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Monday 29 June 2009, Henry Porter's blog, guardian.co.uk
Give local authorities a power and they abuse it. We have seen it with RIPA terror laws and the creation of largely useless CCTV systems: now the right to drink in public is being systematically attacked across the country by local authorities using powers to stop people having a good time in a park or a picnic with their friends.
Click here to read more at guardian.co.uk
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Friday 26 June 2009, Henry Porter's blog, guardian.co.uk
News of the extraordinary state that Britain has got itself into has taken a long time to percolate to the outside world, but when people abroad begin to understand the extent to which the British have been robbed of their freedoms by the Labour government, they are astonished by the lack of reaction in parliament and from the people.
Click here to read more at guardian.co.uk
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Thursday 18 June 2009, Henry Porter's blog, guardian.co.uk
A month ago I drew attention to the way in which the guillotine was being used by the government to cut short debate, when the pressures on parliament's timetable were in fact very few because of the huge holidays MPs were taking.
Click here to read more at guardian.co.uk
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Wednesday 17 June 2009, Henry Porter's blog, guardian.co.uk
The two leading candidates in the race to be Speaker – John Bercow and Margaret Beckett – are simply not up to the job.
Click here to read more at guardian.co.uk
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Tuesday 16 June 2009, Henry Porter's blog, guardian.co.uk
The video released of police officers punching and Tasering a man lying on the ground speaks for itself. Once you give a weapon like this to the British police it will be used and abused as a weapon of punishment and torture.
Click here to read more at guardian.co.uk
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Thursday 11 June 2009, guardian.co.uk
A Stoke City fan has been awarded £2,750 after Greater Manchester Police prevented him from attending a match
Click here to read more at guardian.co.uk
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Wednesday 10 June 2009, Henry Porter's blog, guardian.co.uk
A customer relations officer from Ellesmere Port has been electronically tagged for two months, given a curfew and ordered to pay £2,440.66 in costs for leaving a 15-week-old kitten alone for two days.
Click here to read more at guardian.co.uk
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Monday 8 June 2009, Henry Porter's blog, guardian.co.uk
Sixty years ago today George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four was published, and this evening, as though to mark the anniversary of Orwell's last book, the former head of GCHQ, Sir David Pepper, slips from the shadows to tell the BBC's Who's Watching You programme that it has become necessary for the government to record all data from phone and internet traffic in the fight against terror.
Click here to read more at guardian.co.uk
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Friday 5 June 2009, Henry Porter's blog, guardian.co.uk
To place his chief rival for the premiership in the Home Office, that graveyard of political careers, which has seen the unhappy departure from government of four out of five Labour home secretaries must have given Gordon Brown a rare moment of saturnine pleasure during the reshuffle.
Click here to read more at guardian.co.uk
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Thursday 4 June 2009, Henry Porter's blog, guardian.co.uk
We have a long way to go, but the first signs of an improvement in the civil liberties situation are showing
Click here to read more at guardian.co.uk
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1 June 2009, Henry Porter's blog, guardian.co.uk
Despite a looming election defeat, this government is pushing through a
raft of legislative proposals that have no moral authority
Click here to read more at guardian.co.uk
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Sunday 31 May 2009, The Observer
Orwell said that our national detachment could be seen as a form of wisdom - but indifference has landed us in the mess we're in
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Read more...
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Monday 25 May 2009, Henry Porter's blog, guardian.co.uk
A lawyer and
genetic scientist has raised the disturbing possibility of false
matches being made in the police national DNA database (NDNAD). He
suggests that the DNA database – which at the end of September 2008 had
4,343,624, samples, including those from hundreds of thousands of
innocent people – is now so large that it is mathematically predicted
an innocent person will be matched to a crime they did not commit.
Click here to read more at guardian.co.uk
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Sunday 24 May 2009, Guardian debate, Hay Festival
Henry Porter debates the motion 'Does the left still care about liberty?' in the Guardian's Hay debate.
Click here to listen to the speech at guardian.co.uk
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Friday 22 May 2009, Henry Porter's blog, guardian.co.uk
In a speech two weeks ago, Jack Straw mocked my suggestion that Britain's pupils were being groomed for the surveillance society. I wonder how the justice secretary reacts to a story from Davenant Foundation School in Loughton, Essex, where pupils walked out of classrooms that were fitted with CCTV cameras – on the grounds that their civil liberties were being breached – and refused to return until the camera system had been turned off.
Click here to read more at guardian.co.uk
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Thursday 21 May 2009, Henry Porter's blog, guardian.co.uk
A new study reveals that popular social networking sites including Facebook and MySpace retain copies of users' 'deleted' photos
Click here to read more at guardian.co.uk
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Wednesday 20 May 2009, guardian.co.uk
Statutory instruments greatly increase the power of the executive and allow ministers to avoid public and critical scrutiny
Click here to read more at guardian.co.uk
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Tuesday 19 May 2009, Henry Porter's blog, guardian.co.uk
A Home Office report confirms that the vast spending on CCTV systems is almost certainly unjustified
Click here to read more at guardian.co.uk
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Monday 18 May 2009, Henry Porter's blog, guardian.co.uk
We can't allow the government to introduce legislation which allows the ID card database to be used for tax enforcement
Click here to read more at guardian.co.uk
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Sunday 17 May 2009, The Observer
The anger is wholly
new. During BBC Question Time with Sir Menzies Campbell and Margaret
Beckett, I thought the audience might be minded to let poor Ming off
with 20 years' hard labour, but that it would surely offer no mercy to
the most heavily protected caravan enthusiast in the world, who has
refused to pay back £72,000 claimed on her properties and displayed a
defiance not seen since Elena Ceausescu was led from court and propped
up against a convenient wall.
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Read more...
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Friday 15 May 2009, Henry Porter
A reaction was certainly to be expected after the Convention on Modern Liberty in February and commentators have rushed to deny that there is any such thing as a crisis of liberty and rights in Britain. What’s striking about the blowback is not so much the similarity of style and approach but the expression of unworldly faith in the state.
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Read more...
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Friday 15 May 2009, Henry Porter's blog, guardian.co.uk
Just in case anyone thought the government had resigned itself to the certainty that ID cards would be abolished, here are the new draft orders laid before parliament under the Identity Cards Act 2006
Thanks to Spy blog
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Thursday 14 May 2009, Henry Porter's blog, guardian.co.uk
It is worryingly easy to access personal information – no matter how much of it is stored in a single database.
Click here to read more at guardian.co.uk
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Wednesday 13 May 2009, Henry Porter's blog, guardian.co.uk
Ever since the shooting of barrister Mark Saunders at his home in Markham Square, London, it seems that the police have too often killed, rather than wounded, disturbed people threatening the public with weapons.
Click here to read more at guardian.co.uk
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Monday 11 May 2009, Henry Porter's blog, guardian.co.uk
The scandal over MPs' expenses demonstrates the values and ethics of the people who have waged war on our liberties.
Click here to read more at guardian.co.uk
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