CentreRight

Anyone unfortunate enough to be dependent on public transport in London will know the usual irritation of the constant shut-downs over weekend after weekend.  One always feels humiliated by the "welcome" extended to, and enormously sorry, for visitors and tourists to the capital on weekends, especially those who are not fluent in English, who arrive and expect to be able to use a service (they, poor people, apply the logic of the rest of the civilised world and therefore think that something ought to work) - when they ask an LU employee, they get a shrug and a weary variation on "Didn't you know?  This is London - the city's closed on weekends."  For those of us who live here there is, of course, no reduction in the price of the season ticket to reflect the fact that the service is not delivered as advertised when you bought said ticket, and indeed Boris has just jacked up the price of the tickets once again.

Rather than any more hyperbole from me, just take a look at this in their own words:

Big Brother Watch has today released our first researched report, into the number of CCTV cameras operated by councils in the UK (generated by Freedom of Information requests we submitted to every council in the country).

The result we’ve discovered – council-run CCTV has trebled in the last ten years.  That’s working off a high base, too – a decade ago, people were already alarmed by the extent to which we were being watched, and the network has trebled since then.

I care about this because CCTV cameras are not good in and of themselves. To be worth paying for, they have to help to prevent or help to detect crime.  If they don't do either, then they are worse than useless - people feel a false sense of security because of them, policing techniques are becoming increasingly reliant on them, and they cost a lot.

Cameras are often turned off or not working, as recently happened in an unpleasant beating in Somerset. This is much worse than them simply not being there, as law enforcement becomes dependent on an unreliable resource.

When the cameras aren’t turned off and are actually working, often the footage is “scrubbed” before any investigation retrieves it.  When the cameras are working, switched on, pointing in the right direction and the footage is actually retrieved, the quality of footage is often such that it doesn’t satisfy the standard required for productive use in court.

Research indicates that crime is not driven down by the presence of CCTV as confirmed by London’s Metropolitan Police report this year, which stated that one crime per year was solved per thousand cameras.  And of course, CCTV seeks to solve crimes after the fact – a policeman on the street is much more likely to deter it before it happens.

Lib Dem MEP Graham Watson, who has berated Tory Giles Chichester for congratulating his constituent for winning Miss World, contrasting it with his own uber-laudable commitment to saving the world:

“Needless to say, whilst Giles is ogling women in his office, I will be in Copenhagen campaigning for a deal that will preserve our planet.”

Note: no image of Miss World was gratuitously posted in the creation of this message

**UPDATE** A keen-eyed correspondent points out to me that the Prime Minister congratulated Jo McElderry on his X-Factor win.  Presumably he can expect a slapping from Watson post-haste.

The Heritage Foundation's ever excellent Insider Online has featured an extremely good article from the City Journal. It sets out to deter American policymakers from considering industrial nationalisation by setting out the cautionary precedent of Britain's economy in the 1970s and the nationalisation of British Leyland,

Claire Berlinski writes that post-war British politicians

nationalized the commanding heights of the economy and inaugurated the cradle-to-grave welfare state. By the 1970s, the UK faced an economic crisis unrivaled since the Great Depression. Shabby and hopeless, Britain had become, in Henry Kissinger’s words, a “tragedy” of a nation, reduced to “begging, borrowing, stealing.”

British Leyland, Britain’s largest automaker, faced bankruptcy in 1975. Fearing that its collapse would leave a million workers unemployed, the Labour government nationalized it. The company remained a ward of the state for 13 years. During that time, the British taxpayers invested 11 billion pounds—the inflation-adjusted equivalent of $22 billion today—in a company whose only sign of life was a willingness to spend that money. Though the British economy recovered, British Leyland did not.

She is writing in an effort to deter Congress from replicating such errors.  She concludes:

British Leyland, to judge from the news, has disappeared down the world’s memory hole. We’re nonetheless repeating an experiment that has been conducted already, and its results are known to anyone who cares to consult them. The experiment was a failure—and there is no good reason to think that it will succeed the second time around.

From both an economic and a big brother perspective, it's an example that we should not forget ourselves.

