Last October, former NL drug czar, the (perhaps) aptly named Professor David Nutt resigned/was sacked from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) for stating that so-called Home Secretary Alan Johnson must have been on one if he thought that upgrading cannabis from class C to B was a good trip. I was not surprised when Johnson later confirmed that Prof. Nutt had indeed been sacked, because his ‘advice’ cut across government policy to attack soft targets, such as weed-smoking kids, in order to maintain the pretence that the police, NL’s lard-arsed  political wing, were meeting their targets. Or something like that.

Nutt was sacked for arguing common sense. Alcohol misuse is linked to the overwhelming majority of violent crimes, ditto the number of admissions to hospital accident and emergency departments, breaks up families but is perfectly legal. Weed, and even Ecstasy are far less dangerous. Stoners can’t be arsed to do much more than flop around. Ecstasy becomes dangerous when taken in conjunction with alcohol. Banning one and not the other is a heavy trip down the road to – er  - somewhere else, man.

David Cameron as he might look were he unfortunate enough to become a Methadrone addict

But the Professor killed his own credibility when he strayed into the twilight zone of policy. A couple of his colleagues joined him and nobody apart from the Guardian gave a monkeys, until last weekend somebody called Dr. Polly Taylor also walked the ACMD plank. Speaking on the radio from Amsterdam yesterday – where he was possibly researching the wonders of legalised hash bars (despite what he was saying, there aren’t many left and it’s a load of bollocks to say that drug use in Holland is any less seedy than in the UK) – Professor Nutt reprised his theme that cannabis/weed is less dangerous than alchohol, criminalising it drives the price up, policing it costs money and wastes resources etc. Heavy.

Of course it is, but it’s a different argument. There is a time for expediency, and in the case of Methedrone, aka Mephadrone/M-kat, the time is now. I’m not a user myself, you may be surprised to know, but living in the ballsachingly trendy Bethnal Green/Shoreditch/Hoxton triangle, I know plenty of people with direct experience  - probably more than Alan Johnson or the nutty professor combined – who state categorically that this stuff is very, very bad indeed. Unlike the government or the squabbling scientists I’m happy to hear their unvarnished opinion that Methadrone is more moreish than Ketamine, Amphetamine Sulphide or Cocaine, can quickly reduce kids to a ‘feral’ state and, whether legal or not, creates a burning habit which sucks away money, energy and self-respect. Bummer.

Alan Johnson, as he may appear to David Cameron in his hypothetical state as a Methadrone addict

It is regrettable that political correctness, as represented by Professor Nutt and his grateful-not-to-be-dead academic colleagues, has fetched up against political opportunism, as represented by Alan Johnson and his soon-to-be-dead-in-the-water authoritarian bastard squad. I almost certainly know more about drugs on a first hand level than most of the boneheads in government – not sure about the Tories, though – but surely here is a clear case for decisive legislation. Regardless as to whether it played a small, middling or large part in the recent deaths of three kids, Methadrone is far more dangerous and nasty than weed and hash – think crystal meth and crack cocaine. Criminalising it may well create an underground black market and drive up the price, but it’s facile to argue that notoriety will add to its popularity, since it’s all over the news that the stuff is legal and relatively cheap. Banning its import and resale will only hurt those who wish to go out of their way to use it, and will almost certainly deter recreational/casual/impressionable drug fashionistas. Result.

Ban Methadrone with immediate effect, not because it may or may not have the potential to kill, but because it sure as hell doesn’t do anyone any good. Nor is this a Human Rights issue. If it drives the price up, then boo hoo for the prats who want to use it. And let’s not confuse this with the cannabis/marijuana debate, policy which is in itself influenced by Britain’s costly role as the 51st state of the USA.This is too serious a debate for the chatterati, so while we’re at it, bollocks to the Guardian and the Daily Mail. The drones who write for those rags should get out more. End of.

