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Identity cards chief defends government u-turn

Monday, March 10th, 2008

The head of Britain’s ID cards project and national identity database has defended the government’s revised ID card plans in the face of allegations of a u-turn after the project was scaled back.

By Nick Heath

James Hall, director of the Identity and Passport Service (IPS), told silicon.com the revised scheme is likely to cut £1bn off its £5.4bn price tag, that power station workers are likely to join airport workers and Olympic security staff as the first UK citizens in line for the cards and that the cards may be used to prove identity over the internet.

But UK businesses remain critical, with the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) fearing that companies could be liable if they provide inaccurate information to the National Identity Register and expressing unease over the security of the data that will be held on it.

Shadow Home Secretary David Davis launched a further attack, citing the risk of a massive data breach on the system. He said: “It is something very dangerous the government are doing. We would cancel this database.”

It also emerged that employers of the “trusted workers” who will get the cards first, such as BAA, are likely to continue picking up the bill for pre-employment checks under the ID card system.

Hall said the decision to delay a Parliamentary vote on making ID cards compulsory for British citizens until 2015 was an example of the government “listening to people” and to the recommendations of a wider report into “identity assurance” by former banking chief Sir James Crosby.

He was confident that making the scheme voluntary from 2010 would increase the take-up of the £30 ID cards among the public.

Hall said: “We assume that we will get a very high level of take-up, more than with the previous arrangement by tying the take-up to passport renewal. We are taking a benefit-led approach. The consumer will be able to choose whether they want to have an ID card or a passport. We will enable people with cards to quickly and easily access public services.”

Biometric data for the cards is likely to be captured by private companies with people paying for the service.

Hall insisted that the changes were not what prompted Accenture, BAE Systems and more recently Steria to pull out of the procurement process to build the ID card computer system, describing the remaining bidders as “incredibly positive”.

He added that security and Criminal Records Bureau checks carried out with ID cards would be far quicker and easier for the employer and employees.

Hall said that cards could later be used to confirm identity online using a PIN stored on the card.

Anyone renewing or applying for a new passport from 2011 onwards will be required to add their biometric details to the National Identity Register but they won’t now be forced to pay for a physical ID card and can instead choose to just use their passport.

Foreign nationals living in Britain will have to register their biometric details on the National Identity Register and carry an ID card by the end of this year.

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Drug traces found in U.S. water supply

Monday, March 10th, 2008

Water Trace amounts of pharmaceutical drugs are lurking in Louisville’s drinking water, including one used to treat people with bipolar disorder and alcohol withdrawal, and another prescribed to combat seizures.

Swimming with them in the city’s water supply is a favorite pick-me-up: caffeine.

The findings are part of a nationwide investigation into pharmaceutical drugs in drinking water conducted by The Associated Press.

In the course of a five-month inquiry, the AP discovered that drugs have been detected in the drinking-water supplies of 24 major metropolitan areas serving at least 41 million people — from Southern California to Northern New Jersey, from Detroit to Louisville.

The findings came as no surprise to Judy Petersen, executive director of the Kentucky Waterways Alliance, a group that lobbies for cleaner rivers and lakes.

“There is a drug cocktail, if you will, in our nation’s waters,” Petersen said, adding that there’s little known about how those drugs might be affecting people or the environment. “We’re kind of flying in the dark.”

Louisville Water Co. officials acknowledged an increased concern of the potential health effects of trace amounts of drugs in drinking water, even as they noted there are no national standards for pharmaceutical chemicals in the water supply.

It’s only been in recent years that technology has even allowed detection of the chemicals, said Barbara Crow, a water company spokeswoman.

But they and other companies say the amounts are so small that they don’t pose a health risk. But others worry that the long-term effects of even those small amounts aren’t certain.

Flushed into the system

How do the drugs get into the water?

People take pills. Their bodies absorb some of the medication, but the rest of it passes through and is flushed down toilets.

Other pharmaceuticals end up in drinking water when people flush unused pills down toilets or drugs are used on farm animals that excrete back into the water supply.

Wastewater is treated before it is discharged into reservoirs, rivers or lakes. And some of the water is cleansed again at drinking-water treatment plants, but not all the drug residue gets removed.

Rengao Song, manager of water quality and research for the Louisville Water Co., said the concentrations of drugs they found in two samples taken in 2005 were so weak that they do not suggest any public health risks. They were detected in parts per trillion and lower, he said.

Crow said it was those samples, taken as part of an industrywide study, that found their way with sampling results from other cities into the AP report.