I have written before on CentreRight about my support for the State of Israel.  I believe that that support is a balanced one, in which I am willing to be a critical friend when constructive criticism is needed.

But sometimes a story emerges that requires outright condemnation.  On this occasion, the condemnation goes to the British Government.  The government - our government, supposedly representing you and me in its interaction with people abroad - wants to label goods as coming from the Jewish settlements in the West Bank, so as to help consumers boycott them.

As it happens, I have misgivings about the settlements and think that those who call for a return to old borders have a point.  But only people with no sense of history could think it unobjectionable to start branding Jewish goods like this.

Perhaps we should expect little else from those who don't shudder at the notion of creating a "Justice" Ministry.  But even with that sort of crass ignorance of connotation and sense, I thought that the bright spark who suggests slapping little yellow stars on Jewish products might have sounded alarm bells somewhere.

Alex Deane is the Director of Big Brother Watch, a campaign from the TaxPayers' Alliance

Targeted intercept evidence of a named individual is the best kind of surveillance evidence.  It can be reviewed by a senior policeman, a judge, or even a Minister.  It would only be permitted on application, with good reason.  But we don’t allow it.  We are still told, as per the Times today, that it would breach human rights.

Mass surveillance evidence, storing everyone’s information without any kind of discriminating eye, is the worst kind of evidence.  It generates vast amounts of data that nobody can realistically review, and it’s fantastically expensive.  But we’re trying to build that capacity.  What "human rights" apply only to those accused of crimes, but not to the population at large, remains to be explained.

We’ve got this debate completely the wrong way round.

Over on the Big Brother Watch site yesterday I wrote about plans to introduce tasers to our police force.  I explained that it was my view that this was a bad thing - that for many years, the police have kept order in this country by dint of their authority, not superior firepower.

In any case, an interesting off-topic discussion began about police... well, to use an emotive phrase from the USA, police brutality.

Support for the police, as our guardians and the keepers of law and order, is a traditional conservative quality.  Certainly, we ought to be able to support them.  But it is difficult to do so when looking at the examples linked to on YouTube over on the BBW thread, or indeed easily found with a quick search on YouTube yourself.  Tasering prone and unresisting people.  Multiple punches to the head of a man lying restrained on the ground.  And so on.  That's without even touching on stop and search (as per JP Floru), or the G20 assaults, or the Kingsnorth protests.

Do you think that the police have changed in recent years? Or do you think that the police have always been like this, and the new set of doubts about the police amongst normally law-abiding people (if it exists) arises simply because we have an army of citizen-photographers with mobile camera phones?  Or do you think that the examples are of bad apples amongst a generally good force?  Or do you think that this sort of behaviour is warranted given the challenges and dangers the police face?

President Obama gave a commitment yesterday to begin pulling troops out of Afghanistan by July 2011.

As I've pointed out on this site before, once you set a timetable for withdrawal, you have doomed yourself to defeat.  The enemy knows that he must merely wait you out - and, perhaps, force you to bring forward your timetable by escalating his efforts.  You demoralise your troops, who wonder why on earth they're giving their all to an apparently important campaign that's about to cease at some arbitrary near-future date; and you demoralise your allies in the country concerned, who now have a date on the calendar on which to focus their dread of your impending abandonment.

Thus, it is absurd to state that your commitment to a conflict is time-limited.  To advance this point, it ought to be noted, is entirely neutral on the merits of having entered the conflict in the first place (merits you might find difficult to weigh up in any case, as I've written elsewhere in relation to another conflict); this is a question of how you conduct yourself once you're there.

I am concerned by the extent of state surveillance in our society.  That concern is at the core of what I do and I think that having that concern is reasonable. And yet, over at the Times, in a piece I urge you to read before ploughing through this response, Crime and Security Editor Sean O’Neill says that I and those who feel like me are “mad-eyed” and “paranoid”.  Ignoring cheap ad hominems, let us consider his arguments in turn.

He begins with a robust defence of the rapid expansion of the DNA database.  Well, if those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear, then I await with interest the instruction to all police officers to give their DNA to the database, and the ensuing stampede of obedient PCs lining up to do so.  Of course, in reality, said officers would no doubt refuse to do so, probably on the grounds that they are often at crime scenes and false positives could easily arise from their samples.  They would be afraid of the results the surrender of their samples might have, regardless of their innocence.  Which is how the rest of us are entitled to feel. 

