for a long time,  nevertheless here 
[subject to the dissenting postscript below!] strikes a note of dire 
warning.  Nobody cares any more about freedom.  The people are 
sullenly resigned to the inexorable closing of the prison gates.

This government did not start the process but they, more than its 
predecessors,  have themselves become mere pawns in the hands of the 
scheming anti-libertarian apparatchiks.

Then, still on Home Office territory,  the government is allowing the 
thin end of the wedge of Sharia law to be driven into our legal 
system.  Here the Tory response is true and excellent, not for 
alarmist reasons but on a matter of utmost principle.  I give the 
story below as reported in the Conservative Home Blog.

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SUNDAY TIMES   26.10.08
My farewell plea to MPs: defend liberty

Simon Jenkins

Is Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, a pocket dictator? Is there no 
drop of liberalism in her veins, no concept of personal freedom, no 
fear of a repressive state? Or is she just another home secretary? 
This month she apparently felt obliged by dark forces beyond her 
control to add another weapon to the armoury of illiberal power. She 
wants to record at her Cheltenham communications headquarters every 
mobile phone call, text and internet message of every Briton living. 
This is close to madness.

Home secretaries always speak with forked tongues. Like Augustine 
they cry, "God make me liberal, but not yet, not while someone is 
watching." They explain their latest click of the authoritarian 
ratchet by wailing, "You can't imagine the pressure we were under." 
On leaving office they tend to patronise some civil rights charity, 
as if in penance.

This year's Privacy International survey put Britain bottom of the 
European league for surveillance and civil intrusion, a miserable 
state of affairs for the home of Magna Carta.

Smith's GCHQ "interception modernisation programme", reportedly at a 
staggering £12 billion,  [and where's THAT coming from?-cs]  will run 
alongside the ID card register, the driving licence centre, the 
numberplate recognition computer and the CCTV network in a "pentagon" 
of control. Its data bank will one day and for sure fuse with banking 
and employment records and that stumbling giant, the National Health 
Service personal records computer, each polluting the other with 
crashing terminals, uncorrectable inaccuracies and false trails.

We know from Russian hacking services that such information will be 
freely available because it cannot be kept secret from intruders, 
thieves or the laptops of careless officials. That is why the pages 
of Computer Weekly are crammed with snake-oil salesmen claiming 
"total security" packages. I remember a shack in a Bangalore suburb 
offering to "break all computer encryptions known to man".

The spider at the centre of this web of control, GCHQ's Iain Lobban, 
[we must remember that name! -cs] appears to have so mesmerised Smith 
that officials at the Home Office last week leaked a warning that his 
demands were "impractical, disproportionate, politically unattractive 
and possibly unlawful". Smith was unmoved. Like every home secretary, 
she wants, at the flick of a switch, to know who is doing what, when 
and where anywhere in Britain and in real time. This is truly Big 
Brother stuff.

Since 9/11 there has sprung into being a war-on-terror version of the 
"military-industrial complex", against which Eisenhower warned 
Americans as the cold war developed in the 1950s. The complex roams 
seminars and think tanks with blood-curdling accounts of what Osama 
Bin Laden is planning. Visitors need go no further than the biennial 
defence sales exhibition in London's Docklands to see Eisenhower's 
monsters on parade. They feed on the politics of fear, a leitmotif of 
this government. The entire nation is regarded as under suspicion.

Never was the adage of Louis Brandeis, the US justice, more relevant: 
free men are naturally alert to the wiles of evil-minded rulers but 
"the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachments by 
men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding".

Last week GCHQ lobbyists took to the press declaring that any 
opposition to Smith's surveillance plan would be "disastrous" for 
national security. They even wheeled out the familiar back-up 
argument for those who might regard £12 billion as a ludicrous 
overreaction to terrorism alone. Without the 500,000 intercepts 
placed on mobile phone calls each year, The Times reported, "we could 
not begin to solve any kidnap whatever". Likewise the proponents of 
ID cards call them "vital" for public services and those of the NHS 
computer "a life saver" for accident victims. They are nothing of the 
sort.

A feature of this campaign is its sheer mendacity. Smith last week 
promised that her surveillance regime would cover only details of 
electronic communication, not contents. This is incredible. It 
reminds me of the old Home Office lie that all phone taps "require 
the home secretary's personal authority". Smith's apparatchiks want 
to read the lot.

A similar line was spun last year by James Hall, the head of Home 
Office "identity and passport services", in claiming that identity 
details would be safeguarded and not sent abroad. At the last Lisbon 
conference, European Union members agreed to "cross-border 
interoperability . . . highlighted in electronic identity and e-
procurement", with Lady Scotland, the attorney-general, in active 
participation. Hall must have known this.

