From now on, the 'Private Browsing' and 'Clear History' buttons on your internet browser are redundant. Under a new EU regulation, every email sent and every website visited by people in Britain are to be stored by internet service providers for use by the state. Britain was instrumental in pushing through this regulation, under the guise of 'anti-terrorism' action. But if past 'anti-terrorism' laws are anything to go by, it won't catch any terrorists, but it will be used by the police to criminalize ordinary people.
In the face of public outrage, the Home Secretary has already had to back down from her plans to log every email, phone call and website visit on a Home Office database. But now of course it's happening through stealth by way of EU regulation. This is a massive assault on liberty. Already, if you are arrested – and we can now be arrested for any offence, however minor – the police routinely confiscate your computer and go on a fishing trip to see what they can find. Now they don't have to: they can simply demand your past email and browsing history off your internet provider.
This will inevitably lead to blackmail and abuse – as in the case of the teacher who was arrested and put on the sex offender's register because he had accessed a website that merely had links to child porn – links that he did not access. Rather than take the matter to court, he accepted a caution. So he lost his job for not looking at child porn! Other people have faced charges because they were quietly following an innocent link when some porn site popped up on them. And remember that with the European Arrest Warrant, you can be extradited from the UK to any EU country – Greece, for example, where you can be held for months or even years without trial while your case is 'investigated'. From this week, we really do have a police officer looking over our shoulder – able to examine every email we send and every site we access – and throw us into jail if they don't like the sound of what you're writing or the look of what you're viewing!
The subject of care for war veterans be a sensitive issue. Many feel they have made a huge sacrifice for their country, whilst others believe they took calculated risks in signing up. But, whatever their private views, it is underhand, sly and immoral for the government to use the public's sympathy for them in order to push their system of ID cards.
The government is now proposing that all war veterans will be given ID cards allowing them preferential treatment on the NHS and other benefits such as priority council housing and bus travel. The scheme could be implemented as early as next year, which shows how this government is willing to go to any length to push the unpopular ID cards before they leave office. Perhaps I wouldn’t have been so sceptical towards the governments motives if they had shown some more interest for the welfare of veterans and servicemen in the past. After all, it is this government that has continually failed to equip and protect frontline soldiers and provide decent quality housing for their families.
Essentially, this extra care for veterans could be provided without furnishing them with ID cards. It is too late for the government to compensate for their failings of the past – but to use this as an excuse for more stealth legislation is disgraceful.
Having written a new book, The Rotten State of Britain, to show what a police state we have descended into, I seem to have become a victim of it myself.
This morning I was doing an interview with a Canadian TV crew on the outcome of the G20 at my office just underneath the Church of England's headquarters in Westminster. After I'd told them that capitalism was still alive and well and that the mess we're in was a failure of government policy rather than banks or markets, they decided they would like some set-up shots outside.
So the cameraman lugged his enormous camera and tripod onto Great Smith Street and I started doing my stage walk towards the office door. Whereupon a red police car, lights flashing, screeched up and two officers rushed out, in full body armour, to confront the cameraman and the interviewer and ask them what they were up to.
The cameraman suggested that it was pretty obvious what they were up to – setting up a TV interview. The police officers took out their notebooks. The cameraman ventured that this was not really necessary, but the police replied that under Home Office guidelines – the department run by the keeper of the nation's morals, Jacquie Smith, of course – they had to report that the crew had been stopped. And since we were under the gaze of at least ten CCTV cameras (five on the Schools department and even more on BERR), they had to go through the paperwork. They stopped anyone 'behaving suspiciously' around 'sensitive buildings'. Is the Church of England's headquarters really so sensitive? Am I worried about them taking pictures of my office, when it was me they were photographing?
So the crew had to provide identity and state their date of birth, their height, and even their ethnicity and were duly given their yellow copies of the stop and search form.
