An open letter to my MP, Sadiq Khan, MP [but now see update appended below]:
Dear Sadiq,
Here is an appeal with which you, as a former civil rights lawyer of great distinction, will surely sympathise. As a minister in the government, you won’t be able to speak or vote openly to kill off the provision in a Bill now going through parliament which represents yet another assault on our privacy and fundamental freedoms. But, being a member of the government, you may well have more ability than any back-bencher to talk privately behind the scenes to your colleagues and to press them quietly to delete the clause in question, and not to try to fudge it with ambiguous and still unsatisfactory re-wording as the responsible — or irresponsible — minister, Jack Straw, seems to be planning to do (surprise, surprise).
As you know better than most, Government already collects far too much personal information about us all and stores it in scores of databases. Hundreds of central government departments and agencies and even local authorities have access to some of it, and sometimes abuse that access for purposes differing from those for which it was originally collected. Now your fellow-ministers have slipped an obnoxious clause into a Bill about coroners — truly! — which, if parliament indolently approves it, will make abuse of all that information even more widespread and more harmful. Phil Booth, a leading light in the admirable campaign against ID cards, sums it up concisely in the Modern Liberty section of the Guardian’s Comment is Free blog:
This morning at the Convention on Modern Liberty, I launched NO2ID’s request that everyone at the convention – and around the UK – tells their MP *right now* that they refuse their consent to having their information shared under any “information sharing order”, a power currently being slipped onto the statute books in clause 152 of the coroners and justice bill.
Please tell yours too. It’s important, and urgent – and something that only YOU can do. If you never have before, now’s the time to write to your MP – in a letter, or via www.WriteToThem.com.
Jack Straw has been making noises that could signal a U-turn, but the only acceptable action is to remove clause 152 entirely from the bill. It is not linked to any other clause, despite being sandwiched between other powers and so-called safeguards offered to the information commissioner. It cannot be improved, and Straw can’t be allowed to merely “dilute” it. Clause 152 just has to go.
It’s imperative that in coming days every MP hears from his or her constituents. Please tell them you refuse consent to having your information, taken for one purpose, arbitrarily used for any other purpose. And ask them to vote clause 152 off the bill.
• Phil Booth is the national coordinator of NO2ID. See more on the convention and civil liberties at liberty central.
I think that privately you know he’s right. So please note that as a life-long Labour Party supporter I formally refuse my consent to having information about me which has been taken for one purpose arbitrarily or otherwise used for any other purpose. Please make sure that the infamous clause 152 is removed completely from the Bill.
I am putting a copy of this message on my blog, which I know (with appreciation) that you sometimes read. I hope that by putting it there I might encourage lots of others, from Tooting (your constituency) and elsewhere, to write as soon as possible to their MPs of whatever party to state formally that they too refuse their consent to what this clause proposes, even if it is cosmetically amended to fob off the storm of protest that it has aroused. If the clause is allowed to survive, whether or not amended with fudge, we shall all be looking closely at the division lists to see which MPs shrugged their shoulders and voted for it. You won’t be able to vote against it: but perhaps you could arrange an important engagement (such as coming to dinner with my wife and myself) at the time when the vote is taken?
With my best wishes
Brian
PS: If you should decide to reply to this message, I of course promise to add your reply to my blog, with any further comments of my own as necessary.
Update (Sunday, 8 March 2009): According to this report in today’s Observer, Jack Straw appears to have climbed down:
Straw bows to pressure over data sharing
Jack Straw last night scrapped controversial government proposals that could have allowed patients’ medical and DNA records to be shared with police, foreign governments and other bodies.
In a victory for civil liberties campaigners, the justice secretary bowed to public pressure over the data-sharing provisions in the forthcoming coroners’ bill, which would have allowed public bodies to exchange data without the knowledge or consent of individuals involved. Doctors and the Bar Council had joined privacy campaigners in warning of the potential risks to public trust.
The move will be seen as an olive branch to Labour MPs concerned about what they see as the erosion of civil liberties, and will raise eyebrows at Westminster where Straw is viewed as a potential future leadership contender.
Your ministerial position will forbid you you admit it, but I would like to think that I see your hand in this welcome about-turn, Sadiq. Thanks! Now have a go at those wretched monstrosities Control Orders, and IPPs, and the huge new prisons planned, and mandatory life sentences for murder, and all those surveillance cameras, and ID cards with their supporting giant database, and….
