If I didn’t know better I’d say that it was Bliar that is naive, to think that. It is dissapointing that this will be barely debated or investiaged properly, let alone be learnt from. No inquiry, no real questions asked, New Labour have the arrogance to just deny that Iraq had anything to do with it, despite knowing that everyone thinks it regardless. The other two are just too inept to do anything, even if they wanted to do.

Engels btw, only accepts post sent to Westminster, phone calls at westminster and only has a westminster email address. Shame she’s never there to utilise them.

All over Europe now, like the fly on shit that he is, Clarkey-boy is talking up all the repressions. How long before the “Euro-Patriot” Act ?

Did you see them all “dance” in union ? One or two journalists “dared” ask the question – CAUSALITY. It was … *priceless*. I listened to all the channels and all our leader’s responses. It was, of course, soooo… -> infinty predictable. “No,” (as they keep straight faces) “there’s no connection between this and Iraq etc. etc.”

Then, just when, Kennedy started suspecting he might have to be a little bit more forthright (after all he, eventually got off his political fence on Iraq) – “no ‘causal’ connection but ‘culture’” the tons of bricks came down. The idiots in the conservative party, following their innate genetic disabilities, immediately spouted “Hitlerain Appeasement” (gawd… I can’t program a computer to be better than this).

Our Dear Leader via our New Labour party was more enlightened. He said, Charley Kennedy was “naive.” ROTFL. Yep. They were telling the truth via a lie. Kennedy just didn’t have the guts to go all the way !!!!!! But what can you expect of a party built on triangulation. Hopeless. Three-party politics (?) Give me a break.

Just cross-party, Establishment satisfying bullshit. The problem is now, of course, somebody else is asking ‘em questions – not like the likes of you and me, told we have a democracy, write letters etc. etc. etc. and STILL get no answers (nope, still nothing from our dear Natascha).

Clarke went on the radio to say that I.D. cards wouldn’t make any difference too….

Don’t know about you but just generally feeling negged out. It’s all so heartbreakingly predictable. How do you square Clarke’s, “It came out of the blue” with anybody with half a mind, since Iraq especially, saying it’s not “if” but “when” ?

At least the word seems to have gone out not to make political capital (right now at least) on the back of these poor people’s blood for ID cards. There are some harrowing reports from those first on the scenes, particularly from the tube train on the Piccadilly line that caught full blast pressure given its enclosure (Russell Square used to be my local station during my undergrad. days: deep, claustraphobic and hot even with the pneumatic effect of the trains in the tubes. Must be almost intolerable by now.)

Words just seem so pointless, for a while …

Poll Tax demonstrations wouldn’t have have took place, basically any spontaenous uproar at the seat of democracy is disallowed.

I find it very disconcerting that a “”"”labour”"”" government has outlawed so many civil rights.

The E.U. isn’t exactly democratic, transparent and open either. No-one knows what happens to all the money that goes into it, the accountants (Arthur Anderson of Enron fame) haven’t signed off the accounts in 10(?) years. Whenever someone questions this, they get sacked, demoted, or ignored.

Compulsary voting will just succeed in driving people to destroy ballots while allowing the winner to claim that they have a “true democratic mandate”, or some such.

I’ve got an email back from Engels’ assistant (East Midlands Labour party had obviously forwarded it on), basically saying all post should go to the HoC address or her phone number is – 0207 219 4709.

(BTW let me say, up front, that the stuff I bring to the table is what you might call “real time” [I come from a background of computing science too.] stuff. Not making it up, but learning as I go along. They’ve called for “more” democracy – but I bet “they don’t like it up ‘em.”)

Its former incarnation was the National Council on Civil Liberties (NCCL), I understand, but morphed (I’m not being pejorative here, I understand what they were doing) into Liberty with the subtext, “Protecting civil liberties; promoting human rights.”

That “branding” transition is consistent with the “bringing home the rights” through Labour ’97′s Human Rights Act 1998, when the European Convention of Human Rights (from 1950 and tracing *it’s* heritage to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948[?]) was incorporated into national law here. That meant that folks didn’t have to trudge to the European Court for Human Rights (Strasburg) in the first instance, for remedy.

Of course, the oft confused issue is that this is all about transfers of parliamentary sovereignty to Brussels when, in fact the ECHR(Court) and the ECHR(Convention) have *nothing* to do with the EU (which has it’s *own* Charter on human rights – Treaty of Amsterdam/[proposed] EU Constitution] and which has finer granularity than the 1950 Convention).

Perplexed ? It takes a bit of figuring out, but when you’ve done it, I tell you, you start to get a nasty case of Emperor’s Clothes. I’ve come to the conclusion that part of our “democratic representatives’” fear of engaging with us (I believe that “fear” is not too strong a word to use) is that we start to see the mess the lawyers make of national and international law. This is what the real “crisis of democracy” is. We’ll actually want to get *involved*, and call crap (and corrupt) work for what it is.

What was it that Shakespear said (though one of his creations)? Something like, “First, let’s kill all the lawyers.” I begin to understand what he was getting at.

The point being that *I* didn’t start to get to grips with much of *this* (I’ve been concerned with other stuff, such as the lies on Iraq: I opposed from minute 1) until the EU debate came up. I knew sod all.

(But you know, it’s all part of the *same* puzzle.)

Anyway, coming back to Liberty. They seem to be an NGO standing at the nexus of the tension between traditional British ideas on “freedom” versus alien ideas on (positive) “rights.” The tension is crystalized by the HRA 1998. Thus the change of name. The organization itself dates back to the 1930′s according to my studies. (BTW, I’m not a member of Liberty and this is, by no stretch of the imagination, meant to be a promo. for them.)

The immediate practical side in this? Look up at Edinburgh and the “right” to demonstrate. Do you know (says he in his best Michael Caine voice), there is *nothing* in our national law of a “right” to demonstrate/protest ? The import of ECHR gives the “right” to *free assembly* but no more. The protest part is all tradition and interpretation (and, in the limit, Her Majesty’s Pleasure). That’s why the police, by and large, can make up a large proportion of the “rules”, in real time, during the course of a demo. (Their coding of this is “proportional and *robust*. LOL)

So now we come back to ID cards and rights. Arguably, for the first time in the history of this country, through (positive) rights the subjects/citizens can challenge “traditional” ideas of parliamentary sovereignty through the courts.

And this *is* a whole can of worms since it goes back to the original settlement of the Bill of Rights (168?) and that was all about, in the main (from what I understand) the rights of Parliamentarians i.e. not the likes of you and me. So you can see the genetics of the persistent arrogance of power in this country vis-a-vis “the people.”

Doubt it ? Here’s the empiricism: Geoff “Buff” Hoon sums it all up this past weekend when he gives us his response to the “crisis of democracy” – compulsory voting with one or two salutory cases – he thinks a fine or two here and there will do it – to drive the message home. Then we’ll have the *restoration* of democracy. And yet we pay him !

And now we’re back to our friend Natascha. I’m launching off the “repeat” of my “seven” questions today and so we’ll see. Be sure, any response will be fed back to here too. But you know, somehow, I just have this feeling that we’ll be underwhelmed .