John J Kelly

I’m angry because nobody read my post last November and if they did, it didn’t change a thing (so what’s new). So is Sarah Brown, Gordon’s wife, as well she might be, living with a tripehead. But we’re both angry today because yet another miscarriage of justice is poised to be committed in the name of the ‘War on Terror.’ By John J Kelly

In November 2008, Thus helped draw attention to the long-running battle against the extradition of Gary McKinnon to the US. Today, the government will decide whether to hand him over to the US authorities on dubious, if not outright illegal grounds, or see justice done and tell the US to grow up. So far, in thrall to an extradition treaty covertly passed in 2004 by Tony Blair and signed by David Blunkett (who now admits it was a bad idea), the UK government and House of Lords have done nothing to protect a UK citizen’s rights. With the utmost respect for Mr McKinnon and his mother, who enlisted Sarah Brown, wife of Gordon, in her campaign amongst others, this case is bigger than the illegal and grossly disproportionate detention of an Asberger’s sufferer. If McKinnon’s extradition proceeds, no UK citizen is safe from the predatory ravings of publicity-seeking US neocon nutters. Blair is possibly a loony and certainly has much to answer for. McKinnon is an exopolitics nut who was looking for evidence of UFOs and anti-gravity machines when he stumbled into Pentagon computers (which were inadequately password-protected). One of the above was and is a power-crazed sociopath whose legacy should be extradition and trial before the International Criminal Court in the Hague. The other is a harmless guy with mental health issues who has already suffered enough.

McKinnon hacked in to US military sites looking for evidence of UFOs nearly 7 years ago. He never denied that his hacking was extensive, acknowledged its criminality, but vehemently denied that it was motivated by malice. The US authorities claim his antics caused widespread damage to their defence networks. McKinnon asserts that he was not even a professional hacker – if anything, he alerted the Strangeloves to the frightening inadequacies of their technology and thus deserves a congressional medal. He was arrested by the UK High Tech Crimes Unit in 2002, who told him he would get a community service sentence, but things took a bizarre turn for the worse when the US authorities demanded extradition and trial in the US, which could lead to up to 70 years in a Supermax prison. Incarceration will almost certainly exacerbate McKinnon’s Asperger’s Syndrome, which in his case manifests itself as an ‘honesty compulsion’ that will get him into terrible trouble with fellow inmates. (It also means that he will not plea bargain to reduce the sentence for something he is certain he didn’t do).

The chances of either a fair trial or leniency have been thrown into doubt by reports that US authorities have said they want to see him “fry”. It bodes ill for the much-touted lenient and caring US approach – has anyone seen any evidence thus far? – that the Obama regime have not intervened. Never mind Thus, when the ultra right wing Daily Mail is openly campaigning against the one-sided extradition law in general and the McKinnon case in particular, and the Prime Minister’s wife is onside, even an American should be able to work out that pursuing this vendetta will not win friends abroad. The US is happy to allow Britons to lose their lives fighting its stupid wars. They have no right to demand unilateral rendition of our citizens. Allow McKinnon to be tried here, where he committed his alleged crimes, or tell us to our faces that you don’t trust our legal system. Anything less is anal rape – another thing that Gary will need to watch out for in a US prison. ]]> http://thusmagazine.com/2009/07/stop-the-extradition-of-gary-mckinnon-to-the-us-its-undemocratic-heinous-downright-stupid-and-illegal/feed/ 0 http://thusmagazine.com/2009/05/update-two-treasury-select-committee-members-fiddled-their-expenses/ http://thusmagazine.com/2009/05/update-two-treasury-select-committee-members-fiddled-their-expenses/#comments Thu, 21 May 2009 15:01:51 +0000 John Kelly http://thusmagazine.com/?p=3401

How the other half live - Viggers ducks live in a £1600.00 Stockholm-inspired floating gazebo

This morning The Telegraph reported that Conservative MP Sir Peter Viggers would stand down at the next election, at the request of David Cameron, having claimed over £30,000 in gardening-related expenses, including £1600.00 for a floating duck house. Some wags wondered whether it fell under the MPs’ second home category. Another Tory grandee, Michael Fallon, MP, overclaimed £8300.00 in mortgage repayments. Financial News pointed out that both, as members of the Treasury Select Committee, have been fierce in their criticism of the lack of governance, excessive salaries and expenses of executives of failed UK banks such as Royal Bank of Scotland, HBOS, Northern Rock and the financial sector in general. More pertinent, the Treasury Select Committee, a cross-party group, is tasked to examine the expenditure, administration and policy of HM Treasury, with all of its agencies and associated bodies, including HM Revenue and Customs, the Bank of England, the Financial Services Authority and the Royal Mint. 