During and after the recent conflict in and around Gaza, the media in the UK and many other commentators commonly referred to Israel’s ‘blockade’ of Gaza, imposed by closing the frontier crossing-points between Gaza and Israel. Lifting this blockade has been one of the principal demands of the Hamas régime in Gaza. Now Dave, who has contributed many well informed comments to discussions of Israel-Palestine issues on this blog, has sent me a copy of what seems to me an extremely interesting exchange of messages on the question of Gaza’s borders and the Israeli blockade. The messages are exchanged between himself and a contact of his, here called simply ‘A’, an Israeli living in one of the Israeli settlements on the West Bank. With Dave’s agreement, for which I am grateful, I have put the text of this exchange (“Gaza: frontiers or prison walls?“) on my website. You can read it here.
In my short introduction to this text, I have written:
I am grateful to Dave, who has contributed many informative (and sometimes controversial) comments to my blog, for allowing me to put here this exchange of messages between himself and an Israeli contact, ‘A’, about the nature of the border between Gaza and Israel. I know nothing of ‘A’, and not much more about Gaza’s borders, so I can’t vouch for the accuracy of A’s remarks in this exchange. Nor do I take sides over the issues discussed. But many of the points made and the questions asked seem to me to shed fresh and useful light on issues which some of the UK media have perhaps tended to present in over-simplified black and white in their coverage of the recent tragic conflict. Anyway, judge for yourself.
The text of the exchange of messages is at http://bit.ly/XKggt.
If you wish to leave a comment on any aspect of the Gaza border question or on what Dave and ‘A’ have written about it, please do so here, in the space for comments below this.
Brian
In an uncharacteristically short letter published in today’s Guardian I have compared the outrage of our system of indeterminate sentences with Cuba’s practice of locking people up on the charge of being a “social danger” — a survival from the Napoleonic code, long pre-dating the Castro revolution. The Guardian made only a very few cuts in my letter as originally submitted, which, for the record, read as originally written:
According to the film-maker Professor Chanan (Cold war myths about Cuban jails, letters, February 21) there are still people in Cuban jails who “ought not to be there”, locked up on a pre-revolutionary Napoleonic charge of “social danger”. In British prisons there are around 4,500 people serving indeterminate sentences for “Public Protection”, many of whom have served the punitive part of their sentences but must stay in prison, sometimes for years, until they can convince parole boards that they won’t re-offend, often an inherently impossible task. This is preventive detention or internment, and an outrage: it should have no place in our law, any more than in Cuba’s.
In August 2007 I posted a piece in this blog about the rank injustice of “Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection” (IPPs) under which people who have been convicted of an offence, and who judges suspect might be inclined to re-offend after their release, may be given an indeterminate sentence, consisting of two parts: a tariff of a given length of time representing the period required for punishment, deterrence and rehabilitation, or in other words the minimum time to be served in prison; and an indefinite period of continued incarceration after that, during which the onus is on the prisoner to satisfy the parole board that he or she will not re-offend when released.
One way to achieve this challenging task is to complete, successfully, one of the courses available in some (but not all) prisons that are supposed to assist reform and rehabilitation, such as a course in anger management. The Catch 22 here is that many of the 4,500 or so IPP prisoners now in our jails are in prisons where none of these courses is available. Judges have ruled, and the government has accepted, that failure to attend a course which is not available can’t be a reason for continuing to detain a prisoner, but without having done a course, how can anyone demonstrate that he is a reformed character and won’t re-offend?
Catch 23 is that there are often long waiting-lists for these courses, and just as an IPP prisoner is getting near the front of the queue, perhaps after waiting for several years, he is liable to be transferred to another prison as part of the constant merry-go-round in our grossly overcrowded prisons, whereupon he goes to the back of the queue again. A variant — Catch 23a — is the IPP prisoner who has served his tariff but has to wait for years to get a parole board hearing, dates for which are set but then constantly postponed.
Catch 24 penalises the prisoner who has been wrongly convicted. You’re likelier to persuade the parole board that you have reformed and won’t “re-offend” if you can be shown to have admitted your guilt, recognised the seriousness of your offence, and come to terms with your underlying problems. If you continue to assert your innocence, that’s rather difficult to do. But prisons and parole boards are bound to proceed on the basis that all those in prison are guilty of the offences of which they have been convicted, even though in real life we know that people are sometimes wrongfully convicted. It’s been officially denied that a refusal to confess guilt is a bar to the release of an IPP prisoner, but there seems to be evidence that in practice such a refusal counts heavily against a prisoner in his effort to show that he won’t “re-”offend. I have been personally assured by a prison governor (one who was writing a thesis on the subject) that in practice anyone continuing to assert his innocence is extremely unlikely to secure his release from a life sentence (see below) or an IPP.
