Chambers was given a space for a whinge in the Guardian yesterday. Blogger Shane Richmond on the Telegraph website compared his tweet to messages saying the authors wanted to kill or assault some politician or other, and pointed out that Chambers wasn’t at the airport when he sent the tweet. In the “New Review” in today’s Observer, David Mitchell also took Chambers’s side:

Certainly, the threat – and I suppose it is theoretically a threat, in the same way that an aspirin is a food and George Osborne a successor to Gladstone – was classified as “not credible” by the airport. I don’t know if that means they thought it was funny. Maybe these people sit in front of Morecambe and Wise, sides splitting, tears streaming down their faces, yelling “Not credible!” as Eric picks up André Previn by the lapels.

However, despite Chambers’s manifest lack of credibility, the security people were apparently obliged to inform South Yorkshire police, who arrested him a week later. They were obviously convinced he was a man of his word in terms of the week-and-a-bit timescale. With many plausible terrorist threats, they might have rushed straight round there. Or maybe they’re not morons and knew perfectly well that he had no intention of blowing up an airport but had decided to make an example of him.

It’s vindictive and it’s humourless. Could they not just have had a quiet word? Was bringing him to trial really in the public interest? Is a large fine, unemployment and a criminal record proportionate punishment for an irritated quip, albeit one made within the earshot of others? He didn’t actually send the message to the airport, written in letters cut out from a newspaper, wrapped round a raw liver and a holy text (Christian, Muslim or SMS).

The reason why, as Mitchell says, “we live in serious times” is because planes have been flown into buildings and on a few occasions nearly blown out of the sky, and because if you’re on a plane (as opposed to, say, a train) and any part of it blows up while the plane is airborne, the plane will be destroyed and you will die. People are nervous about flying at the best of times in a way they aren’t about car or train travel, because a plane is inescapable. That is why we take threats to blow up the air infrastructure seriously.

If the guy who had posted that tweet had turned out to have a Muslim name, regardless of the circumstances, there would have been no qualms about prosecuting him and giving him a much more substantial sentence than this idiot got. He may not be a Muslim and he may also not be a Nazi, but there have been quite a few cases of white guys having stashes of weapons found in their homes, intended for use in a race war. Just because you’re white and have an English name, it doesn’t mean you’re not a terrorist. As with the case of the English-Canadian married couple denied a visa because the wife is “underage” (19 years old), people whine about laws aimed at Muslims or other “foreigners” when “their own” people find that the rules apply to them too.

This isn’t the whole story; the prosecutors in Pennsylvania started alleging charges of obtaining money by deception, “relating to her time working at a US magazine”, which Prosser denies. However, the fact remains that Prosser is bed-ridden, has persistent pain controlled with morphine, and a colostomy bag following damage to her digestive system caused by the Crohn’s. She also requires a stair-lift, bath-lift and a specialised wheelchair. The American penal system’s record in dealing with severely disabled inmates is not a good one — in 2004, Andrew Magbie, a ventilator-dependent quadriplegic in Washington, DC, died, having received a short prison sentence for possessing marijuana (which he used to control the spasms caused by his spinal cord injury) and for riding in a car in which someone else carried a loaded gun (which he could, by definition, not use). His sentence was 10 days long; he died four days later, following a “pop-off”, i.e. the dislodgement of his ventilator pipe from his tracheostomy. He required round-the-clock nursing care, as do all vent-dependent quads, and clearly nobody was there to put his pipe back on once it had become dislodged.

Liz Prosser is not that disabled, in terms of being able to move her body and breathe on her own, but Andrew Magbie was not bed-ridden either. People do not become bed-ridden because they want to be, but because their bodies cannot cope with activity or because they cannot sit up for very long (or at all). Given that they allow this to happen to one of their own citizens over a petty drug charge, how on earth can they be trusted — whatever their assurances (and our government thinks such assurances mean anything when they come from dictators, also) — to look after a severely disabled British citizen? The truth is, they cannot and should not be.

