Articles with the Tag Civil liberties

I Expect Gordon Brown Already Has His Complimentary Copy, Not that It’ll Do Him Any Good

Election Skullduggery, Gordon Brown, New Labour, Totalitarianism, Video
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North Korea’s video instructions to the populace on how to vote:

See, apathetic UK voters, it’s easy. Step up, bow to the nice party officials, and don’t forget to vote overwhelmingly for the Dear Leader. It certainly works for Kim Jong Il, who got 99% of the vote in the last North Korean election: it could work for Gordo too. He could put a copy through every letter box along with the swine flu leaflets.

It’s the only way Labour under Brown will ever get elected again anytime soon, despite their members’ best efforts to subvert the vote.

Labour MPs know this. They see the gravy train rapidly steaming out of the station. That’s why there are so many carefully placed rumours Charles”I’m ashamed to be a Labour MP” Clarke is plotting for the leadership as a Blairite ‘safety’ candidate, just to get rid of Brown.

Prepare for mean, stalking safety elephant on a media rampage and worse; like the once-laughable Squirrel Nutkin Hazel Blears and the lightweight James Purnell being touted as actual contenders for PM.

But the Blairites’ve tried it numerous times before, and like the Dear Leader Brown’s still there, despite being universally loathed by the public and his own party alike.

They’ve all failed to dislodge Brown; despite every failure, every disaster, every mismanagement and however many Nokias and printers he’s attacked in temper, the bugger’s still bloody there. It’s at least a year until the general election. We may yet get the instructional voting videos in the post.

Injustice Is Built In

Bloody Lawyers, Civil liberties, Life under Capitalism, Manufacturing consent, Policing, UK politics, War on Terror
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You wouldn’t have seen it in New Labour’s 1997 manifesto, though.

Labour’s deliberate policy of shutting down legal channels to justice for the average Joe and Josephine in order to crush dissent, this from an adminstration of lawyers, is something I’ve been blogging about for a long time.

I was idly rereading the ‘police’ post archive this morning in light of the G20 police brutality reports when I was reminded of this 2000 Schnews article, which made me wonder: how many of those peaceful protestors arrested at Kingsnorth or Nottingham or the G20 or Plymouth or on misapplied terrorist legislation have had, or can get access to legal advice?

Not too many, I’d wager:

Sweeping changes to the legal aid system are going to mean that thousands who find themselves dragged into the legal system are going to find themselves without proper legal advice. Despite the fact that this government has created 6,000 new criminal offences in the last ten years, and is hauling record numbers before the courts and off to chokey, they’re now keen to restrict access to legal advice. All in the name of cost-cutting and reducing inefficiency of course. What is actually happening is a massive erosion of hard won rights and the end of the legal aid system, which helped achieve some degree of parity in court cases. (OK, so SchNEWS is obviously against the system, man, but meantime still not keen to see what few civil liberties we have taken away!)

The changes came in on January 14th. Prior to this, on arrival at the police station you would be offered contact with a solicitor of your choice. From now on you will be directed to the Criminal Defence Call Centre (CDCC). This is staffed, not by solicitors but by accredited representatives who’ve done a training course, many of them actually ex-coppers. You will only be allowed to contact your own solicitor if you pay privately. Needless to say the call centre advice is probably going to be different to that of a specialist defence solicitor.

While I have met at least one accredited representative who was an ex-copper and did a fantastic job, to put so many of them (they’re cheaper than actual lawyers) in charge of dispensing legal advice to the arrested might lead one to think the government’s given the police control of the independent legal process – though no doubt Jack Straw would deny that to his dying breath.

One Brighton-based solicitor told SchNEWS, “Previously we could intervene in the process earlier – warn people to make no comment, not to sign police notebooks and not to answer any questions off the PNC1 form*. We could act as an outside guarantee of people’s rights while they were inside. Now, the system is in meltdown. If the call centre is too incompetent to get hold of your brief then you may end up using a duty solicitor or remaining unrepresented. If you’re not going to be interviewed then you can be fingerprinted, DNAed and booted out of the door without once receiving any independent advice.”

While there was never a Legal Aid golden age Labour’s deliberate blocking of justice and dismantling of low cost legal advice networks and legal aid over the past 12 years has created a legal advice desert. So far it’s only been affecting those nasty, nasty druggies, petty crims, burglars and crusty anarchists, so there’s been little outcry about it from the bourgeoisie. They’re criminals, who cares?

But if there’s no justice for criminals, there’s no justice for anyone. As I wrote at the time:

Should citizens, empowered by knowing what their rights are and how to enforce them, start to challenge the boss, who knows where it might lead?

The overthrow of New Labour – and that would never do.

Why, such an informed populace might start enforcing their rights on other things too. They might even start to challenge the everyday petty tyrannies of Labour’s incompetent and authoritarian government, like, say, the deaths of children in custody or the illegal invasions of other sovereign nations or the selective imposition of swingeing terrorist legislation on people of a certain ethnicity and/or religion.

Maybe now a few of the comfortable middles at legitimate protests like the G20 have had theirs or their kids’ heads batoned, been kettled by aggressive paramilitaries or arrested on trumped up ‘terrorism’ charges for merely expressing their right to free speech, we’ll see a bit more outrage and a lot more challenge.

Comment of The Day

Activism, Civil liberties, Comment of the Day, Life under Capitalism, Manufacturing consent, Media, Police Murder, Policing, UK politics
Published on 2 Comments on Comment of The Day

I see that anarchist rag The Sunday Times (prop. R. Murdoch) is featuring more video of police brutality at the G20.

Rupert Murdoch’s the champion of the oppressed masses now? Who knew? Fight the power, Rupe!

As if.

Commenter GnosticMind responded to Henry Porters’ column on public order policing in today’s Observer and he hits the bullseye when he says:

19 Apr 09, 5:36am (about 2 hours ago)

What is also interesting here is the media treatment of those attacked by the police : The second victim to come forward, the woman from Brighton, has now hired Max bloody Clifford of all people, to represent her : Anyone well versed in Situationist dialectic and critique will see exactly what is happening here — the state media machinery absorbs the threat to the status quo, by repackaging the threat — and selling it back to its own people — as spectacle and entertainment.

The society as spectacle wins yet again — if , that is, most people are fooled and pacified by it yet again.

All that Situationist theory is old hat by now, and very overdone, years ago — but by God they got it right.

They certainly did.

I bet TimesOnline’s hitcount is well up. The management (R. Murdoch) and the advertisers must be loving it. Do I smell an advertising revenue spike?

Dissent and violent repression;not only poliitical theatre but the saviour of the economy.
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Not A Coronary

Police Murder, Policing
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BBC Radio 5 live is reporting that the second postmortem on Ian Tomlinson has found that he died of a internal bleeding in the abdomen and not a heart attack, as police claimed.

The pathologist at the first postmortem has form for jumping the gun with the press and getting things wrong:

Dr Patel is on a Home Office register of accredited forensic pathologists, which is managed on behalf of all police forces by the National Policing Improvement Agency. Questions have twice been asked about his handling of suspicious death cases. In 1999 Dr Patel was disciplined by the GMC after he discussed the medical history of Roger Sylvester, a 30-year-old black man who died in police custody, outside an inquest hearing.

He told reporters: “I am aware from the medical records held at Whittington hospital that Mr Sylvester was a user of crack cocaine.” Sylvester’s family were devastated by the suggestion and contested that he been a user.

More here.

[edited for links as more reports become available]