All this is pure Kafka — especially for the truly innocent prisoner. Much of it applies similarly to those serving life sentences and who have served their ‘tariffs’ but, like the IPP prisoners, can’t be released until they can demonstrate the unlikelihood that they will re-offend. Within hours of the publication of my letter in today’s Guardian, I had a telephone call from an old friend about the son of her neighbour who is in prison after serving his tariff of 15 years of a sentence for a murder which he almost certainly didn’t commit, but who is still in jail after 19 years. He and his family are convinced, although it’s impossible to prove it, that this still-young man has failed to win his release after two appearances before the parole board because he continues to insist on his innocence of the original murder. Part of the problem here is that the mandatory sentence for murder is life, regardless of extenuating circumstances — which may be reflected in a relatively short tariff but which still leave the prisoner with the requirement to demonstrate what it’s often impossible to demonstrate, that he won’t do it again. Judges have repeatedly condemned the mandatory sentence as inflexible and unjust, but our politicians are too scared of the wrath of the tabloid newspapers to do anything about it. Kafka again.
Since my blog post of 2007 there have been a couple of dozen ‘comments’ appended to it, some with extremely useful advice, from experienced and authoritative sources, for families of people serving indeterminate sentences: others from people whose spouses or sons are serving IPPs and who feel trapped by their inability to secure their release even years after completing their tariffs. To be in prison for an indefinite time, with the only prospect of ever being released made conditional on completion of a virtually impossible task, is a form of mental torture, apart from its inherent injustice. Everyone in prison should be able to look forward to a definite date, however distant, when his incarceration will end.
But the basic point, surely, is that we should not be keeping people in prison because Authority, in whatever form, thinks they might commit an offence in the future. Any one of us might offend at some time in our lives. None of us can foresee the future. Parole boards will always be tempted to play safe and refuse an application for release: to send out onto the streets someone who has once upon a time committed an offence is to take the risk that he might offend again, and that the board will then be blamed for getting it wrong. Defenders of the system point to the fact that parole boards have an impressive record of success, in that remarkably few of those whom they do agree to release seem to re-offend; but mightn’t that be a symptom of excessive caution by the boards? We shall never know how many of those whom they refuse to release would not have re-offended had the decision gone the other way, and that’s the real measure of the success or failure of the system. Persistent offenders receive longer sentences both to deter others and to keep them out of society for a long time for society’s protection. But the system of indeterminate sentences is indefensible: a blot on British justice. It should be swept away.
PS: On a lighter note, my letter in today’s Guardian is the second from me to be published in four issues (see this). If I carry on at this rate I’ll be catching up with the legendary and inimitable Keith Flett.
Up-date (2 March 2009): The following from a report in today’s Guardian speaks for itself. It refers to a prisoner serving a life sentence, but it might equally well have been said of someone on an IPP:
Kevin Lane is what is known in the prison system as a “denier”. More than 12 years after he was convicted of the contract killing of Robert Magill in Hertfordshire, he is still strenuously denying it, and so is not eligible to take the rehabilitation courses that would lead to his release.
New evidence has come to light which may exonerate Mr Lane and cause his case to be reviewed and his conviction to be quashed. But others who have been wrongly convicted and who refuse to “admit their guilt” may not be lucky enough to benefit from the discovery of new evidence in their favour. In principle such people face continued incarceration with no end in sight. Kafka, indeed.
Brian
Some things won’t change as much as we had hoped, even under President Obama:
The Americans are still holding more than 14,000 Iraqi detainees in other facilities [besides Abu Ghraib], in conditions that have been radically revised since the Abu Ghraib scandal. Under the new status of forces agreement with Iraq, the prisoners are being released at a rate of about 50 a day. Those against whom there are pending charges will be handed over to the Iraqis as the Americans withdraw. There is much concern over the conditions in some Iraqi jails, where there is acute overcrowding and allegations of abuse and torture. American officials say the detainees they hand over are only going to prisons run by the justice ministry and which are up to international standards.
