Two unrelated events this month - David Davis’ resignation to fight a by-election on the issue of 42-day internment of suspects without trial, and the ‘no’ vote in the Irish referendum - seem to me to be connected. The connection is the conservative journalist Peter Oborne’s theory of the ‘political class’.
I’ve written here from time to time on the evolution of Britain as a surveillance society, and the trends embedded in it. Now the journalist Henley Porter, in a submission to the Joint Committee on Human Rights, has produced a list of the ways in which surveillance has been increased in the UK since the [...]
The current scandals around surveillance in the UK reminds me that I meant to post about Privacy International’s most recent international league table. (Thanks to Our Kingdom for the prompt). England and Wales are in the bottom category - “endemic surveillance societies” - while Scotland, split out for the first time, is a little higher, [...]
More than half think that Britain “has become a surveillance society”, while experts suggest that the police should put new limits on its DNA database.
The indefatigable civil rights lawyer Clive Stafford-Smith is suing the company which provided the logistics for the CIA’s ‘rendition’ flights. At the same time, there’s a judicial challenge in Europe from the Council of Europe, which has produced a second report substantiating complicity by European governments in the rendition programme.
The film Taking Liberties, which I mentioned recently and which opens in London this weekend, seems to be a sign that the economics - and maybe culture - of the film market are changing. It’s the first time, as far as I recall (corrections welcome) that a documentary with a clear British (rather than US/global) [...]
I wrote last week of trends that seemed to be colliding and reinforcing the ‘liberties’ agenda. There have been more since then, both pointing in the same direction.
I mentioned in a recent blog the acquittal of the ‘B-52 Two’ - the peace protestors acquitted of causing criminal damage to USAF planes at Fairford in Gloucester. There’s more detail and comment by Stuart Weir at the Our Kingdom blog.
A trend is a trend is a trend - until it bends, said the futurist Ged Davis, but two which keep colliding without seeming to bend are the trends about human rights on the one hand, and security on the other. The UK government’s penchant for security related legislation (is it 50 Acts in the [...]
While checking some of the background for yesterday’s blog on liberties, I found this comment attributed to the former Conservative British Prime Minister Ted Heath, dated from the 1970s and recalled by Alan Hart, a former BBC journalist in a letter to the Guardian last November:
I am reminded of something Ted Heath said to me, [...]