Who is the victim in all this, anyway? Nobody. All the parties to the “abduction” have made up, including the father (who was never married to Prosser). The only offended party is the state of Pennsylvania: prosecutors with unfinished business who want to rack up their conviction rates, which seems to be par for the course in much of the USA. In any case, when a mother is threatened with permanent separation from her six-year-old daughter by a state which is playing games with her, it is quite natural that she should want to preserve their relationship. In the event, she lost contact with her daughter for years and did not see her for many years afterwards, and was imprisoned in this country before being released on bail; she was unable to travel outside Wales even before she became ill (travelling anywhere is impossible now, of course).

There is no reason this woman should be sent to the USA. The “suicide risk” is a red herring; the fact is that the journey to the airport would be a risk to her health, never mind the flight. The reason this action is even being considered is because we have a government which is so in awe of American power and has such a miserable sense of the decline of British power that it will never openly defy American wishes or demands, which, of course, the British government did do during the Cold War and which other countries in Europe continue to do. The Labour government has no convictions and no courage, and will readily betray British citizens to appease imaginary American wrath. I really do hope that they do not have a majority after the coming election.

Today, it was revealed that the scanners could not be used on travellers under 18 as that would break child pornography laws, which prohibit naked images of people under that age (a trial at Manchester airport went ahead only after under-18s were exempted). There are also worries that images of celebrities or “people with unusual or freakish body profiles” would be exploited by some security staff.

The disability group blog FWD/Forward notes that all manner of medical items will show up in the scans, among them catheters, incontinence pads, colostomy bags, breast implants and prostheses, and the genitalia of people with intersex conditions:

People with marginalised bodies already have major issues with air travel – with the uncertainty of the security process, with the practicalities of dealing with aids and needs while travelling, with the spoon-sapping of travel, with no option but unfamiliar foods that may affect the body unpredictably, with the difficulty of maintaining personal privacy in prolonged periods in close quarters with others, with unpredictable delays that affect health, with security threats when bodies don’t ‘match’ identification documents.

Soon there may be one more element in the mix: the sure knowledge that one’s personal business will be laid bare in front of security-theatre goons who will almost certainly be poorly trained in disability awareness and gender tolerance.

I give it 24 hours before clandestine mobile phone images of travellers with marginalised bodies show up on the Internet.

The discussion which follows is worth reading, in my opinion; it touches on whether scanning is preferable to pat-downs or not, and the extent to which security staff (or “security theatre goons” as the post calls them) can be relied on to be sensitive to the needs of people with various disabilities and medical conditions. Someone advanced the idea that Israeli methods of ensuring airport security are worth exploring as throughput is vastly quicker than at British or American airports, although others countered that the authorities there are open that racial profiling is an important part of it, that “most of my Muslim friends (or people of descent that leads to them being assumed to be Muslim) who have attempted to enter Israel have experienced as a component of their security procedures their willingness to profile people of a particular religion and detain them for 8+ hours in a little room while periodically questioning and harassing them” and that some people with disabilities such as autism might fall foul of their behavioural profiling methods. (The notorious case of Maysoon Zayid should serve as a warning to anyone advocating Israeli methods as a complete solution.)

Gary Younge, in yesterday’s Guardian, noted the pattern of reactive and repressive security measures following terrorist attacks (or attempts), which are often fruitless in terms of catching actual terrorists, alongside failure of the authorities to do their jobs properly and take notice of intelligence which is available, to the extent that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was able to get onto a plane after his own father had warned that he was a terrorist threat. Meanwhile, the much-resented liquids restrictions in the UK are, it turns out, not being enforced rigorously: news reports emerged that the ban was breached in the past week, while this lady reported various inconsistencies and confusion on different parts of her recent journeys.

Still, one aspect of this case which has not been adequately discussed is the fact that these scanners represent the first case in which non-suspect people are subjected to this kind of invasion of their privacy to non-medical staff: an image of them naked. If this gains general acceptance, it will be much less easy to object to any future invasion: it will be said, “you get seen naked every time you fly; what’s so objectionable about this?”. Given that experts believe that such scanners will not detect explosives and other chemicals, only objects, it is difficult to see how they will prevent anything that existing security measures, if implemented properly, would not prevent. It will simply give the state more licence to impose more intrusive “security” measures whenever they claim there is a need. It should be resisted vigorously.