http://tinyurl.com/cfzrpr [BBC]
Detainees being held at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan cannot use US courts to challenge their detention, the US says. The justice department ruled that some 600 so-called enemy combatants at Bagram have no constitutional rights. Most have been arrested in Afghanistan on suspicion of waging a terrorist war against the US. The move has disappointed human rights lawyers who had hoped the Obama administration would take a different line to that of George W Bush. Prof Barbara Olshansky, the lead counsel in a legal challenge on behalf of four Bagram detainees, told the BBC the justice department’s decision not to reform the rules was both surprising and “enormously disappointing”. The BBC’s Kevin Connolly in Washington says the move has angered human rights lawyers, with one saying the new White House was endorsing the view of the old one, that prisons could be created and run outside the law. It is certainly evidence that having set the tone for his administration by announcing plans to close Guantanamo Bay, Mr Obama intends to adopt a much more cautious approach to the problem of detainees held elsewhere by the US military, our correspondent says. [Emphasis added]
http://tinyurl.com/c3puf7
WASHINGTON (CNN) — The Senate on Thursday night confirmed Leon Panetta as CIA director by unanimous consent. Panetta, 70, will become the oldest person to head the spy agency. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which passed Panetta’s nomination on to the full Senate on Wednesday, said at that time that Panetta would mark a “new beginning” for the CIA. “He has the integrity, the drive and the judgment to ensure that the CIA fulfills its mission of producing information critical to our national security without sacrificing our national values,” the California Democrat said. …
Panetta was an eight-term congressman from central California who chaired the powerful House Budget Committee before moving over to the Clinton White House as the budget director. He later became President Clinton’s chief of staff. He left government in 1997 and returned to California, where he and his wife created the Leon and Sylvia Panetta Institute for Public Policy, a nonprofit foundation.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/02/12/panetta.cia.director/index.html
Panetta said that President Barack Obama forbids what Panetta called “that kind of extraordinary rendition – when we send someone for the purpose of torture or actions by another country that violate our human values.” “What happened I can’t tell you specifically,” he said later, “but clearly steps were taken that prompted this president to say those things ought not to happen again.” Rendition has been used by U.S. presidents for several decades; Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., said the Clinton administration used it 80 times. However, Panetta said the difference is whether the prisoner is transferred to another government for prosecution in its judicial system or for secret interrogations that may lead to torture. Panetta said renditions that send individuals to other countries to face prosecution are appropriate. “Having said that, if we capture a high-value prisoner, I believe we have the right to hold that individual temporarily, to debrief that individual and to make sure that individual is properly incarcerated so we can maintain control over that individual,” he said. While the Obama administration is turning its back on some Bush administration practices, Panetta said there is no intention to hold CIA officers responsible for the policies they were told to carry out. CIA interrogators who used waterboarding or other harsh techniques against prisoners with the permission of the White House should not be prosecuted, he said. [Emphasis added]
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090205/ap_on_go_co/cia_panetta
On January 22, I examined the possibility that Leon Panetta, Barack Obama’s nominee for CIA Director, may favor the controversial practice of extraordinary rendition. The Los Angeles Times has now confirmed that the new US President has authorized the CIA to continue its policy on renditions under Mr. Panetta – a Clinton-era administrator who has publicly come out against the use of torture in interrogations. Extraordinary rendition involves extrajudicial kidnappings of wanted terrorism suspects by CIA or FBI paramilitaries, often abroad, followed by extrajudicial transfers of same suspects to third countries, such as Egypt or Syria, where they are usually tortured. The extracted information is then utilized by US law enforcement and intelligence agencies in their pursuit of the “war on terrorism”. This notorious practice became widespread under the first George W. Bush Administration, but it was first implemented under former US President Bill Clinton. As White House aide to Mr. Clinton at the time, Leon Panetta was reportedly “a consumer of intelligence at the highest level”. It follows that he must have known about the practice, though he apparently failed to speak out against it. [Emphasis added]
http://www.propeller.com/story/2009/02/13/confirmed-cia-extraordinary-renditions-to-continue-under-panetta/
[Note: In fact, 'rendition' of people kidnapped in other countries to the US for trial in US courts has been practised since the 1880s: see http://www.barder.com/ephems/1448]
Panetta formally retracted a statement he made Thursday that the Bush administration transferred prisoners for the purpose of torture. “I am not aware of the validity of those claims,” he said.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iNqjrsQ96LSw38bHitcinz_SQAWgD966663O1
Regarding torture, Mr. Panetta testified he would leave open the possibility the CIA may request permission to use interrogation methods more aggressive than the Army Field Manual (the Obama Administration standard) allows.
Under insistent questioning from a Senate panel, Mr. Panetta said that in extreme cases, if interrogators were unable to extract critical information from a terrorism suspect, he would seek White House approval for the C.I.A. to use methods that would go beyond those permitted under the new rules.
“If we had a ticking bomb situation, and obviously, whatever was being used I felt was not sufficient, I would not hesitate to go to the president of the United States and request whatever additional authority I would need,” Mr. Panetta said in his nomination hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee.
He gave no specifics about what interrogation methods he would suggest, but he said that the agency would always abide by the law. He also said he believed that interrogators could reliably get information from detainees using noncoercive means.