ID cards were defended by David Blunkett, a former home secretary, as 
to "protect identity". He knew they would be churned out from a 
Bombay back street at £5 a time. The government does not know the 
meaning of the term "safeguard". A year ago all 25m recipients of 
child benefit were told their personal details, addresses and bank 
accounts had been handed to contractors and lost.

Each new repressive law is abused, sometimes blatantly. This month 
Gordon Brown used the 2005 antiterror law to seize the assets of 
Icelandic banks, an outrage that passed without protest from 
parliament or the courts. The same law has been used by local 
authorities to monitor school catchment areas and rubbish disposal. 
When ministers take untrammelled power, they lie.

Government computers are protected by safety measures costing the 
taxpayer millions. Yet this summer almost 2m personal details from 
the defence ministry were dispersed by EDS, the American firm.

The employment records of the constitutional affairs department, 
including of the lord chancellor, were also lost. Revenue & Customs 
treats every Briton's tax details as vulnerable to freedom of 
information. As for bank accounts, a newspaper found them available 
from a Russian website at $75 a batch.

Smith parrots the totalitarian's answer that "the innocent have 
nothing to fear". But they do. They know from experience that 
government cannot be trusted with private information. In addition, 
any errors in that information are almost impossible to correct. Ask 
anyone whose credit rating has been falsely challenged by a bank 
computer.

This month some worms started to turn. The Lords rejected Smith's 
demand to be allowed to detain suspects for 42 days without charge. A 
galaxy of former judges, law officers and ministers opposed her. In 
response to the proposed expansion of surveillance, Sir Ken 
Macdonald, the director of public prosecutions, accused Smith of 
going down a path "in which freedom's back is broken by the 
relentless pressure of a security state". Even the Association of 
Chief Police Officers warned that collecting so much data was "a real 
threat to the individual".

The war on terror has been a wretched blind alley in British 
political history. It has revealed all that is worst in British 
government - its authoritarianism, its sloppiness and its 
unaccountability. Yet restoring the status quo ante will be 
phenomenally hard.

In all my years of writing this column, from which I am standing 
down, I have been amazed at the spinelessness of Britain's elected 
representatives in defending liberty and protesting against state 
arrogance. They appear as parties to the conspiracy of power. There 
have been outspoken judges, outspoken peers, even outspoken 
journalists. There have been few outspoken MPs. Those supposedly 
defending freedom are whipped into obedience. I find this ominous.
-------------------------
Next month Simon Jenkins takes up the chairmanship of the National Trust

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The first comment printed when I downloaded this is highly relevant:-

Does the 'amazed' Jenkins not see a connection between the 
spinelessness of Britain's elected representatives in defending 
liberty and protesting against state arrogance and the European 
Union, of which he is a supporter?

With most of our laws now made in Brussels they are one of a piece.

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CONSERVATIVE HOME Blog   26.10.08
Conservative frontbench reemphasises opposition to sharia law

Bridget Prentice, a junior minister at the Ministry of Justice has 
confirmed that Sharia councils will have the right to settle disputes 
between two 'consensual' parties, where they relate to money, 
property and access to children. By the letter of the law, these 
decisions and ruling will have no legal force. But in practice, where 
Sharia councils have ruled on a matter, English family courts will be 
now expected to rubber stamp their decisions.
Nick Herbert and Paul Goodman have both come out in strong opposition 
to this decision:

Nick Herbert, the shadow justice secretary, said: "There can be no 
place for parallel legal systems in our country.
"It is vital that in matrimonial disputes where a Sharia council is 
involved, women's rights are protected and judgments are non-binding."
Another Conservative spokesman, Paul Goodman, the shadow minister for 
communities and local government, accused the Government of keeping 
the public in the dark and warned: "There must be one British law for 
everyone."

Neither are quoted explaining why Sharia courts should not to be 
welcomed or why women's rights should be a concern in them at all. 
David Green of Civitas is however quoted noting that such courts do 
not consider the voice of a woman equal to that of a man, nor treat 
men and women equally under the law.

9.45am: In his speech last month to the Conservative Party 
Conference, Dominic Grieve made clear the Tory position:
"For all its tough talk on terrorism, the government is dropping the 
ball on security and radicalisation. Lax on fanatical preachers. 
Silent on sharia courts. Let me make our position clear. Sharia 
courts can be given no authority over criminal and family law matters 
in Britain. Our law must reign supreme. The next Conservative 
government will make sure it does."