The UK Supreme Court has ruled that a government ban on British citizens bringing spouses under the age of 21 from outside the EU to live in the UK, introduced under the Labour government ostensibly to prevent forced marriage, is unlawful. The court heard that two couples, one including a husband from Chile and the other with a bride from Pakistan, had been separated or forced to live outside the UK for extended periods, in one case resulting in the British spouse losing a university place. There was also a challenge from a British-Canadian couple, who were separated as the Canadian wife could not come to live in the UK and the British husband could not find work in Canada.

I’ve covered this issue before, and there are two separate issues at play here. One is that the former Labour government pretended this was about preventing forced marriage, spinning lurid stories about how “victims can suffer physical and emotional damage and can find themselves being held unlawfully captive, assaulted and raped”. The problem is that, during the research that led to this rule being introduced, victims of forced marriage and the organisations that represent them were asked whether a rise in the minimum marriage age would be helpful, and only one in six said yes. This clearly indicates that the reason for the measure was nothing to do with forced marriage and everything to do with eliminating back-home marriages in the Asian community, which were being blamed for everything from the 2001 Bradford riots to the 2005 London bombings. The anti-immigration pressure group “Migration Watch”, well-known for lurid tales of the disasters immigration would bring to the UK, had been agitating for a rise in the minimum age to rise to 24, in line with Denmark.

There are obvious inconsistencies in the law: it is aimed at people bringing spouses from developing countries, but also applies to countries like Canada; it allows spouses to be brought from poorer regions of Italy or Portugal, but not the USA or Canada; it also ignores the fact that many Canadians and Australians have British citizenship anyway, yet this penalises those whose spouse does not have a recent British ancestor. It also allows couples to settle anywhere else in the EU except the British spouse’s home country. 18-year-olds are adults in almost every country, and it was common, especially for women, to marry at that age until only a generation ago. My parents married when my mother was 19 and my father, 20.

The second issue is that the outrage over the white couple separated by this rule demonstrates that the right-wing in this country never likes it when social control measures are brought in which obviously target a minority group and turn out to apply to them as well. The same was true when a white man makes jokes about blowing up an airport, and finds that pleading “it was a joke” gets him nowhere — recent history proves that just as terrorism has no colour, it also has no religion, judging by the repeated incidence of white Nazis found with stockpiles of weapons. The outrage was solely based on the principle that a white businessman making that threat must be joking — those others, on the other hand, must be serious. They do not accept that the law cannot discriminate on that basis.

As for this judgement, the government have said that they will “come forward with [their] response in due course”, which may include forming legislation to re-introduce it, or appealing to the European Court of Human Rights if that is possible for them; they argue that other countries have found a lower age limit of 21 to be compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), but they also support scrapping the Human Rights Act which enshrines the convention in British law (making appeals by British citizens to the European Court unnecessary). The Human Rights Act is unpopular with the UK’s right-wing media, but so is this rule as it affects people far beyond its obvious target population.

A man has been jailed for 18 weeks for posting insulting messages on Facebook pages dedicated to young people who had died, in one case a 15-year-old girl who had committed suicide in Reading after being bullied. He posted other tasteless messages on various forums related to young people who had died tragic deaths. The 25-year-old man suffers from alcoholism and Asperger’s syndrome.

This is not the first time this year that someone has been prosecuted for making jokes which offend people without raising the serious risk of violence. In March, a man received a suspended sentence for infiltrating a video made by Crawley Town FC supporters and making “aircraft gestures”, intended to mock those who died in the 1958 Munich air crash, which included eight Manchester United players (the so-called Busby Babes). While I can see how this could cause serious disturbance if the disaster had been recent, 1958 is a long time ago (this man was 19 and it is most likely that his parents were not born then and his grandparents were only children) and anyone getting seriously worked up about someone mocking an event that happened more than fifty years ago is taking the game a little bit too seriously.

The police should not be involved in matters like this: it’s tasteless and nasty, but hurting someone’s feelings should not be a criminal offence. It should be a matter of deleting the man’s comments and, if they persist, removing him from the site. Unless there is a threatening element to it and there appears to be a risk of violence or it interferes with someone being able to live their life, such things should be a private matter, and adults should not expect to be able to run to authority like a kid in the playground running to teacher when someone posts something nasty about them on a website. The laws which make prosecutions for such petty misdemeanours possible should be repealed, or drastically reformed, as free speech should not be curtailed by vague catch-all laws.

The reason I support banning this march is that any time the EDL attempt to march through a Muslim area (and the whole point of this organisation is to “reclaim” or “protect” Britain from a mythical Muslim take-over, so there would be no point in them marching anywhere else), there is always disorder. They commonly attempt to break through police lines (meaning it takes a greater effort, and a greater cost, to police) and if they were to succeed, they would certainly damage property and use violence against local Muslims, or locals perceived to be Muslims. While it is true that there is often a violent extreme element on many demonstrations, it is usually a tiny minority and has nothing to do with the organisers. With the EDL, it is the whole point of the demonstration.