In the meantime, if Mr O’Neill and those with views like his wish voluntarily to surrender their details, they ought to be able to do so.

Between the point of the question, and the point of the answer:

2:09	Meg Hillier:  Yes you can use it like a passport - only in the EU. The first ones have already been used successfully  for EU travel. Monday November 23, 2009 2:09 Meg Hillier

2:08	[Comment From Mike Mike : ]  Is the data you need from me for an ID card the same as for a passport?

That's Meg Hillier, Home Office Under-Secretary of State for Identity, "answering" a question in a webchat over at the Manchester Evening News website.  We in the Big Brother Watch office are gripped..!  If you hurry, you, too, might see such quality responses as they are unveiled!

Most people I speak to are not concerned about the security of the passport database

The databases will be very secure - think Police National Computer.

polling tells us that many people will take up cards.

As we've written elsewhere, Sandwell Council has backed down in their attempt to fine Vanessa Kelly £75 for feeding the ducks in her local park.

We at Big Brother Watch were proud to support Vanessa, but we know that this example of absurd bureaucratic bullying is hardly unique.  We seek others like her.  If we can help you, let us know.

I've written on CentreRight before about the pervasive issue of wrongful convictions based on DNA evidence. DNA is in the news once more because Alan Johnson u-turned on disposing of the samples taken from innocent people, just as a high-flying lawyer lost her job simply because her DNA is on the database (so much for the presumption of innocence, eh?).

It is on my mind today because this morning I have read the sad story of the investigation into the murder of Suzanne Jovin, which has collapsed after 8 years because of a lab error by a technician.  Think of the frustration on the part of hard-working officers.  Think of the suffering that the poor family must have gone though, only to be so tragically disappointed.  Think of the potential for a miscarriage of justice if the error had occurred in another way, not been detected (or covered up) and a wrongful conviction had resulted.

Law enforcement funds are finite and different kinds of policing efforts are often mutually exclusive.  Money and effort spent on this cannot be put into investigating offences in other ways.  Put more prosaically, it also serves as an example of the colossal waste of money this process often is.  The team on the Jovin case put hundreds of man-hours into DNA sampling and investigation, time which could have been used productively in other ways but we now know was totally wasted.  DNA investigation has its uses of course, but the point is that there is a balance to be struck - overreliance on technology can lead to not following up other leads, and cases solved by DNA must be balanced against unsolved, DNA-reliant cases which might have been solved if properly investigated in the traditional way.

Meanwhile, innocent people are still being added to the database at a rate of knots.  And now the government plans to make you pay if you want your DNA off the database.

At Big Brother Watch we're not luddites - we of course accept that technology has a role to play in law enforcement - but are juries told about errors like these?  Are they told that, according to the last study I know of on the subject (from the University of Texas in 2002), lab error occurs in one in every hundred DNA cases..?

**UPDATE** 26 November 2009: I note with interest that the Director of Prosecutions in Victoria, Australia's second-most populous state, has publicly cast doubt on the quality of DNA evidence used in past cases, including many resulting in convictions.  He promised an audit.  The Victorian police have replied that no such audit will take place.  An unhappy situation for all concerned - for victims and relatives of victims left uncertain as to whether the person convicted was the right individual; for law enforcement, whose achievements have doubt thrown over them; and for those wrongly convicted, offered a ray of hope, now ended.  As the report says, "it's not the first time the Victoria Police DNA database has been the subject of doubts. Last year Victoria Police dropped double murder charges after admitting the DNA evidence they had used was contaminated."

**UPDATE 2** 10 December 2009 A similar story detailing DNA processing errors has emerged in South Australia, where the authorities have claimed that the error doesn't matter because it was in the defendant's favour, so wouldn't lead to a wrongful conviction.  I'm not sure they get it... what if it had led to a wrongful acquittal?  Those of us who query the efficacy of DNA evidence don't want people acquitted willy-nilly, we want the guilty convicted and the innocent acquitted - which is supposedly the aim of the justice system per se.

