No Mandate Brown is slowly but surely revealing himself as the tin-pot dictator we all know him to be.

Between 2009 and 2014, new rules will come into force requiring 53 pieces of information to be captured and handed over to the state for every journey in and out of the country.  As well as the type of information you’d expect – name, date of birth, nationality, passport details, etc. – they also want to know how much you paid for your ticket, credit card details, email address, “no show” details for previous flights, itinery, contact numbers of people being visted and “other biographical information”.

This information be required for ports, including the Eurotunnel, but that’s not all.  Anyone sailing a yacht out of territorial waters for the day will need to provide the information, as will anyone flying a light aircraft out of British airspace.

The British government says that the information will allow them to refuse travel to anyone a bit dodgy but the rules will allow them to stop people who have outstanding fines such as parking tickets from travelling.

So who’s going to check these details collected on every one of the 305 million journeys in and out of the country?  HM Revenue and Customs?  It’s a well-known fact that they’re cutting jobs so perhaps not.  The police?  They can’t even keep up with Criminal Record Bureau (CRB) checks to stop kiddie-fiddlers from working in schools, let alone check 305m travel details a year.  The security services?  They certainly don’t have the resources and given the role of security services in pretty much every attrocity and crime against humanity in recent history, nor should they.

This is an ill-conceived idea with absolutely no merit whatsoever.  The state has no business knowing all these details about citizens.  Government exists to serve the people, not the other way around.

Technorati Tags: Police State

The British government, acting on instructions from their masters in Federal Europe, have abolished our right to privacy.

Jacqui Smith, the new Home Secretary, signed a Statutory Instrument in July bringing an EU Durective into force requiring all phone records to be kept for at least one year and made available to various state agencies and even local authorities when requested.

The data collected and made available to anyone ranging from police officers and security services down to local council officers and doctors includes the numbers you call, how long you’ve been on the phone, the name and address of the person the number relates to and for mobile phones, the geographic location of the call.

Moblie phone companies can pinpoint your location, usually within a few feet, using triangulation.  Triangulation involves looking at the signal strength from the transmitters that your phone is connected to and, factoring in geographic features, an accurate location for the phone can be calculated allowing mobile users to be tracked whether they are using their phones or not.  People who write spy books aren’t making this stuff up, in a previous job I spoke to someone who dealt with the requests from the Police for phone tracking at Orange.

Plans are afoot to extend the legislation – again, without the involvement of the British Parliament – to cover emails and internet usage.

Every piece of “anti-terror” legislation that eminates from this shower of shits in Westminster brings us closer to the kind of society Orwell envisaged in 1984.

Despite the fact that judges – like the police – are supposed to be the independent upholders of the law, Lord Justice Sedley has called for everyone to be on a DNA database.

Sedley says that the current system is unfair because only people who have been involved with the police are on the database.  He cites the fact that people who are arrested but not charged or people who are convicted but subsequently acquitted have their DNA on the police database forever but rather than draw the obvious conclusion – that keeping DNA of innocent people is wrong and should be taken off the database – he concludes that every innocent person in the country should have their DNA profile stored on a police database.

Lucky for Lord Justice Sedley that the British government is going to force every citizen to hand over a DNA sample for a big database and that every child is going to appear on a childrens identity database which will no doubt be expanded to include DNA samples of children as well.  But as this is all going to happen anyway, why does Sedley feel the need to ask for it anyway?  The only reasonable conclusion is that he is promoting New Liebour policy which is highly inappropriate for a member of the judiciary.

Traitor Bliar got upset a while back when a Tory MP suggested we were living in a police state.  What does he think now?

The Home Office is considering giving Police the power to take DNA samples and fingerprints, without the consent of the “offender” for minor “crimes” such as not wearing a seatbelt, speeding and dropping litter.  The Police currently have to take an “offender” to the Police Station to be able to take their DNA samples but under the new regime they would be allowed to do this in the street.

This is all while a British government supported genetic watchdog has expressed concerns that an average of one person a minute has their DNA stored in the British government’s DNA database and that black men are 4 times more likely to have their DNA taken than white men.

I would certainly never submit to having my DNA or fingerprints taken voluntarily.  I once had my car broken into and was asked to provide fingerprints so they could discount mine from any they took.  After weighing up the pro’s and con’s (it was a company car anyway) I declined knowing full well that my fingerprints would be kept on their records indefinitely even though I hadn’t committed any crime.

It is also worrying that black men are 4 times more likely to have their DNA taken but not for the lefty liberal reasons the CRE and others are bothered.  It’s a simple fact that young black men in inner cities commit a disproportionately high number of crimes.  Race or colour has nothing to do with it – if you belong to a group that is statistically responsible for a high proportion of crimes then you should expect to recieve more attention from the police.  What is worrying is that there was no complaint about the high number of muslims who have had their DNA taken and that’s because, despite belonging to the group that is most likely to blow shit up and lop people’s heads off, they haven’t been targetted with the same vigour as black people.

We’re rapidly descending into a police state here.  The state doesn’t need to know your most intimate details, DNA profile, fingerprints or exact whereabouts whenever you drive your car to run the country or make us safe.  Our freedoms and liberties are being taken off us in the name of fighting terrorism – the same terrorists that target the west because they don’t want us to have those same freedoms and liberties.  The British government is actually doing the terrorists job for them and a damn sight more effectively than they ever could.

No Mandate Brown has already spoken in favour of giving the state the power to detain people suspected of terrorism for 3 months without charge. Now Lord Carlile, the “independent” advisor to the Goblin King’s rump cabinet on anti-terrorism laws, is saying that politicians should make the decision on how long suspects can be detained without charge, judges should.

