Longrider

While America has traditionally trumpeted its claim to be the land of the free; Britain has generally regarded itself as the cradle of that particular trait. And, indeed, for much of our recent history that has been generally true. However, things are taking an ugly turn for the worse.

Wearing a T shirt with a slogan that the police take a dislike to is enough to get you arrested.

A girl was arrested for wearing her “Bollocks to Blair” T-shirt at the Midlands Game Fair last weekend. Charlotte Denis, 20, a gamekeeper from Gloucestershire, was stopped by police as she left the Countryside Alliance stand because of the “offensive” slogan.

Words fail to express just how crass this is. This is blatant abuse of power by the police. Their excuse that it “would offend a 70-80-year-old woman” is utterly incomprehensible. The police have mind readers that are able to identify what is offensive to a particular demographic group now?

No, this is exactly what it appears to be - oppression of free expression by a police force that has been encouraged by government to stamp on dissent wherever it finds it.

Oh, and while we’re at it:

Bollocks to Blair!

Unfortunately I managed to miss the “charm offensive” roadshow that came to Bristol last week. However, NO2ID managed a small presence and Dave Gould, a local activist managed to interview Andrew Burnham MP, on the matter. It was televised and I watched with a mixture of amazement and amusement as it was reminiscent of the Jeremy Paxman interview with Michael Howard.

- So, how much will the project cost?
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- So, how much will the project cost?
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- Okay, an easier question… Would ID cards have stopped the London bombings in July 2005?
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- Okay, have you read your own bill?
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It was a delight to watch - not least, because other people could see just what buffoonery the government is engaging in. Stupidity from the mouth of a government minister is always a pleasure as it condemns them without effort on our part. Equally it is worrying. Surely a minister of the crown should be able to answer such simple questions without hesitation? And, shouldn’t he have read the bill in question?

However, Mr Burnham was better prepared when talking to the Bristol Evening Post.

He said: “Anyone who is worried about these improvements to the security to our country clearly has something to hide.

“There is nothing to fear about any of this and if people want to be able to continue to travel abroad freely, as they do now, then these changes are vital.”

He later told the Evening Post: “There is no secret about it. This is the first step towards identity cards.

“The biometric data being used in the new passports will form the basis of ID cards.

“There are a lot of myths being bandied about by people and I will admit there is some pressure on me to find a way of making the database secure.”

What Mr Burnham is conveniently ignoring is that the bill has not passed through parliament - indeed, it still has to receive a third reading, go through the Lords (and doubtless back to the commons) before gaining royal assent. So, Mr Burnham and his puppet masters are doing what they have systematically done since coming to power in 1997 - displaying a complete contempt for the parliamentary process and the rule of law.

And, to say that anyone who is worried has something to hide shows that he is worthy of nothing but contempt himself for repeating yet again the same tired mantra so beloved by the hard of thinking. We have plenty to worry about; Mr Burnham and his odious New Labour colleagues are the biggest threat to the security of this country than any terrorist group.
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I guess this story has been doing the rounds since it was published in the Guardian yesterday. The upshot is that David Mery was detained and subsequently arrested by the police for “behaving suspiciously”. His behaviour? Well, he walked into Southwick tube station past police officers without looking at them. He then went down to the platform and while waiting for his train, checked his text messages. All this while wearing a rucksack, which, it would seem, became a heinous crime on July 7th. The police subsequently raided his flat and took away various items of a “suspicious nature”.

“They take away several mobile phones, an old IBM laptop, a BeBox tower computer (an obsolete kind of PC from the mid-1990s), a handheld GPS receiver (positioning device with maps, very useful when walking), a frequency counter (picked it up at a radio amateur junk fair because it looked interesting), a radio scanner (receives short wave radio stations), a blue RS232C breakout box (a tool I used to use when reviewing modems for computer magazines), some cables, a computer security conference leaflet, envelopes with addresses, maps of Prague and London Heathrow, some business cards, and some photographs I took for the 50 years of the Association of Computing Machinery conference.”