Louisville Water doesn’t normally test for pharmaceutical drugs because it’s too expensive, said Jack Wang, director of water quality and production for the city-owned utility.

Way below medical dose

The concentrations of the pharmaceuticals are far below the levels of a medical dose, the AP reported.

But the presence of so many prescription drugs — and over-the-counter medicines such as acetaminophen and ibuprofen — in so much of the nation’s drinking water is heightening worries among scientists of long-term consequences to human health.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency also is taking notice.

“We recognize it is a growing concern, and we’re taking it very seriously,” said former Louisvillian Benjamin Grumbles, assistant administrator for water at the EPA.

Recent laboratory research has found that small amounts of medication have affected human embryonic kidney cells, human blood cells and human breast-cancer cells. The cancer cells proliferated too quickly; the kidney cells grew too slowly; and the blood cells showed biological activity associated with inflammation.

Even those who use bottled water and home-filtration systems don’t necessarily avoid exposure.

Bottlers, some of which simply repackage tap water, do not typically treat or test for pharmaceuticals, according to the industry’s main trade group. The same goes for the makers of home-filtration systems.

Pharmaceuticals in waterways also are damaging wildlife, research shows. Notably, male fish are being feminized, creating egg yolk proteins that usually come from females.

Some scientists stress that the research is limited, and there are many unknowns. They say, though, that the documented health problems in wildlife are disconcerting.

“It brings a question to people’s minds that if the fish were affected … might there be a potential problem for humans?” EPA research biologist Vickie Wilson said.

Song, at the Louisville Water Co., largely attributed the problem to effluent discharged from treatment plants.

Metropolitan Sewer District Executive Director Bud Schardein said he’s aware of the issue, and he doesn’t want people flushing drugs down the toilet.

But Alex Novak, who runs MSD’s Morris Forman Wastewater Treatment Plant on the Ohio River in western Louisville, said MSD does not test for drugs in its effluent. He characterized concerns about health and environmental drugs in rivers or drinking water as being “more in the research realm at this point.”

Key test results

In its report, members of the AP National Investigative Team reviewed hundreds of scientific reports, analyzed federal drinking-water databases, visited environmental study sites and treatment plants and interviewed more than 230 officials, academics and scientists. They surveyed the nation’s 50 largest cities and a dozen other major water providers and smaller community water providers.

Some key test results:

Officials in Philadelphia said testing discovered 56 pharmaceuticals or byproducts in treated drinking water, including medicines for pain, infection, high cholesterol, asthma, epilepsy, mental illness and heart problems.

Anti-epileptic and anti-anxiety medications were detected in a portion of the treated drinking water for 18.5 million people in Southern California.

A sex hormone was detected in San Francisco’s drinking water.

Of the 28 major metropolitan areas where tests were performed on drinking-water supplies, only Albuquerque, N.M.; Austin, Texas; and Virginia Beach, Va.; said tests were negative. Arlington, Texas, acknowledged that traces of a pharmaceutical were detected in its drinking water but cited post-9/11 security concerns in refusing to identify the drug.

The AP also contacted 52 small water providers — one in each state, and two each in Missouri and Texas — that serve communities with populations around 25,000. All but one said their drinking water had not been screened for pharmaceuticals; officials in Emporia, Kan., refused to answer AP’s questions, also citing post-9/11 concerns.

Grumbles, the EPA’s water chief, acknowledged that just late last year the agency developed three new methods to “detect and quantify pharmaceuticals” in wastewater.

“We realize that we have a limited amount of data on the concentrations,” he said. “We’re going to be able to learn a lot more.”

Associated Press reporters Jeff Donn, Martha Mendoza and Justin Pritchard reported and wrote this story. Courier-Journal reporter James Bruggers, who contributed to it, can be reached at (502) 582-4645.

From Sstaff and Wwire Ddispatches

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AUDIO: Dialect Radio - Diana Inquest

Monday, March 10th, 2008

Features this week

News featuring the latest on the Princess Diana inquest, including excerpts of interviews with Mohammad Al Fayed and Princess Diana.

Columbia Solidarity - Report on the protests staged by Bristol’s Columbia Solidarity Campaign against state sponsored violence in Columbia. Making the link between British corporations and Columbian death squads in dramatic style outside the main entrance of Bristol university.

DJ Samurai from DC Breaks talks about producing drum and bass music and on vinyl records.

Studio guest June Wentland, author of children’s books, talks about the challenges and rewards of self-publishing her own stories.

Sally Allnutt muses on the day she tried to measure the height of her ceiling.

