Just don’t say you’re English Goodbye to my England – so long my old friend, Your days are now numbered, being brought to an end. To be Scottish, or Irish, or Welsh, that’s just fine, But don’t say you’re English, that’s way out of line.   more »

Beat the Government at its own game over fingerprints, this idea from Guido is the best I have seen yet.   more »

HatTip Little Man in a Toque

Clocks go forward

Sunday 30 March 01:00 GMT* (02:00 BST)

* As the UK is presently on GMT, we change our clocks at 1 am on Sunday 30 March.

brought to you as a public service announcement, from someone who loses every year an hours worth of party time....

The Libertarian Party UK has issued the following Press Release regarding the Draft Constitutional Renewal Bill.   more »

The corporate interests of America are now almost entirely at one with the political interests of America. The people are either relegated to the outskirts as unimportant bystanders or are caught in the cross-fire as casualties of a hostile corporate takeover by American and even foreign corporations. We "the people" do not matter in a country where corporate profits are tied to state policy, which then uses those same corporations to tell us what is real and what is fabricated, what is true and what is false.
Laura Alexandrovna Our Cold Civil War


Do you see the same in the UK. I do.



HatTip Postman Patel

A Bill to repeal of sections 132 to 138 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 has been published by the DoJ but there is NO repeal for section 128 of SOCPA.   more »

So what happens on Tuesday ? Holidays and a vacation from reality is over boys. The baboons who yank mindlessly at the financial levers face a grim choice.   more »

As Mr Eugenides has noted, the campaign to get Darling banned from the nation's pubs is gathering pace. There is now a Facebook Group and, as Jim points out, a Tory MSP, Alex Johnstone, has even issued a press release.   more »

The Observer has a short piece of media spin, ahead of what they claim will be a Government pronouncement, supposedly later this week. Gaby Hinsliff is the Political Editor of The Observer, and so has presumably been briefed by a suitably well placed spin doctor. Given how untrustworthy the current Government is, we will wait to see exactly what the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith really announces in detail, before celebrating any return to the status quo ante.   more »

The politically motivated ACPO are at it again. This is sick. Sick and Immoral.   more »

Three major UK ISPs apparently are in advanced talks with a company called Phorm, intending to let Phorm monitor all unsecured web traffic to and from their users. Quite apart from being a breach of trust by the ISPs involved, it appears to drive a coach, horses and a whole army through protection offered by assorted UK legislation, including the Data Protection Act, Computer Misuse Act, Regulation of Regulatory Powers Act, etc, etc. It will if nothing else provide a central point for cracking to obtain information about these ISPs' users.   more »

This blog wrote about the TIA programme in an article called The Infrastructure of Mass Surveillance that I first published in March 07 then again in October last year, and how UK Government and European policy was based upon the TIA programme. At the time I was called a conspiracy nut, an idiot, a scaremonger. Today, comes a press release from the UCLA in the US, following a report that the NSA had revived the TIA programme after being banned by Congress in 2003.   more »

In total, by last night, the Company has defaulted on approximately $16.6 billion of its indebtedness. The remaining indebtedness (?) is expected soon to go into default. Today we expect margin calls tomorrow of approximately US$97.5 million.   more »

According to this Parliamentary Written Answer, the current spending on "security" for the heavily fortified, and increasingly prison like Houses of Parliament and the associated office buildings, is running at about £38 million a year , yet MPs and Lords can still escape from the buildings, and protestors still get in !   more »

In a free society, the rights and laws protect the individual from the government. In a dictatorship, the rights and laws protect the government from the people. When governments begin to abuse laws to protect their own wrongdoing, we should be rightly worried, but more so when the supposedly impartial Speaker of the House shows his bias by siding with government in a court of law.   more »

Prof Ian Angell writes in The Times:

However, the ID card itself isn’t the real problem: it’s the ID register. There, each entry will eventually take on a legal status. In time, all other proofs of identity will refer back to the one entry. If the register is wrong - and remember fallible human hands will at some stage have to handle your personal information - then all other databases will be wrong too. Given the propensity of officialdom to trust the details on their computer screen, rather than the person in front of them, you will have to conform to your entry in the register - or become a non-person.

In effect, your identity won’t reside in the living flesh and blood of you, but in the database. You will be separated from your identity; you will no longer own it. All your property and money will de facto belong to the database entry. You only have access to your property with the permission of the database. Paradoxically, you only agreed to register to protect yourself from “identity theft”, and instead you find yourself victim of the ultimate identity theft - the total loss of control over your identity.




Say NO to ID Cards, Say NO to the Database State


Do you want to say NO?. Then perhaps a visit to the Libertarian Party website may satisfy your needs.




HatTip ID in the News

The UK Libertarian Party today condemned the Labour government's proposals to introduce ID cards through a “soft sell”. Party Leader, Patrick Vessey, said, “Both ID cards and the accompanying database fundamentally change the relationship between individuals and the state. “The Libertarian Party is utterly opposed to this cataloguing of the people of Britain.   more »

Some countries require Police record information as part of their immigration, visas, work permits and residency acceptance processes. This is the case for the USA: ‘Under United States visa law, people who have been arrested at anytime are required to declare the arrest when applying for a visa.’ This applies to all those that have been arrested even if never convicted. With very little fanfare, a piloted trial by the ACPO has recently started. Instead you will need a police certificate..   more »

The Libertarian Party of the United Kingdom today publishes its Manifesto. It is now for you to decide whether you want to continue to support the old statist parties, who see nothing wrong in telling you how to live your lives, what to eat, smoke or drink, to take your information and use it against you, to tax you to the limit, waste it on a daily basis and use it as their own like pigs at the trough and still want to take more, or whether you want a life free from government interference, free to do with it as you see fit, free to defend yourself and your property, free to grow, free to earn what you can and keep it all.   more »

Giving evidence to the (House of Commons) Home Affairs Committee on Tuesday, Meg Hillier, Minister for ID cards, said we should see the cards as “passports in-country”.   more »