“We can protect this country, we can get the information we need, we can provide for the security of the American people and we can abide by the law,” Mr. Panetta said. “I’m absolutely convinced that we can do that.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/06/us/politics/06cia.html?_r=1&ref=us) [Emphasis added]
http://www.newshoggers.com/blog/2009/02/panetta-rendition-and-torture.html
It was always obvious that the dizzy expectations raised by the Obama campaign couldn’t all be satisfied, but this cold shower of reality is perhaps a little earlier than we might have hoped.
Brian
Two and a half years ago I posted on this blog a provocative extract from a BBC interview with Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu about Israel’s attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon and the issue of proportionality. It prompted, predictably, a lively debate in comments on it. Now ‘mazal tov’ has posted a new comment on that 2006 post which links to a blog post which in turn has a link to an audio clip of a different BBC interview with Netanyahu, this time by the Today Programme’s John Humphrys, both in typically ebullient form. The clip, an mp3 file that may take a few moments to load, is here. It’s fascinating to listen to, whatever view you might take of the middle east conflict, for at least two reasons: first, because of the powerful parallels between Israel’s assault on Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006 and its more recent assault on Hamas in Gaza, which make Netanyahu’s remarks uncannily topical nearly three years later; and secondly because of the strong possibility that Netanyahu will either become prime minister of Israel following the recent Israeli elections, or else will play a weighty part in, or in relation to, whatever new government does eventually emerge. I am grateful to ‘mazal tov’ (whose pen-name, to his credit, leaves no doubt about where he’s coming from) for sharing this revealing clip with us.
I refrain from commenting on the substance of the Netanyahu interview except to point out that although the Israeli attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon in July 2006 was widely regarded, even in Israel, as a humiliating defeat for Israel, it did prompt the UN Security Council to pass a resolution which in effect endorsed Israel’s principal war aims in launching its attack, and that since then rocket attacks on Israel by Hezbollah in Lebanon have almost entirely ceased.
As a postscript, to those who (like me) have been dismayed by the ferocity and one-sidedness of the denunciations of Israel over its attack on Hamas in Gaza on the part of much of the UK media and large parts of British public opinion, I strongly commend a passionate polemic by Howard Jacobson in the Independent newspaper’s online ‘Independent Minds Live Journal’ posted on 18 February 2009. It’s hard to disagree with Jacobson’s thesis that whatever aspects of Israel’s actions deserve strong condemnation, they manifestly weren’t so utterly atrocious as to justify the outpourings of bile against Israel that disfigured the reaction in Britain to the events in Gaza, terrible as they were. Jacobson’s piece begins:
A discriminatory, over-and-above hatred, inexplicable in its hysteria and virulence whatever justification is adduced for it; an unreasoning, deranged and as far as I can see irreversible revulsion that is poisoning everything we are supposed to believe in here – the free exchange of opinions, the clear-headedness of thinkers and teachers, the fine tracery of social interdependence we call community relations, modernity of outlook, tolerance, truth. You can taste the toxins on your tongue.
But I am not allowed to ascribe any of this to anti-Semitism.
You may well not agree with Jacobson’s analysis, but whether you do or not, read it with an open mind and then ask yourself whether perhaps he might have a point. (Hat-tip to the much reviled Melanie Phillips for — predictably — commending Howard Jacobson’s essay on her blog.) You might, incidentally, take the view that many of the comments appended by readers to Jacobson’s essay tend to confirm his worst fears.
PS: Reflections in comments below on the Netanyahu interview or the Jacobson essay are very welcome, but this is not, please, the place for renewed verbal warfare either in condemnation or in justification of the actions in Gaza or Lebanon of Hamas, Hezbollah or Israel, however strong the emotions they provoke.
Update, 21 Feb. 09: My old friend and (verbal only) sparring partner Peter Harvey points out, justly, that his blog was there first with the article by Howard Jacobson, which he both quotes and praises. I arrived at it via Melanie Phillips’s blog, as I acknowledge above (don’t all hiss at once) which in turn was mentioned in some Twitterer’s Tweet, I forget whose. Hat-tips all round, drinks on me.
Brian
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more. Today’s Guardian publishes yet another letter from me calling for a fully-fledged federal system for the UK (if you have a sense of déja vu, please re-read this, from November 2007). As always, some of what I originally wrote has got lost in the Guardian‘s compulsive ‘editing’, but the main thrust has survived, not terminally scathed. For the record, and for those who may be interested to read my ipsissima verba, here’s what I wrote before the Guardian‘s letters people got their hands on it (actually, I love them all dearly, and gladly acknowledge my debt to them):
George Monbiot (England, that great colonising land, has itself become a colony, February 17) is right to high-light a glaring defect in our present constitution: England alone of the UK’s four nations has no separate legislature (and, he might have added, no national government). Another equally untenable defect, flowing from the first, is that the Westminster parliament attempts to play two separate and incompatible roles: first, as a legislature for the whole UK dealing with all subjects not devolved to Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, such as foreign affairs and defence; and secondly, as a parliament for England dealing with all the subjects devolved to the other three nations.
