Well now, this is interesting.

Gordon Brown has promised to reverse the Commons decision to exempt MPs from the Freedom of Information Act. “It will be corrected,” he said of the legislation, passed by MPs 10 days ago. is interesting.

Put the Prime Minister elect in front of an audience of book-loving luvvies and happy camping Hampstead liberals, have Mariella Frostrup purr in his ear, and he folds faster than Tony Blair being told to grab his ankles by Rupert Murdoch.

Not that we should expect that this reversal sets any kind of encouraging precedent, but we can only hope that John Reid’s last gasp grab for Mosleyite posterity is similarly screwed.

…petition the Prime Minister to implement a full Freedom of Information Act. There is no justification in Government business being executed in a shroud of secrecy. The Government works in our name, therefore access to ALL business should be free and immediate.

Section 37 of the Identity Cards Act 2006 requires the Home Secretary to publish his estimate of the ten-year cost of the ID scheme “before the end of every six months”. The first Dobson report was published on 9th October 2006. The next report is now more than two weeks overdue.

Phil Booth, NO2ID’s National Coordinator said:

“What’s the big secret – why the delay? It can’t be lack of resources as there are dozens of highly-paid consultants doing nothing but planning the ID scheme. These latest cost estimates matter to local government and yet the Government is hiding the cost to councils, even from its own candidates.

“The elections on May 3rd are a test for policy and the ID scheme is unpopular. 1 in 3 people across the UK, if we are to believe recently-revealed government figures, are expected to resist it. Labour Party candidates, whatever their personal views on the scheme, suffer when public attention is drawn to it. Is this yet another attempt to bury bad news?”

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The Department for Constitutional Affairs (DCA) - against the advice of the Electoral Commission, an independent watchdog, has decided to play fast and loose with the election process and commission a spate of experimental voting and counting procedures which have not been properly thought out. Worse, some of the experiments have been predicated on laws that, ministers have just discovered, were not properly drafted in the first place.

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In half an hour…

Mark Thomas: my life in serious organised crime.

Update: Mark’s on form today:

Consider Geoff Hoon, being defence secretary will be the crowning point of his career. As such it is unlikely that he will ever condemn the invasion of Iraq and his role in it. He is probably proud of his part and I reckon every now and again he must glimpse the flames of Baghdad on the telly, nudge his wife on the sofa and say, ”I did that. That was me.”

A computer blip is threatening to wreck electronic counting in May’s local elections - delaying the potential overnight declarations in dozens of town halls across England.

Thousands of people who have downloaded postal voting forms from the Electoral Commission’s website could find they cannot be properly validated by their local council.

read the rest

I was one of 60 citizens in Downing Street on Saturday, but the consultation was a sham, says Liam Curtin.

Read the rest

How to avoid arrest on Red Nose Day.

Anti-war protester Brian Haw has won his latest legal battle to maintain his demonstration in Parliament Square.

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The government has bowed to privacy concerns about a new NHS computer system and conceded that patients should be allowed a veto on information about their medical history being passed from their GP to a national database.

Following a Guardian campaign against the compulsory uploading of personal details to the system known as The Spine, Lord Warner, the health minister, will announce a plan that would allow individuals to review and correct their records and withhold them from the database.

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More on this hopefully later, but in the meantime here’s the initial dirt. They certainly pick their moments. And other depressingly overused epigrams.

Remember this?

Saudi Arabia has given Britain 10 days to halt a fraud investigation into the country’s arms trade - or lose a £10 billion Eurofighter contract.

Well, it took just a little over ten days. Here’s this:

The Serious Fraud Office is discontinuing its investigation into a multi-billion pound arms deals with Saudi Arabia, it has been announced.

Attorney General Lord Goldsmith said the decision had been made in the wider public interest, which had to be balanced against the rule of law.

‘It has been necessary to balance the need to maintain the rule of law against the wider public interest,’ apparently. Just what this wider public interest entails other than the massively subsidised (at the UK taxpayers expense) jobs in the British defence industry and the flogging of weapons to an oppressive regime, isn’t clear.

From now on, upon hearing the words ‘rule of law’ trip from the mouth of a New Labour hack, the urge to spit will be nigh on irresistible.

