I know this is going to sound frightfully liberal - sandal-wearing or whatever witty epithet we’re using at the minute - but this kind of thing bothers me:

BBC News: ‘Dog whistle’ to control youths
A high-pitched “dog whistle” device is to be used by police in north Staffordshire to stop groups of nuisance youths hanging around shops.

I suppose it’s cheaper than a water cannon or a barrage of rubber bullets. It’s literally the 21st Century’s clip round the ear - it (hopefully) won’t do them any harm. Most of the news outlets are treating this as a gleefully sadistic “and finally…” story. The fact is, this is yet another of those “tough on crime” while not giving a toss about “the causes of crime”.

The inventor of the device was on PM on Radio 4 last night and he actually said, “…what about the human rights of the shopkeepers?” He’ll go far that one, A New Labour peerage can’t be far away. What about the nice children and their rights? What about the A-grade, never-said-boo-to-goose, model child sent out for a pint of milk?

Once upon a time latchkey kids were something to be pitied, now they’re a control group for technocratic social engineering. Never mind why these children are hanging about, let’s just corral them like animals. Why not give them collars that explode if they stray into a designated area as in the movie Battle Royale?

Adults can’t hear the siren, although I bet the technology could be adapted to drive off, oh I don’t know, let’s say unauthorised protesters around Parliament. I wonder how easy it would be adapt the technology so that instead of emitting a high-pitched whistle it sent messages, “CONSUME. OBEY. PROCREATE. BE CONTENT.”

We’ve been shown, most recently in the Tory leadership campaign, that age and experience are embarrassing liabilities. We’re also told to fear the youth - hooded, rutting, drug addicts that they are. It seems the only age worthy of respect is complacent, condescending, comfortable, careerist middle age. And yet look at the carnage the forty- and fifty-somethings have caused since 1997. Won’t anybody think of the children?

Further to this…

The Panel is satisfied that the penalty imposed reflects the offence caused by your actions and is designed to protect both staff and students. Members are aware that the decision to dismiss your appeal is not the one you will have wanted but you are urged to accept the outcome and seek advice on how you can continue your studies elsewhere.

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From Slinging Ink, on the naughty cartoon apocalypse:

We therefore call on free-thinking bloggers everywhere to post the images on their sites and, through sheer weight of numbers, defeat those who would deny us our right to freedom of expression. We also request the that the companies that host these blogs do not capitulate to this 21st century inquisition. In particular we expect the British government to respect the vote that was passed in the House of Commons not two days ago.

I’ll provide links to the cartoons but I’m not going to reproduce them here, for the same reason I don’t post Bernard Manning jokes: I think they’re shit.

Some of these cartoons barely pass as art let alone satire. Some of them, in my opinion, are making no other point than attempting to be deliberately inciteful. It’s a taste thing, I suppose. If they’d been clever and made me laugh I’d have posted them.

This whole thing is the equivalent of Little Johnny being given detention because he drew a knob on his pencil case (which is actually funnier than these cartoons). It’s childish, it’s puerile but the seas didn’t boil and the skies didn’t rain blood. The people who drew some these cartoons are arseholes but, in what we laughingly call our liberal society, we must defend their right to be arseholes. So scribble away lads, somebody, somewhere must find you funny.

And, whatever your faith, if it’s not up to withstanding a few rubbish drawings or a sweary opera, then your god clearly isn’t as great and powerful as you keep telling us he is. What exactly are you frightened of? Get a bloody grip, eh?

On Saturday 14th Jan 2006, I went on a little pilgrimage to the exclusion zone, and gathered some data. I began with a map and the limits of the zone as defined by The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 (Designated Area) Order 2005:

…

Exclusion Zone Fact #3 - The perimeter extends much further beyond Parliament than MPs were expecting when they voted on the Act and, at its very limits, it just happens to cover Labour HQ, both branches of the Home Office and Scotland Yard (i.e. the people responsible for introducing it, and the people responsible for enforcing it)…

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Almost a week ago I wrote about two students who were suspended after accused the college of breaking the Human Rights Act in a homemade newsletter.

Since my original post Assed Baig, 24, and Daniel Williams, 22, have both been expelled by the college. Last week I met up with them to find out more about what exactly went on. Assed and Daniel had both gone to college with the precise intention of progressing to University as they both had taken up Access courses. The decision to interrupt their academic careers during the Winter mucks up this process entirely, as most UCAS submissions are made around this time. If you fail to get the application processed, you’re stuck with clearing…

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(PDF) Over the year there were 851,200 “stop and searches” under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (14% more than in 2003/4). Only 11% of those stopped were arrested (13% in 2003/4). In addition there were 41,300 stop and searches under Section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, with only 3% leading to an arrest, while another 35,800 were stopped and searched under S.44(1) and (2) of the Terrorism Act 2000, 1.3% leading to an arrest. more…

Two students from Matthew Boulton College in Birmingham were this week suspended for criticising their college in a newsletter.