Kim Howells had an article published in the Guardian today, in which he recommends that British forces are pulled out of Afghanistan and that the money saved by that should be ploughed into the police, border controls and security forces:

If we accept that al-Qaida continues to pose a deadly threat to the UK, and if we know that it is capable of changing the locations of its bases and modifying its attack plans, we must accept that we have a duty to question the wisdom of prioritising, in terms of government spending on counter-terrorism, the deployment of our forces to Afghanistan. It is time to ask whether the fight against those who are intent on murdering British citizens might better be served by diverting into the work of the UK Border Agency and our police and intelligence services much of the additional finance and resources swallowed up by the costs of maintaining British forces in Afghanistan.

Of course, do we accept that al-Qa’ida still poses such a threat? Keep in mind that there has not been a successful attack since 2005 and that we have not heard of a major terrorist conspiracy being thwarted for some time now.

Such a shift in focus would have the benefit of exposing far fewer British servicemen and women to the deadly threats of Taliban snipers and roadside bombs, but would also have momentous implications for UK foreign and defence policy. We would need to reinvent ourselves diplomatically and militarily. Treaties and international agreements would have to be renegotiated. In particular, relationships with our Nato partners, especially with the Americans – our most trusted and valued allies – would alter fundamentally.

Life inside the UK would have to change. There would be more intrusive surveillance in certain communities, more police officers on the streets, more border officials at harbours and airports, more inspectors of vehicles and vessels entering the country, and a re-examination of arrangements that facilitate the “free movement” of people and products across our frontiers with the rest of the EU.

Some of these changes will generate great opposition, but many of them will be welcomed. If media reports are true, the British public is becoming increasingly hostile to the notion that any of our service personnel should be killed or wounded in support of difficult outcomes and flawed regimes in faraway countries.

Of course, they will “generate great opposition” among the people they will affect (innocent people caught up in a security dragnet because they share similar names with suspected terrorists, or harassed by security forces or border agents emboldened by government rhetoric echoed in the popular press), but will be welcomed by those they are supposedly designed to protect, or allow to feel protected (white, middle class people in Middle England, the least likely of people to be affected by terrorism in any case; don’t forget that the 2005 bombers stopped in Middle England — Luton — only to argue about the cost of parking or something similar) and by bigots who read even lower-rent rags.

As for our free movement to the rest of the EU, the fact is that we still don’t have the free movement that the rest of the EU has. To get from France to Belgium, you just drive straight across - there have been no passport controls for decades. I have simply walked across the German-Dutch border, and that was in 1991 or 1992 (from Aachen to Vaals). You can’t do that in the UK to any country besides Ireland, and Labour have been talking about scrapping even that. That will matter to an awful lot of British citizens with Irish family connections, like me.

Henry Porter sums up his attitude as coming from an old communist who has ditched his commitment to social justice, but not his commitment to state control:

His deduction that Britain must retreat and retrench, ignoring all obligations to Nato and the international treaties we have signed, is characteristic of someone who veered from outright communism to a point in the 90s where he could say that the word “socialism” could be “humanely phased out”. He has the classic New Labour profile and like fellow migrants from the far left – Straw, Reid, Blunkett and Clarke – he has retained a love of state intrusion and is, as they all are, an enthusiast for ID cards. There is a part of Howells that remains firmly rooted in the beliefs that ruled east Germany until 20 years ago. Actually, what he advocates in this proposed withdrawal from the world is more akin to a British version of Albania, a locked-down police state with stringent border controls and unwavering state control.

I have two personal points to add. One is that we should withdraw from both of the Bush wars because we shouldn’t be there, and never should have been. There was never any question that our action was going to result in a stable, democratic government, as the recent farce of an election demonstrates; it was meant to get rid of Bin Laden and make sure that his gang could not use Afghanistan as a safe haven. The gang has been disrupted, but the history of Afghanistan demonstrates that they will never be loyal to a foreign master, Muslim or otherwise. We did not go in to deal with any threat to British security; we went in because of a rush to “do something” after 9/11. History, however, shows that attempts to conquer Afghanistan are doomed to fail, because it is an inhospitable part of the world settled by people who can and will fight, and will fight as if they have all the time in the world to do it.

