Making a late challenge for the title of the most offensively authoritarian Blairite, with only a week to go: David Triesman, the former Labour General Secretary and now “The Prime Minister’s Special Envoy for Deportations.” He apparently thinks that nationality can be determined through…yeees..biometrics. Or DNA sampling. Or something, you know, sciency. Perhaps maglev, or…
Read More A late run up the blindsideSo our fine Immigration Minister, Liam Byrne is going to launch an “international marketing campaign” in order to attract more immigrants. Does anyone now remember that David Blunkett launched a propaganda campaign to put immigrants off, emphasising fine British institutions like rain and railway disruption? Clearly Byrne doesn’t. But perhaps he’s hoping to target the…
Read More The stupid – it’s Byrne’s!So the cult of the amateur is killing our culture, right? What if I was to tell you that bloggers had accused someone of abducting Madeleine McCann purely on the basis that he spoke foreign and had associated with Bogus Asylum Seekers? You’d be shocked. Well, the national press did it. Robert Murat, the only…
Read More Your Professional National PressGuess what our old pal Jim Gamble is up to? The man who gave us Operation Ore is about to solve the Madeleine McCann case. Can we guess how he’s going to do it? Yes, that’s right. With a big database and a stunning ignorance of the rules of statistics. Senior police officers within Ceop…
Read More I can see for miles and miles and miles..oh yeahAll right, I said I’d held Sir Ian’s comments on the Today programme on Christmas Eve for treatment. What he did this time was to complain at length about the extra paperwork a cop has to complete after making an arrest. He reckons it’s increased by a factor of three since his wild youth. But…
Read More Ian Blair: Still IgnorantGareth Crossman of Liberty: “The only way the National Identity Register can fight terrorism is if the amount of information on it is increased to make profiling possible.” Next up: Simon Watkin. Former head of David Blunkett’s private office at the Home Office, he now runs the HO’s Covert Investigations Policy team and the ACPO…
Read More Confoblogging: The NIR and the surveillance that goes with itI’m currently at the Royal Society’s “Privacy: A Fine Balance” conference, a DTI-sponsored shindig for eggheads, ubergeeks, cash grabbers and Home Office/defence industry control bureaucrats to thrash out digital rights issues. First speaker is Stephen Hailes of UCL, who’s talking about embedded computing. He says that we need to realise that statistically, most multicellular life…
Read More Privacy: A Fine BalanceEveryone is talking about this New Statesman story in which so-and-so visits Westminster Council’s CCTV surveillance control centre, which rather wonderfully turns out to be situated in the bowels of the dire Trocadero on Wardour Street. Apparently we have 20 per cent of world CCTV capability in Britain. But it was this response at Spyblog…
Read More User 64Now here’s a party proposal I can get behind. Lib Dems want to introduce a Great Repeal Act, which would consist of a single sweeping revocation of a whole catalogue of liberticidal, stupid and expensive Blairite nonsense. Details are here. 1. Restrictions on protests in Parliament SquareSections 132 to 138; Serious Organised Crime and Police…
Read More Repeal!A man in Doncaster gets caught speeding in the firm’s van. Fearing for his livelihood, he decides to eliminate all traces – including the camera. Fortunately for him, he’s a railway welder and has access to thermite. Ah, thermite.. I remember this as the coolest reaction going in school science. For the un-initiated, the thermite…
Read More Thermite ahoy!