As I noted elsewhere, as a result of the attention garnered by the case of Jenny Paton, the woman whose family was the subject of covert surveillance because she was suspected (wrongly) of lying about her chilld's school catchment area, Alan Johnson bowed to significant pressure and adverse coverage last week when he declared that the power of local authorities so to surveil would be restricted.

The irony will not be lost on those who appreciate that, this very week, the very same Home Office has extended powers to search homes, seize cash, freeze bank accounts and confiscate property to councils, quangoes and a plethora of agencies such as the Post Office and Transport for London.  No policeman is required for the exercise of such powers, and it is instructive to note that the extension of such intrusive powers to an array of bureaucrats is condemned not only by us but by such organisations as the Police Federation.  As Big Brother Watch noted some time ago, this remarkable extension of the Proceeds of Crime Act is even more troubling by dint of the fact that Parliament didn't vote on it - it was introduced by Statutory Instrument.

An uncharitable person would accuse the Government of being underhand, as Ministers declare that they are "cutting back" on draconian powers being granted to unaccountable people at the very moment they extend such powers.  I think that a more accurate assessment is probably that Ministers are now so buffeted by the media, are so driven by their bureaucrats' aganda and care so little about the consequences of their policies beyond the hit the soundbite secures in that day's news, that the conflict didn't even occur to them.  Either way, the dichotomy is certainly apparent to Big Brother Watch - we can, I suppose, hope that the same has dawned on the Conservative Party, despite the lack of robust response thus far.

In the meantime, all of us who live in these islands, free as we supposedly are, will have to live subject to these powers. We have seen the widespread abuses Councils committed when they were given Ripa powers.  Are we really to expect that an even wider collection of bodies will be more responsible with more intrusive powers, which come with a revenue-raising capacity to boot?

At Big Brother Watch we're used to monitoring Government intrusion into the lives of people.  But try this for size.

In June this year, a remarkable debate took place in the House of Lords.

Despite the fact that we have managed to track animals in this country since time immemorial, and despite the fact that any sign of foot and mouth results in the destruction of the whole flock, Britain's farmers are going to be forced to tag individual sheep by means of electronic implant - a very expensive procedure compulsorily pushed on an industry that is already on its knees, with the Government's own figures showing that the suicide rate amongst farmers is tragically high. 

Why? Because

the introduction of electronic identification is an EU obligation, which must be implemented

To recap - stupid measure, required by EU.  So far, I accept, so unextraordinary.  BUT... honesty is clearly more common in the Lords than in the Commons, for Lord Tunnicliffe, the Minister supporting the regulation, stated

I accept that this regulation is probably, on balance, not a good idea.  It will create more costs than benefits in most of the industry.... This is part of being in the club called the European Union, of which I am proud to be a member citizen.

Well, if that's the case, Lord Tunnicliffe, given that this is a result of bureaucratic absurdity rather than any business requirement, perhaps the bureaucracy can pay for it, or at least part of it?  Oh, no...

My Lords, it is absolutely clear, I am afraid, that the industry and the individuals in the industry will pay.

This is a classic example of the worst excesses of Eurobureaucracy.  It is entirely unnecessary, it is positively harmful and when questioned the answer from the proponents is "that's the way it shall be, because the EU says so, so there."

Oh, and to cap it all off, and I accept that there's something rather disarming about this frankness, in the face of opposition from people with some real expertise in the area, the Minister went on to say...

My Lords, it would be wrong of me to pretend that I had any knowledge of this subject 12 hours ago.

I raise it because at 3pm tomorrow the issue returns to the Lords.  All any objective observer can say is... Godspeed Lord Vinson & Co.

Related post: In defence of modern farming

We recently discussed the worst extremes of Britain's injunction culture here on CentreRight.  Over at Big Brother Watch, a brave freelance journo, Willard Foxton, has put his head over the parapet to claim that

Britain's libel laws are killing investigative journalism

And his story certainly seems to support that proposition.

We were all right to say that the super-injunction was an absurdity, and perhaps we've seen the end of it now - the point of this piece is that, day to day, the plain old normal injunction (and even the threat of it) is choking things just the same.

