Pathetic

David Goodhart in Prospect magazine:
We are not living in a police state. Not even a remotely authoritarian one. In fact we, all of us, have never enjoyed so much liberty—personal, political and legal. Yet to assert this view sets one at odds with a large part of liberal opinion in Britain. 
… When I read the [...]

Abu Qatada and human rights

Lots of complaints along the following lines.
Alisdair Palmer in the Telegraph:
One step forward, two steps back. The Law Lords ruled last week that Abu Qatada – the Islamic extremist who has called for the murder of Jews, Americans and Britons, and who has been identified as al-Qaeda’s spiritual leader in Britain – can be deported [...]

Where are we going with this, and where do we want to end up? (Part 2)

Part two of an ongoing, indefinite number of ‘observations’ in no particular order.
Eroding the right to trial by jury
It was proposed by this Government (when Jack’ Straw was Home Secretary) to remove the right to trial by jury for offences including theft, criminal damage, burglary and assault, or so-called ‘either way’ offences, and in  fraud trials [...]

Polly Toynbee is quite mad

In the Guardian:
Meanwhile a second anti-state battleground had opened up, as libertarians of right and left attacked the government for Big Brother-like interference with the privacy and freedoms of the citizen. Labour’s plans to introduce identity cards, to allow police to hold terrorist suspects without trial for 42 days and the widespread use of CCTV cameras [...]

Won’t somebody think of the children?

When the Government proposes a measure it sometimes exhorts us to think of an unknown number of children who would suffer if we didn’t support it (for example ContactPoint) – emotional blackmail by any other name.
The very same Government is, however, complicit in the suffering of a known number of children in Immigration Detention Centres, [...]