Besides, British participation in these wars motivates a fair proportion of whatever support for al-Qa’ida exists among British Muslims, which may well mean that the need for increased surveillance of British Muslims (which is clearly what he means by “certain communities”) decreases. If British politicians had thought more about the British national interest from the start, rather than about cowering from a raging American bull after 9/11, the July 2005 bombings might never have happened. The problem is that, when confronted by power, Howells and his New Labour colleagues and masters proved to be so spineless, one wonders how they moved their arms and legs.

Second, we easily forget that the price of freedom is not eternal vigilance, it is risk. This means risk from our own behaviour and other people’s. If we have the health and safety industry industry looking over our shoulders all the time, perhaps fewer people would get injured, but life would end up being a whole lot less interesting, and probably more expensive, for everyone. We’ve all heard that this country or that has no crime and you can walk the streets without fear or leave your front door open, but people conveniently forget that these countries, like Syria, Saudi Arabia and Singapore, have secret police forces and people disappear. Crime happens in police stations, not on the streets, and the people who commit them are much less accountable. Less terrorism from groups opposed to the state (of course, Syria and Saudi Arabia have experienced terrorism) but more, along with more intrusion and propaganda, from the state itself.

Of course, we’ve already been told that the surveillance is most likely to affect “certain communities”, not the general population, but if those communities have enough of it, we are likely to see riots or worse.

Afua Hirsch (the Guardian’s legal correspondent) on the recent change of mind regarding a British-Libyan man who had been under a banning order based on evidence he was not allowed to see as it would have compromised an informant. The Law Lords ruled in June that the man’s (and two others’) human rights had been breached because the gist of the evidence against them had not been revealed to them; the government has decided that releasing him from the order is preferable to revealing the information. Alan Travis, the paper’s home affairs editor, suggests that all of the other orders are likely to be revoked.

Clearly, it is contrary to the rule of law for people to be subjected to any kind of punishment, which is what a control order is, even if it is not formally presented as one, without being charged with or convicted of any offence. This is something that goes on either in countries which are at war, which Britain is not, or under dictatorship or some form of pseudo-democracy. Significantly in the case of Cerie Bullivant, no further evidence has been offered against him since his control order was lifted; it was claimed that he intended to go abroad and fight. All this came after they had driven him near to a mental breakdown and wrecked his marriage.

This is all about the problems some photographers have been having taking pictures in ‘sensitive’ locations, particularly in London; these places have also included shopping centres, many of them privately owned even though they appear public. The magazine Amateur Photographer have printed many letters from photographers complaining about having been stopped by the police and even required to delete their pictures.

I’ve never had this particular experience, but when I first got my digital SLR in 2007, I was taking pictures of trees in a nearby playing field in New Malden, and two guys passed behind me and one of them said to the other that I was ‘noncing’. A ‘nonce’ is a paedophile. There were boys in the playing field, but why is it that we (men in particular) can’t take pictures when there are children around without being accused of something as dreadful as this?

I’m obviously pleased that a mass newspaper has decided to take up this story, but there is obviously the stench of hypocrisy here. This treaty has been in force since 2003, and many others have been extradited in the past, including one (a US citizen) who has been held under administrative restrictions in New York which prevent him doing anything which could be interpreted as “martial training”, or from talking in his cell. The probable reason why the Mail did not make a fuss then is because that person is a Muslim. As with police brutality, which the Mail has no real record of campaigning on when it takes the form of black men being choked to death in police cells, they make a fuss when it’s a white man — or better still, a pretty white girl — who’s on the wrong end of the cosh. We saw the same with the NatWest Three.

