Spontaneous Monotony

Delegates at the annual conference of the University and College Union (the ’super-union’ formed by the merger of the AUT and NATFHE) have voted unanimously to reject the government’s call for lecturers to inform on students expressing undesirable political views. For this order request to have been made in the first place was disgraceful, but congratulations to the UCU for standing up to Robo-Reid’s plans. Aside from the very serious human rights issues surrounding the security services investigating people solely for their political views, this proposal if agreed to would have stifled the very atmosphere of academic debate on which universities and colleges depend:

UCU delegates in Bournemouth have made it clear this morning that they will oppose government attempts to restrict academic freedom or free speech on campus. Lecturers want to teach students, if they wanted to police them they would have joined the force. (…) Universities must remain safe spaces for lecturers and students to discuss and debate all sorts of ideas

- UCU General Secretary Sally Hunt
External links

• BBC News - Campus extremism request rejected
• UCU - Lecturers vote unanimously to throw out government spying plans

Accusations such as this are often overused, but a police state is exactly what we will have if Tony Blair’s proposed new terrorism law is passed by Parliament. If it is, then anyone walking down the street can be stopped and interrogated by the police - if they refuse to divulge who they are, where they have come from, and where they are going, they could be fined or even put in prison.

The fact that such a thing could even be considered by a government which claims to be democratic is monstrous. Anyone who doubts the sinister nature of these powers need look no further than Blair’s own comments:

We have chosen as a society to put the civil liberties of the suspect (…) first. I happen to believe this is misguided and wrong.

Blair seems to be forgetting that the whole point of terrorism is to destroy our way of life. When we start punishing people without a trial (or without even enough evidence to put a person on trial), we destroy our democracy and hence do the terrorists’ job for them. Thank whatever deity you believe in that we’re getting rid of this dangerous man next month.

These proto-fascists need to be opposed at every turn - our only hope is that our MPs discover some spine between now and October, when this travesty is due to be voted on by the Commons. Thank you very much to everyone who voted Labour at the last General Election, and forced this lot on the 67% of us who didn’t. We know who to blame if these people succeed in destroying our democratic state.

External links

• Times Online - Concerns voiced over new terror powers

In case anyone thought that John Reid’s decision to leave office, rather than be sacked by Gordon Brown, showed him developing something approaching a brain cell, think again. Just read today’s words of wisdom from El Baldo, courtesy of the BBC:

Unfortunately under these limitations, within the existing legal framework, it is very difficult to prevent determined individuals from absconding

The redtop scumsheets have of course step forward to print the Neo Labour propaganda as accepted fact. Of course giving people who have not been charged with any crime ‘human rights’ causes terrorism, they say. Leaving aside the notion that human rights are something ‘given’ to people by the state (complete nonsense, of course, to anyone who understands the definition of the term ‘human rights’), there is a more immediate reason for why these people can easily escape: they aren’t in jail.

“Ah!” say the proto-fascists. “That’s because of the Human Rights Act”. Complete and utter nonsense. The reason that these people aren’t in jail is that the government refuses to put them on trial. Yes, you read that right. These people, who the government claims are dangerous terrorists, are not being put on trial because John Reid and minions say so. The Lib Dems and Torys have tried to press the issue every time an ‘anti-terror’ bill has been put through the Commons, but to no avail.

What John Reid, and the bastions of quality British Journalism (sic) at the Sun, fail to realise is that this is a democratic country. In democratic countries, you do not put people in jail without first convicting them of a crime in a court of law. That was the case before the Human Rights Act was passed. It was the case before the European Convention on Human Rights was signed - the Sun says that the ECHR became part of UK law in 1998, in fact it became part of UK law when it was signed in 1950 (written by British lawyers by the way). It will still be the case if El Baldo derogates from parts of the ECHR, or if David ‘Snowballs chance in hell’ Cameron wins the next election and withdraws from the ECHR. Detention without trial is a violation of the most basic principles of our democratic society - ECHR or no ECHR.

Sorry folks, but with being busy I hadn’t noticed that I had totally arsed up the server configuration. Now sorted.

[EDIT] RSS feeds were still borked for some reason. Cheers to the person who let me know about these errors.

I’ve upgraded to Wordpress 2.2 - despite the ‘major’ version number change there aren’t actually any new features. The official ’sidebar widgets’ functionality, which was previously a plugin, is now integrated into Wordpress. That’s it. Usual request for help applies - if anything screwy happens, post a comment here.

EDIT: Because the ’single post’ template got overwritten during the upgrade, tags were missing for a couple of minutes - this is now fixed. Unfortunately I had to reset the cache so pages might load slightly slower for a short while.