42 days – without charge! It’s just the start.

So, it’s happened. This utterly pointless New Labour administration have brought in a totally unworkable, unmanageable, unrealistic, draconian, Orwellian and genuinely unnecessary piece of unjust, knee-jerk, headline-grabbing legislative nonsense! 

It will be declared illegal by the European High Court, the UK House of Lords and the human rights lobby will make it the biggest waste of time in – a few days since the last biggest waste of time to come out of the UK parliament. They waste time in an exceptionally regular and methodical way, better in fact than they do any other single thing.  

1000 hours in detention without charge under new terrorism laws! Constitutionally comparable countries have nothing near this length of time without charge, in the US it is 2 days maximum, but they do have convenient  ”offshore” facilities like Guantanamo to get around this…

But certainly in the European Union nothing like it exists. This is a directionless British government desperately peddling the fear of terrorism to an increasingly insecure populous, insecure because they are fed paranoia by a state that wants to know everything about everyone.

Amendment 64 to the Criminal Justice BIll on “Extreme Porn”, see the article I wrote for the New Statesman online 

:http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2008/05/extreme-rights-pornography. This article includes interviews and opinion related directly to government and personal privacy issues.

The DNA database is already well under way with millions of individuals’ genomes so far committed to government hard-drives and I am currently working on another article about the proposed government super-database of every email and phone call made within the UK.

These are actions not of a ‘nanny state’ – these are the actions of a megalomaniacal, unaccountable and intensely paranoid administration. It wants nothing less than total control over all your actions, your movements, words and as soon as technology permits your thoughts too! Not in the manner of the old totalitarian forced labour and Ministerium für Staatssicherheit police regimes.

This ‘New’ Labour [like it's analogous monikers 'neo'-con, 'new' world order, a 'new' kind of terrorist threat...] is far more subtle, cynical and manipulative than the blunt instruments of the old Bloc. Anything with the prefix “New” – watch it; it spells trouble in the form of a brand new lie!

I am not a conspiracy theorist at all, I know some of them and believe me, I am really not one! But we – the people – are really being slowly corralled into a bad situation, a very real slavery that we are encouraged to buy into! And the best way to do this is for the government to know absolutely everything about you.

The best way to know absolutely everything about you is to get you to either voluntarily or by act of parliament surrender information about every aspect of your life. The best way to do this is to put the fear of God in you with a bogus ‘War on Terror’ and then act as your benevolent protector and saviour.

Under the guise of protecting you against terrorists they can piece by piece erode every single civil liberty that once made Western Europe and the UK the envy of many other nations. 

42 days held in custody – without charge, for most people that would be enough time to go stir crazy and admit to anything at all just to get the hell out of the cell you were ‘moved into’.

If on the other hand you are a trained ‘terrorist’ or ‘unlawful combatant’ or part of any other demonized group and as fanatical about whatever cause you ‘represent’ as to be a real threat to national security then 42 days in detention will not make any difference to you or break your beliefs, but it may well strengthen your resolve to ‘fight on’. 

If I were a violent gun wielding christian fundamentalist or an equally aggressive bomb planting orthodox jew – utterly determined in my ‘religious’ fervor – locking me up for any considerable length of time is most definitely going to make me more hateful of my ‘enemies’ and more determined than ever to kill them all.

But as yet I don’t know of any radical, extremist, fanatical, fundamentalist, violent or paramilitary journalist groups. What would we blow up? The Editors desk? Who could we hold hostage? The photographers? 

By the time extremists of any denomination are at the point of violent expressions of the nature we have witnessed in their various atrocities they are beyond the reach of any preventative and punitive measures.

They are fanatics, they are pretty damned imbalanced and even if they seem like ‘nominally socialised’ individuals, that they would get on to a packed commuter train or bus and blow themselves and many other people up is a good indication they need some form of intensive therapy, some kind of professional psychiatric intervention. 

I would have thought it more relevant to use the mental health act instead of another anti terrorism act. You could hold people on an indefinite Section or a Section-2 if just for 28 days observation…

If they really are terrorists then the chlorpromazine certainly will moderate that troublesome ‘religious fervor’ and if they are mentally ill, well surely they are in the best place for them; “trust me… I’m with the government”. 

 

 

 

 

 

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