PoliticsOctober 18, 2005 4:42 pm
Ken Clarke has been knocked out of the Conservative Party leadership race.
Phew.
News 11:09 am
Terrorism laws: only those with something to hide oppose them
To which I might reply: If the terror laws were only used against those nasty people you have in mind when you think of terror laws then maybe they’re not so bad.
But once you give a government power it sometimes feels the uncontrollable need to exercise it. So you get this:
34 year old property developer Sally Cameron was arrested under the Terrorism Act for walking along a cycle path in the harbour area of Dundee. She should have been cycling but wasn’t.
She said: “I’ve been walking to work every morning for months and months to keep fit. One day, I was told by a guard on the gate that I couldn’t use the route any more because it was solely a cycle path and he said, if I was caught doing it again, I’d be arrested.
“The next thing I knew, the harbour master had driven up behind me with a megaphone, saying, ‘You’re trespassing, please turn back’. It was totally ridiculous. I started laughing and kept on walking. Cyclists going past were also laughing.
But then two police cars arrived on the scene and Ms Cameron was indeed arrested. Ignoring muggers, rapists and assorted chavs dirtying our streets the police held her for several hours before charging then releasing her.
She said that she was particularly galled by the letter from the procurator fiscal’s office, which said that she would not be prosecuted even though “the evidence is sufficient to justify bringing you before the court on this criminal charge”.
It seems nobody knew why she was arrested. They knew which legislation they were using to make the arrest possible but quite what offence she had actually committed remains a bit of a mystery:
Keith Berry, the harbour master at Forth Ports Dundee, said yesterday that Ms Cameron had been seen as a “security risk”. Speaking about the incident, which took place in May, he said: “We contacted the police in regards to this matter because the woman was in a secure area which forbids people walking. It was seen as a security risk. We were following guidelines in requirement with the port security plan set up by the Government.”
A spokesman for Forth Ports said: “We will robustly prosecute anyone who breaches these new security measures because they have been introduced by the Government and we are obliged to enforce them.”
So these were ’security’ measures used to deal with a ’security’ risk. And they only apply to people with something to hide?
I wonder if Ms Cameron believes she has anything to hide? Maybe she ought to swap notes with Walter Wolfgang to see if he had something to hide when the police used the Terrorism Act to bar him from re-entering Labour’s conference? I bet they don’t come up with much…
[Thanks, The Daily Propaganda]
News roundup 10:20 am
News: Tuesday 18th October 2005
Haven’t done a news roundup for ages. They’re much more fun than real blogging because you can be sarcastic without having to think too much about whether your sarcasm is warranted.
Children from council estates may be “bused” to wealthier middle-class suburbs under a government plan to give their parents more choice of schools.
In the age of ‘Education, education, education’ you’d think the government would actually work out why the local schools were so poor and do something useful with them. But you’d be wrong. You see, this is an ‘initiative’, it’s a ‘reform’, it’s probably ‘modern’ and it offers ‘choice’. Buzzwords fall like confetti but the bad schools remain bad and the poor sods left languishing there may as well give up now.
Mr Carke said
…there would be “a great deal of ill-feeling” if he did not make the final round. He claimed that rank-and-file party members wanted to be able to make a choice between him and Mr Cameron - as they plainly had “overwhelmingly more public support than the other two”.
You’re a nice chap and all the rest of it Mr C but the wails of your disappointed supporters will be drowned by the celebrations of those of us who want the Conservative Party to actually be conservative.
Bob Kiley, the commissioner of Transport for London, plans to use a maintenance and safety crisis on a key part of the capital’s underground rail system as a trigger to wrestle more control from the private sector.
He also called for Tube Lines to scrap a maintenance contract with the French firm Alstom.
The extent to which the commissioner has control over the system he’s commissioner of is revealed by the hoops he had to jump through just to be able to send inspectors in to oversee maintenance work on the Northern Line.
An army of lawyers had had to read the 2m words of the PPP agreement to ensure that TfL’s actions through its London Underground arm were appropriate, and check a separate private finance initiative (PFI) deal between Tube Lines and Alstom contained in another 18 volumes and 358 different documents.
When I get to vote in the Conservative Party leadership contest I’ll use it for the non-Ken candidate with the balls to admit some things shouldn’t be privatised - and that one of those some things is the railway system.
Every year about 28,000 projects receive funding but a further 56,000 are turned away because they fail to meet the criteria or the fund has run out of cash.
Ah, like The Samaritans, who were originally refused a grant because they didn’t do enough to encourage asylum seekers and immigrants to use their facilities.
[Davies] described it as “the X Files meets This Life”. Stuart Murphy, the BBC3 controller, said: “There will be sex and swearing, I assume. I’m quite relaxed about that, as it will be post-watershed and Russell can do it in a funny and sexy way.”
The star will be John Barrowman, who plays the bi-sexual Capt Jack Harkness.
How very ‘modern’ and ‘relevant’. Let’s hope they remember to include a story of some sort…
