If this passes, Blair and Reid should be questioned every day. See how they like it.

This is the last test of whether the Parliamentary Labour Party is dead or just in  a coma.

Bush is a symptom, not the disease.

Police officer:  OK, you.  Who are the terrorists?  Where are they living?

Innocent brown man:  Um, I dunno.  I don't know any terrorists.  I'm an accountant.  I was just going to the store.

Police officer:  Store my arse.  We know you're a terrorist.  Or at least that you know something about the terrorists.  You meet them at the mosque.  We know they're around here somewhere.  Now tell us where they are.

Innocent brown man:  No, really, I don't know anything about terrorists.  I'm from Chile!  I'm an atheist!  Honestly, I don't know any terrorists.

Police officer:  A likely excuse.  Where'd you get the fake passport?  And didn't the athiests write some terrorist cookbook where they taught people how to make bombs?  I'm not gonna ask you again, where are the terrorists?

Innocent brown man:  It's not fake.  I really am from Chile.  Ands the anarchists did the cookbook, not the athiests.  And I don't know any terrorists!

Police officer:  Yes, you do.

Innocent brown man:  No, I don't.

Police officer:  Yes, you do.

Innocent brown man:  No, I don't!

Police officer:  That's it.  I've had enough.  We're arresting you for refusing to answer questions.  Come with me.

Innocent brown man:  But I answered the questions!

Police officer:  I didn't like your answers.

Where's the Murdoch Alert?

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.

I was arrested and held in Canada for refusing to identify myself and answer policemen's questions.  There is no requirement in Canada to carry any identification unless one is driving, and one is not required to answer policemen's questions unless one is suspected of a crime.

In my case, I was walking down the street when a police cruiser pulled up beside me and the policeman started flirting with me.  I rebuffed him and that's when he started treating me like a suspect.

I eventually won my case, but it took me two years and many thousands of dollars to do it.

I have dual Canadian - German citizenship.

Animation available from here

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

Well I've just fired off a letter to a politician that i nearly knew

here is what I wrote

Dear David
        I don't  live in your constituency, and I don't  usually write to our elected representatives, however you have drawn the short straw on the grounds that I very nearly lived in the same house as you, having been both a boarder and cathedral chorister at Kings leaving  the year before you started.
I am somewhat distressed by the suggestion that there will be an introduction of new stop and search powers for the police. To quote the Times "Under the new laws, police will not need to suspect that a crime has taken place and can use the power to gain information about "matters relevant" to terror investigations. If suspects fail to stop or refuse to answer questions, they could be charged with a criminal offence and fined up to £5,000." This I see as a tremendously regressive step in race relations. Historically whenever stop and search measures have been introduced, they have been used disproportionately against the coloured population of these Islands, and mostly unfairly. In the past, during the Northern Irish situation, similar requests for powers  have been made by the police and security services. Politicians in the past have always had the strength to turn these requests down. Allowing this would be an act of political, ethical, and moral cowardice, and is an act that would obviously fail the Daily Mail test. It would even be an act that appears so negative, that it would be on the wishlist of the British National Party. It is something that would appear to be a betrayal of everything that the Labour party stands for.  I do hope to see you acting apropriately in the near future.

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.

Lets get this right. Tony Blair is retiring and as last act he wants to turn the state (which he will not controll anymore) into a police state.

My question is why?

A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!

Just seen a presenter on Sky news say

"This will allow police to stop suspects, even if there is no reason to have any suspicion of them"

My mind is now spinning trying to join the dots in the logic.

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.

Something just occurred to me, so the thought isn't very well formed. But-- am I correct in thinking Blair just handed the SNP something they could use to make Scottish independence seem a lot more enticing to the public? ("Vote for independence so we aren't under this totalitarian thumb" sort of thing.)

Steve Bell:

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.

Blair and John Reid, his home secretary that is also leaving, are trying to put into place the same law the British government had in Northern Ireland over all of Britain.

In 1972, I was stopped on Oxford Street at 7 pm as I walked calmly towards a Tube station. Two officers in uniform asked me who I was, where I had been and where I was going. They asked me for ID. It happened that I had just got in from Paris and had my passport. They went through it. They asked me to repeat details like my date and place of birth. I was carrying a grip that they searched. They pulled things out and asked me what they were. They wanted full explanations of who I said I was going to see (my dad!). And what was the address again? (Three times that question). They were cold, aggressive, professional, worked as a team, cross-cutting questions. You said you were born in what year again? No, in full, the full date. Your mother's maiden name? (Yes, they asked me that). Spell it. So you came from where? Paris? What were you in Paris for? Do you have any proof you live and work in Paris? Tell me again how you travelled today, you weren't clear about that. And how are you going to that address, what was it again? What Tube are you taking? All right, go.

I was perfectly aware they had no right to do any of this. I also knew I was a long-haired hippie who was going down the station where some dope would be found in his pocket if I didn't cooperate. Later that week, a barrister friend who knew what was going down with respect to the Northern Ireland situation told me I'd been dead right to make that call. "They may have been in uniform, but they were Special Branch," he said.

"wartime"-like powers "to stop and question people." The "draconian" powers will give the police the ability "to interrogate individuals about who they are, where they have been and where they are going."

Of course, all that was under the radar back then. And of course it is intolerable that a Prime Minister should be openly supporting policies of this kind in order to make them "legitimate" and everyday. But I can't help thinking Britain has been on this slope for a very long time.

We have chosen as a society to put the civil liberties of the suspect, even if a foreign national, first.

