The Conservative-LiberalDemocrat agreement

The agreement signed yesterday between the Conservative and LiberalDemocrat parties to frame their relationship in the new ruling coalition has now been published and can be downloaded here.

This initial agreement document is not very long and is worth reading in full. Of particular interest to me (although other parts of the document are of great importance, too) is point 10., which covers the broad issue of Civil iberties and I quote this section below in full:

Conservative Liberal Democrat coalition negotiations Agreements reached 11 May 2010 - 10. Civil liberties The parties agree to implement a full programme of measures to reverse the substantial erosion of civil liberties under the Labour Government and roll back state intrusion. This will include: A Freedom or Great Repeal Bill. The scrapping of ID card scheme, the National Identity register, the next generation of biometric passports and the Contact Point Database. Outlawing the finger-printing of children at school without parental permission. The extension of the scope of the Freedom of Information Act to provide greater transparency. Adopting the protections of the Scottish model for the DNA database. The protection of historic freedoms through the defence of trial by jury. The restoration of rights to non-violent protest. The review of libel laws to protect freedom of speech. Safeguards against the misuse of anti-terrorism legislation. Further regulation of CCTV. Ending of storage of internet and email records without good reason. A new mechanism to prevent the proliferation of unnecessary new criminal offences.

If these plans are carried through, and I hope they are implemented fully and rapidly, it will be nothing less than the destruction of the 'Police State' the previous Labour government has been busy implementing these part 13 years.

Quite apart from all the other sensible and pragmatic matters touched upon in the Coalition agreement, the section on 'Civil Liberties' does it seems to me justify a special celebration!

Peter Mandelson and the "Digital Economy Bill"

A most illuminating YouTube dissection of the Digital Economy Bill being piloted through Parliament by Lord Mandelson by someone called Dan Bull - a pretty professional effort and ejoyable, too:



(thru the Spectator 'Coffee House' here - main page here)

The power of leadership and an infectious personality

This fellow seems happy and doesn't care what people think of his antics. In a very few minutes they've all joined in the fun:



(thru José M Guardia at Barcepundit)

Is freedom of speech only for those people one happens to agree with?

Or is freedom of speech for everyone?

Like a lot of people I was shocked and angry, and more pertinently fearful, at the election of two British National Party candidates as MEPs during last week's European Parliament elections. I loathe and abhor everytthing about the BNP, but it is a legal political party. I've written here before (here in May 2007 and here in July 2004) denouncing the misguided prohibition on BNP members being employed in various types of employment such as the police.

Similarly, I think the actions of some opponents of the BNP in making it physically impossible for newly-elected BNP MEPs to hold a 'press conference' (aka 'publicity stunt') in London yesterday was completely misguided and quite possibly counter-productive; people receptive to the filth that the BNP promulgates are likely only to see such actions as 'proof' that they are as disriminated against as they claim. The same anti-democratic antics were apparently on display again today in Manchester from people opposed to allowing BNP MEPs to speak. Personally I believe in confronting odious views with debate and discussion - I have sufficient confidence in the strength and validity of my beliefs to be willing to argue against views I dislike, but some people obviouusly don't share this view. They think it satisfactory simply to prevent people speaking with whom they disagree. Whatever this is it is most certainly not 'democracy'.

If the government or anyone else in authority wants to make it impossible for members of odious organisations like the BNP to have a political platform then they should declare it an illegal organisation and have done with it! I do NOT advocate this as a 'solution', because it would not solve anything, merely drive 'underground' people who support BNP ideas. I don't like having to defend the right of odious people such as Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons to speak in public, but defend it I must. Democracy and freedom of speech is not just for 'nice' people, it's for everyone or it has no value - and the police should have been on hand yesterday to defend the right of legally-elected politicians to speak. But the police were curiously-absent in this video report or an event taking place in Parliament Square, which must be in one of the most heavily-policed parts of London. Why? I would hate to think it is because the Metropolitan Police and/or the Labour Government had asked the police not to intervene because it was politically expedient (as Labour had suffered most at the European Parliament elections), but I'm afraid I am forced to consider it as a possibility. Would a violent demonstration like that yesterday have been permitted for a cause with which the Labour Government had no sympathy? That's a hard question, but I'm afraid it HAS to be asked! Specially when one recalls scenes of an elderly Labour Party member who heckled in a pretty restrained manner Jack Straw (then Home Secretary) at a Labour Party conference being forcibly removed from the hall, or the lady who wished merely to recite the names of British military personnel killed in Iraq since 2003 whilst standing near the Cenotaph in London being bundled away by the police and having her DNA samples taken as well as being found guilty of breaching Section 132 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act(!), or this sad incident during another Labour Conference.

