U.K. MEP Daniel Hannan: Transcript of His Attack on Gordon Brown

I don't normally delve into the politics of the European Parliament, but this video of Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan stripping the bark off British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is worth noting. ("The devalued prime minister of a devalued government.") Many American politicians might be hearing the same criticisms next year if the U.S. economy is still depressed even as the national debt soars. Here is a transcript:

Prime Minister, I see you’ve already mastered the essential craft of the European politician, namely the ability to say one thing in this chamber and a very different thing to your home electorate. You’ve spoken here about free trade, and amen to that. Who would have guessed, listening to you just now, that you were the author of the phrase ‘British jobs for British workers’ and that you have subsidised, where you have not nationalised outright, swathes of our economy, including the car industry and many of the banks? Perhaps you would have more moral authority in this house if your actions matched your words? Perhaps you would have more legitimacy in the councils of the world if the United Kingdom were not going into this recession in the worst condition of any G20 country?

The truth, Prime Minister, is that you have run out of our money. The country as a whole is now in negative equity. Every British child is born owing around £20,000. Servicing the interest on that debt is going to cost more than educating the child. Now, once again today you try to spread the blame around; you spoke about an international recession, international crisis. Well, it is true that we are all sailing together into the squalls. But not every vessel in the convoy is in the same dilapidated condition. Other ships used the good years to caulk their hulls and clear their rigging; in other words – to pay off debt. But you used the good years to raise borrowing yet further. As a consequence, under your captaincy, our hull is pressed deep into the water line under the accumulated weight of your debt We are now running a deficit that touches 10% of GDP, an almost unbelievable figure. More than Pakistan, more than Hungary; countries where the IMF have already been called in. Now, it’s not that you’re not apologising; like everyone else I have long accepted that you’re pathologically incapable of accepting responsibility for these things. It’s that you’re carrying on, wilfully worsening our situation, wantonly spending what little we have left. Last year - in the last twelve months – a hundred thousand private sector jobs have been lost and yet you created thirty thousand public sector jobs.

Prime Minister, you cannot carry on for ever squeezing the productive bit of the economy in order to fund an unprecedented engorgement of the unproductive bit. You cannot spend your way out of recession or borrow your way out of debt. And when you repeat, in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we’re ‘well-placed to weather the storm’, I have to tell you that you sound like a Brezhnev-era apparatchik giving the party line. You know, and we know, and you know that we know that it’s nonsense! Everyone knows that Britain is worse off than any other country as we go into these hard times. The IMF has said so; the European Commission has said so; the markets have said so – which is why our currency has devalued by thirty percent. And soon the voters too will get their chance to say so. They can see what the markets have already seen: that you are the devalued Prime Minister of a devalued government.

By James Pethokoukis 25 March 2009

‘We’re anglers not terrorists’

Three anglers claim they were arrested under anti-terror laws in Woodley after using laser pens to frighten ducks away from their bait hooks.

The three men were taken into Loddon Valley Police Station late on Friday, March 7, and two were held overnight, DNA tested, fingerprinted and then released without charge.

The third man was released almost immediately following the 10.30pm incident.

Former Lib Dem councillor Tom McCann said: “When I was in the Thatchers at the weekend and they came in and told me what had happened to them, I couldn’t believe it.

“These were all local men who knew some of the police officers involved. They were fishing on a Friday night. It doesn’t seem possible to me that the police really thought they were terrorists.”

Reading East prospective Parliamentary candidate for the Lib Dems Cllr Gareth Epps said: “Liberal Democrats repeatedly warned that the thousands of new criminal offences created under this Labour Government were dangerous and mostly useless.

“Now we have the surreal spectacle of local fishermen being thrown into the cells using anti-terrorism legislation. Local people are owed an explanation and those arrested an apology, as I understand some of them want to take this further, understandably.”

Police spokesman Adam Fisher said: “Three men were arrested in Woodley on March 7 on suspicion of endangering an aircraft and were later released without charge.

"Over the past year there have been several incidents in the Thames Valley area where civil aviation pilots have reported being dazzled by ground-based lasers shining into their cockpit.