This act should be struck down on principle, because it is allowing British citizens to be extradited for acts committed in the UK. Regardless of whether the computers hacked into were here or abroad, we have a Computer Misuse Act which penalises cracking other people’s computers without their consent. If something is illegal here, it should be prosecuted here. If it is not, then there is even less reason to extradite them, even if the act involves exporting a substance which is legal here to a country where it is controlled; and let’s be honest about this, would we extradite someone to any old country for exporting a perfectly legal substance there, as if British citizens had to learn the laws of every country in the world? Of course not, so why is a Scottish couple under threat of extradition when the country happened to be the USA? It could soon reach the point where a British citizen is extradited for injuries to an American citizen sustained in a pub brawl in Tottenham!

Whether the conditions McKinnon face are as brutal as those mentioned in the Mail report yesterday is doubtful, because they appeared to be about state prisons, which take most of the violent offenders including murderers, rather than federal ones. What is more worrying is the possibility of ending up in a “communications management unit” of the sort normally used to house Muslim prisoners with ‘terrorist’ connections, some of them clearly political. It has also been suggested that Asperger’s sufferers actually do well in prison because it offers consistency and routine; this, however, depends on various factors, such as whether there is arbitrary brutality, whether the rules are enforced consistently or capriciously, and whether any odd behaviour he exhibits annoys anyone who is given to violence (I have heard of a mentally-ill man being stabbed to death on a London bus by a man he annoyed by talking to himself, for example). There is also the issue of family contact, and being in the federal system, he could be held in a prison in New England or California, or anywhere in between, and moved from one to another at any time.

The fact that the Extradition Act forbids the challenging of evidence in a British court makes no difference to the McKinnon case, of course, as what he did is not disputed. However, it is a clear example of the inadequacies of the British “unwritten constitution”, as other countries have rock-solid guarantees of protection from extradition; some countries do not extradite their own citizens at all, while others require the other state to provide evidence, as is the case with the USA. There seem to be two particular problems facing British citizens required for extradition in the UK. One is that the British government is unwilling to say no to power, particularly American power, as we saw with their following America into two disastrous wars in less than two years; the other is the fiction that any western judicial system is as good as ours, when in fact many have lengthy pre-trial delays (e.g. Spain, Portugal), different standards of presumption of innocence, unreliable legal representation, and miserable prison conditions.

We need robust protection of British citizens from extradition. No extradition for acts committed in the UK. No extradition without sufficient evidence and an opportunity to challenge it. No extradition where trials have been held in absentia, or the accused has not been informed because of some bureaucratic mistake. Finally, prison conditions must meet a given standard in terms of food, protection from violence and from arbitrary and capricious restrictions on speech, contact etc. The state demands loyalty, to itself and the Queen, but if it is unwilling to protect its citizens from the designs of selfish foreign powers and their capricious rulers and officials, it becomes nothing more than a bureaucracy and a provider of services for money, and is no more worthy of anyone’s loyalty than Tesco or any other such organisation.

It’s reached the point where the front pages of several major newspapers, including the Daily Star and Daily Express, feature a woman who had been struck across the leg with a police baton at the demo, complaining that she looked like she’d been attacked by the Taliban (you can see the mark on that page, and it’s an angry mark). The Guardian has carried several letters two days running this week (here’s today’s), unusually without any attempt to “understand” the awful pressures the police are under, etc. Among the letters in yesterday’s collection was from a former Austrian tourist (former, because he says he’s never coming back) who complained that the police had stopped him taking pictures of buses, telling him that it was illegal to take pictures of anything involving transport (news to anyone who’s seen the many books containing nothing but pictures of buses in every branch of Smith’s) and forced him to delete them. This is quite credible, because the pages of photography magazines in the UK, such as Amateur Photographer, have contained letters complaining of being stopped by the police or private security guards for taking pictures in public places.

The New Statesman had a four-page feature, entitled Public Enemy Number One, which points out the similarities with the De Menezes slaying in 2005, including the fact that the police tried to spin a web of lies immediately after the incident, alleging that they were pelted with bottles and other missiles as they attempted to save his life; in reality, it was members of the public who tried to save his life as the police, some of them masked and with numbers hidden (their numbers are supposed to be display in silver figures on their shoulders, so that they can be identified; having them hidden often means they are up to no good), stood over him and did nothing. With De Menezes, the news reports featured some flack telling the public that the victim had a puffy jacket with wires coming out of it (he did not have a jacket on at all), among other untruths.