What this seems to illustrate, no let me be less mealy-mouthed about it, what it DOES illustrate is that under this present Labour Government, policing and justice depends upon whether views held are 'approved' by Labour. Those who hold views that Labour disagrees with can expect harrassment, whether direct or indirect (by permitting hooligans to shout down views the Government happens not to like).

To summarise, I may loathe and despise everything that the BNP stands for, but whilst it remains a legal organisation their right to express their views within the law must be defended.

Positive DNA ruling!

A small step has just been taken by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) to rein in the authoritarian tendencies of the British government by ruling that DNA samples and fingerprints taken from persons who are not subsequently charged or convicted cannot be retained on file. This runs a coach and horses through Labour's apparent desire to have the DNA of everyone in the country in a database, just in case.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith opines she is 'disappointed' at the ruling. For its part the ECHR has ruled that keeping the information:

"could not be regarded as necessary in a democratic society"

Is the UK, in the fullest sense, still a 'democratic' society or has it morphed into some kind of Dystopian nightmare society? I am angry, embarrassed and scared that I can no longer, in all honesty, answer that question with a resounding and unequivocal 'Yes, the UK is still a democracy'.

Meantime, back at 'stately Wayne Manor' (i.e. the House of Commons) the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has just been reporting on that other little local difficulty - the row resulting from the arrest of Damian Green MP and the searching of his parliamentary office on obviously spurious fears of terrorism as a cover for the government's embarrassment about 'leaks' which have nothing to do with terrorism. Dominic Grieve MP has just sat down after making his response and now Ms Smith is speaking again - more later.

Call to ban tobacco products in EU by 2025

Irish MEP Avril Doyle wants to see a ban on tobacco products across the EU within 15 years:

"I would be happy to see a long-term target date, say 2025, when it would be illegal to sell tobacco products in the EU," she said to an applauding crowd of parliamentarians and global health experts. "That would give them 15 years' notice for all our citizens to realise just how serious we are about not allowing their continued sale in the EU, and hopefully elsewhere," she added.

She was speaking at a conference she had organised, as a member of the steering committee of the EPP, the largest political group in the EU, to discuss 'ways for the EU to comply with what anti-smoking campaigners call the most important article of the World Health Organisation's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, Article 5.3, which requires its signatories to prevent lobbying by tobacco companies on any public health policies.'

The final two paragraphs of the linked article are also quite 'interesting', for what they reveal of the European Commission's long-term intentions; remember these are the people who brought us the [now defunct] EU Constitutional Treaty and the Lisbon Treaty, the one which the irish people rejected in a referendum and which is somehow not quite dead yet:

Talk of banning tobacco and tobacco lobbyists came as the commission unveiled plans to make Europeans pay a lot more for cigarettes by hiking excise taxes. The commission wants to harmonise tobacco taxes across Europe in order to discourage smoking and clamp down on smuggling.

Yes, I am broadly in favour of the EU, but these folks really have a peculiar way of trying to garner the support of my already pretty-sceptical fellow country-men/-women if the polls are to be believed!

Now, as a person who has never smoked, but is not a 'militant' anti-smoker either (that's often, I find, the province of former smokers), I have no personal stake in this and would certainly find a tobacco-free world a much more pleasant place. However, quite apart from the fact that I believe in more liberty, not less (although whether I would really wish to see the 'hard' drugs which are currently illegal become legal is something I'm not totally sure about, to be quite honest), I do wonder if Mrs Doyle and those who think like her have forgotten all they might ever have learned in their history classes at school, about how disastrous that other great attempt at banning a formerly-legal substance (alcohol) was in the US? Do we really want to see tobacco driven underground and become the province of drug-pushers, with all the crime and corruption that this causes? Tobacco is, remember, an addictive substance and people aren't just going to accept meekly the total ban she proposes, any more than those who wished to consume alcohol during 'prohibition' in the US accepted it; the [18th] amendment outlawing alcohol remains the only amendment to the US Constitution ever to have been repealed [by the 21st amendment] and that after only 14 years. No, Mrs Doyle, I doubt very much whether this utopian idea has a chance!

Are we helots or free individuals?

The UK Goverment has announced that it favours changing the law to make a presumption of consent to harvesting of human body parts after death, unless specific prior opposition had been registered or the deceased's family objects. At present only those who who have given prior consent may have their organs harvested after death, although this is sometimes thwarted, I understand, by the objections of family members. See (*) at the end of this article, too.