What’s On Guide and song of the week with Jeff Sparkes.

[audio:http://www.tjpdesign.co.uk/wordpress/podpress_trac/web/78/0/2149-1-20080309-Dialect08Mar08.mp3 |autostart=yes]
For more visit http://www.dialectradio.co.uk/

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Can we believe Gordon Brown?

Monday, March 10th, 2008

‘Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” Johnny Rotten famously sneered to the audience at the San Francisco Winterland in 1978, just before the Sex Pistols split up. Well, 30 years on, we have all been cheated: ripped off, swindled, stitched up like kippers. What happened last week in the vote on the Lisbon Treaty was a confidence trick of epic proportions.

By Matthew d’Ancona

First, and however grudgingly, all credit to the grifters who pulled off this awesome scam: it was a masterly political operation. Gordon Brown, David Miliband and Jim Murphy, the Europe Minister, played an absolute blinder, in the idiomatic and literal senses: they barely put a foot wrong in their handling of the referendum vote, and they managed, by keeping their cool, remaining poker-faced and burying the debate in obfuscation, to divert the public’s attention almost entirely from what was going on.

My jaw dropped last Wednesday as I listened to the Prime Minister tell David Cameron that it was time for the Tories to move “to the centre of Europe instead of being left at the margins of Europe”.

Rarely has Gordon sounded so like Tony. I don’t believe for a second that Mr Brown has become a true believer in the European Union. But - however much the words stuck in his craw - he was willing to say just about anything to get this one out of the way.

When the Prime Minister and his allies looked ahead to the referendum vote in the Commons, not in their wildest dreams could they have imagined that the headlines the morning after would focus on Nick Clegg and the Lib Dem split over Europe. Talk about missing the big picture: it was as if the press the day after the storming of the Winter Palace in 1917 had led on drainage problems in Petrograd.

Much as I like Mr Clegg, I do not think his parliamentary management skills are of greater significance to the real story of Wednesday night: the denial to the British public of a referendum that all three parties promised to them in the 2005 election. The arguments deployed to justify this treachery were remarkable for their sheer effrontery.

We were told, first of all, that the Lisbon Treaty is not the same as the original EU Constitutional Treaty. Come on, guys: everybody knows that the two texts are so similar that any claim to the contrary is either sophistry or an outright lie.

It is true that some European leaders have joined in the sophistry to claim that the two documents are not the same. But the overwhelming majority concur with Valery Giscard d’Estaing’s declaration that “All the earlier proposals will be in the new text, but will be hidden and disguised in some way.”

Next, it was argued by the Government that the Lisbon Treaty is no longer “constitutional” and so does not require a referendum. This is a moot point, to say the least: the deal establishes a permanent EU presidency, an EU foreign minister, wide-ranging extensions of qualified majority voting, dramatic changes to the “passerelle” or escalator system which enables the European Council unilaterally to extend its powers, and - perhaps above all - the Charter of Fundamental Rights, the precise legal significance of which Foreign Office lawyers admitted is unknowable in testimony to the Commons European Scrutiny Committee.

However, let us say, for the sake of argument, that the Government is right and that the Lisbon Treaty is not “constitutional”. This is, as it happens, irrelevant.

When Tony Blair made the original promise of a referendum to the Commons on April 20, 2004, he was absolutely explicit: the proposed deal, he claimed, “does not and will not alter the fundamental nature of the relationship between member states and the European Union”.

He was not constitutionally obliged to hold a referendum, he said, but driven to do so by the “partly successful campaign to persuade Britain that Europe is a conspiracy aimed at us”, and by his own growing desire for a grand reckoning. “Let the issue be put and let the battle be joined!” he declared. To be clear: Labour made the promise on the grounds that it was ready for a punch-up, and could win. So it is not that there was a constitutional hurdle that the original treaty cleared, but the Lisbon Treaty does not.

What has changed is that there is a new Prime Minister, who is not ready for a punch-up on Europe, and knows he would not win such a confrontation.

The breach of trust in shifting from one position to another is extraordinary. Three days before he entered Number 10, Mr Brown said that “The manifesto is what we put to the public. We’ve got to honour that manifesto. That is an issue of trust for me with the electorate.”

Well, apparently not. No referendum for us lot.

And why not? Because we are too thick, apparently. On Thursday’s Question Time, the PM’s close ally, Ed Miliband, said that all the technical stuff in the Treaty was really not the sort of thing to be bothering us dimwit voters with.