The good news is that so far only two of its 15 members have been found to have only a sketchy knowledge of accounting and principles of sound governance as regards the use of taxpayers’ money, so we should all feel safe that our watchdogs are beyond reproach. Now, back to Tony McNulty, Minister for Welfare and Employment, (who voted strongly against a transparent parliament) and Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, who votes against transparency of any sort. These staunch allies of Gordon were in the frame long before the general mayhem erupted. Why has Brown not acted in the new spirit of hang-em-high and why have we heard nothing about the domestic finances of Mr and Mrs. Balls? I leave it to you to join up the dots.

John J Kelly

A scary picture of Phil Woolas, clearly unaware that the Gurkha kukri knife, once drawn, must taste blood. It is also customary to lop off the enemy's testicles. They'd have to find them first.

This prompted a bizarre confrontation in the BBC Westminster studios, where the oligenous Immigration Minister, Phil Woolas (Thus passim – most recently yesterday), there on other business, happened upon Joanna Lumley by chance. The ex-Avengers heroine demanded an explanation of the latest government perfidy, breathtaking even by the standards of Brown/Mandelson. She forced Woolas into a joint press conference, where he weaseled an explanation that since the government was considering new guidelines in the case of the Gurkhas, and that as part of the process, they had agreed that all rejected applications were to be ‘subject to review,’ his department was ‘obeying the law’ in sending rejection letters to the five. He neglected to mention that their previous appeal for leave to remain had also been rejected and equally clearly has no interest in, nor knowledge of, the anguish and anxiety this was bound to cause, much less the intimation of treachery on the part of the government. Under pressure, Woolas was forced into an impromptu agreement to consult and accept help from Joanna Lumley’s campaigning group in drawing up the new guidelines.

Yesterday Thus helpfully suggested that if the 10 Pakistani student alleged ‘terrorists’ were deported on the grounds that their immigration papers were incorrectly completed or bogus, this would be proof that Woolas and his madcap department were incompetent or worse, and that he should resign. Today’s glaring example of the right hand clearly being unaware of what the left hand is doing (one look and you can guess what at least one of those hands is doing) emphasises both the need to replace power-drunk nincompoops with real ministers – if any are available. Add Woolas to your reshuffle bonfire of the vanities, Gordon. And pop another log on for yourself while you’re at it. 

John J Kelly

The default position is that they must be guilty – of something. Being Pakistani will do for starters. A couple came from Peshawar Province, a ‘notorious Taleban stronghold’. Thus reported on April 10 that Liverpool John Moores University, where they were studying, has an official student recruitment agent in Peshawar but this appears to have been overlooked in the ensuing witch hunt. Others allegedly travelled to study in Britain on ‘incorrectly completed immigration forms.’ Phil Woolas, Immigration Minister, whose department is responsible for checking such matters, intemperately pronounced ‘we’ve got them’ (meaning bomb plot terrorists) on the evening of the arrests. If they are indeed guilty of entering the UK on false pretences, for the purpose of terror-related mayhem (no evidence was produced to even hold them for the 28 days permitted) and they do represent a real threat to security, then senior heads should roll in the Borders Agency. If they are innocent, they should be allowed to stay. In summary, logic dictates that Woolas should go if the ‘terror suspects’ are deported. 

Home Secretary (for now) Jacqui Smith shows her ID card at the video shop

Woolas, arch advocate of the government’s Identity Card scheme, is an Oldham MP, so it is less than surprising that Manchester has been ‘chosen’ as the testbed city where ‘young people’ aged between 16-25 can voluntarily apply for ID cards (at a cost of £30.00). Foreign nationals have already been obliged to register. The scheme is opposed by Lib-Dems and Tories, who, human rights considerations aside, may not object to ID cards as such, but doubt the government’s ability to deliver the scheme on budget  - latest estimates are £5.5 billion, so let’s call it £11 billion –  but more importantly, whether the system will further compromise individual data and actually facilitate identity fraud. The half-baked cards which will not carry biometric data until 2015, there will be no new national identity database – the existing government databases are a hacker’s half hour recreation – plus scanners which link to said databases will not be readily available for quite some time. Apart from that, it’s great!