Clearly the man is a menace to society and should be locked up indefinitely. If only we had the powers to do that. Oh, wait, we’ve done that one already…

Mr Mery was fortunate, Sir Ian Blair is proposing turning his officers into Judge Dredd style enforcers - he could have been summarily executed. Just as well they don’t do that. Oh, wait, they do…

One of the great worries about the Identity Cards bill is that the audit trail will provide the security services with sufficient data to indulge in profiling - something that happened to Mr Mery. It could happen to any one of us. indeed, given the level of incompetence displayed by the police during Mr Mery’s experience, I am seriously worried about my regular trips to London. After all, I do not conform to the usual profile. I have long dark hair, generally wear dark clothing and a long dark coat… Oh, and I carry my stuff in a rucksack. Well, bang to rights, then.

Welcome to Britain in the 21st Century, the land of free speech and freedom of movement. The land where you can be arrested for using your mobile phone while wearing a rucksack. Osama Bin Laden must be splitting his sides.

According to the BBC, the Government’s biometrics roadshows have been wowing shoppers. I guess these shoppers are easily wowed. Well it does seem that way when you have comments such as this:

A typical response about the desirability of such measures comes from Barry Burton, from nearby Netherton. “I’m all for making everything more secure,” he says. “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to fear.”

Here we go again - the same mantra, the same tired, debunked, fraudulent lie repeated by someone who is willing to demonstrate to the world their lack of reasoning skills. The subliminal message being that anyone who objects to increased surveillance must have something to hide; something secretive, furtive and criminal - otherwise we would be happy to have our lives an open book to be summarily surveyed by any casual snooper. Clearly Barry Burton is foolish enough not to give the matter any deep thought. That, or he is merely a stooge for the roadshow.

Yet - and I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it while idiots such as this keep repeating the nothing to hide mantra - we all choose to conceal aspects of our lives from others. This is simply our desire for privacy. I choose to keep my shopping habits to myself because I do not wish to be bombarded with junk from retailers for example, and I fail to see why I should grant the Home Office access to information about my previous addresses. It serves no useful purpose and is none of their business - consequently, I shall not tell them. Perhaps most of all - as we are being bombarded by the big lie - it is important to repeat once more, that this national database will create an intrusive audit trail. The government’s open touting of business confirms what objectors prophesied and government denied; that purchasing habits will find their way into it and be available for a price to businesses. So, my careful refusal to engage the market surveyor will be undermined when they can buy their way into the database - except, of course, I will not be registering.

In the meantime, perhaps Barry Burton and those of his ilk might like to see what has happened in the Netherlands where compulsory ID documents have been in force since January this year.

Freedom in Holland officially died Jan. 1st 2005 when a new law came into effect, making it compulsory in the Netherlands for everybody above the age of 14 to - at all times and outside of one’s home - carry an official ID. Leaving home without it means at least a fifty Euro fine, eventually a court case. The first trial - in which a batch of two-hundred-and-fifty people is taken to court for not carrying an ID card - starts next week Sept. 28th in the central dutch city of Utrecht. Demonstrations against this Dutch, and also global shame, have been announced.

At the end of last August close to fourty-seven-thousand people had been fined, of which four thousand were children aged 14 and 15. Last January around 100 people a day were stopped, checked by the police and fined when they were not able to immediately produce a valid ID card.

And, tellingly, the author of the piece; Henk Ruyssenaars reminds us of this:

And remember: we were promised a European Union without borders, where we all would be able to travel freely, not even needing a passport. None of it was true: it was all a pack of lies.

Ah, but all those folk who have been arrested and charged must have had something to hide. Barry Burton won’t mind being stopped while going about his business and being asked demanded to show his papers; his life is an open book, he has nothing to hide, so he will have nothing to fear…

As a footnote to all of this, when NO2ID tried to discover details of these roadshows, they were thwarted by kafkaesque departments that claimed not to know anything.

Apparently the Home Office is not publicising the venues for the Roadshow until the morning of each event due to ’security reasons’

Clearly the Home Office did not want them to know about it - something to hide, perhaps?

Following a roadshow by Home Office Ministers in Edinburgh, Grant Stott of the Scotsman comments on the surveillance society and he doesn’t have a problem with it. Now I’m perfectly happy to engage with people who have thought the issue through, read the impending bill and understand its potential impact - and still think it’s a good idea. However, Mr Stott, clearly hasn’t.