“Obviously this is an issue that we have to take very seriously as it is a matter of public safety.”

A police spokesman clarified later that the men were arrested under the Air Navigation Order 2005 - not terror laws.

For full story

Click here for link to Liberty

By Linda Fort March 24, 2009

Parliament berates police over treatment of press

The Parliament's Joint Select Committee on Human Rights has officially criticised the police for the 'unacceptable' way photojournalists are treated while covering protests.

Over the past few weeks, the Committee has been looking at how police handled the media covering recent protests and demonstrations.

The report, released this week, says that it 'is unacceptable that individual journalists are left with no option but to take court action against officers who unlawfully interfere with their work. Journalists have the right to carry out their lawful business and report the way in which demonstrations are handled by the police without state interference, unless such interference is necessary and proportionate, and journalists need to be confident that they can carry out their role'.

It continues: 'The public in turn have the right to impart and receive information: the media are the eyes and ears of the public, helping to ensure that the police are accountable to the people they serve.

'Effective training of front line police officers on the role of journalists in protests is vital. Police forces should consider how to ensure their officers follow the media guidelines which have been agreed between ACPO and the NUJ, and take steps to deal with officers who do not follow them.'

Source BJP 25th March2009

Police arrest man for 'not' taking photos of sewer-grates and retain his DNA

Channel M (for Manchester) has the story of a man who was arrested for allegedly taking part in terrorism reconnaissance by taking pictures of sewer-grates in Manchester. The problem? The man was not taking pictures. He didn't even have a camera, and there were no pictures of sewer-grates on his phone... Watch the report here.

Liberty stated in press release 4th Dec 2008 "Retaining DNA samples of innocents breaches human rights"

The DNA profiles of roughly 850,000 innocent people should be taken off the National DNA Database (NDNAD) following a European Court of Human Rights judgment today said Liberty. Two Britons whose DNA was retained by police brought the legal challenge, claiming that their inclusion on the NDNAD continued to cast suspicion on them after they had been cleared of any wrong-doing.

Liberty welcomed the decision, which will require the UK Government to reconsider its policies under which the DNA of innocent individuals (those who have not been charged or cautioned) is permanently retained by police.

Last month the Home Office revealed that 2,324,879 recorded criminals (40 percent) in England and Wales did not actually have a DNA sample held on the NDNAD. At the same time, the Home Office reported that 857,366 innocent individuals’ profiles are currently held on the NDNAD. [1]

Liberty’s Director Shami Chakrabarti said:

“This is one of the most strongly worded judgments that Liberty has ever seen from the Court of Human Rights. That Court has used human rights principles and common sense to deliver the privacy protection of innocent people that the British Government has shamefully failed to deliver.”

The Home Office is expected to hold a consultation about the retention of DNA following today’s judgment. The judgment would not have affected the outcome of any of the recent, high profile, convictions where DNA evidence has been a significant factor.

Liberty’s Legal Officer Anna Fairclough said:

"Forty percent of Britain's criminals are not on this database, but hundreds of thousands of innocent people are. Sweeping up the innocent with the guilty does not help fight crime. The Court of Human Rights has protected the privacy of British people so poorly let down by our own government."

Key passages of Grand Chamber Judgment of S and Marper v the United Kingdom include:

● The Court was struck by the blanket and indiscriminate nature of the power of retention in England and Wales. In particular, the data in question could be retained irrespective of the nature or gravity of the offence with which the individual was originally suspected or of the age of the suspected offender; the retention was not time-limited; and there existed only limited possibilities for an acquitted individual to have the data removed from the nationwide database or to have the materials destroyed.

● The Court expressed a particular concern at the risk of stigmitisation, stemming from the fact that persons in the position of the applicants, who had not been convicted of any offence and were entitled to the presumption of innocence, were treated in the same way as convicted persons. It was true that the retention of the applicants’ private data could not be equated with the voicing of suspicions. Nonetheless, their perception that they were not being treated as innocent was heightened by the fact that their data were retained indefinitely in the same way as the data of convicted persons, while the data of those who had never been suspected of an offence were required to be destroyed.