Part of the feature is an article condensed from an interview with a teacher who became a policewoman, but quit after just weeks in the job. She found that the police treated those they thought low-class with contempt, in one case taking a teenager arrested for trying to steal a car, who had already been handcuffed and was on the floor, and throwing him into a van; when this officer complained, she was ostracised. She found senior male officers treated both female police officers and members of the public, such as rape victims, with similar contempt, and heard it said of someone who had died of an overdose, “one down, a thousand to go”.

A common theme in deaths at the hands of the police is the impunity. Not only do police officers not get punished in the courts for these killings; there is usually not even a trial at all, nor even job losses, as was scandalously the case in the De Menezes case, in which politicians seemed to be falling over backwards not to blame the police. Politicians have made a point of appearing to support the police, again and again, even when they are clearly in the wrong, and have usually increased their powers rather than restraining them. The popular press has colluded, railing against the Macpherson report, published after the killing of a young black man in south-east London in 1992, claiming that “political correctness” was impacting morale in the police. When Jon Gaunt rant the morning talk show on BBC London, I recall listening to complaints about police discriminating against white men in recruitment. On (at least) one occasion, the white-sounding male caller said that a senior officer had had a word in his ear after his son had been turned away, telling him that if his son was another colour, he would have been admitted.

The police are treated with a tenderness not afforded to other professions. The way the tabloids howled until Sharon Shoesmith, the former director of children’s services in Haringey, the north London borough where “Baby P” was murdered by his family after having been known to staff in her department, you would have thought the staff had killed him rather than simply not doing enough to protect him. I’ve personally lost an agency driving job for telling a noisy kid to shut up. This past week, a nurse was struck off for secretly filming inside a hospital, where she witnessed filthy conditions and general bad practice at a hospital; another nurse, interviewed on a Channel 4 programme two weeks ago, expects to be struck off using the hospital computers and email addresses for eBay during lengthy idle periods at work. A few years ago, a woman who was dying of a gunshot wound inflicted by her husband, who had then shot himself, was left to die by the police because they imagined that it was all a ruse to get the police into the house so that the husband could shoot them. The family took the police to court, and lost.

I find the obvious differences between the police behaviour at the G20 protests and that at other demonstrations, such as the anti-war or pro-Palestinian marches, or the Tamil vigil at Parliament Square (after the Westminster Bridge occupation was over) interesting. Despite the smaller sizes, the police have a record of being much more heavy-handed, even with peaceful demonstrators. Why is this? Well, part of the reason is that the green and anti-capitalist protest movements have a history of real direct action rather than just protest and that gains for them would mean real losses for powerful interests and disruption to everybody’s way of life, but its participants are also easy to dismiss as “trustafarians” — middle-class people, even products of public schools, running around and playing at revolution. The ridicule persisted until after the protests, when it became obvious that the man who was killed was the opposite - a City paper seller who no doubt shared none of the protestors’ politics. It would be an enormous public relations disaster for the police to be seen laying into Muslim demonstrators, or even Tamil ones, on YouTube.

Sadly, I suspect that this thuggish behaviour of the police has been receiving all this attention and protest because white, middle-class people have realised that they are targets now as well: the victims were a shambolic, middle-aged white man and a pretty young white woman, not a stereotypical aggressive black person (male or female). It is, of course, not news to black and Asian people that some of our police are thugs. This is not the only recent scandal involving bad policing — remember that we have had two big controversies about lackadaisical investigation of rape in London in the last month and a half — and one might hope that they lead to serious reforms of the way the police are investigated and how they operate, and an end to the culture of impunity. However, some of those crowing right now did not complain much when the police were harassing black men in the streets and left “their people” alone, and will not complain if they forget about “political correctness” and go back to their old ways.

