Election news blues
A few depressing news stories today leave me wondering for how long this country will still be worth living in. This morning, they were discussing on the Jon Gaunt show a proposal to limit demonstrations within a mile of Parliament Square – which, by the way, includes Trafalgar Square. I’m not sure where they got this information from, as it’s not on any of the news websites I checked, including BBC News. The closest I could find was a proposal to demand six days’ notice of any demonstration outside Parliament, which appears, to many people, to be an attempt to get rid of one guy who’s been holding his own protest (against various things) in the square for three years.
Even so, it’s a worrying development that they could change laws affecting everyone just to get rid of one (basically harmless) protestor. The waste of public money sticks out, but apart from this, it’s totally unncessary. I’ve not heard of an attack on a political building, or a terrorist attack, being launched out of a demonstration anywhere in the western world. The last time anything like this happened in the UK was in Northern Ireland 30 years ago. It’s yet another wasteful security measure against a threat which isn’t there. (If they want to stop protestors obstructing MPs getting to Parliament, they should build a tunnel – or several – to various secret points a few streets away. I’d have thought they would have done this years ago.)
Next depressing news stories are Labour and the Tories’ attempts to out-do each other in the eyes of the vulgar press. The Tories are proposing an end to the “early release” system, whereby people serving a four-year sentence are normally released after half that time, and people serving more than that usually, in fact, serve two thirds. They want to replace it with a system whereby a minimum and a maximum are specified. This sounds fine until you realise that it is exactly the system we have now. A four-year sentence is, in fact, a two to four year sentence, and a six-year sentence is, in fact, a four-to-six. Of course, this is the same get-tough message they were peddling in the mid-1990s (after the “Back to Basics” campaign failed miserably because of two separate sex scandals involving Tory cabinet ministers), just before they lost the 1997 election. Of course, back then everyone found the Major cabinet a miserable, sleazy bunch with no new ideas. Now, the “big issue” is immigration.
This time round, the Tories are playing to the Daily Mail / Sun / Star gallery with proposals for offshore holding camps (as in, or rather off, Australia). Labour responds with yet another Australian-based scheme – a points system, under which migrants with given skills which this country needs can be brought in for a limited time. They also want to “end … the automatic right to settle for immigrants’ families”, which clearly means that the immigrants won’t stay immigrants for very long.
What bugs me about all this is the constant reference to Australia (rather than, say, Canada, which also uses a points system). Australia has one of the worst human rights records in the developed world, notably in its dealings with its Aboriginal population. It’s the only developed country which has not eliminated trachoma, which affects mainly Aboriginal children, and causes blindness. As far as allowing skilled workers in goes, it has been known to reject highly skilled workers on the grounds that they intend to bring a disabled child with them. And its notorious detention policies have attracted widespread condemnation (and considerable protest locally).
The targets for this oppressive legislation are the likes of the Sun-reading morons I encountered in west Surrey a few weeks ago, who fear being “swamped” based on lurid press reports. If we are concerned about “bogus asylum seekers taking all the council houses”, then maybe we should be looking at building more council houses, given that the population has risen somewhat since a whole lot of council houses were sold off under the Tories’ “right to buy” scheme. These immigration policies hit home when these same people’s children lose friends from school when they are taken to detention centres ready to be kicked out. Then, they protest, as happened recently in Portsmouth, an area said to be notorious for anti-immigrant hostility (and, I’ve heard, racism). But it’s too late, because they have already fed the hysteria by buying the papers which spout it, and repeating the garbage in the pubs.
I’d like to know if freedom and national dignity is going to be made an issue in this election at all. We need more than an Olympic bid to restore this. We need to get rid of proposals for mandatory ID cards, unequal extradition treaties with the USA, and the tag-along policy which has seen this country get dragged into two wars which have nothing to do with us at all. (While I also agree that we should surrender no more control of our own affairs to the EU, we certainly shouldn’t pull out altogether, much less join NAFTA – the EU is, after all, a union in which we are a major player, rather than a satellite of another country, which we would be in NAFTA.) We need to get rid of both New Labour and the Tories to save what dignity we have left.