● It observed that the protection afforded by Article 8 of the Convention would be unacceptably weakened if the use of modern scientific techniques in the criminal justice system were allowed at any cost and without carefully balancing the potential benefits of the extensive use of such techniques against important private life interests. Any State claiming a pioneer role in the development of new technologies bore special responsibility for striking the right balance in this regard.

●In the Court’s view, the capacity of DNA profiles to provide a means of identifying genetic relationships between individuals was in itself sufficient to conclude that their retention interfered with the right to the private life of those individuals. The possibility created by DNA profiles for drawing inferences about ethnic origin made their retention all the more sensitive and susceptible of affecting the right to private life. The Court concluded that the retention of both cellular samples and DNA profiles amounted to an interference with the applicants’ right to respect for their private lives, within the meaning of Article 8.1 of the Convention.

Click here for link to Liberty

Source BJP 4th March 2009 and Liberty 4th Dec 2008

The Orwell Prize 2009: Blog Prize

I am very proud to have entered and for my submissions to be successfully accepted for The Orwell Prize 2009: Blog Prize.

The next milestone for me will be the Longlist Announcement - Wednesday 25th February 2009.

Actually, if I get that far I will be very pleased especially as the standard of entries of my peers is very high.

The shortlist will be announced on Wednesday 25th March 2009.

Primrose Hill and Belsize February 2009!

I could not resist the temptation on that only too brief Sunday and Monday of "real" snow for 18 years to get out there with my daughter on the piste of Primrose!

For my daughter this was the first time to experience snow, she loved every moment of it.

As for myself, I remember only too well the last occasion in London 18 years ago when I found myself snowed in my Baker Street office.

I seem to recall then that it was apparently the wrong kind of snow as far as British Rail was concerned! Now in 2009 it was the wrong kind of quantity! It makes me very proud of our British traditions to blame the weather! I don't ever remember being without public transport of some kind or the other whilst on holiday in the Ski resort of Gstad or Zermat in Switzerland. The Swiss do what comes natural and that is to plan for the snow and anticipate the ice, but then they have had rather more practice at it every year for whole seasons long.

What a pity that as global warming is taking its hold not only is the polar ice caps melting at an alarming rate, but also the winter paradise of the Alps is facing increased ice melts and industrial pollution from cars and industry not in Switzerland itself but from the heavily polluted atmosphere that deliver contaminates which are concentrated in the ice and snow. This is not a very well known or publicised fact in Switzerland but there is a team that sets out every year from the University of Bern to investigate the worsening pollution. But it acts as a strong reminder that CO2 global warming is touching all wildernesses and not just the capital cities.

Author: Nigel Rumble 17 February 2009

Power without responsibility

"Respecting press freedoms while safeguarding public safety can be a difficult balancing act, especially when mayhem breaks out at an unauthorised demo. But if you've been reading our news pages recently, you'll know that there's a lack of equilibrium when photographers come face to face with police and their sometimes over-zealous use of stop-and-search powers.

As the Home Office has quite correctly stated, there are no restrictions on photographing in public spaces, and the government - as far as we're aware - has no plans to introduce any. But it has failed to address concerns that despite new guidelines designed to ease tensions, many rank-and-file officers seem unaware or are blatantly disregarding them. Simply put, if guidelines aren't enforced, they're not worth the paper they're written on.

Which is why I'm particularly concerned about section 76 of the new Counter-Terrorism Act, which criminalises taking pictures of police officers 'likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism'. The wording is little different to the 2000 Act, (in fact, it's equally vague), except that police officers are specifically mentioned. And that's an important detail because the issue we're fighting is not so much erroneous legislation (although many see the Act within wider concerns about the erosion of our liberties) as the misuse of power. The amendments in the 2008 Act provide further ammunition for officers who, for reasons of their own volition, are effectively criminalising street photography ad-hoc. "

See my last blog where I discussed Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 and read Liberty for more facts if you wish to join the debate and campaign for more sensible measures of police stop and search powers relating to photography.

Simon Bainbridge, Editor BJP 11/02/09