“I don’t think those issues are issues which people in my constituency want to have a referendum on,” said Mr Miliband in a performance of Sesame Street didacticism. “If you’re interested in improving democracy in this country, having a referendum on issues that don’t speak to people’s lives is not the way to achieve it.”

Best left to clever folk like you, eh, Ed? How fortunate we dunces are to have a ruling elite of brainy Fauntleroys to do our thinking for us.

It is interesting, too, that we now hear the Treaty does not “speak to people’s lives”, having been told so often by ministers that to jeopardise its passage in any way would lead to the downfall of Western civilisation. In fact, this particular Bill speaks to our lives in a sense that has nothing to do with Europe and everything to do with the drainage of trust from the political system.

Osmotically, this latest betrayal will compound the question that all voters now ask about all politicians: why can’t they keep a promise? Why has the Government that came to power 11 years ago with a pledge card become a gang of card sharks?

The battle is not quite over. This week’s Spectator urges the Lords to make imaginative use of the Salisbury Convention when the Bill goes to the Upper House. This tradition holds that the second chamber will not reject a manifesto bill at second reading. In this case, however, the Lords should demand, as a matter of conscience, that MPs honour their manifesto commitments to vote for a referendum and send the Treaty back to the Commons.

Lord Strathclyde, the Tory leader in the Lords, is already talking to pro-Europeans and cross-benchers, urging them to see this as an issue of principle in which the second chamber has a moral responsibility. There is all to play for, and Strathclyde’s intellectual and persuasive powers are immense. But the odds are not in his favour.

In his book The Politics of Consent, Francis Pym, who died on Friday, wrote “the politics of consent are neither a luxury nor a soft option. They are the only form of democratic politics that will ultimately work or that can have a moral basis.” He was right, and it is a shame that this principle, so scandalously breached last week, has come to mean so little to those who govern us. They must be very proud.

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DNA register ‘labels children as criminals’

Monday, March 10th, 2008

Campaigners condemn laws that have put 1.5 million juvenilies on a database

Jamie Doward

Nearly 1.5 million 10 to 18-year-olds will have been entered on the national DNA database by this time next year, sparking claims that Britain’s youths are being criminalised and disproportionately ‘targeted’.

Campaign group Action on Rights for Children (Arch) says ‘no other country in Europe criminalises children at such a young age; no other country in the world has such an extensive database’.

Changes to the law have meant police can arrest anyone over the age of 10 on suspicion of committing a ‘recordable’ offence - which includes even minor crimes - and place their details on the register. But the government has been reluctant to discuss the issue of minors, confirming last year only that the profiles of some 358,012 children are currently on the register.

But campaign groups claim that this figure masks the bigger picture. A close analysis of the register by Arch and the pressure group Genewatch reveals the profiles of more than 1.1 million young people aged 10 to 18 have been added between 1995, when the database started, and April last year. Of these, they calculate 521,901 were aged 10 to 16 and 604,590 were between 16 and 18. When the youths become adults they are reclassified, resulting in a much lower number of minors being recorded.

‘The Home Office has shown repeated reluctance to release figures for children on the DNA database, presumably realising how shocked the public would be,’ said Terri Dowty, director of Arch.

Given current trends, with an average 170,000 youths being added to the database every year, the number of 10- to 18-year-olds who have been recorded on the register is expected to rise to almost 1.5 million by early 2009. Figures show a significant increase in the number of children being arrested compared with adults. According to Arch, the number of children between 10 and 17 arrested between 2002 and 2006 rose by 16.4 per cent. Over the same period the number of adults arrested went up by just 6.6 per cent.

Genewatch calculates some 100,000 children on the database are ‘innocent’ in that they have not even received a caution after being arrested. It also claims that between 1995 and 2007 only 189 minors have successfully applied to have their details taken off the register.

Stephen Bain, chair of the identity testing monitoring group at the government’s Human Genetics Commission, recently wrote to the Scottish government querying whether putting more young people on the database was useful. ‘We question the evidence supporting the suggestion that expanding the database would deter young people from committing minor offences in the first place and deter young offenders from moving on to more serious criminal activities,’ the letter states.

A spokeswoman for the National Policing Improvement Agency, which oversees the register,confirmed the profiles of around a million youths had been placed on the database so far - once replications and removals had been factored in - but added: ‘The retention of a person’s DNA profile… is not a criminal record. If a young person has DNA stored on the database but does not have a conviction, this database record will not show on criminal record checks for education or employment matters.’