It really does underline the fact that we are now living in a police state, which is exactly why I wrote The Rotten State of Britain. One smart comment or false move and we could all have been arrested and held for 21 days as terrorist suspects. It's exactly why I wrote the book. The police used to be our servants. Now they're our masters. No doubt they get a bonus for everyone they stop; senior officers certainly do get a bonus for everyone they caution or charge. Fortunately, the police are drowning in paperwork so they can't do too much harm. But I wish they were out there catching burglars rather than stopping people from doing their job.
The Home Secretary's demand for access to our Facebook records is just the latest in a remorseless stream of spying that is turning us into a surveillance state.
The government has delayed, but not shelved, plans to link up all the government databases so that our details could be zipped instantly around half a million civil servants.
Last month the Home Secretary was proposing to set up a database that would log every one of our phone calls, email messages, and Google searches. Google has already been forced to hand over information, under government threats. Police can already requisition CCTV footage, our cashpoint transactions and our mobile phone records – and together with traffic-camera information, these will show exactly where any of us are at any time.
Earlier this year, Liberty had to go to the European Court to fight for the right of innocent people, including children, to have their samples removed from the police DNA database – the biggest in the world, naturally. The police said they'd think about it.
The Home Secretary says it's all necessary to fight terrorism. But during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, people were free to move about – even from Ireland to the UK without a passport – and not be monitored all the time.
The danger is that things like our Facebook information will end up in the wrong hands. Already, hospital staff have been caught swapping online medical information on celebrities. Officials have used CCTV cameras to ogle female customers in shopping malls. The new child database will be accessible to 400,000 officials – let's hope there's not a paedophile among them. People put very personal information on Facebook, and it remains there. So if the rules change and the police can check your past postings, it could prove very embarrassing. The opportunities for abuse or blackmail are legion.
Dr Eamonn Butler's new book, The Rotten State of Britain, is now available to buy now. Click here to find out how.
The current debate on the ever increasing presence of databases reveals a shocking and sinister truth. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the government is using technology to turn this into an Orwellian authoritarian state.
One of the most worrying aspects of these databases is that they are indiscriminate. On the National DNA database there are 500,000 innocent names listed (from a total of 4.5million). The government has taken the identity of these people and labelled them along with murders, rapists and other criminals simply in order to ‘keep tabs’ on them.
Perhaps this would not be so frightening if we knew the government could be trusted with our personal data. This, as we all know, is not the case. There are seemingly endless examples of government officials losing our data or leaving it in folders or on laptops. Worryingly I have had a letter from the government saying that my data ‘may’ have been left on a laptop in a public place – but they cannot be sure. Very reassuring.
On the whole, technology benefits society, but not in the hands of the government. ‘Onset’ is a new tool which is designed to use data to profile a child and assess whether they are likely to become a young offender. The reliability of this software is dubious and makes a mockery of our age-old right of bring ‘innocent until proven guilty’.
You'd have thought that after twelve years and countless Acts of Parliament on police, crime, and terrorism, the government would have its security policy about right by now. But no, the Policing and Crime Bill, which is coming up for its Third Reading and will go to the Lords soon, is a rag-bag of measures – some administrative trivia, but others fundamental to our freedoms.
There is, for example, a bit stuck in which would allow the police to insist on CCTV being installed within licensed premises – that is, all bars, pubs, clubs, corner grocery stores that sell alcohol, and even the poshest, quietest, country house hotels. Quite apart from the fact that I don't want some camera lip-reading me, or looking over my shoulder as I tap out my PIN number in a restaurant, my concern is that, once again, it will be the innocent who get criminalized by this technology. The police will regularly demand the CCTV records, and if they find one occasion where the shopkeeper has failed to ask some 20-year-old for ID (perhaps because he's known them for years), well, that's an offence and another nice conviction to put towards Gordon Brown's targets.
Then there's the bizarre new offence of paying for sex with prostitutes 'controlled for gain'. It's billed, of course, as preventing human trafficking. But it actually says that if 'any' of a prostitute's activities are controlled by another, the clients are nicked. So that's an end to places where some experienced woman actually schedules and looks out for the girls. From now on, they're on their own in that big bad world. I guess it would include girls who use agencies (like taxi drivers do) to bring business to them. After all, that peripheral part of their activities is 'controlled for gain' by the agency managers.