There is a big difference between demonstrations aimed at influencing those in power, be it the local council or the government, or even a major company, and those aimed at intimidating a section of the population (see this article by the local mayor, Lutfur Rahman, in yesterday’s Guardian). The latter category includes the Orange marches, and the marchers’ insistence on marching through predominantly Catholic areas was always a major source of tension which sometimes led to rioting. In some cases, the marchers gloated about Catholic fatalities in “Loyalist” terrorist attacks. They often led to people being forced to leave their homes, leading to neighbourhoods becoming more segregated than they had before the Troubles began. On occasions the government attempted to prevent them from passing through these areas, but caved in to mob rule as in the Garvaghy Road incident in 1996.

East London can well do without the EDL coming and stirring up this kind of trouble. It should be remembered that it saw less violence than many other parts of London during the August riots, and the areas with a particularly heavy Muslim concentration (around Whitechapel) saw none. Since the populations there distinguished themselves by obeying the law at a time when many others did not, why should they be subjected to an invasion by this rabble led by football hooligans, many of them with convictions for violent offences, accompanied by either the inconvenience caused by the necessary police presence, or the violence that would ensue when it broke down, or (more likely) both?

The reason I support banning this march is not to do with what the group stands for politically, or what they might say or shout. It is because of what they might do, as demonstrated on countless previous marches. If the EDL wish to march, they should be invited to do as the rest of us do, and march in the centre of London where the well-guarded seat of power is, not where an unarmed minority lives.

The above article is about how ATOS, the French company hired by the British government to conduct disability assessments, has used legal threats to get a carers’ forum, Carer Watch, shut down for supposedly defamatory content. For some background on this, see Amelia Gentleman’s article in the Guardian from February; she had spoken to some of those who received these assessments and were found able to work when they were clearly not. It’s also been reported that ATOS prevents any recording of the assessments that a patient might be able to conduct on their own, so patients (term used as the assessments are conducted by doctors and nurses) cannot challenge what the doctor says about them, and cannot help defend this action.

I’ve not written about the ATOS issue here as many others have covered it adequately and I won’t start now; this is more about the dangers of hosting political content of any sort in the UK. Put simply, if you are running a web hosting service in the UK, you are liable for any defamatory content that is on your servers, exactly as if you were a newspaper owner. The customer is probably paying you a small amount, say £5 a month, so you can afford to lose their business more than you can afford the costs of legal action; the plaintiff will find it easier to sue you than your customer, who is unlikely to have the means to pay and may well have given you a false name and address. So, from the customer’s point of view, it would only take one lawyer’s letter to get your site shut down, at least temporarily until you remove the “offending” content. Remember, it does not matter to your host if it is true.

A few years ago I wrote an article about things that had gone on at my old school, and I received an anonymous complaint from an old boy or staff member demanding that I either delete the whole entry or give him my name and address so he could sue me for libel. I refused, and asked him which part of the article offended him, but he refused any further details. He then contacted my web host, which is in the USA, and asked them for my address. I wrote to them and told them not to give them the details, as he probably intended physical violence, not legal action (he could easily have published my new address to the school Facebook forum, for example). However, the host told me that they would not hand over my personal details to a third party anyway, and told the complainer that their customer was “exercising her freedom of speech” (why they thought I was female, I don’t know — they do have my name). When this man found he could get no answers out of me or the host, he slunk away.

Of course, hosting in the USA has its own risks, particularly if your site might be open to criminal liability, but it offers much more robust protection against frivolous defamation or copyright suits than the UK or any other Commonwealth country. In the UK, all it takes is a letter for ATOS, a Russian oligarch or the abusive staff member at your old school to censor anything you might need to say about them, and anything else along with it.

I am planning to attend the march organised by the Trades Union Congress this coming Saturday (26th March), but I am very uneasy about the plans to organise spin-off events including the shutting-down of a number of shops in the West End and occupations of Hyde Park and Trafalgar Square. In the first case, some people attending want to get through, hear the rally and go home, and do not want to get caught in a police “kettle” intended to contain the disorder manufactured by fringe gangs of lunatics (the sort of groups which often get infiltrated by MI5 or Special Branch anyway). Among those attending are a large number of disabled people who are going to have personal needs to see to fairly soon after finishing the march, and getting penned in for several hours is going to be bad for their health.As for turning Trafalgar Square into Tahrir Square, I’ve been to rallies in Trafalgar Square and remember one particular incident in which George Galloway exhorted the crowd to shout solidarity with the then besieged Fallujah (it was generally believed, rightly or otherwise, that those holding it were al-Qa’ida). The response was not particularly enthusiastic. Anyone familiar with the recent history of the Middle East, particularly the dictatorships outside the Gulf region, knows that the difficulties people are facing in the UK right now do not come close to what prompted the recent protests in Tunisia and Egypt — we are not living in a police state, we have a free press (certainly compared to anything found there), we don’t have “emergency laws” which allow people to be locked up for years for no real reason by military tribunals without any appeal (or just locked up without any trial at all), we are not forbidden from wearing what clothes we like as long as they’re decent (traditional Muslim dress is effectively banned in several Arab countries, particularly for men).