Patricia Hewitt’s got a little list…

At the beginning of November we had this:

Millions of personal medical records are to be uploaded regardless of patients’ wishes to a central national database from where information can be made available to police and security services, the Guardian has learned.

Details of mental illnesses, abortions, pregnancy, HIV status, drug-taking, or alcoholism may also be included, and there are no laws to prevent DNA profiles being added. The uploading is planned under Whitehall’s bedevilled £12bn scheme to computerise the health service.

Now, (via the excellent Philip), at the beginning of December, we have this:

Sir Liam Donaldson, the chief medical officer, said letters from patients who want to keep their private medical details out of the government’s reach should be sent to Patricia Hewitt, the health secretary, for “full consideration”.

‘Full consideration’. The Secretary of Health would like to give you her full consideration. Sod the privacy of patients frightened of what an authoritarian government, that has been shown time and time again to be darkly mendacious and comedically incompetent, might be capable of. Patricia wants to know who you are.

Just what that ‘consideration’ will involve other than creating another little database, this time of dissidents, and then tossing the letters in the trash, isn’t clear. The Government’s response seems to be a polite ‘get stuffed‘:

The department’s response to people [...] explains that it will not agree to their request to stop the process of adding their information to the new NHS database. The department does not believe that processing their information in this way is a genuine reason linked to substantial and unwarranted distress.

This form letter (pdf) sent out to all those good enough to submit their misgvings, along with their names and addresses, to the authorities is full of warm reassurance:

While a few doctors have said that the Spine could have been designed in a different way, the majority - including some of the most senior and respected doctors in the country - are supportive and believe that it will improve delivery of healthcare to patients.

There are those who disagree. You have to wonder how much of a comfort that is to Helen Wilkinson who…

…was mistakenly labelled an alcoholic after a simple computer error by the NHS. An unknown official at a hospital was updating her medical records and inputted a wrong code. The mix-up meant she was recorded as having received treatment for alcoholism, instead of surgery.

Wouldn’t you call that ’substantial and unwarranted distress’? And how about this:

She was also angry that the records had been shared with a private company which distributes personal medical records to academic researchers [...] In 2003 she was contacted by researchers a week before she was due to have an operation.

The thing is, and it can’t be pointed out enough, the people forcing this on us are the last people who are going to have to rely on it. Are you seriously telling me that Gordon Brown’s son will have nothing but the finest care for his cystic fibrosis? That he’ll suffer the vagaries of the system as pointed out by the Cystic Fibrosis Trust? (Word document). Tony Blair was lucky enough to get the catheter ablation he needed to sort his dodgy ticker. Others haven’t been as fortunate.

Is it any wonder that people refuse to sign OurPetition, the petition asking ‘elected representatives of all UK political parties voluntarily refrain from self-paid or insurance-paid medical care treatment’. The former Tory leader Michael Howard was just the latest:

I cannot sign your petition for a number of reasons. First, the number of letters I receive from my constituents suggests that very many people have to use private healthcare not through the desire to jump the queue and the system, but because it is necessary for their own health. Such is the state of NHS dentistry, for example, that many people have no option but to use the private sector.

It looks, once again, that we’ll have to put our faith in governmental incompetence and hope the system never sees the light of day in full ‘working’ order. That you have to hope your government is as stupid as you suspect it is in order to secure peace of mind just shows how low we’ve come.

“Rights and responsibilities” is a current catchphrase of Blair’s government. The problem lies in its preferred distribution of each: rights accrue to the government, and responsibilities to citizens. That’s a dotted line we should refuse to sign on.

read the rest…

…unless you happen to read through pages 43-44 of the Postwatch Annual Report 2005/6, you’ll have no idea that the self-appointed (but certainly not self-financing) consumer champion spent £200,000 obtaining a judicial review of a Postcomm (that’s the regulator, by the way) decision; or that during this financial year they anticipate a potential £700,000 bill from legal action involving Royal Mail. Corporate lawyers get distastefully rich while different parts of the sclerotic state sue the arse off each other. Nor would you know that since Postwatch is funded on a fee per complaint basis, a shortfall of £870,000 caused by a drop in customer complaints is expected to be made up by the DTI. When service improves, it costs us more…

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Henry Porter’s ‘Suspect Nation‘ documentary is up on YouTube.