No2ID spokesman, Phil Booth (also based in Manchester) said: “It makes a lie of all these grandiose claims about biometrics if there is not the infrastructure to back it up. . . . It will be a bit of plastic that will be eminently copyable.” He added that employers who doubted the authenticity of the card have been told to ‘flick it to check for a distinctive sound’. File under ‘you couldn’t make it up.’

Along with the Pakistani student bomber farrago, Manchester gave us the imaginary 2002 Old Trafford bomb plot (10 ‘Iraqi Kurds’ released without charge in the runup to the Iraq War) and the curious case of Hassan Butt allegedly a Jihadist turned informer, but by his own admission, a publicity-mad fantasist. Even known mad mullahs, such as Sheikh Bakri Mohammed  declared Butt’s claims to be a Taleban recruiter fraudulent, as far back as 2002, but this did not stop the British hounyhmns from hanging on his every word. He – or they – may or may not have been manipulated by the security services, but Manchester police compounded the felony by wasting millions attempting to prosecute Butt and compel the gawps who promoted him to ‘reveal their sources.’  Finally, Manchester had the UK’s highest crime rate in 2007 - another compelling reason to make it the place to launch a hugely costly, half-arsed ID card scheme which is open to widespread abuse. As we said last December, put me down for two, mate.

John J Kelly

The schizophrenic government which allowed hundreds of thousands of allegedly bogus ‘asylum seekers’ to pour across our porous borders in the name of human rights – and cheap labour – has once again misread the public mood. According to Lib-Dem home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne: “I am pleased that the Government has climbed down from the Big Brother plan for a centralised database of all our emails and phone calls. However . . it is simply not that easy to separate the bare details of a call from its content. What if a leading business person is ringing Alcoholics Anonymous, or a politician’s partner is arranging to hire a porn video? There has to be a careful balance between investigative powers and the right to privacy.”

Innocent pigeon fanciers might be used as conduits of terror messages

At the heart of the matter is the debate as to whether layers of extra legislation are required to enable the security services to do what they are paid to do in the first place. Internet Service providers (ISPs) and browser search engines such as Google already hold records of internet access. Telephone companies keep records as a matter of course. The EU directive gives governments access to such data, provided they can show just cause. By now, any sensible subversive will have been alerted to the danger of publishing plots on the internet and will instead be tying notes written in invisible ink to the legs of homing pigeons.Have you thought about that one, Vernon Coaker (if, indeed, that is your real name?) Terrorists, paedos and their ilk may resort to communicating via small ads in local newspapers – what does ‘massive blow-out sale, Arndale Centre, everything must go’ really mean? Find out who placed that ad, Jacqui. Sudoko enthusiasts are probably honing their secret coding skills. Out them by forcing the Times to deliberately publish unsolvable puzzles. Gather data on those who complain. I’ve even heard unconfirmed rumours that in provincial towns, swingers identify each other by planting pampas grass in the front gardens of their semis. Break down the doors, Austin Powers. If they are not swinging, they are probably terrorists. If they are neither, then they have nothing to fear. 

What if the government has already put some or all of this deep packet inspection plan into place, in its Intercept Modernisation Programme, without bothering to ‘consult’ the population at large or inform Parliament and is trying to cover its tracks ahead of the election? But that would be anti-democratic in the extreme. We all know how committed this government is to open democracy, so it can’t possibly be the case. Perish the thought. It’s about as far-fetched as manufacturing a fiction about weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for an illegal war.

John J Kelly

For thirty years I have been travelling to unfree places, from East Germany to Burma, and writing about them in the belief that I was coming from one of the freest countries in the world: Britain. I wanted people in those places to enjoy more of what we had. In the last few years, I have woken up – late in the day, but better late than never – to the way in which individual liberty, privacy and human rights have been sliced away in Britain, like salami, under New Labour governments that profess to find in liberty the central theme of British history.