The injustices and anomalies noted by Monbiot result from the composition of the House of Commons being wholly unsuitable for that second role. Tory proposals for an ‘English Grand Committee’ (only English MPs voting on purely English matters) are half-baked and unworkable, not least as completely failing to remedy England’s lack of its own executive. The only workable (and inherently desirable) solution is a separate legislature and government for England plus full devolution of all remaining internal matters to all the four nations. The Westminster parliament and government, with much reduced powers, should become the federal organs for all-UK matters on the federal models of (e.g.) Australia, the US, Germany and many other successful western democracies.
If the Tories genuinely seek to push real power downwards and away from the centre, as David Cameron asserts in the same issue, why do they not accept the logic of federalism, which does exactly that? Only a federal system can resolve the West Lothian Question, give a democratic role to the Westminster second chamber as a federal Senate, and cure the distinctively English disease of gross over-centralism.
A parliament for England should not be just an issue for English nationalists, but one part of a long-term, comprehensive constitutional reform which everyone, of whatever party, who wants a durable relationship between the nations of the UK should be working for.
Several relatively small omissions from this in the published version seem to me mildly regrettable, but the omission of the hyphen between “all” and “UK” is especially mortifying (“The Westminster parliament and government, with much reduced powers, should become the federal organs for all UK matters…”). For want of a hyphen, the sense was lost, etc.
The letter immediately following mine in today’s Guardian, from the Director of the Federal Union, argues that England is so much bigger than the other three UK nations that a UK federation would work only if England were split into regions for federal purposes. I tried to deal with this argument back in 2007 in my response to an interesting comment by Anthony Barnett:
….the point in Marquand’s article about the asymmetry of a federation of the four nations (because of the enormously greater size and resources of England than those of the other three nations put together) is an important one. In my opinion, FWIW, a federal system would help to protect the three smaller nations (and the federation as a whole) from the potentially destructive consequences of asymmetry: in other words, the asymmetry is a fact of life whatever constitutional system is in force in the UK, and inevitably presents problems (unless of course the Union disintegrates), but much the most effective way of minimising those problems would be a federal system that gave the three smaller nations the maximum possible autonomy and protection from English domination (e.g. by, among other things, preventing the federal centre from interfering in their internal affairs, and by establishing an upper house of the federal parliament, i.e. senate, with equal representation for all four nations irrespective of their populations, as in the US and Australia which also have lower-tier ‘states’ of widely varying sizes). Asymmetry is an argument for federation, not an obstacle to it. I tried to spell this out at (even) greater length earlier this year in a response to a comment that questioned the viability of a federal system dominated by a single disproportionately big participant (England).
I hope that those who are bothered by the asymmetry point will, if they have the time and inclination, also have a look at the fuller exposition of the argument from an even earlier response to a comment, here.
I’m glad that the Guardian is airing discussion of federalism again in its main letters section, and I hope it will prompt further vigorous debate. I’m baffled and frustrated by the fact that this is not a live issue in our overall national political conversation. The problems and anomalies arising from our halfway-house semi-federal system are pretty widely debated and agonised over, yet their obvious cause is rarely identified, still less discussed. For politicians it goes straight into the Too Difficult tray: the urgent, as always, is the enemy of the important. For much of the media, ‘federal’ is a dirty f-word, signifying (perversely and ignorantly) the crafty attempts of the European Union to lure Britain into a single unitary European state and to destroy its national identity. For English nationalists, it’s a diversion from the chauvinist campaign for an English parliament for its own sake, as a means of allowing England to go its own way without having to accept the authority of a lot of Scottish politicians in Whitehall and Westminster — the opposite of the federal cause, which seeks to bind the four UK nations together in a durable, equitable and democratic system: something we don’t yet have.
Update (later on 19 Feb 09): Following an amicable exchange of e-mails with the Guardian’s letters department and Readers Editor, the missing hyphen has been graciously restored to its proper place on the online version of my letter. Much appreciated!
Brian
Twitter isn’t the tedious waste of time and energy that Facebook is (in my view, anyway). Twitter is like a shared mini-blog in which every item posted is short and pithy and you decide for yourself which pieces posted by other people you choose to glance through, and if you want to, you can also control who reads your own. It’s a negligible commitment — you can Twitter, or Tweet, as much or as little as you like, and read as many or as few of other people’s Tweets (very short messages, never more than 140 characters long including spaces and punctuation) as you like, or none at all. For examples — which you can read without signing up — have a look here, not that my own efforts are by any means the most entertaining or informative in all Twitterdom.