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Putting the ID in idiotic

Monday, March 10th, 2008

Iain Macwhirter

ISN’T IT reassuring that the finest minds of their generation are serving in Gordon’s government. Take home secretary Jacqui Smith and her brilliant solution to the problem of compulsory identity cards: making them voluntary! This oxymoronic U-turn sets a new benchmark in government dithering.

The whole point about identity cards - or so Tony Blair told us - was that they were meant to be held by everyone.

That way, wrong uns, illegals and people with dark faces (sorry, “criminally profiled terrorist suspects”) would be easy to spot because they wouldn’t have said card.

They could then be banged up for weeks without charge under the proposed law on detention of suspected terrorists.

Now that the cards are voluntary, the terrorists, illegals, etc, will not even have to go to the inconvenience of forging their own ID cards.

Only those who actually have the cards will be liable to arbitrary arrest and detention by the police, when they inevitably confuse Mr Oswald B Linden with Osama bin Laden.

We can sleep safely in our beds, secure in the knowledge that they know where we live.

In her further wisdom, Ms Smith has made students an exception to voluntary compulsion. They will all be expected to have identity cards.

Which is inspired because, of course, students are the one group in society that can be guaranteed to lose their identity cards, after using them to cut up lines of coke or whatever. This means that the government won’t have to go to the trouble of losing the identity cards itself, in the way it lost the child benefit records of 25 million citizens.

Senior managers at HM Revenue and Customs have been amply rewarded for losing our bank accounts, national insurance numbers and pension details and posting them in a Jiffy bag to al-Qaeda. A grateful government has increased their bonuses by more than 50%.

You might find it surprising that officials in dysfunctional government departments are getting any bonuses at all, but incompetence on this scale doesn’t come cheap.

It takes brains to lose £3.3 billion in overpaid tax credits, and civil servants need proper incentives or, heck, they might go to the private sector.

Talking of which, Gordon Brown himself must surely be in line for some kind of bonus for losing £4bn of our money on the bullion markets.

Gordo sold most of Britain’s gold reserves off the back of a lorry eight years ago when it was worth $275 an ounce. Now the yellow stuff is trading at nearly a $1000, which makes GB the biggest rogue trader since Jerome Kerviel.

You can see why banks are so keen on hiring top politicians like Tony Blair when they leave office. I bet Societie General will be lining up to hire Mr Brown, who will be able to name his price even if he can’t price his name.

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Government tries to abuse the Bill of Rights

Monday, March 10th, 2008

Government and the Speaker of the House of Commons collude to try to abuse the 17th Century Bill of Rights to suppress the FOIA disclosure of OGC Gateway Reviews of the ID Cards Programme

Spy Blog

The Bill of Rights 1689 a historical piece of the English Constitution, which was intended to preserve the rights and freedoms of the public and of Members of Parliament from abuses by the Executive branch of Government, which, in the 17th Century was:

Whereas the late King James the Second by the Assistance of diverse evill Councellors Judges and Ministers imployed by him did endeavour to subvert and extirpate the Protestant Religion and the Lawes and Liberties of this Kingdome.

If you replace “the late King James the Second” with.”Tony Blair”or “Gordon Brown”, the words fit just as well.

We are astonished and furious, that this Bill of Rights, is being abused in the High Court to try to weasel out of having to disclose the early (and now very out of date) Gateway Reviews of the Home Office’s Identity Cards Programme (as it was then, circa 2002 / 2003), by the lawyers for the Government’s Office for Government Commerce, supported by, incredibly, lawyers for the Speaker of the House of Commons, in their Appeal against the Decision of the independent Information Tribunal, which ordered full disclosure, in the public interest.

Are the Government and their lawyers desperate, or evil ?

Why is the Speaker of the House of Commons helping the Executive branch of Government, to suppress freedom of speech and transparent open government, in a matter of huge public interest ?

Daily Mail / Mail on Sunday: 319-year-old law used by Speaker Michael Martin to gag ID report

Computer Weekly: Government seeks to bury ID card reviews

[hat tip to UK Liberty for spotting this before us]

Bill of Rights 1688 ( “Act declared to be a Statute by Crown and Parliament Recognition Act 1689 (c. 1)”)

That the Freedome of Speech and Debates or Proceedings in Parlyament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any Court or Place out of Parlyament.

See the history of this long running Freedom of Information Act disclosure suppression in our OGC Gateway Reviews of the Identity Cards Programme blog category archive.