I know I've used this before, but 1100 riot police were deployed on the occasion of Sarkozy's visit with Gordon Brown to Arsenal football stadium, allegedly and coincidentally as part of a never-repeated exercise to find 'mobile phone thieves'. Here you can see them marching in formation towards Finsbury Park Mosque. 20 stolen mobiles were found. John Kelly

‘Oh, these powers will almost never be used,’ they say every time. ‘Ordinary people have nothing to fear. It affects just 0.1 per cent.’ But a hundred times 0.1 per cent is 10 per cent. The East Germans are now more free than we British are, at least in terms of law and administrative practice in such areas as surveillance and data collection. Thirty years ago, they had the Stasi. Today, Britain has such broadly drawn and elastic surveillance laws that the local council of a small town called Poole could exploit them to spend two weeks spying on a family wrongly accused of lying on a school application form. The official spies reportedly made copious notes on the movements of the mother and her three children, whom they referred to as ‘targets’, and watched the family home at night to establish where they were sleeping. And this is supposed to be England?

Though the Stasi headline is irresistible, such Stasi-nark methods do not yet make a Stasi state. The political context is very different. We British don’t live in a one-party dictatorship. But nor is this just ‘an isolated case’, as ministers always protest. Almost every week brings some new revelation of the way in which our government has taken a further small slice of our liberty, always in the name of another real or alleged good: national security, safety from crime, community cohesion, efficiency (ha ha), or our ‘special relationship’ with the United States.

Liberty comes last. As the conservative author Dominic Raab writes in his excellent book The Assault on Liberty, this government ‘has hyperactively produced more Home Office legislation than all the other governments in our history combined, accumulating a vast arsenal of new legal powers and creating more than three thousand additional criminal offences’.

Other free countries, including the United States, have over-reacted to the threat of terrorism, violating their own basic constitutional principles and legal standards. The peculiarity of Britain is that we have nibbled away individual liberty on so many different fronts. We have been complicit in American-led torture of our own people; at the same time we have eroded free speech in ways unthinkable in the United States; and we have become what Privacy International calls ‘an endemic surveillance society’.

Yes, fighting terrorism requires some restrictions. Yes, you can make a crime-reduction case for some CCTV. But we have more CCTV and a larger DNA database, a more ambitious, and unworkable, National Identity Register scheme, more police powers and more email snooping than any comparable liberal democracy. Added to which we have a bureaucracy so centralised and incompetent in managing this mass of data that it lost a computer disc with the child benefit details of 25 million people.

What’s more, the certain loss of liberty will often not result in the alleged gain in security or efficiency. So, for example, PM Gordon Brown and other ministers continued to press for 42 days detention without trial, despite the fact that two former heads of the Security Service, the Director of Public Prosecutions, the former Lord Chancellor, Attorney General and Lord Chief Justice – in short, almost everyone in a position to know – said it was wrong, unnecessary and counter-productive. How can a government of intelligent and often personally liberal-minded persons behave so illiberally, arrogantly and stupidly? What screw have they got loose? What nerve is missing?

The fightback has begun, led by three groups: judges and lawyers; unelected peers (witness, most recently, an outstanding House of Lords report on surveillance); and a rainbow coalition of journalists, academics, writers, artists, think tankers, civil society activists and simply citizens, of left and right, young and old, some of whom have now joined together to launch next week, in several British cities, a Convention on Modern Liberty (http://www.modernliberty.net/. See the following Modern Liberty video, which argues that the UK was complicit in torture, rendition and secret prisons.

Notably absent from this list is the one group who should be in the front line when it comes to the defence of British liberties: our elected representatives. This is not just a New Labour failing. With a few notable exceptions, such as the former Conservative home affairs spokesman David Davis, most MPs have been complaisant and pusillanimous beyond belief. For example, last week the Home Secretary (Britain’s interior minister) idiotically banned Dutch MP Geert Wilders from entering Britain to show his noxious and offensive anti-Islam film at the invitation of members of the House of Lords. Result: a curtailment of free speech that gave Wilders more free publicity than he could otherwise have dreamed of. ‘Liberal’ Democrat Home Affairs spokesman Chris Huhne agreed with the decision on the grounds that the film is really offensive. I shall need some convincing that the Conservative front bench are going to be any better.