“The ID pass debate is a very contentious one and, to be honest, one I don’t have a problem with. Actually, that’s a lie. I do have an issue with it. Where about in my wallet should I keep it? Should I put it beside my cashline card or gym membership? I think you’ll probably be able to tell which one is used more often.

But I really don’t think they’d be a bad thing. Think about the fun we could have at parties showing each others photos! It would be as much fun as we have at the airport when we all compare those dodgy passport snaps.”

This buffoonery reduces the debate to a level that misses the issues completely. Let’s be clear here, we are not talking about a plastic card; we are talking about a national database that will provide a unique key that identifies every individual. A key that will link records in one government database with those in another - an audit trail that follows employment, purchases, GP and hospital visits, and tax, driving and criminal records. Indeed, given the enabling nature of the legislation, anything a future Home Secretary wants it to link to. And Grant Stott thinks it’s a funny joke, one where he compares his portrait with those of his equally shallow and hard of thinking acquaintances.

He repeats the same fallacious arguments propounded by our equally buffoonish Home Secretary and Prime Minister.

“I don’t think there’s much of an argument, when you think about it the choices we have are; stopping the cameras in the name of our human rights, or not being able to freely walk down our main thoroughfares at night.”

No, these are not choices we have to make. Security and liberty are not tradeoffs. If the streets are unsafe, then more effective policing is in order. CCTV cameras do not make our society safer any more than ID cards and the national database will. CCTV cameras simply drive the criminals elsewhere - where there are no CCTV cameras. It isn’t difficult to work out. Clearly, though, it is for Mr Stott who appears to have swallowed Home Office newspeak hook, line and sinker.

And then the prize nincompoop comes up with this:

“Similarly with ID cards. Yeah, they could be a pain in the proverbial, having to show them at the most inopportune moments, but if you’ve not done anything wrong, then you shouldn’t really have anything to worry about!”

For crying out loud! How many times do we have to tolerate fools repeating this tired old mantra? Everyone has something that they wish not to share. We may not know what it is. The Jews in Germany during the late nineteen twenties didn’t realise that their ethnic origins were something they would need to conceal. In a more mundane situation, we all choose to keep parts of our lives private - unless Mr Stott wishes to share his bank details, PIN numbers, national insurance number, reasons for visiting his GP, home address, telephone number and the log on details to his internet account would be nice, too.

That Mr Stott is willfully ignorant is bad enough - that a newspaper such as the Scotsman should give credence to his ignorance is bordering on the criminal.
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There’s an article in the Guardian yesterday written by Michael Cross. In it, he makes a case for Identity Cards. Fair enough. However, he attempts to demolish the counter argument rather clumsily.

“The government’s ID card team this week made an important admission. They admitted that, much of the time, the new systems won’t work. It de-fangs a common argument against the scheme - that it was conceived in an IT consultant’s fantasy world, where citizens are obedient and technology always functions. (The opponents’ next logical leap, from “It’ll never work” to “It’ll create a totalitarian state” is beyond the intellectual scope of this column.)”

If that is so, then Mr Cross is not particularly intelligent. There is no paradox. An imperfect scheme is perfectly capable of being used in an oppressive manner. It isn’t difficult to make that leap - indeed, it is merely a small step in logic. But then, Mr Cross is looking at this from the perspective of the IT industry that hopes to make a killing. Whether it works or not is largely irrelevant; they will make their money regardless. Therefore, Mr Cross wants this shabby invasion of our privacy to go ahead; there’s mulah to be made. This article is simply a warning to keep off his patch - ID refusniks are a threat to him and his ilk. Too bad, he’ll just have to get used to it as I’ve no plans to sacrifice my liberties so that the IT industry can make a few bucks.

He finishes the article by asking the following question:

“Opponents will say that conceding the fallibility of biometrics in day-to-day life removes the card’s big selling point, so the whole programme should be scrapped. The question to throw back at them is, if the card could be shown to work perfectly, would they accept it?”

No. Next!

Yesterday was just another day and another bomb or eleven in the city of Baghdad. The recent bombs in London pale into insignificance when we see the daily horror Baghdad’s citizens live through.