The lawyers for the Government, seem to be desperately clutching at straws, by claiming that the Information Tribunal, in its very thorough 4 day hearing, involving submissions from top barristers Queens Councils and specialist professors of Freedom of Information Act law, somehow made improper use of a publicly published report from a Select Committee of the House of Commons, the one which scrutinises the Department for Work and Pensions.

See the House of Commons Select Committee on Work and Pensions report: Third Report - 7 July 2004 - Department for Work and Pensions Management of Information Technology Projects: Making IT Deliver for DWP Customers specifically paras. 110 - 123 Publishing OGC Gateway Reviews

If they are allowed to get away with this line of reasoning, then there is no point in any of the supposedly powerful Select Committees whatsoever, if their official public reports following their inquiries and investigations, cannot be used to scrutinise the policies and decisions of Central Government Departments or Agencies.

Incredibly, they are being supported by a lawyer acting on behalf of the Speaker of the House of Commons, to help the Executive branch of the Government (i.e. no longer the Monarch, but a Central Government Department, which was not the case in the 17th Century) to suppress the rights of the public in general, and of the two people who submitted the original Freedom of Information Act requests, which have been considered together by the Information Tribunal. One of those people is actually a Member of Parliament !

This bit of law is what is supposed to protect Members of Parliament from libel cases for what they say, with Parliamentary Privilege, in speeches or debates, in the Chamber of the House of Commons.

This fundamental constitutional law pre-dates the official record of the proceedings of Parliament i.e. Hansard, which started out as a private sector journalistic publishing venture, and the general acceptance of press and media reporting of the procedures of Parliament. Neither of these existed back in the 17th Century.

Provided that these reports use fair and accurate quotations, then these media reports are themselves protected by Parliamentary Privilege from being accused of promulgating what might be a libel, if it had not been uttered by an MP within the House of Commons. This protection against libel or other civil cases also extends to the official written Reports of Select Committees of the House of Commons, and the Lords or Joint Committees of both Houses of Parliament.

There are perverse consequences of this Parliamentary Privilege e.g.
1995 case of the then MP Neil Hamilton (”Cash for Questions”), trying to sue The Guardian newspaper for libel, and being unable to, because The Guardian would not have been able to get a fair trial in a UK Court, by not being able to quote any of his speeches or the rules of the House of Commons. This anomaly was later amended by specific legislation allowing MPs to waive their parliamentary Privilege on an individual, case by case basis, so as to sue for defamation..

See Defamation Act 1996 section 13 Evidence concerning proceedings in Parliament

The provisos in this section of the Act explicitly cover Select Committee evidence and reports.

Information Tribunal was not criticising, let alone libeling or even “Questioning” the Select Committee report. The Information Tribunal simply cited this publicly published Report as evidence, noting the arguments, both for and against publication of such Gateway Reviews.

para 23In the course of this hearing, the Tribunal was referred to the
inquiry conducted by the Select Committee on Work and Pensions that reported in 2004 on Management of Information Technology Projects: Making IT Deliver for DWP Customers. It considered, amongst other things, the arguments for and against publishing GR’s.

The “Questioning” by the Information Tribunal Judgement was of the Office for Government Commerce, part of HM Treasury, headed, at the time (May 2007) by the “control freak” Chancellor / Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

That is definitely not anything to do with the “Freedome of Speech and Debates or Proceedings in Parlyament” which is what the Bill of Rights clause is on about !

How can the High Court, Judge Mr. Justice Stanley Brunton possibly decide that reading or mentioning a Select Committee Report contravenes the Bill of Rights, without also destroying Hansard, official Government Press Releases, the wider Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press ?

How can he ignore the Parliamentary Papers Act 1840 ?

The Speaker of the House of Commons should not be colluding with the Government and the civil service bureaucracy, he should be Ordering them, under threat of Contempt of Parliament, to obey the several cross-party Select Committees such as the Public Accounts Committee, the Home Affairs Committee, and the Work and Pensions Committee etc. have not even been allowed to see copies of Gateway Review reports, even in closed evidence sessions.

That is the scandal which the Speaker of the House of Commons should be employing lawyers to remedy.

He should not be helping to suppress proper public and Parliamentary scrutiny of massive Government IT projects, involving millions of pounds of public money, which will affect every person in the UK, individually.

The publication of the High Court’s Judgment could take several weeks or months. We await the result, with mounting despair and resentment of the English legal system, which is stacked by the Government so heavily against normal individual citizens, and which fails to uphold their fundamental human rights, in a speedy and just manner.

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 10th, 2008 at 11:34 am and is filed under Surveillance, Civil Liberties & Human Rights News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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