I’m not sure I fully understand all the reasons for this cravenness, but here’s one. A couple of years ago, I asked a very senior New Labour politician if his government had not got the balance between security and liberty wrong. ‘Well’, he replied, ‘one thing I can tell you is that if you ask the British people they will always choose more security’. And this is where the ball comes back to us. Since our leaders are now mainly followers – following the latest opinion poll, focus group or newspaper campaign – it’s up to us, the British people, to change their view of what ‘the people’ want.

Timothy Garton Ash is Professor of European Studies at Oxford University, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of Free World. A longer version of Tim’s piece appeared in the Guardian.

I'm not a top copper, but the giveway clue in this advertisement from Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick's undercover limo service might have been 'police officers at the wheel'. In itself, this is an unenticing, unless the newly-weds wish to be driven at high speed, dragged from the vehicle with a blanket over their heads and bundled up the aisle by ex Plod. Good for shotgun weddings, I suppose.

The story of Bob Quick’s (wife’s) sideline business hiring luxury executive cars, run from the family home has now been well-documented. The unwise and slanderous outburst from Quick, who accused the Tories, and Shadow Home Office Minister Dominic Grieve in particular, of ‘corruption’, of endangering his family safety and undermining the Police enquiry into the earlier Home Office leaks is now common knowledge. His subsequent ‘grovelling apology’ to Cameron and the Tories is now also in the public domain. Silobreaker is the most comprehensive source.

I’m (clearly) not a copper, but it appears that Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick may have compromised the integrity and impartiality of the ‘enquiry’ which he is leading by his rash slander of the party and parties accused by Labour (Thus passim) of encouraging Home Office leaks of allegedly sensitive immigration data which led to the dramatic arrest of a top Tory. On this basis alone, he should resign as head of the enquiry and pass the job along to another department or (preferably) another police force entirely. 

One way to discredit and spin an investigation which might severely embarrass the government is to throw a large spanner into the spokes of the enquiry, add a spice of ‘Terror’ and hope that the resulting muck and bullets will smear everyone, especially if it is timed for the festive season, when not much news reporting happens. A version of this tactic may have been at play here. Bob Quick may have blindly lashed out at what he considered a mischievous attack by the Tory-favouring Mail on Sunday, but history shows that this influential right wing middle class tabloid has been used to great effect in the past by elements of New Labour, especially when there is a ‘Terrorist threat’ angle to the story.

Silobreaker networking image puts Quick in the middle and terrorism on the extreme edge

All this is largely irrelevant, since we already know the ‘outcome’ of this enquiry by the Met Police into the Met Police. We will hear that the Police acted completely independently of the government. Even though the Home Secretary and Prime Minister were informed of the raid on Damian Green’s parliamentary office and had it in their power to mitigate or halt the breach of parliamentary privilege that occurred, they ‘chose not to’ since to do so would compromise the ‘integrity and independence’ of the Police. The leaks, we will be told, were and are too sensitive to be revealed to the public and possibly exposed the entire nation to Terror on a massive scale. It will be conceded that neither David Cameron, Dominic Grieve nor Damian Green actively conspired to encourage the junior Home Office civil servant to leak information, but it will be acknowledged that he had an ulterior motive in so doing – to curry favour with the Conservatives. 

What possibly won’t be acknowledged is that the Police acted disingenuously in searching Green’s offices without a warrant, that it is possible that covert surveillance techniques were used which may have required authorisation from the Home office, that Jacqui Smith and the leaky Immigration Office department had prima facie motive for suppressing information relating to a breakdown of information relating to the number and whereabouts of illegal and overstayed immigrants, some of whom may be nationals of countries with whom Britain has a parlous diplomatic relationship (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia, for example). Neither will it be acknowledged that Gordon Brown and his advisors, principally Mandelson, had no right or justification to publicly intimate on national public media that the Leader of the Opposition and his Front Bench played an active role in colluding to leak information of this nature.

Nobody will be prosecuted (Scotland Yard have already conceded as much). Nobody will be brought to book. Bob Quick wedding car hire will operate from another premises (and frankly why not – good luck to him and his wife) – unless unkind – and possibly jealous – ‘sources in the Metropolitan Police’ leak his new address too. Please prove me wrong. And tell me I’m not a Tory. I’m not. I’m not. I’m not. I’m fed up of defending the poor lambs. But independent or not, I wouldn’t fancy my chances when they sweep to power, Superintendent Quick, so I’d keep the car hire business ticking over.

