The Politics of Dancing

I watched the appearance of the heads of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ yesterday in front of the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee, [ISC]. To say that the questioning at times was soft would be an understatement. The tone of the proceedings can be summed up as:   We all thank you   for the wonderful job you do of keeping us safe, and applaud the wonderful selfless and public spirited people who work for you. Do you think recent newspaper revelations have damaged the security of this country? I exaggerate little. The really interesting questions were simply never asked. For example no one thought to explore something along the lines, you say you harvest the whole haystack so they you may bag the needle, what sort of things in the stack are you looking for that might lead you to the needle? As a PR exercise though it was flawless and I am amazed that hitherto they have been so reluctant to hold such an event. The head of MI5 Andrew Parker appeared positively cu...

“If you’ve done nothing wrong you’ve nothing to worry about.” William Hague House of Commons earlier this year If you have got nothing to hide, nothing you would prefer to keep private. if you have led a blameless life, this article need not detain you any further. You may go off and listen to Louis Armstrong’s rendition of 'What A Wonderful World.' No, touched by sin, one or two things you would rather were kept private; join the club. Relax, we are not alone, I would hazard a guess that 90% of the population share our blemished record. I am not talking here, of course about significant criminal activity, major crimes and misdemeanour's but of minor infractions of the law, infidelity, lapses of moral taste and judgement, a failure to live up to the standards that, ideally, we would all wish to attain. There is nothing new here, thus it is and thus it ever was, and was ever destined to be; man an imperfectly developed animal, flawed from the moment of conception. ...

Londoners pay twice for the services they receive from the Metropolitan police, once through general taxation and secondly through a proportion extracted from their Council Tax. In exchange for paying the salaries of Plod & Co you might think a certain degree of accountability could be demanded. On Sunday night the boyfriend of a whistle-blower was held and interrogated for 9 hours by the Met under legislation designed to combat acts of terrorism.   Enter the press in the form of Nick Cohen, who has a few pertinent questions to ask on behalf of the general public. The response was less than forthcoming:- I phoned the Met press office. You will need to read our statement before we can answer your questions, a spokeswoman said. She emailed me the statement. True to form, it said nothing worth noting: ‘At 08:05 on Sunday 18 August 2013 a 28 year old man was detained at Heathrow Airport under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000. He was not arrested. He was...

I listened to the remarks of Malcom Rifkind on the Today programme on Monday morning. I found the sanguine attitude toward the steady erosion of privacy in the name of security* unsurprising but no less disturbing. I always note that people who are very quick to volunteer that you can never have complete privacy are less inclined to offer up the reality that we can never have complete security. People talk in bland terms of 'striking a balance' by which they usually mean less privacy. Wouldn't it be refreshing for a politician to state 'yes we will better protect your privacy, but there will be some corresponding loss of security.' New Labour was particularly fond of this 'striking a balance’ formula. I'm not sure the likes of, Tony Blair, Jack Straw, Jacqui Smith, John Reid et al had any understanding of concerns about privacy and civil liberties, which they saw as merely a fetish of Hampstead liberals. The Foreign Secretary's performance in Parlia...

There is a silly argument always used when seeking to attack privacy as part of the current culture of surveillance and the steady and unrelenting attack on our civil liberties, it goes along the lines of ‘if you've got nothing to hide what are you afraid of?’ My response to this is that if you have got nothing to hide, nothing you would prefer to keep private, you have led a shallow and wholly insubstantial life. P G Wodehouse once reflected if you sent the following telegram to a random group of individuals: - ‘All is discovered. Flee,’ nine out of ten would pack up and leave the country. It is the stuff of life, it is what we do, it comes in a package marked ‘the human condition,’ we make mistakes, do things we are ashamed off, hold discreditable thoughts; we lust, we envy and stoop to low cunning. When Jesus said “Let him without sin cast the first stone,” for once, at least, he knew what he was talking about. And still the assault on civil liberties goes on, this...

Three items of news this week, a meeting was being convened to identify and honour the names in an old photograph, Labour members of parliament imprisoned as conscientious objectors in the First World War The Conservative MP and Shadow Spokesman David Davis has resigned his seat on a point of principle and intends to fight a by-election in protest and the extension of pre-charge detention to 42 days allied as it is to the steady erosion of our basic freedoms and civil liberties. Thirdly we have witnessed the disgusting spectacle of ‘pork barrel’ concessions being extended to the Ulster Unionists and other sundry MP’s in exchange for the erosion of fundamental civil liberties; and all for what, to gain some populist votes by wrong footing the Tories to make them look weak on security, with the added bonus of favourable editorials in the Sun newspaper. When told of Mr Davis’s stand Mr ‘rent a quote,’ Denis MacShane described it as a ‘stunt,’ a description now taken up by the Prime Min...