Again, agencies actually protect the girls they manage – barring violent clients, checking on the girls to ensure that clients have left on time without doing them injury. Depending on how these vague clauses are interpreted – and you can be sure that the police and the Home Secretary will interpret them as widely as they dare – it all means that there will be more prostitutes out there, on their own, without the protection of experienced other people. Like the human trafficking legislation that preceded it, this law isn't going to catch any nasty guys – it's simply going to be used to harass girls who are trying to make a living from an entirely voluntary activity. This government really are turning into a bunch of fascists.
If Labour wins the next election and the new Bill of Rights is introduced, it will be a step towards a new type of slavery in this country. One that would enshrine in law the government’s stranglehold over the people of this country. The legislative foundations will shift, drowning freedom under a plethora of rights and responsibilities. A step greater than the 1998 Human Rights Act, if introduced, this should make all who value freedom weep.
The rights and responsibilities agenda is viral. It assumes a de facto subservient relation of subject to ruler. The Bill of Rights would permit entitlements to free health care, education and mush else that the state is best left out of. A lawyers dream, but a nightmare for the productive, as the government strips them bare to uphold their side of this new socialist contract.
Any rights and space within the law for freedom will in effect be subsumed by the rule of ‘social justice’. As kings and queens before them, politicians will be the undoubted granter of rights and the ones to whom we owe responsibility. Hobbes’ Leviathan is taking shape nicely.
We could not trust the opposition to scrap it when finally in power;, after all, they are unlikely to do much in taking back powers lost to bureaucrats in Brussels. Similarly the fourth estate is scrambling around in the dirt, perhaps busy planning the rise and fall of its next celebrity superstar. As such, if Labour were to win this Bill of Rights would slip below the radar. The Times and Telegraph are well off the mark with their evocation of a ‘nanny state’, while the Daily Mail is mistaken in branding the Bill ‘spin’. This is nothing less than the blueprint for setting socialism in law.
Apologies for stealing the headline to this interesting Matthew Parris piece. He's pondering upon the difference between rules based regulation and judgement based. For example, was the earlier system when the governor of the Bank of England could simply raise an eyebrow and an activity would stop better than the current FSA system of rules....leading to box ticking rather than a consideration of the underlying reality of said activity.
In this instance I find myself agreeing that the eyebrow system works better. Yet Parris goes on to another example: wouldn't a tax system that depended upon HMCR simply saying "Oi! That's not on!" be better than a rules based, box ticking one. And I find myself disagreeing.
Which leads to something of a conundrum. If judgement, the eyebrow, is better sometimes than the strict interpretation of the written down rules and yet at other times the reverse is true, is there any sort of sorting mechanism that we can have to work out when for which? Erm, a rule as to when to use judgement or a judgement as to when to use rules as it were?
I don't claim that this is the final word and would welcome comments which would help sharpen this up. But I would say that judgement is correct when we're talking about a voluntary activity and rules when we're talking about the power of the State over us.
Being in the City, being able to rely upon the Bank of England as the lender of last resort, as an example, is a choice made by your business model. I see no problem with that meaning that you've also accepted the judgement based control of your activities as a quid pro quo. To use a sporting analogy, by agreeing to play the game of rugby you've accepted that the referee has the last word and can indeed send you off for anything he likes and no arguing.
However, how we are taxed is not voluntary. This is something imposed upon us by the State and at this point we want to know exactly what the rules are, in detail, in advance. Thus we need to have a rules based system,. the legislation which we can all read and understand (well, if tax law was in fact comprehensible by ordinary mortals).
To use another analogy, that of the criminal law. I want to know what is legal and what is not in advance. I don't want myself (or anyone else) to be dragged off the street and incarcerated just because someone has judged that I am a bad 'un. I've done what that is illegal? And how have you proven this and have you ticked all those boxes of evidence, trial, jury, of justice?