Yes, bad things are happening. It’s worth demonstrating to protect the mobility allowance for disabled people, and to save community centres that provide activities for local elderly and disabled people from being closed. But if a group of people decide to provide these services out of their own pockets, are they going to have their doors kicked in by the secret police, their computers and equipment seized, and the organisers carted off to jail? No, they won’t. People have been locked up in some countries for things which would not be considered out of the ordinary here, because the state recognises that this is dissident activities (such as organising screenings of Gandhi). These conditions don’t exist in this country, and nor do the stifling corruption present in both Tunisia and Egypt under the régimes that recently fell, so talking about Tahrir Square just smacks of overblown revolutionary rhetoric. To anyone who’s experienced a really repressive political atmosphere, it’s offensive.

As for closing shops in Oxford Street, these people could do this any time, but choosing the day of a big demonstration simply detracts from the power of the demonstration and makes life difficult for anyone who wants to get on with their business (perhaps after the demo). I’ve been uneasy about this kind of activity since my sister had a narrow escape from a McDonalds which was attacked by a mob of “anti-capitalists” a few years ago in London. They have had years to build up a head of steam for their revolution but only manage brief and pointless bursts of violence. Some might say demonstrating achieves nothing, but that kind of activity will achieve one thing — curtailing other people’s right to protest, while leaving the system they claim to despise intact.

Lately I’ve seen a few stories about parents receiving cautions or fines for “child neglect” which consisted of leaving a young child in the company of an older one (as in, a teenager) for what was reported as short trips to the local shops. In the most recent case, the mother was away for 30 minutes which passed off without incident; in an earlier one, which I found reproduced on Samizdata but which originally appeared in the Nursing Times, two nurses in separate cases won appeals (brought by the Royal College of Nursing) against being disqualified from nursing after being cautioned for similar acts of petty “neglect”. In one case it was not even the disqualified nurse who left the children alone, but his wife. Today, it was reported in the same journal that those affected were suing the Home Office.

It seems that not only are parents being punished for making “wrong” judgements on what was safe for their own children, with no adverse consequences, but that these punishments are having far-reaching consequences and were forcing them out of professions they had worked in for years and for which they had exemplary records. As the original BBC news article notes, there is actually no minimum age for babysitting, although the child remains the parent’s responsibility if the person left alone with them is under 16. In other words, people are being punished when they have not broken any law; the law is being made up by the people issuing the punishment. “Neglect” looks bad on any record, after all; it can mean anything up to leaving a baby sitting in a filthy nappy for days, or having people round regularly who were known to be violent, or leaving children alone and uncared-for while going on holiday.

The article also links to a Mumsnet discussion page in which a number of participants reported that they were looking after multiple children, sometimes for money, when they were 14 or younger. This was, I recall, normal when I was growing up (80s and 90s, everyone) and although there were some who might not have been suitable, or willing, to babysit (like me), plenty of teenagers, particularly girls, were. Of course, teenagers can also be parents themselves; are they to be deemed unsuitable to be left alone with their own children (usually babies, not toddlers)? Why a teenage parent and not a teenage sibling?

Quite apart from the injustice of people being punished for breaking some official’s ridiculous made-up “law”, there is the matter of how the police came to know about the mother’s “neglect” in the first place. Of course, someone told them, because of course the police are watching when you go out of your house to the shops, aren’t they? When did we become such a nation of snoops and busybodies that some of us will call the police when a mother leaves two children together for half an hour, and the police will take such a petty complaint seriously (rather than telling the caller, “call us if she’s not back in an hour or so”)? Recent government advertising campaigns advertising call-free hotlines so we might “rat on a rat”, meaning inform on people we suspect of claiming benefits they are not entitled to, encourage this culture of snitching and spying on neighbours over things that are really none of our business, and of being suspicious of our neighbours.

Surely parents should be trusted to make small decisions on what is safe or not for their own children, and what level of responsibility their older children have reached, and if not, the laws should be made clear, not left to police to make up as they go along. Nobody should be losing their job over a private decision that someone in authority disagreed with but which had no adverse consequences.

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.