Parky Posted February 20, 2009 Share Posted February 20, 2009 We are letting the well run dry, allowing little bits of our civil freedoms to be chipped away by paranoiac governments who assure us we can trust them – and consistently betray that trust. We are gradually sacrificing what has taken hundreds of years of civilisation to achieve, which is a condition of some kind of liberty. It may not be evident to everyone yet, but we have lost so much freedom in the past 10 years. When the Government passed its "anti-terror" laws, it reassured those who campaigned against them that they would only ever be used in the most extreme circumstances. But these are completely vague laws which enable a government to arrest almost anybody for almost everything. Within a couple of years they had been used to eject an 80-year-old heckler from a Labour Party conference, to arrest a woman for reading out the names of British soldiers killed in Iraq, and to freeze the assets of Icelandic banks in England. This is the problem with vague legislation of this type: it invariably gets called into use whenever anybody does anything that the Government finds embarrassing or the police find inconvenient. It criminalises the behaviour of concerned citizens and thereby encourages disengagement and apathy. By preventing people from taking part in critiques of governance it increases the gap between rulers and ruled: it is fundamentally anti-democratic. I worry about initiatives like identity cards and computer databases because they could be a step towards a police state, with completely innocent people being held in custody because of software malfunctions. It is incredibly sad that these moves towards a police state should have happened under a Labour government. Gordon Brown should think about the serious problems that need to be solved – such as climate change – and direct his government's efforts towards that. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
indi Posted February 20, 2009 Share Posted February 20, 2009 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Giselle Posted February 20, 2009 Share Posted February 20, 2009 In the same vein as that article... http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/revealed-the-full-extent-of-labours-curbs-on-civil-liberties-1627054.html Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Parky Posted February 20, 2009 Share Posted February 20, 2009 In the same vein as that article... http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/revealed-the-full-extent-of-labours-curbs-on-civil-liberties-1627054.html "Almost 60 new powers contained in more than 25 Acts of Parliament have whittled away at freedoms and broken pledges set out in the Human Rights Act and Magna Carta, according to a new audit of laws introduced since Labour came to power in 1997. The dossier, compiled by the Convention on Modern Liberty, criticises police powers to detain terror suspects for 28 days without charge, new stop-and-search powers handed to police (allowing them to stop people without reason at airports and other designated areas), and restrictions on the right of peaceful protest." Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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