He’s doing something right, is Henry. This is from an Independent interview with the Observer’s editor, Roger Alton:

One of the good things we’ve done is a series by Henry Porter on surveillance and civil liberties, which I know is getting under Blair’s skin. One of Blair’s drivers said Blair was saying “fucking Henry Porter”, and last time I went to see Blair he name-checked Henry and got quite cross.

Thanks to Hannah for the links.

What Blair is proposing, in forcing a literal, physical contract between the state and individual citizens, is a destruction of this collective obligation between citizens. He is proposing the destruction of society itself.

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Three reports in two days make it utterly clear that Britain is about to become the Twenty First Century’s first surveillance society. It is not being melodramatic to say that each one of us stands on the threshold between a world in which individual liberty and privacy are taken for granted - and appear to the majority to be unthreatened - and a dystopia of total and unwavering scrutiny by big corporations and the state.

read the rest…

Millions of personal medical records are to be uploaded regardless of patients’ wishes to a central national database from where information can be made available to police and security services, the Guardian has learned.

Details of mental illnesses, abortions, pregnancy, HIV status, drug-taking, or alcoholism may also be included, and there are no laws to prevent DNA profiles being added. The uploading is planned under Whitehall’s bedevilled £12bn scheme to computerise the health service.

read the rest…

(Some background here, for those coming in late.)

This from the Save Parliament email list:

Go to it.

In Nosemonkey’s excellent rant he points out that local councils are going to be given the power to create by-laws without recourse to central government and - yes! - impose ‘on the spot’ fines. (The fines are so named because the reasons for issuing them are thought up in much the same place. ‘Back of a fag packet fines’ doesn’t have the same ring.)

With summary justice being the lubricant of this Government’s sweaty authoritarian fantasies, we shouldn’t really be surprised by this. It comes in the same week that John Reid has announced that, after their countries’ accession to the EU in January, Bulgarians and Romanians could face an - altogether now - on the spot fine if found to be working illegally in the UK.

As critics have pointed out, nobody at the Home Office has thought through what will happen if these people can’t or won’t pay. Expecting John Reid, the Tories or the right-wing press to consider the humanitarian implications of making already poor people poorer is, needless to say, a bridge too far.

Yes, such fines seem to be the answer to all our prayers from dogshit on the pavements to shifty foreigners stealing our jobs.

It’s to be wondered if this doesn’t present a solution to the backlog of terrorism cases currently ‘challenging‘ the Crown Prosecution Service. Let’s not bother with all those tedious trials (especially if the evidence is as thin as in the not-ricin and not red mercury trials) and legally ambiguous control orders and internment.

Let’s just bankrupt the buggers.

‘You see, that’s the beauty of propaganda - it has no internal logic or integrity to violate.’ (Jon Stewart)

(via Dave)

This lecture by Henry Porter is vital stuff. Read it before it slides behind The Independent’s infernal subscription wall in a few days.

(Thanks to Tim for the link.)

According to the BBC, it appears that at least two of the 16 people who are currently under these Control Orders are on the run.

One of them, appears to have been “missing” for “some months” !

Section 14 of the Act provides that, every 3 months, the Secretary of State must

(a) prepare a report about his exercise of the control order powers during that period; and

(b) lay a copy of that report before Parliament.

Such a report was made by Tony McNulty, the Minister for Policing, Security and Community Safety on the 11th September 2006 i.e. when the Home Office must have known that one of the, supposedly most dangerous people, in the UK was missing.

read the rest…

Richard Norton-Taylor on the al-Jazeera memo and how the two men charged with ‘disclosing’ the document are to be tried in secret:

At a time when David Blunkett makes money by revealing cabinet discussions, we are prevented from hearing evidence against defendants in a criminal trial simply, say some who have read the memo, to protect ministers from embarrassment. It is a genuine scandal. It is even more so given Blunkett’s suggestion on Channel 4’s Dispatches programme last night that the US bombing of al-Jazeera would have been justified at the time of the invasion in 2003.

What Norton-Taylor doesn’t say is that Blunkett is going around this week and causing more embarrassment, for himself and others, than the leaking of the memo ever could. As Dave W points out, Blunkett certainly seems to have decided to deal and take the money rather than see what might be in a ministerial box.

Anyway, if anybody out there has a copy of the memo lying around and wants to share, I, amongst others, will happily give it an airing.