The Government plans to have legal compulsions to enforce higher minimum payments on credit cards.

Doubleplusgood! Another tentacle of Big Brother slithers into our lives.

Individuals are responsible for the debt they take on.  This involves an element of self-initiated risk, but we are not free individuals without that.

A trip this weekend to Bury St Edmunds, where I grew up, yielded two very different anecdotes in one evening.

First; a prophet is not without honour, save in his home town.  I've been running Big Brother Watch for six weeks now, an organisation that does what it says on the tin, but the first time I had a genuine "why on earth do you need to know this information about me?" moment personally came last night, when I was refused a pair of tickets to a play unless I yielded up my name and address.  If one were to pay the £12 in cash then there would be no need at all, one would think, and if one paid with a card, then the PIN system offers all the protection any retailer would need, so - pourqoi?  My mother and brother were both in the show, and She Who Must Be Obeyed was tapping her foot impatiently as I made my fuss with the no doubt personally blameless chap on the desk, so of course I paid up.  But as I have documented elsewhere, this "it's not worth the hassle" factor is a vital part of our constant little defeats in the fight against the accrual and use of information about us.  Yet the question still remains - for what possible reason might such information be required to permit one to attend a regional theatre?

As the front page of today's Daily Telegraph sets out, the Conservative Party's plan to abolish the Human Rights Act and replace it with a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities has been attacked by the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer QC.

There is an important debate to be had on the topic.  Indeed, Liberty are amongst the most well known of the many opponents of the Conservative plan.

But regardless of the merits, Big Brother Watch thinks it wholly wrong for the Director to make political commentary, particularly about the qualities of the policies of a Party with which he might soon properly be expected to work to the best of his abilities.  In this country we do not have a culture of public discussion from civil servants.  Indeed, the apolitical quality of that service, much undermined in recent times, is to be prized.

Far be it from me to say that the Court of Appeal has got it wrong, but... no, wait.  The Court of Appeal has got it wrong.  As told here, with more details on the absurdity of the relevant examples here, the Court has held that even generation-old, spent convictions should be represented on the criminal records database:

Five police forces which challenged a ruling that they should delete records on criminal convictions from their database have won their appeal.

The court of appeal said convictions, however old and however minor, can be of value in the fight against crime.

Absent any specific example of how a 25 year old conviction for lifting a packet of crisps can be of any assistance, I think that's spurious.

The reason that this matters is that people are getting kicked back for jobs because of such convictions.  This is crazy.  We have a Rehabilitation of Offenders Act in this country, which tries to do exactly what it says on the tin – rehabilitate people back into society.

However, the Police are effectively stymieing this by retaining data from age-old, spent convictions, which then go on to show up when people apply for jobs a generation later.

The Court, rather than give guidance on how such old, isolated, spent convictions could or should be used in a reasonable or rational way, just gives the boys in blue and the database state continued carte blanche with this judgment.  The Court states that the rationale for retaining the information is much more persuasive than the rationale for disclosing it to anyone - but when or how will that differentiation actually be manifested?  No help here...

The benefit to the police of retaining the samples is minimal.  The cost to the individuals, as these stories show, can be huge – indeed, potentially life-ruining.

So, to our learned Court, Big Brother Watch says... d'oh.

Very surprised to load Con Home and find I'm the first to comment on this today, but...

As reported by Guido, the Guardian have been stopped from reporting of a Parliamentary Question.   A Parliamentary Question!

It is simply extraordinary, and really very wrong, that this has happened.  This - the right to discuss what our representatives say and do in Parliament - is the exact, basic, legitimate expectation in a democracy for which people fought for generation after generation.  It finally stopped, as Parliament's own website proudly boasts, in 1771.  Well, apparently it hasn't stopped after all.  It is appalling that the fight needs to be had again, but it certainly needs to be had.  We at Big Brother Watch find ourselves (grits teeth, breathes deeply, squares shoulders) firmly on the side of the Guardian.