Lord Carlile is an Illiberal Dipshit Lord and campaigned to get a UK version of the US Patriot Act introduced in this country. The US Patriot Act allows the US government to detain – without charge, trial or access to legal representation – any forieng citizen for an indefinite period.

Of course, to fall foul of anti-terrorism laws you need to do something really bad like stand outside Downing Street reading the names of soldiers killed in Iraq or stand outside Parliament with a blank placard or wear a “Bollocks to Blair” t-shirt in Parliament Square. For these henous crimes you can currently be locked up for a month without charge.

This decision should not be made by unelected judges. Elected politicians have already rejected it knowing that it is not what the electorate wants. When the British government first tried to bring in 90 day detention it instructed the police to write a proposal asking for it and then said “look, the Police are asking for it” by way of justification for abusing our civil rights. Expect the Goblin King to appear on the telly shortly telling us “Look, the British independent British judiciary have British asked for it. British. How can we British refuse to British give them what they British need to do their British job?”.

The Metropolitan Police spent £111k last year trying to remove Brian Haw, the anti-war protester who embarasses the British government outside Parliament.

The British government brought in a new law banning any form of protest – peaceful or otherwise, within 1km of Parliament and sought to use it to remove Brian Haw. Unfortunately for them a judge ruled that as Haw has been there for 6 years and the legislation was brought in after that, Haw was entitled to stay where he was. But not before 78 police officers were involved in dragging this one man – who hasn’t shown any inclination towards violence in 6 years of protesting outside Parliament – from his spot on Parliament Square.

No other government in any civillised nation in the world bans peaceful protest from outside their parliament.

While I’m on the subject of this illiberal law, I don’t think it’s lawful and I’ll tell you why. It’s nothing to do with being illiberal, a breach of human rights, violating our rights under the constitution or anything like that. It’s those two letters – km. Under English law the use of kilometres for road signs, bridleways and other forms of official measurements are illegal and I think that this metric exclusion zone is illegal too.

Support for the amendment to the Freedom of Information Act that will exempt MPs from the regulations has dropped significantly and it looks likely that the bill will be rejected by the Lords.

That is assuming, of course, that the bill makes it that far because divisions within the Commons means that the bill may run out of parliamentary time and have to start again in the next session of Parliament if it can get enough support.

MPs supporting the amendment claim that the change in the law is necessary to protect communications from their constituents but this argument is deliberate misinformation.  The law already prevents disclosure of personally identifiable information – there is no need to change the law to allow MPs to operate in complete secrecy and to deliberately withhold information.

The Fraud (Trials without a Jury) Bill, which seeks to remove the right to trial by jury for fraud cases, is due for its second reading in the Lords.

John Reid, the British Home Secretary, declares that the Bill is conpatible with the European Convention on Human Rights but fails to mention whether it is compatible with our own constitution.  Which it isn’t.

The 1215 Magna Carta guarantees the right to trial by jury.  There are only three clauses of Magna Carta still in force today and the right to trial by jury is one of them:

XXIX. NO Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the Land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either Justice or Right

The Fraud (Trials without a Jury) Bill does not repeal Magna Carta explicitly and the rule of implied repeal doesn’t apply here because Magna Carta is a constitutional law and must be explictly repealed as established in the Metric Martyrs case (Thoburn v Sunderland City Council).

Denying the right to trial by jury is illegal and unconstitutional.

John Reid, the British Home Secretary, wants to try and change the law again to allow the state to hold suspected terrorists for more than 28 days without charge.

The British government has already tried to extend the limit to 3 months but it was defeated.  No developed country in the world allows suspects of any crime to be detained for 3 months without charge.

As I said back when the 3 month limit was first proposed, if the authorities have sufficient evidence to suspect someone of terrorism, they should have sufficient evidence to charge them.  If the case is complex the courts can remand the suspect whilst the case against them is built.  Alternatively, the suspect could be charged with something trivial while they’re being investigated – how many suspected terrorists do their archery practice every Sunday as per Edward III’s writ in 1363 which has never been repealed?  How many terrorist suspects are guilty of breaking an egg at the sharp end in blatant disregard of one of Edward VI’s laws?

Where there is a will, there’s a way.  These illiberal laws are designed to cutail the rights and freedoms of every citizen, not just suspected terrorists.

It appears New Liebour have inadvertently proved the theory of time travel by slowly moving us back to 1984.

There was a joke email doing the rounds a couple of years ago saying that the estate of George Orwell were sueing the Labour Party for breach of copyright.  It was funny at the time but I think someone at Liebour HQ must have taken it seriously and thought they’d better get their money’s worth if they were going to get sued.

Children as young as ten are being asked to complete a questionaire on their school and home life.  The questionaire asks if they feel safe at home and school – sensible questions because a child that feels unsafe needs help.  The questionaire also asks if they drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes – a bit intrusive but children that drink alcohol or smoke need to stop before they do themselves damage.  Nothing to Orwellian so far but it gets better.

Children are asked if their mother or step-mother does paid work and if they feel the statement “my parents and family look out for me” is true.  Pupils aren’t asked for their names but they are asked for their postcode and many schools have introduced biometric devices for logging into school computers.  Parental consent isn’t being sought for this questionaire but there is an obvious malpurpose for this questionaire – the information could be used by the DWP to try and identify benefit cheats and as much as I approve of them cracking down on fraudsters stealing our taxes, using children to spy on parents is wrong.

Hat-tip: PJC Journal