Britain - Land Of The Ever Less Free

The Telegraph reports:

Up to 600,000 people each year who apply for their first passports will have to attend an interview under a scheme announced yesterday by the Home Office.

It is ever clearer that the government regards itself as master, and we all live on sufferance. Travel is a privilege, and the passport is not supplied to clear the way and help us travel, but as a means of control.

The purpose behind ID cards is the creation of a unified national database - principally for the surveillance and control of British nationals (the 26 million transient foreigners annually are not to be subject to it, thereby negating many of the supposed reasons for having it).

Now the government announces all adult passports issued for the first time will require an interview from 2006, at one of 70 centres around the country. This means travel, and travel expense, and time off work, and time waiting for interview, and time being interviewed, and time being processed and approved. And being subject and beholden to some self-important official, and whatever personal questions he chooses to ask. An intrusion into one's life and privacy.

All for our own good, of course. I don't think so.

What the government announcement is really saying is that it is setting up the system by which, when the ID cards come along, we will all have to go along for "interviews" to get our passports, whether for the first time or not.

Britain becomes less attractive by the day, and, so long as they subscribe to this evil, it is another reason the Tories will not get my vote. Time for the 1952 Committee.

Right Not To Be Offended?

We have just seen a play close in Birmingham because Sikh protesters used violence, and the forces of law and government lacked the will to defend free speech, which if it is to mean anything means allowing people to offend others.

I think Mark Steyn has it right when (discussing mainly USA examples) he says:

The elevation of the right not to be offended into the bedrock principle of democratic society will, in the end, tear it apart.

If this is a consequence of the creation of a multicultural society, it is a heavy price to pay.

Government To Risk Coaching Witnesses

The Government is hell bent on dismantling the traditional safeguards of the criminal justice system. It now wants to let prosecution lawyers interview prosecution witnesses - a practice currently prohibited because of the risk of the prosecution coaching its witnesses, and tainting their evidence.

A particular motivation seems to be the Damilola Tayor case, where a young witness proved unreliable. In other words, the Government is keen that child and other vulnerable witnesses be interviewed before trial.

Yet it is child and other vulnerable witnesses in a trial that are at especial risk of being used by others; are most at risk of being coached; and pose special problems in being interviewed. See relevant article on child interviews.

Defence lawyers would be excluded from these interviews, further reducing confidence in the proposed system.

To compound the problem the Government is saying there is no need for these interviews to be recorded by video or audio, and that only written notes need be made.

In other words, there will be no record of the interview independent of the prosecution; no possibility of evaluating the effect of the interview on the witness; and no possibility of assessing the prosecutor's use of the interview. And of course, the prosecution have a career interest in successful prosecutions.

Liberty has already submitted cogent criticism of the proposals, which were floated at least a year ago.

Hard cases make bad law.