I have no personal objection to donating my organs and indeed have carried an organ donor card for many years, although I have not added my name formally to any 'Organ Donor Register' as this is presumably a centralised register and I have deep misgivings about the whoe concept of centralised registers for this or any other purpose (e.g. Personal Data Register, NHS online centralised records).

Now I learn that the Scottish Executive (aka 'Scottish Government') is sympathetic to the change suggested by the UK Government.

My position is very clear. I think I have the sole right to decide what will happen to my body parts after I die. I resent strongly the notion that if I were to object to the harvesting of my organs after my death (which as it so happens, I don't) that I must make a positive declaration to that effect. My body belongs to me, not to the State and the presumption is and should remain that no harvesting of body parts can occur without my specific prior consent. Similarly I will choose if and when I wish to end my life (since 1961 suicide has no longer been a crime), provided I am physically able to carry it out (assisting another to commit suicide remains a crime).

The reasoning behind criminalising assisting another to commit suicide is that there is a risk that the person's 'loved ones' might collude in a suicide because they may have a material interest in the person's death, or otherwise gain from it (for example a carer who is member of the family would be 'free' to pursue his/her own interests if there was no longer a requirement to care for the fmaily member who wishes to commit suicide). There is also the fear that 'loved ones' might tacitly, or even explicitly, encourage a relative to commit suicide or cause the person to feel they were doing the 'right thing' by committing suicide.

I'm afraid that whilst I think the effects of this law are sometimes harsh, specially when the person who wishes to commit suicide is physically unable through disablement or infirmity to carry it out without assistance it is probably a necessary precaution in most cases to prevent abuse. Notwithstanding this, I believe that the Swiss organisation Dignitas does valuable and worthwhile work; the link is to the part of the site which is designed to inform people from the UK about the organisation, as the main site is in German. A BBC article about this organisation is here.

To get back to the subject at hand, I think there is the potential for abuses with the harvesting of organs. Of course, we are told that body parts would only be harvested upon death (excepting the case of organ donations made of ogans which are in pairs (e.g. eyes, kidneys) where the donor can survive on one remaining organ, but what if the person was very old, or severely disabled, whereas the potential donee was young and otherwise physically fit? What if the person being looked at as a donor was regarded as in some way less worthy then the potential donee? Far-fetched, you may argue, but it is only a couple of weeks ago that the Prime MInister suggested that people could be refused treatment on the NHS if it was felt they should lose weight, stop smoking or take exercise. The fact that such people were most likely helping to pay for the NHS through their taxes seemed an irrelevant detail! How hard, in such circumstances, would medical personnel try to keep a potential donor alive, specially if the official attitude of the government is to make a presumption that body parts may be harvested unless the donor had lodged specific objection beforehand.

Many will say I am being alarmist. However, it is only a few years ago that it was discovered, accidentally, that for years doctors in various hospitals around the country had been taking organs from dead infants for medical experimentation, without the permission of parents, a matter which was discovered only when the body of an infant had to be exhumed after burial and it was found to be missing most of the vital organs. I think the scandal, when it was exposed, happened to involve a hospital in Liverpool, but was later found to have occurred elsehwere, too.

Basically what all this boils down to is individual liberty. This Government seeks to take unto itself the power of life and death over all citizens. However, the Government is only granted temporary powers by citizens at an election. I think the Government, indeed Parliament itself, would be going way beyond its mandate to change the law to permit post-mortem abstraction of body parts without the specific approval of the donor or, in some curcumstances, members of the deceased's family.

(*) A horrid aspect of this whole issue is the way that the Government's proposals are framed is to imply that a person is somehow lacking in civic-spiritedness by declining to agree to donate body parts after death, by stressing the long waiting-lists of potential donees awaiting body parts and organs. I may feel, and in fact I do feel, that it would be humane on my part to permit my body parts or organs to be taken after my death, if they could help someone else to live longer or in better health. However I would absolutely refuse to feel in any way guilty if I chose not to have this attitude and I object strongly to the moral blackmail being pushed down our throats by the government and the way this is being reported in the media, particularly the BBC, in its reporting today on this matter! It really is just like some of the public 'hate' or 'love' sessions described in George Orwell's novel 1984, where citizens were expected to follow the latest policy changes of 'Big Brother', however quixotic. On this subject in general a lot of the news reporting on the BBC of late has veered away from the delivery of news to the promulgation of propaganda on behalf of the government under the guise of 'manufactured' news stories.