Friday, 5th December 2008
Curiouser and curiouser
8:04pm
Apologies for referring twice in three days to the Estimable Joshua, but he has now answered the question I posed here about Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick’s letter with another fact that no-one else has spotted (the landing carpet between our respective studies has been worn thin over the past few days). In the letter, Quick suggested that the police made no attempt to obtain a warrant to search Damian Green’s Parliamentary office because the law provided no basis for doing so, since it was assumed that consent for this search would be forthcoming. This struck me as rather an odd thing to say. It was backed up by Quick’s statement of the law as follows:
The effect of the condition in subsection 3(c) is that a Justice of the Peace may not issue a search warrant under section...
Ruling by a Radical
4:17pm
At the end of October, I wrote here about the interview Barack Obama gave back in 2001 in which he said the American constitution was flawed because it only provided for ‘negative liberty’ – which I suggest is what genuine freedom consists of -- as opposed to what the state should do for individuals, or ‘positive rights’ as this is known, which I suggest amounts to state control of individual behaviour. He regretted the fact that the civil rights movement had
a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change.I commented that, since Obama recognised that the Supreme Court was unlikely to redraft the constitution, his stated aim was to...
Paliamentary Cluedo
2:51pmFurther to my post below, the Home Office appears to have released yesterday the text of a letter written to the Home Secretary by Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick, the officer in charge of the Damian Green investigation. As has been noted by others, the letter contradicts the Speaker’s claim that the police failed to inform the Serjeant-at-Arms Jill Pay that she was entitled to refuse consent to search Green’s Parliamentary office and to demand a warrant instead. This was always a bizarre claim to make, since if someone is asked for their consent it is obviously implicit that they have the option of refusing to give it. In his letter, moreover, Quick states not only that the police told Pay they were seeking her consent to search Green’s office, but that she had taken a day to do...
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