Scrutable

I've been making separate threads for the various bills coming out of this government designed to limit our civil liberties but they seem to be coming so thick and fast I'm making this summary thread. Please add any other bills you see (though I'm hoping this is it for a while, especially given Parliament goes on holiday soon).

The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill was introduced on 9 March 2021, discussed here. This bill will, essentially, make it illegal to protest in any meaningful way and make the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller way of life illegal. More specifically, protests that cause causes disruption, noise, distress or even "impact" to others will be criminalised. The bill also widens the definition of trespass to essentially any land you don't own and criminalises anyone who stops on that land with "an intent to reside". So anyone who lives in a static home is fine, but for anyone whose home is mobile and has two or more vehicles (say, a caravan and a motorbike), they would be criminally trespassing should they stop on the side of the road even if their vehicle had broken down.

The Elections Bill was introduced on 5 June 2021, discussed here. This bill will, among other things, making it photo ID a requirement to vote, disenfranchising many voters all because of concerns over non-existent threats of voter fraud.

The Nationality and Borders Bill was introduced on 6 July 2021, discussed here. This bill will, among other things, create a two-tier system of asylum seekers based on how they arrive in the country, criminalise anyone who helps an asylum seeker reach the UK, whether or not they are benefiting financially, allow asylum seekers to be held outside the UK while their applications are being processed, and make it harder for asylum seekers to be successful in their applications and restrict their ability to appeal decisions.

Legislation to Counter State Threats is being updated. The consultation opened on 13 May 2021 and closed on 22 July 2021, discussed here. The proposals include conflating whistleblower leaks with espionage and therefore treating whistleblowers and any journalists reporting on their leaks as spies.

The Judicial Review and Courts Bill was introduced on 21 July 2021. This bill limits the right for parties in immigration and asylum cases to seek a judicial review when other avenues have failed, though it should be pointed out that the feared changes do not seem to have come to pass.

The Human Rights Act is currently under review. The Conservative party has long pledged to remove or radically alter the HRA and its 2019 Manifesto promised to "update" it, which is what is now happening. From here,

...civil rights groups fear the policy is aimed at severely limiting the scope of legal protections for asylum seekers, victims and other vulnerable groups.

The review will examine the relationship between UK courts and the European court of human rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg and whether dialogue between domestic courts and the ECHR works effectively.

It will also consider the impact of the HRA on the relationship between the judiciary, executive and parliament, and “whether domestic courts are being unduly drawn into areas of policy”.

The word "fascist" has been used so often as an insult that now, when the real thing has taken up residence in our seat of Government, we have no word to describe it. Adios democracy, it was nice knowing you.

Many thanks to Fishnut for making this excellent summary.

As the filleting of the Judicial Review bill shows, there are still some checks and balances left. And this is still mild stuff in comparison to what has been going on in the USA. History gives reasons for hope. Mrs Thatcher dabbled in terribly divisive politics, ruining many peoples' lives, but seemed unremovable at the time. People forget how terrible things used to be not very long ago. They remember the past with some unwarranted nostalgia.

I think we are still a long way from the inevitability of a Chavezian slippery slope into dictatorship, and there will be a reaction to what is happening now. It may well come when you don't expect it, like Mrs Thatcher's defenestration.

On the other hand, someone has to do the defenestrating...

Form an orderly queue.

But srsly though, I was barely even alive in the Thatcher years. 2010 was my first election and everything has been inexorably sliding into the shitter since then. It's pretty difficult to keep the faith.

There's also the "ratcheting rightwards" thing. It took a couple of terms of Blair to partially undo Thatcher's legacy, while various crises - 911, the 08 crash, covid - are used as excuses to lurch to the right. Lurching leftwards again seems to be disapproved of even by much of the British left, so it's hard to see how the UK can become a normal North European social democracy in my lifetime. Just a long slide into neocontopia, perhaps with a few little ramps along the way.

Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑

Fri Jul 23, 2021 7:01 pm

There's also the "ratcheting rightwards" thing. It took a couple of terms of Blair to partially undo Thatcher's legacy, while various crises - 911, the 08 crash, covid - are used as excuses to lurch to the right. Lurching leftwards again seems to be disapproved of even by much of the British left, so it's hard to see how the UK can become a normal North European social democracy in my lifetime. Just a long slide into neocontopia, perhaps with a few little ramps along the way.

A big chunk of the US (and hence UK, as the share the same strategies and strategists) neocon/right tactics involves eroding faith in the ability of public institutions to do anything to help people. That can be achieved rapidly through scandals (real or imagined) and by making institutions go to sh.t through ministerial malfeasance, incompetence and underfunding. The left needs institutions that work efficiently for the user, and you can't build those quickly. If you try, every hiccup becomes another talking point for those trying to erode faith in institutions (see Obamacare roll-out for a good example). Thus lurching leftward is a difficult thing to do and make stick without it becoming a propaganda win for the right.