Assed Baig and Darrell Williams were asked to leave the college after distributing a student-run newsletter ‘The Guerilla’ which criticised the college’s failure to provide formal student representation and the decision to prevent religious student groups on campus. The article asks “whether the college is ‘aware that they are in breach of Human Rights Act of 1998, article 11, which states that everyone has ‘the right to freedom of peaceful assembly.’”

read the rest…

(via Kitty Killer)

More here.

Another example of the whacky world of British counter-terrorism:

The Independent: Enemies of the state? Police fail even to question men held as a terror threat

Four men deprived of their liberty for four years on suspicion of being international terrorists disclose today that they have not once been questioned by police or security services since being arrested.

If further evidence were needed that we are ruled by chumps you wouldn’t lend a tenner to but for some reason are quite happy to let have power of life and death over you, it presented itself during an interview (RealPlayer required) between Lord Falconer, the Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs and Lord Chancellor, and John Humphrys on the Today programme yesterday:

Humphrys: Can I turn to another subject, fairly quickly, and that is freedom of speech. What’s happened to it? Why have we lost it? Why can’t a woman stand near Number 10 Downing Street and read out a list of names without being arrested?

Humphrys: I shall bear that in mind next time I want to stand outside Parliament and read my newspaper aloud, possibly an editorial that somebody doesn’t like.

Overdone. Like the fuss over Walter Wolfgang was overdone. Sally Cameron? The Fairford protesters? And the rest. The odd dog turd on the pavement is a minor inconvenience. When the streets are paved with them, like they are in Brighton, it becomes clear that somebody somewhere isn’t doing their job properly.

Now, I don’t think I’m going out too far out on this limb when I say a large slice of modern politics is about defending the indefensible. Falconer it seems, for some unfathomable reason, is charged with taking the shitty end of this stick more often than most:

Constitutional Affairs Secretary Lord Falconer told Today the Hutton report had been “fair”.

And you know, this is what his BBC profile says about him:

His reputation was of a man with a razor sharp mind, who could both master a brief and get to the nub of a problem very quickly.

To which I’d say: prove it. It’s like Mr Dean, my old 3rd Year Junior teacher, used to say: there’s a world of difference between being educated and being intelligent. Does anybody watch Falconer on the telly and think, “hmmm, if only I could be a bit more like him”? He’s emblematic of the kind of intelligence and wit that permeates New Labour. Would you jump at the chance of a pint with Geoff Hoon? Would your life be improved for a dash of Alistair Darling’s turgid managerialism?

What Falconer did to earn his peerage, I’ve yet to discover. Peerages are usually awarded for “services to X“. All I can find out about Falconer’s is that he was denied a safe parliamentary seat in Birmingham after refusing to withdraw his children from fee-paying schools. A meritocratic Labour man to his bones quite clearly. Still, all was put right when, in May 1997 after the New Labour win at the general election, the new prime minister bunged his former flatmate a peerage (he was the very first person to get a peerage under Blair) and the Solicitor General’s job.

Which, I suddenly realise, is the unfathomable reason for him getting the shitty stick all the time. He can make an arse of himself on the radio (see above) as much as he likes, safe in the knowledge that - not having to face the electorate and knowing where the Blairs’ metaphorical bodies are buried - he’ll still have his job after the next election.

He must be either incredibly secure in his job or incredibly dim to go on national radio and say that a woman being arrested for reading a list of names near the Cenotaph isn’t an attack on freedom of speech. You also suspect he doesn’t really get this protest thing - it’s an alien concept to him - and like all prejudices it breeds contempt.

“Reading names in the street?” you can imagine him thinking. “Why doesn’t she just go on the Today programme like I do? Couldn’t she have just got herself a neo-aristocratic upbringing and a bunch of influential friends like I did?”

UPDATE: Charles Clarke was at it as well this morning:

Mr Clarke told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that there were places people could go to air their views, like Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, and through the newspapers.

Translation: Sod off out of my sight and earshot.

UPDATE: Humphries/Humphrys blunder rectified. (Cheers Tom)

What is most remarkable is that until Mr Wolfgang was held, neither parliamentarians nor the press were interested. The pressure group Liberty, the Green party, a couple of alternative comedians, the Indymedia network and the alternative magazine Schnews have been left to defend our civil liberties almost unassisted. Even after “Wolfie” was thrown out of the conference, public criticism concentrated on the suppression of dissent within the Labour party, rather than the suppression of dissent throughout the country. As the parliamentary opposition falls apart, the extra-parliamentary one is being closed down with hardly a rumble of protest from the huffers and puffers who insist that civil liberties are Britain’s gift to the world. Perhaps they’re afraid they’ll be arrested.

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