Forgive me if I seem a little cynical when George Bush talks of liberating Iraq. The coalition forces were not an army of liberation, they were one of invasion. They are not there by invitation. Had they been, there would have been no objection from me. This was a war waged on a false premise. A premise exposed as a lie. And as each lie was exposed, the next layer would be peeled away to reveal another equally preposterous fabrication. Until we hit the inviolable truth; regime change. Saddam Hussein was indeed a nasty, vicious, brutal dictator who terrorised his citizens and I shed no tears at his downfall - good riddance to very bad rubbish. It was the one decent achievement of the whole sorry escapade. But regime change is illegal. And that makes the war illegal - whatever the attorney general might say. Even if governments and heads of state can paint a thin veneer of respectability over it, the sheer absence of morality seeps through.

Perhaps worse, was the utter incompetence. In their haste to invade, the US and UK failed to even consider the lessons of history. If as a casual observer, I could foresee the current quagmire of warring tribes, surely they with their intelligence services could? Surely, they cannot have been that crass, stupid and blind? Iraq is an artificial nation carved from the downfall of the Ottoman empire, an uneasy collection of competing tribal groups. The cracks were held together with the band-aid of the Ba’athist regime. Removing that regime as happened in the former Yugolsvia brings the whole edifice down.

We may be fed news of “insurrection” and “insurgency” or even terrorism. But the truth is; Iraq is engaged in a tribal civil war that was entirely predictable. That the coalition did not predict this and prepare for it along with a suitable exit strategy, compounds their ignorance, stupidity and arrogance. If the war was illegal, that it was so incompetently planned and executed, is criminal.

Still, we may rest easy. The good citizens of Baghdad may sleep well tonight, for they have been liberated, George Bush said so.

In the wake of hurricane Katrina global fuel prices have risen dramatically. As they do in the wake of any disaster, it seems. Far be it for me to even hint that there might be a little profiteering going on here, so I won’t…

In the UK we are heavily taxed on fuel - of the 90 odd pence we currently pay at the pumps, around 60 pence goes straight to the exchequer. This is a legacy of the accelerated tax brought about by the previous administration in an attempt to persuade us to use less. And didn’t that work a treat?

Five years ago the farming and road haulage lobbies joined forces and blockaded oil refineries and outlets, thereby starving the nation of fuel. In their attempts to persuade the government to accede to their demands, they blackmailed ordinary users - preventing us from going about our daily business. So, while many supported their stance, I like many others, abhorred it. While I sympathize with their position, I do not approve of their methods and never will. Tomorrow, it looks like starting all over again, although they tell us that this will be protest rather than blockade. If that is so, all well and good - and I wish people would resist panic buying; it helps no one.

Protests are a good thing. Look at organisations such as Greenpeace. Through decades of protest they have - rightly or wrongly - influenced public opinion and government policy. For protest to work, you need patience and persistence.

Civil disobedience is a good thing in the right circumstances - Mahatma Ghandi used it to great effect.

“Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state becomes lawless or corrupt.”

It is arguable that such a situation now exists in the UK whereby the government is waging war on our liberties in the name of public protection (why am I reminded of the reign of terror?). Civil disobedience finished off the poll tax and precipitated the demise of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership - so, little people can have an effect. It is a matter of choosing one’s battlefields and fighting those conflicts where there is a reasonable chance of success.

For the first time in my life, I am bracing myself to engage in civil disobedience. I will not register for the national identity register and flatly refuse to carry an identity card. The difference between my actions and the fuel blockades of 2000, is that enough ID card refuseniks will disrupt the process of government - we hurt no one else.

The difference here is twofold. Given the matter in hand; cost of fossil fuels; the fuel lobby is already starting off on the back foot. Protesting for cheaper fossil fuels that will pump yet more hydrocarbons into the atmosphere is not going to win friends and influence people. I know, I know, there’s rank hypocrisy going on, but that’s the reality and the protesters will have to work within that. Also, while protesting outside refineries is fine - it’s peaceful protest - blockades amount to blackmail and no government in its right mind will concede to that. I certainly wouldn’t. Also, should they want to, the authorities can invoke the civil contingencies act to keep the refineries open. This is not a battle that the little people can win.

As I said earlier, we must choose our battlefields. I’ve chosen mine.
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