Tell that to the family of Jean Charles de Menezes.

Jeb Avenue
London, South West 2
Inglan

Dear Ma Maa,

Good Day

I hope that when these few lines reach you
they may find you in the best of health

Ma Maa I really don' know how to tell yu dis
'cause , I did meck a solemn promise
to teck care a likkle Jim and try
mi best fi look out fi 'im

Ma Maa a really did try mi best
but none de less
mi sorry fi tell yu sey
poor likkle Jim get aress'
it was de middle a de rush 'our
when everybody jus' a hustle an a bustle        
fi go 'ome fi dem evenin' shower

Me and Jim stand up waiting pon a bus
not causing no fuss
when all on a sudden a police man pull up
out jump 3 police man
De 'ole a dem carrying baton

Dem walk up to me and Jim
one a dem 'ole on to Jim
sey 'im teckin 'im in
Jim tell him fi leggo a 'im
fa 'im no do nuttin
an 'im naw tief, not even a button

Jim start to riggle
De police start to giggle

Ma Maa, meck a tell yu weh dem do to Jim
Ma Maa , meck a tell yu we dem do to him

Dem tump 'im in 'im belly
   an' it turn to jelly
Dem lick 'im pon 'im back  
   an 'im rib get pop
Dem lick 'im pon 'im head
   but it tuff like lead
Dem kick 'im in 'im seed
  an it started to bleed

Ma Maa I just couldn't just stan' up
  deh a no do nutten

So mi juck one ina 'im eye  
   an 'im started to cry
Mi tump one in 'im mout  
   an 'im started to shout
Mi kick one pon 'im shin
 an 'im started to spin
Mi tump 'im pon 'im chin  
  an 'im drop pon a bin
       an crash an dead

Ma Maa more police man come down
   an beat me to de ground          

Dem charge Jim fi sus
Dem charge mi fi murder
Ma Ma!  Don't fret
don't get depress an down 'earted
be of good courage

Till I hear from yu

I remain your son

Sonny

-- Linton Kwesi Johnson

The irony, the US and the UK slowly and steadily eroding the laws that were put in place after WWII to prevent there ever being another Nazi state. Creepy, very creepy.

"Once in awhile we get shown the light, in the strangest of places, if we look at it right" - Hunter/Garcia

An update in the Guardian:

Peter Hain, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, where the powers are already in force, warned the restrictions could become "the domestic equivalent of Guantanamo Bay". But it emerged later that it was the Northern Ireland Office - Mr Hain's own department - that proposed extending the provision across the UK.

It is understood that stop and question powers in Ulster are due to be relaxed as part of the peace process, but officials in the province want to retain them.

Labour chairwoman Hazel Blears told Sky News: "What I understand is that the request has come from the Northern Ireland Office because they have the powers, they want to be able to carry on using them, they find them useful."

There's also this gem at the end:

Counter-terrorism minister Tony McNulty said the measures would not go before Parliament until the autumn, allowing plenty of time for consultation. He insisted they would only be used to tackle terrorism and would not mark a return to the "heavy-handed days of 'sus' law", which permitted police officers to act on suspicion, or "sus", alone.

If that clarified anything about how police are going to figure out who to stop, please explain it to me, because I sure missed something.

After all these years sucking up to Blair (sucking up to Bush -- what a disturbing picture) the UK has become a has-been country without even a decent opposition party. Of course  a lot of the things Blair is foisting on the Brits are similar to the ways Bush et al have fucked the U.S. The difference is that WE are angrier than Americans have ever been. The British? Not so much.

All this weekend I've been listening to Rufus Wainright's beyond-brilliant Going to a Town. Not sure what this song has to do with the British not caring about their rights, but it does make me proud to hear an American express our national mood so note-perfectly.

(And by the way, if you're sitting smugly in one of those other Old European countries thinking, oh yes, those perfidious Brits, don't. You're ALL Bush-lovers to me.)

Excellent Diary. I strongly recommend you watching the three part BBC documentary'The Power of Nightmares' directed by Adam Curtis. It is not available on DVD but can be wathed online on various sites. It is about the ways the US and the UK have used terrorism in which to maintain power and decrease our civil liberties. What Blair is doing was correctly predicted by the show. The following is a link to The Nation review of the documentary:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050620/bergen

The Power of Nightmares, a three-hour BBC documentary directed by Adam Curtis, is arguably the most important film about the "war on terrorism" since the events of September 11. It is more intellectually engaging, more historically probing and more provocative than any of its rivals, including Fahrenheit 9/11. But although it has been shown at Cannes and at a few film festivals in the United States, it has yet to find an American distributor, and for understandable reasons. The documentary asserts that Al Qaeda is largely a phantom of the imagination of the US national security apparatus. Indeed, The Power of Nightmares seeks nothing less than to reframe the past several decades of American foreign policy, from the Soviet menace of the 1970s to the Al Qaeda threat of today, to argue that neoconservatives in the American foreign policy establishment have vastly exaggerated those threats in their quest to remake the world in the image of the United States.

The only positive thing I can say is that reaction in the press has been pretty sceptical, bordering on hostile.

Blair and Reid are yesterday's men and they can shout about taking us all on as they're bundled out the door as much as they like, but I think (hope) that the days of the blank cheque on terror are drawing to a close.

I'm sure there are still a lot of sun readers who can be persuaded that all we need to do is lock up a lot more darkies and everything will be alright and there will be council houses for all (blessings on sainted Margaret Hodge), but I think the darkest days are behind us.

keep to the Fen Causeway