1. ConHome on Lord Pearson's new policy on standing against Eurosceptic Tories.2. Donal Blaney doesn't think much of the LSE's new "Carbon Reduction Manager".
3. Craig Murray on the Islamic threat from Central Asia.
4. Next Left on Rod Liddle and THOSE jokes.
5. Daily Referendum on why we need an election now.
6. PoliticalBetting on the 'blowing' of Brown's master strategy.
A British blogger has been intimidated by the police. The Reverend Stephen Sizer didn’t like comments and criticism made on the Seismic Shock blog, so got the police to physically intimidate the blogger, to take down that mild criticism.
ReplyDeleteThis is a clear freedom of speech issue, the police should not be used to intimidate bloggers.
I urge you to publicise this issue and support Seismic Shock, as “I too am Seismic Shock”
For more information see http://modernityblog.wordpress.com/2010/01/23/reverend-stephen-sizer-uses-british-police-against-a-blogger/
And http://engageonline.wordpress.com/2010/01/23/anglican-vicar-uses-police-to-intimidate-blogger/
Regarding Brown appearing at Chilcot --
ReplyDeleteI think the enquiry team are seriously under-qualified to examine Brown. They need to add either a Vet and / or a Dentist.
Getting a straight answer out of Brown will be as easy as extracting hens teeth.
Ian, a couple of weeks ago you predicted a Lib Dem gain in East Lothian, so I thought you might be interested in this:
ReplyDelete‘Party ditches controversial Labour MP’
Scotland on Sunday can reveal that activists have voted overwhelmingly to unseat Anne Moffat as MP for East Lothian and are seeking a candidate to replace her before the general election.
Their decision will now go to Labour’s National Executive Committee as a matter of urgency, where it is expected to be rubber-stamped before Gordon Brown goes to the polls later this year.
Assuming the decision is ratified by the NEC, Moffat will become the second sitting Scottish Labour MP to be deselected in the run-up to the election.
Jim Devine, the Livingston MP, was deselected after his expenses were criticised for submitting invoices for electrical work worth £2,157 from a firm with an allegedly fake address and an invalid VAT number.
There is the added embarrassment that East Lothian is a constituency shared with the Scottish Labour leader Iain Gray, who represents it at Holyrood.
http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/news/Party-ditches-controversial-Labour-MP.6008974.jp
Anne Moffat is actually the 3rd Scottish Labour MP to be deselected, unless Jim McGovern (Dundee West) gets a last minute reprieve.
This is a catastrophe for Iain Gray. Full out civil war in his own local party speaks volumes for how much authority the man carries.
Understanding and using multiple laws for maximum advantage is something for which I have surprised myself and many lawyers over the years. When pinned down and asked "my interpretation is legal, you may not have seen the combination of laws used like this, but the law does support this?" They say "Yes". (mostly for financial law, contract law, medical law, freedom of information and data protection etc). You have to approach law with the mind set of being above it and using it, but never stepping outside it.
ReplyDeleteSo with this is mind I'd like to put the law on Human Rights in context. What you need to understand is their is a lot of posturing by the authors of the law to have powers they don't actually have, regardless of whether the law was ratified. A good example of this is the death penality. I'm sure the authors of the law would love beyond anything else to have removed it, but they didn't because they couldn't. This reveals a fundemental weakness. The authors must rely on the case law that follows the Human Rights Act to make the law because the Act couldn't.
So this is what it boils down to. The Human Rights Act contains a number of very woolly concepts - like a right to a family life. What does this mean. Well , if you take a passive role beneath the law as most people do, it can mean anything. You'll say, let's leave it up to the judges to make case law. On the other hand you can see the act as a list of words that can be interpreted literally.
So the Human Rights act is full of stuff like, the Sec of state can make amendments, in so far as it is possible. In fact it's best to read the first and last line of an act because like all those trick questions the context sets up the punch line. So the first line is basically saying judges must follow these rules when making case law. But the act doesn't actually bind politicians to this. There is nothing in the law saying the sec of state can't change the law so that judges don't follow it.
However once the human rights act gets interpreted into case law the goals of the law do become law. In effect the lawyers have pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps.
The sec if state could and should introduce a "wrapper" law to all Eu law to say that all case law introduced canbe subject to change.
Oh the punch line on the humans right act is in the last page. It's about judges pensions not about the law. There is a long section on paying judges lots of wonga.
So please look at the humans right act, and eu law for what it is.