Despite these apparently turbulent developments, BT is ploughing ahead with the implementation of its ‘Webwise’ tracking software which profiles user behaviour by tracking online viewing through ISP data. BT should think carefully about the effect this may have on its already-tarnished reputation, but it probably won’t.

Lies, damned lies and statistics. Over 1000 people asked for ID cards – counted over TWO years

carving up the crime statistics

In a demonstration of the contempt for sensible interpretation of statistics which recently got the UK government into trouble for claiming that knife crime had fallen based on a sample of 78 incidents over three months, “Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has said that 1,142 messages from the public to the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) between November 2006 and October 2008 were classified as ‘wants an ID card’. This made ID-card requests “by far the most common subject matter”, Smith said on Thursday, in response to a parliamentary question from Liberal Democrats’ Home Affairs spokesperson Chris Huhne.” In real terms, that’s around 1.5 ‘messages’ a day. By contrast, up to 2 million people actively protested against the Iraq War in one day, but the government ignored them. Worse yet, Ms Smith admitted that “the IPS received 3,073 items of correspondence on the scheme between 1 November, 2006, and 31 October, 2008 but admitted that the IPS did not sort the correspondence according to support for or opposition to the scheme. (Thanks to ZD Net). So the erosion of democracy and slide into banal authoritarianism continues apace. We already know the endgame. We’ll get ID cards, the system will fail and vastly exceed its budget. The data warehousing will be managed at great expense by US companies. There will be huge breaches of security and fraud. But the statistics hold out a glimmer of hope. At this rate of take-up, the government could save a huge amount by purchasing card-making kit and laminators from Woolworths and individually making up the identity cards. There are plenty of out-of-work folks who could help, taking photos of the 1100 people who definitely want an ID card and putting their names in a special ‘Loonytunes’ databank. Their psychological profiles identify them as prime targets to vote positively for any mad government initiative, volunteer for crazy scientific experiments, buy Jaguar cars and sign up for BT Broadband. So it’s not all doom and gloom.

Another victory for profiling.

Police went Crackers in Wimbledon, aided and abetted by the tabloids, they hounded the wrong man for 12 years

With the conviction of Robert Napper, the Metropolitan Police announced today that there was no need for an enquiry into the Colin Stagg fit-up, on the grounds that ‘lessons were learned.’ In other words, the Police know what they did wrong and it won’t happen again. So that’s alright then. Except it’s not. It has not been too widely reported that the female police officer who participated in a ‘honey trap’ to frame Colin Stagg received £125,000 compensation, early retirement and a pension, while Napper, the person responsible for the crime, who had been reported to the police by his own mother for rape, was arrested twice for carrying a loaded handgun within eight weeks of the murder on Wimbledon Common, had a history of copycat crimes, including rape and battery of a mother and child and was allowed to roam free to commit further horrible crimes while the police and tabloid media engaged in a vicious miscarriage of justice aimed at clearing up the case of a mother brutally murdered in front of her infant child. Their grotesque entrapment antics led to further crimes being committed. It has been claimed that using today’s technology, the same ‘mistakes’ could not happen, yet contrary to media reports, DNA samples from both Napper and Stagg were available and could have been used to at least eliminate Stagg from their ‘enquiries.’ This is doubtful: Stagg was ‘convicted’ by the police, egged on by the media, keen to find a perpetrator for a heinous crime, at an early stage. The ‘honey trap’ was sordid, illegal and reckless. There should be an enquiry, but there won’t be. 

John Baker’s piece for THUS (below) summarises the details of this case better than I can. It is sad and remarkable that we are not taking this opportunity to re-examine the lack of police (and media) accountability which led to this gross miscarriage of justice. The victims were not just the family of the murdered woman, nor Colin Stagg and his family. Several other people raped and possibly murdered by Napper, certifiably criminally insane, might have been spared had the police not behaved like actors in a bad TV drama. As far as we know, nobody lost their job or has been called to account – at least not publicly.

John J Kelly

Next step Somalia, to deal with those blemming pirates. The strategy is simple . . . .