In an interesting twist, my colleague Dylan (who is "very web 2.0" apparently) tells me that Trafigura, which might or might not be the name of the company that might or might not be involved in said Parliamentary question, is one of the top "trending" topics on Twitter.

UPDATE: Carter Ruck defeated.  Hurray.  It is still an outrage that this ever happened, but still - good.

From today onwards, millions of Britons will be subject to potential (expensive) "enhanced checks" from the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB), including information taken from unfounded allegations, on the basis that they might be paedophiles.

First of all, we still (so far) have a presumption of innocence in this country.  These policies are a mandate for smears to destroy careers.

Secondly, Children of course need to be protected, but this is hardly the way to do it.  Millions of perfectly law-abiding people in this country will be inconvenienced, and thousands of businesses made less efficient, as a result.  The state will be empowered to find out and retain more about us.

All in all, it's another harmful aspect of our national obsession with paedophilia.  Just as the threat from a small group of nihilistic thugs has ramped up our "security agenda", greatly harmed habeas corpus, curtailed our freedoms of speech and movement, so the tragic and unpleasant but small threat from paedophilia has empowered thousands of bureaucratic busybodies to pry into our personal lives and clog up our workplaces with (even more) red tape.  And to what end?

Big Brother Watch says "shame".

As I've said before, the Conservative position on surveillance and civil liberties is a classic "good but could be better".  The (dread phrase of the moment) direction of travel is good, but there's no pledge to get rid of the database behind ID cards, which is of course more important than the card itself, and no timetable for the removal of innocent people from the DNA database, etcetera.

However, Big Brother Watch wholly approves of the announcement at conference that the Party intends to name and shame prolific criminals.

This is a debate about balance, not absolutes.  The rights of the law-abiding majority not to be victims of crime must be weighed in that balance, and given more weight than they are at present.  Those who would be affected by this legislation will have been convicted on multiple occasions.  The focus in the human rights debate has long been on the "rights" of such guilty people at the expense of the rights and needs of the innocent.  There is of course a powerful privacy point to be made on their behalf (and the issue of how one can reform and get off the list of people suitable for naming and shaming needs very careful attention) but overall in my view this is a good example of the rights of the well-behaved majority prevailing, as they should.

In recent times, there have been many unjust incursions into our civil liberties.  This isn't one of them.

A disturbing piece over at Strange Justice in Australia today. It has been announced that a processing error at a New South Wales Health lab led to the wrongful conviction of a man for breaking and entering:

NSW Health discovered the error in its "cold links" system while conducting a review earlier this year. The system matches DNA evidence collected at a crime scene with people on the state DNA database. The review found NSW Health's DNA laboratory mistakenly linked a man to a break and enter because of human error.

The added emphasis is mine, as if it didn't scream out enough already.

The poor chap was convicted of the offence in early 2008 and has had it around his neck ever since, quite unjustly.  But convictions on this sort of basis are nevertheless very common because people think that DNA evidence is totally infallible.  What this actually means is that they are convinced that the science is accurate, without contemplating the fallibility of the technicians processing the samples, of those responsible for gathering and retaining them, etcetera.

You will of course be struck by the thought: well, what if they hadn't identified the error?

Many people, some of whom will be in prison having been convicted solely or largely due to DNA evidence, will have such thoughts.  That's why William Sessions, the FBI Director who oversaw the introduction of DNA evidence, has called for post-conviction DNA analysis as of right for those convicted using it.  Both in the USA and here, his calls have gone unanswered.

Sessions' article also contains a number of equally alarming examples of poor procedure with regard to DNA use.  They're quite shocking.  They're in accordance with a University of Texas study from 2002 that suggested false results occur in as many as one in every hundred DNA tests in the United States.  An old study, you might say - but then, there are plenty of people serving prison sentences from that time who think it pretty current.  And at least they're even alive to the existence of the issue in the USA.

It's a sort-of Big Brother Watch issue, I suppose.  Technology has its place in law enforcement, of course.  But along with being mindful of the imperative to find and convict the guilty, the perils of wrongful conviction as a result of tools we trust too much seem to have been forgotten.

A brilliant spot from my colleague Dylan - the teen mother borstal plan is a recycling of a Blair plan from 1999