Basically, it's far harder to build than to destroy.

The Elections Bill will have its second reading on 7 September.

Interesting article in the Law Society Gazette about Robert Buckland's proposal to have offenders dressed up in orange tabards with “community payback” on the back, and used for “local and visible” clean-up projects.

... In some ways, talking about the paucity of evidence for the effectiveness of this policy is missing the point; if the Justice Secretary was interested in evidence then he would never have gone near this outdated notion.

To be sure, we should be concerned with the shaky evidential foundations for this proposal. But there is also something fundamentally vicious about a society which insists that the most appropriate way of building public trust in the justice system is by turning prisoners or offenders into a kind of carnival sideshow for everyone else to gawp at. This is not, in Buckland’s words, a way of ensuring that ‘justice is seen to be done’; it is a way of providing a kind of grotesque catharsis – a spectacle for the vindictive pleasure of the ‘law-abiding’ onlooker, which no doubt would prove just as edifying in its own way as the stocks and pillory of a different time.

We must not lose our capacity to shudder with disgust when we contemplate a future in which visible groups of offenders in high-vis jackets, marked out for hostile treatment by the public, are as common a sight as chain gangs were in times past. Perhaps we might begin to get an idea of what that might feel like if we pre-emptively took to calling them ‘Buckland gangs’? At the very least the Justice Secretary would be forced to think before attaching his name to such a legacy.

The sad thing is that I suspect that the Justice Secretary would be overjoyed to leave us the term "Buckland Gangs" as his legacy. Harsher sentencing always plays well with a public that seems convinced that the law is getting softer in its treatment of criminals even though the reverse is happening.

snoozeofreason wrote: ↑

Sat Jul 31, 2021 1:52 pm

Interesting article in the Law Society Gazette about Robert Buckland's proposal to have offenders dressed up in orange tabards with “community payback” on the back, and used for “local and visible” clean-up projects.

... In some ways, talking about the paucity of evidence for the effectiveness of this policy is missing the point; if the Justice Secretary was interested in evidence then he would never have gone near this outdated notion.

It has long been thus in Britain. Michael Howard as Home Secretary started the trend. He brought in various measures to be "hard on criminals", which all the evidence showed were counterproductive.

Usually they point to some offender who re-offended prominently after being on some rehabilitation scheme, and so cease the rehabilitation scheme because it is "soft", a "reward for criminality". Yet it is ridiculous to suppose rehabilitation schemes are going to be 100% effective. They are often well worth the effort if they are much less effective than that. Mitt Romney discovered that the hard way, when Governor of Massachusetts. He cancelled all rehabilitation, on grounds that prison is for punishing. And then discovered that the result was increased spending on incarceration.

IvanV wrote: ↑

Sun Aug 01, 2021 11:26 am

snoozeofreason wrote: ↑

Sat Jul 31, 2021 1:52 pm

Interesting article in the Law Society Gazette about Robert Buckland's proposal to have offenders dressed up in orange tabards with “community payback” on the back, and used for “local and visible” clean-up projects.

... In some ways, talking about the paucity of evidence for the effectiveness of this policy is missing the point; if the Justice Secretary was interested in evidence then he would never have gone near this outdated notion.

It has long been thus in Britain. Michael Howard as Home Secretary started the trend. He brought in various measures to be "hard on criminals", which all the evidence showed were counterproductive.

Usually they point to some offender who re-offended prominently after being on some rehabilitation scheme, and so cease the rehabilitation scheme because it is "soft", a "reward for criminality". Yet it is ridiculous to suppose rehabilitation schemes are going to be 100% effective. They are often well worth the effort if they are much less effective than that. Mitt Romney discovered that the hard way, when Governor of Massachusetts. He cancelled all rehabilitation, on grounds that prison is for punishing. And then discovered that the result was increased spending on incarceration.

And before that, Willie Whitelaw with his "short, sharp shock". And no doubt others before.

Just a reminder that what's happening in the UK is in a context of a world becoming more right-wing and reactionary. Denmark voted to allow offshore processing of asylum seekers back in June. The African Union put out a press statement yesterday condemning the decision,

Denmark’s Aliens Act will successfully allow Denmark to abdicate its international responsibility to provide asylum and protection to those that enter its territory, and will play to distort the international asylum regime as well as pave the way for more wealthy and developed countries that only host 15% of the global refugees, to shift their responsibilities to the developing countries who already have a burden of hosting 85% of the global refugees while struggling with other challenges. Such a practice would not support the principle of equitable burden and responsibility sharing as envisioned in the Global Compact on Refugees and is also unsustainable.

Given the enormous waves of climate-induced migration due over the next decades, I fully expect pretty much all rich countries to enact similar policies sooner or later.