This is at least the second time that the antics of al-Muhajiroun have led to a campaign to ban whatever they are doing - the law banning people from “glorifying” terrorism was in direct response to their post-9/11 press conferences in which they crowed about the “magnificent” attacks on the World Trade Centre. Their strength then was barely more than it is now, and yet laws are framed which affect all of us just to stop a few dozen loud-mouths whose ravings are amplified by a press which, while feigning hostility to them, actually loves the money they bring in.

I do not believe that these protests are equivalent to inciting hatred for people based on religion or race, anyway. Racial and religious hatred is what communal riots and mass murder, rape and general destruction is based on; a few strong words aimed at soldiers on parade in a public place is not in the same league at all. In any case, if our soldiers had really been involved in an atrocity - if something like Abu Ghraib had been British soldiers’ responsibility rather than Americans’ - then public anger, particularly from any community connected in some way to the victims, would be quite understandable. If the soldiers had been returning from Sierra Leone or Bosnia, suffice to say that there would have been no protest, but how many regiments were taken on a parade through a town centre after coming back from either of those places, when a heroes’ welcome might have been more appropriate?

It is depressing that we see reactive legislation, or attempts at it, in response to vexatious antics by loud-mouths such as Anjem Choudhary and his gang, who should have been denied the oxygen of publicity years ago rather than being dignified with bills in parliament in response. I notice that there have been few prosecutions for inciting hatred based on religion, despite the flood of Muslim-bashing headlines from the Daily Express, which a lot of Muslims, including myself, find more worrying than the rantings of delinquent BNP activists. Why do people cry “ban it” every time an annoying public demonstration is reported on the news? Why does freedom of speech mean so little to us? This could never happen in the USA, where the First Amendment would make it not worth discussing unless real harm could happen as a direct result.

Mr Davies’s voting record is interesting - very strongly against ID cards, generally against Labour anti-terrorist laws, and in favour of an investigation into the causes of the Iraq war; his position, as expressed in the BBC news report, is that any protest should be directed at Parliament and not at the soldiers themselves. I wonder if he sees the irony in voting in favour of civil-libertarian causes but proposing a law telling us how we should talk about soldiers in their presence? This is exactly the kind of law used by dictatorships and pseudo-democracies like Turkey to ban criticism of the military. There would be some justification if abusive or violent demonstrations at such events were a known problem (and even then, police action to keep them away would be a better idea), but this is one incident involving a small number of people, and a law banning such demonstrations is a disproportionate response.

Jack Straw (currently the Justice secretary in the British government) wrote in yesterday’s Guardian that his government has done more to reinforce civil liberties than any since the Second World War, and that the age before wasn’t a golden age of liberty, but of “informal ‘judges’ rules’, the absence of statutory protections for suspects, ‘fitting up’, egregious abuses of power, miscarriages of justice, arbitrary actions by police, security and intelligence agencies, phone tapping without any basis in statute law or any legal protection for the citizen whatsoever, gaping holes where there should have been parliamentary scrutiny”. This is all fair enough, but what gives his argument away is the last-but-one paragraph:

And there is of course an ultimate check on executive power - democracy. Talk of Britain sliding into a police state is daft scaremongering, but even were it true there is a mechanism to prevent it - democratic elections. People have the power to vote out administrations which they believe are heavyhanded.

The reality is that democracy tends to guarantee the things that matter only to the majority, which are usually related to taxes and services. In fact, democracy is as likely to guarantee human rights abuses for a disliked or untrusted minority as the opposite, because politicians will do what pleases the majority (or seems to by what appears in the papers they buy), and allows the legislature to quickly respond to whatever appears to cause public vexation, even if that involves trampling on others’ rights. Seriously, this phenomenon was first identified by Thomas Jefferson more than 200 years ago, and yet we have Jack Straw wheeling out such nonsense in a centre-left newspaper in 2009? While written constitutions and bills of rights do not guarantee human rights either, as we have seen since 2001, they do prevent the most egregious violations being passed in a moment of collective outrage by a simple majority vote.

While it’s true that the Labour government has passed the Human Rights Act, this act does not include a judicial check on Parliament, which is what a written constitution delivers, and this government has used get-outs on a number of occasions. No type of constitution guarantees human rights, but ours is the worst for allowing the legislature to sweep them away.