The always sensible and readable India Knight underwent a convincing conversion in yesterday’s Sunday Times:
I wrote sniffily about Twitter a few weeks ago, saying it was needy and megalomaniacal and plain weird for any sane person to spend the day posting random thoughts onto a public site. I’d like to eat my words. I was completely wrong: Twitter is amazing.
I’m relatively new to it, but it does three things brilliantly. One, it reminds you that people, complete strangers, are basically clever, funny and nice. This may seem a small thing but it’s an important and life-affirming one, especially with the amount of anonymous bile elsewhere online: Twitter puts you in a good mood.
Two, it’s an incredibly useful resource, which is why some people even use it as an alternative to Google; aside from the fact that Twitterers are everywhere and often break news as a result, you can ask a question – where to have dinner in Minsk, whether the baby’s rash is sinister, if an exhibition is worth seeing, or whatever else you like, from politics to engineering via making noodles and the finer points of construction – and know you’ll get succinct, informed replies.
Three, it makes you feel connected in a way that is hard to describe but that I’d miss terribly if Twitter died overnight. My hippieish streak finds it beautiful to have these little insights into other people’s lives. Two weeks ago I’d have called that interest prurience. But there’s a difference. So: total U-turn. Come and say hello. I’m @indiaknight.
So to read India Knight’s recent Tweets, just click http://twitter.com/indiaknight.
There’s a useful step-by-step guide to joining and using Twitter, recommended by India Knight, here — it’s actually much simpler than perhaps that makes it look. Signing up only takes a couple of minutes and you can provide as much or as little information about yourself as you like. If you forget all about it for weeks, it doesn’t matter. (But if you do join Twitter, do please point it at http://twitter.com/BrianLB, or, in Twitterese, “@brianlb”, and click ‘Follow’: I’ll then get an automatic message to say that you’re following my Tweets, which will enable me in turn to follow yours.)
PS: If you’re already a veteran Twitterer, please accept my apologies — and please “follow” me so that I can “follow” you. And if you have some useful tips for getting the most and best out of Twitter, do post them in Comments below this. Finally, don’t be put off by the twee in tweeting and twittering. It’s pretty adult, in fact, depending of course on whose twee– er, messages you choose to read.
Brian (aka @brianlb)
Eagle-eyed Matt, frequent and welcome contributor to these columns, has sent me this disturbing message, which needs to be read with the Los Angeles Times article mentioned in the first sentence. (The article is headed: “Obama preserves renditions as counter-terrorism tool” and, as Matt shows, is well sourced.) Here is what Matt wrote:
Did you notice this? Looks as if extraordinary rendition stays under Obama.
Or is this a case of lazy journalism?….when I look at the sources section 2 g states:“(g) The terms “detention facilities” and “detention facility” in section 4(a) of this order do not refer to facilities used only to hold people on a short-term, transitory basis.”
and section 5:
“Sec. 5. Special Interagency Task Force on Interrogation and Transfer Policies.”“(ii) to study and evaluate the practices of transferring individuals to other nations in order to ensure that such practices comply with the domestic laws, international obligations, and policies of the United States and do not result in the transfer of individuals to other nations to face torture or otherwise for the purpose, or with the effect, of undermining or circumventing the commitments or obligations of the United States to ensure the humane treatment of individuals in its custody or control.”
(my emphasis)Anyway I thought I’d draw your attention to this as this is the kind of thing you are often interested in and can probably make better sense of it than I can!
Cheers
I agree that this is worrying, on the face of it. It is however important to remember that ‘ordinary’ rendition — kidnapping a suspected criminal extra-legally in a foreign country, removing him from it without any extradition or other legal procedure and transporting him to the US for trial — has been practised by US administrations since the 1880s (not a typo: the 1880s) and that the US courts have consistently refused to enquire into the circumstances in which a person accused of crime has been brought into their jurisdiction. In his magisterial and authoritative account of rendition, Ghost Plane, Stephen Grey describes how in the 1980s, under President Reagan, renditions became an acknowledged weapon against terrorists: Executive Order 12333 of 4 December 1981 authorised the CIA to participate in such operations (Ghost Plane, p. 119). It seems to have been only after 9/11 in 2001 that ‘extraordinary rendition’ — used to kidnap suspects overseas and transfer them secretly not to the US, but to third countries for harsher kinds of interrogation than would be legally permissible in the United States — began to be practised and eventually to have aroused intense concern both in the US and internationally.
