IMAGINE a country where ordinary citizens could be be detained for as long as the authorities fancied without the right to a trial or even to hear the evidence against them.
Imagine a country where people were forced to buy an ID card containing personal information on everything from their mortgage to their medical records, just to allow them to live their own lives in their own home town.
Imagine a world which was being physically destroyed by the greed of a small ruling clique of very rich people, whose stranglehold on the reins of power and the media was so tight that they felt free to carry on regardless.
Yes, that’s right. It’s this country, this world. And while we’ve been trying to draw attention to all this non-stop for the last seven and a half years, things are now getting seriously scary. The new 'control orders' brought in by New Labour are so extreme that even Prince of Darkness Michael Howard and his Tory party felt obliged to oppose them, along with all sort of establishment figures whom the likes of us don’t usually count as allies (Independent, March 2).
Former High Court judge Lord Thomas said: "Security is no justification for the breach of the fundamental principles which underpin our democratic system. No deprivation of liberty by ministerial say so, no midnight secret knock on the door, no gulags whether in Siberia or in Guantanamo."
Former Tory attorney general Lord Mayhew warned: "Provisions that commit such wide incursions into liberty as these do need to be examined by other minds as well [as the police and security services]." And Labour peer Baroness Kennedy condemned the way the government spin doctors dressed up the full horror of the proposals with talk of "concessions", helpfully played up by Her Majesty’s Press. She said: "The Home Office practice now is to bring forward new legislation which is absolutely abhorrent and totally disgraceful in its abuse of civil liberties and then, when there is uproar, replace it with something only slightly less abhorrent and tell us a major concession has been made."
Meanwhile, as all the propaganda in the media focused on spurious claims of hundreds of Al Qa’ida operatives roaming the streets of Britain, a hint of the true target of these police state laws came out. The Scotsman reported on March 5 that when Tony Blair was asked whether the Government would use the new house arrest powers against G8 protesters in Scotland in July, Mr Blair said: "I couldn’t rule it out."
With ID cards also being imposed on us and the government proposing yet more "anti-terrorist" laws after the general election, the idea of traditional English freedom is looking pretty extinct. But the good news is that in spite of all this there are still people out there, even here in Worthing, who are prepared to stick their heads above the parapet and stand up against the tycoons and the tyrants. Here’s some stuff we know about, that’s coming up:
* Saturday April 30. "Critical Mass" cycle ride against Climate Change and the G8. Meet Steyne Gardens, Worthing, at 2pm.
* Tuesday May 3. "Standing Up for Liberty". Special meeting on the assault on civil liberties and what we can do to fight back. Including contribution from new Worthing branch of NO2ID, the anti-ID card campaign. 7.45pm, upstairs at The Downview, Tarring Road, Worthing (opposite West Worthing station).
* Thursday May 5. "Don’t Vote - Remember What Happened Last Time!" Campaign to boycott the elections in protest at the way democracy has become a farce and politicians do what they like once in power, regardless of public opinion. Contact via www.worthinganarchists.cjb.net
* July 6-8. G8 meeting in Scotland. War criminal George W Bush, his obedient poodle Tony Blair and the leaders of the other richest countries in the world in the G8 are meeting behind massively high security at Gleneagles, Scotland, and thousands of angry people are going to be gathering outside to let them know what they think of them... Contact Worthing’s Shut The G8 via www.freewebs.com/shuttheg8.
SINCE the events of September 11 2001 in New York, there has been a school of thought suggesting that George W Bush’s adminstration may have allowed the attack to happen in order to provide the justification for draconian restrictions on civil liberties at home and a series of aggressive wars abroad. In the light of that, it was a little worrying to read this in the Independent on Sunday on March 6: "Government sources are indicating that it would take just one terrorist incident for the present uproar about house arrest, control orders and civil liberties to evaporate."
You have been warned...
"I AM a Police Officer and I can tell you straight I don’t want a police state as I have to live in it as well".
That was the emailed message sent to The Porkbolter on March 4. It warned of some "very alarming" changes in the police being introduced by New Labour, involving police wardens and PCSOs, comparing the current situation with that in Nazi Germany, where the normal police, who refused to submit to direct Nazi Party control, found themselves in competition with new Special Police. "These Auxiliaries in the end out numbered the Real Police and took over as the new Political Army for that Party," warns our correspondent.
He adds: "The Police Service as we know it is being slowly privatized through the back door and we have to ask ourself who is going to benefit from this. Will it be the individual person who lives in the UK? Not at all, it will be a great deal worse for them. So will it be the country as a whole? Again no, it won’t. So looking at it from a logical perspective, the only group of people to gain from this enterprise is of course the Politician.
"Now by privatizing the Police the politician you might think won’t have any control over it. Well, there is a new breed of thinking in the Labour Party what I call ‘Nationalized Privatization’. This new way of control has already been going strong for some years and no one has even noticed it. The politicians privatize a company, say the Police, they then have as managing directors their own party’s politicians. They run it, they control it, and they tell it who to investigate - and for sure no politician will be standing in Court asking questions for perverting the course of Justice. If the Company is ridiculed in any way by the Public then the Party can distance itself from it, explaining that it’s a private company and they have no connection with it.
"I myself am a Police Officer and I can honestly say that the labour Party has caused the Problem with the Police. Since they have come to power they have increased every Police Officer’s paper work by ridiculous amounts. This has been deliberate and calculated in its execution, with their propaganda machine on full throttle informing the masses that they are indeed cutting our paper work. Their whole aim was quite literally to fool the public into not caring if new Labour Party Police came into being. They caused the problem, got the reaction, and then gave the masses the answer. The future for the Labour Police is still in the making and I can see a Police Service sponsored by the Labour Party and policed for the good of The Labour Party."
* Three days after we received this email, The Guardian reported (March 7) that the Government was planning to use private security firms like Securicor and Group 4 to police the new draconian house arrest control orders "in an attempt to save money".
One of our readers wrote to the council under the Freedom of Information Act to try and get to the bottom of the issue. After trying to avoid answering by wrongly claiming he had to provide his full home address (we let him use our PO Box), the council’s corporate lawyer Julie Watson eventually replied: "As soon as it transpired that Michael Ball had been mistakenly overpaid Election expenses, it was brought to his attention and he immediately repaid the sum involved. Accordingly there was never any consideration given to a prosecution, as this was not appropriate, and it was not referred to any Committee for a decision."
"Mistakenly overpaid"? How strange! The evidence at the "Sherylgate" tribunal clearly stated that Mr Ball and a colleague had "claimed election expenses for which they were not entitled" and that the police had been consulted. Since when did anyone call the police over a simple administrative bungle?
More questions will shortly be winging their way to the Town Hall...
Mr Mayes also picked up on a stray mention of "media tarts" in our last issue (which was certainly not a reference to him or anyone else on the jet-setting Worthing Advertiser!) and decided to run with it in a big way, declaring "here’s one media tart who..." (blah blah blah etc etc). So now it’s official. Tony Mayes is a Media Tart and that’s not libel coz he wrote it himself! Just to celebrate this announcement fully, we have decided to launch a new regular cartoon strip, showcasing Mr Media Tart’s wise words to the Worthing public, which you can see if you get hold of a printed version.
Printed and published by The Pork-Bolter, PO Box 4144, Worthing BN14 7NZ. No copyright, no risk of "overpayment" for us lot.
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