As I say I'd appreciate some help fleshing this out but I'd say judgement is appropriate when we voluntarily submit and rules when we are forced to.
Huddled in the back of a lorry that has just rolled off the ferry at Dover, in a few minutes time you’ll be speeding up the M20 towards London and a new life living and working as an illegal immigrant in the UK. The government won’t know you exist... The lorry driver on the other hand has been thoroughly and electronically examined in fine detail. His whereabouts have been known to the government since he decided to travel abroad. This will be heralded as a success by the eBorders team as they search their database looking for the guilty needles in the haystack.
This article in the Daily Telegraph highlights, what is now fast becoming a common theme of government attempts at security: everyone is potentially guilty and to protect you from yourselves they have to know all they can about you, including where you travel to. And as the eBorders spokesman says, they’ve already discovered that 0.00353% of travellers are in fact wanted criminals. This is heralded as a success; that the rest of us, under governmental threat of being fined have ‘willingly’ shared our data with them. This is us proving to the government that we have nothing to hide, and therefore nothing to fear; self-perpetuating their own rhetoric so that they continue to believe that they are on the correct policy path.
The majority of legislation introduced in relation to the apparent security of our nation, and ourselves, has contained a comparable threat to our own liberty which has forced us into compliance. Were this a private firm we would have long ago ended the contract and sought others who do not treat us as criminals from the outset. Perhaps the solution open to us is that we should all decide to become illegal immigrants, especially as it no longer seems this country is one that we are allowed to feel at home in.
One unintended consequence of the smoking ban has been the rise of e-cigarettes. Although I have yet to see them in the flesh, with sales in excess of 1,000 every month for the £40 starter-packs, it can only be a matter of time before they are a common sight.
One can picture the scene. A packed restaurant with waiters and waitresses rushed off their feet. From his pocket of a young gentleman produces the e-cigarette and starts to partake. Silence. A young lady screams and faints; the passing chef returns to the kitchen to fetch his sharpest cleaver; the restaurant owner’s finger hits the first of three nines. Calm, the restaurant manager asks the man with his now mortified date to leave.
Deafly silence is broken by an explanation of the product, but confusion and consternation still reigns as the man refuses to be deterred. He continues to smoke while tucking into his poached langoustines. Faux coughs abound, surely it only a matter of minutes before the young gentleman will be hounded from the restaurant by his fellow dinners. However, the mob will grin and bare it tonight: the lady on the next table, a comrade, asks if she could try the e-cigarette. The baying mob has been held at bay, it is a small victory for freedom.
If the owner of any restaurant chooses not to allow smoking they should be free to make their restaurant non-smoking. Though, the alternate should also hold. Private property should be protected from the excessive regulations of an intrusive government. Let people be free to lead their lives in the manner to which they choose. Don’t regulate, nudge or even suggest. It is time to fight back, preferably with cohiba esplendidos rather than e-cigarettes.
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The Home Secretary's demand for access to our Facebook records is just the latest in a remorseless stream of spying that is turning us into a surveillance state. 
The current debate on the ever 
You'd have thought that after twelve years and countless Acts of Parliament on police, crime, and terrorism, the government would have its security policy about right by now. But no, the Policing and Crime Bill, which is coming up for its Third Reading and will go to the Lords soon, is a rag-bag of measures – some administrative trivia, but others fundamental to our freedoms.
If Labour wins the next election and the new Bill of Rights is introduced, it will be a step towards a new type of slavery in this country. One that would enshrine in law the government’s stranglehold over the people of this country. The legislative foundations will shift, drowning freedom under a plethora of rights and responsibilities. A step greater than the 1998 Human Rights Act, if introduced, this should make all who value freedom weep.
Huddled in the back of a lorry that has just rolled off the ferry at Dover, in a few minutes time you’ll be speeding up the M20 towards London and a new life living and working as an illegal immigrant in the UK. The government won’t know you exist... The lorry driver on the other hand has been thoroughly and electronically examined in fine detail. His whereabouts have been known to the government since he decided to travel abroad. This will be heralded as a success by the 
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