Given such a long history of ordinary rendition, never apparently challenged in the American courts and practised relatively openly by successive administrations for well over 100 years, it becomes more understandable that President Obama’s Executive Order of 22 January, made only two days after he took office as President, should adopt such a cautious attitude to the practice. It seems that many Americans see nothing much wrong with it so long as it doesn’t involve torture. I suppose most Europeans, certainly including me, see it as worse than kidnapping — worse because sanctioned and indeed carried out by the state, because it’s inherently arbitrary, because those who authorise and carry it out are not accountable to anyone, because its victims have no means of redress, because if deemed acceptable when practised by Americans, there’s no ground for resisting it if and when carried out anywhere in the world by agents of the governments of Zimbabwe or Russia or China; and because if it’s sanctioned and continues to be practised, even if only by the Americans, no citizen of any other country, anywhere in the world, is safe from sudden abduction at the hands of the CIA or other US agencies, with the possibility of the ruin of a perhaps perfectly innocent life. Rendition, even in its original form, certainly seems completely contrary to the spirit of President Obama’s Inaugural Address. It’s devoutly to be hoped that the proposed working group set up to study this obnoxious practice finds that it is indeed contrary to basic tenets of international law, and, in spite of rendition having been tolerated in the US for so many years, that it should stop. Period.
Brian
There’s been a lot of snow today in our corner of south-west London: around 6 or 7 inches (I still can’t quite come to grips with snow in centigrade) from the stuff that fell overnight last night, plus the stuff that has been falling all day; and more is forecast for this evening and tonight. There are a few pictures to flick through here. (Click the first one and then move through the rest using the arrows at the top.) I’ll put a specimen below as well.
Some snow pundit on the radio says that the UK record for snowfall remains 89 inches in County Durham in 1949. Be that as it may — and I for one don’t believe it — today’s modest blanket is both pretty unusual and faintly alarming. There are no buses running in London today, and very few trains or tubes (subway trains). As it happens, J. had a medical appointment up in north London in the early afternoon. Even if we had managed to struggle through the snow to the nearby railway station and had been lucky enough to get one of the very few trains stopping at it, followed by similar luck with a tube from Waterloo, there could well have been real problems over the return journey home, and being stranded in north London wouldn’t have been a lot of fun. (It’s been well below freezing all day.) Fortunately, or otherwise, the medic who had been due to see J. answered his mobile to say that he wouldn’t be able to get in today, so we’ll try again tomorrow, although there’s no evidence that it will be any better then.
We have lived, worked and driven assorted modest cars through far more sadistic winters overseas: two in Moscow, three in Warsaw, four in New York, one on the great lakes in Canada; so we still have the clothing, the shovels, the stiff long brushes, the de-icer fluids, and some familiarity with the varying uses in ice and snow of the reverse and second gear facilities of the modern car. We also know about the importance of grit. In Moscow just clearing the snow from the car and scraping the solid ice from the windscreen each morning, then digging out the snowdrifts immediately in front of the wheels, was a formidable task, and I was younger, fitter and leaner then. I used to go out into the great courtyard and car park of the foreigners’ ghetto at 1 or 2 in the morning, wearing six layers of heavy clothing and a fur hat, to start the engine of our humble Ford Cortina and run it for half an hour so as to improve our chances of getting it started in the morning and so get in to work. Often others who had not taken the same precaution would appeal for a tow-start when they heard the Cortina engine cough into life. I once towed a Saudi First Secretary for about four miles along the snow-drifting avenues of Moscow before he managed to get his huge American car started — and when it did, he very nearly drove it into the back of me.
Now there’s nothing like as much snow here in our Mews, it’s not nearly as cold, and the car starts at the first twist of the key in the morning without the need for a midnight warm-up. All the same, the effort required to clear the snow from on top of and in front of the car and to clear a track out into the exit road from the Mews has increased in proportion to my age and waist-line, and by the end of it I was uneasily remembering the statistics of old age pensioners, some a decade younger than me, dropping dead from heart attacks from similar exertions in English snow-storms. I seem to have survived, so far, to fight another day (tomorrow). But the knowledge that the car on the ice-bound roads could well be the only way of getting to a doctor or a hospital Accident & Emergency department in case of a sudden medical problem affecting either of us is a little depressing. Luckily these things don’t generally last long in this country, courtesy of the Gulf Stream. But those old generalisations seem no longer to be operative now in the age of Global Warming. Roll on summer! No doubt the unprecedented heat-waves will kill twice as many old age pensioners as the snow.
Brian
- Clearing the car
