I went to launch this evening of Keith Ewing's important new book Bonfire of the Liberties and the Institute of Employment Rights new booklet Ruined Lives on blacklisting in the UK construction industry, also written by Ewing. I was expecting the usual drinks party. But no, it was a serious meeting of trade unionists at the NUJ headquarters. We heard from Henry Porter, who I find it hard to disagree with. He talked about the expansion of what he called "State patrolled space" and how each one of us is being made to feel that both we and everyone else are persons who may "harbour bad intentions". (Or, as John Berger

One of the really insistent questions raised throughout the Convention of Modern Liberty one year ago was the one Anthony Barnett signalled in his opening invitation to participate: " What is the problem to which the database state and the surveillance society is... the solution?"

I made this the first real article in the CML book because it struck me that the rest of the book (and the event itself) is really a set of different attempts at an answer, coupled with some early exploration of what to do about it. Anthony kicks off with a list of potential candidates. Helena Kennedy puts it differently - "What do they put in the water in the Home Office? ". Simon Jenkins asks what happens to perfectly reasonable liberal types when they get into high office... etc. etc.

Maybe Simon Jenkins gets close to the truth with the shocking passing reference to the fact that, 'We now apparently spend more money on surveillance equipment of all sorts than on arms." If you have quarter of an hour this week, I recommend that you listen to this aptly named, undersung BBC 4 radio programme called Thinking Allowed on the theme of "military futurology" while it's accessible.  

Today, it is all too easy to call yourself a ‘politically engaged person’ and to walk around without a care for the fact that a general election is on its way with no sense of a contradiction. The televised cross-party debates are set – not that anyone is looking forward to watching them – and the papers are publishing daily pre-electoral polls – not that anyone is at all inspired by any of the three horses in the race.

It appears evident that the coming UK election lacks the excitement or intensity of last year’s stateside whirlwind. Without even the pretence of a British Obama it is tempting to write off mainstream politics as irrelevant, and take a ‘none of the above’ position; this would achieve nothing beyond feeding a pervasive anti-political cynicism.

How is it that the President of Britain's new Supreme Court has been quoting the Book of Deuteronomy in reaching an important judgement?

I have been involved with equality law in Britain – law which seeks to restrain unfair discrimination - for example by those who control the allocation of employment, housing, education, and other benefits and services since I was appointed legal adviser to the Race Relations Board in 1965.

Since then we have had a lot of piecemeal legislation – hopefully soon to be consolidated. It has extended the law against discrimination into new areas: gender, disability, sexual orientation, and, recently, religion.

Many major problems of interpretation have been resolved in the courts but new and unforeseen ones always continue to arise. Issues of race remain the most intractable form of discrimination and the recent extension of the scope of equality law to religious discrimination has exposed this. It raises very important and interesting larger questions as the secular processes of the state collide with religious practise. These issues can be intensely divisive in our increasingly pluralistic society.

The recent Jewish Free School (JFS) case, one of the first to be decided by the Supreme Court in December 2009, exemplifies many of these issues.

In 2003, two people were stopped and searched outside London’s Excel Centre and prevented from attending a peaceful protest against the arms fair taking place inside. Journalist Pennie Quinton was forced to stop filming despite showing her press card, and Kevin Gillian was stopped for 20 minutes when riding his bike.

Together with pressure group Liberty, the pair refused to accept this horribly commonplace police interference and challenged the government over the legal basis for this stop and search – Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000.

The case went through several defeats in the domestic courts, but in January 2010 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the use of Section 44 violated Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights – the right to privacy.

...according to this Labour attack ad:

So much for the right having a monopoly on anti-crime populism. As for the actual merits of the attack - where to start? Well...

1) 'Even the Daily Mail' concedes that "just one in 350, or 0.3 per cent, of the 1.3 million crimes solved by police" can be credited to the DNA database.

An OurKingdom conversation: Michael Wills > John Jackson > Michael Wills > this post

I can quite understand why Michael Wills is upset about John Jackson's note on his struggle to move the democratic agenda forward with a government which is alternately hostile and indifferent and under a Prime Minister who blows hot and cold, hot and cold, on all the issues. My guess is that he is a genuine democrat who has been given a very uncomfortable and impossible brief.

However, the whole enterprise was flawed from the very beginning. In the July 2007 governance paper the spelling out of the problems was ducked which weakened the proposals for dealing with them. I said as much in a meeting Michael Wills - held with reformers in an attempt to get us on board and support the initiative.

It is no good saying that progress is slow and incremental on constitutional reform in the UK - my god, we know that too well - when nearly all Labour's reforms since 1997 have been predicated on preserving the power of the executive more or less intact.

All right, freedom of information has largely escaped the built-in safeguards for executive hegemony and Scotland has proved to be an evident model for reform at work. But Wills draws attention to the disgraceful pledge for a referendum on the two majoritarian electoral systems on the assumption that it is a good thing. I differ from that view; the public are not being offered a genuine choice which should be the principle of all referendums. The government has simply controlled it by fiat and offered only the prospect of straight AV because its leaders believe that the parliamentary party can live with it at a pinch (though my guess is that those MPs who fear AV are being quietly reassured that it will never happen).

How can any democrat possibly favour a referendum which denies the people a full choice of the alternative systems that exist, including AMS as in Scotland and Jenkins's AV Plus? It is an abuse of power that would be all the more serious if it were not also a botched stitch-up.

Power2010's campaign to bring change to UK politics is stepping up a gear.

With just a few weeks left until a general election is announced, it's time to call out those MPs who have consistently stood against reform of our democracy preferring the corrupt, top-down politics of the past.

If we want a reforming Parliament and a new politics out of the next election we need to ensure the people who want to represent us take seriously the need for change.

That means identifying who the main culprits are amongst sitting MPs.

You know the ones. The dinosaurs in Parliament who tell us reform isn't needed, whilst clinging to their perks and privileges; the MPs who never miss a chance to vote away our civil liberties, whilst telling us it's for our own good.

Apologies to those of you who have commented in the last twenty four hours and seen your comments disappear. We have had a rare site-wide technical mishap which means that many of the comments from the last day have been deleted. Commenting from now on should be fine so please do continue to leave comments. Many thanks for your patience.

Tom Bingham, The Rule of Law, Allen Lane, £20.00 (available from Amazon.co.uk for £12)

In the second review of the book on the rule of law by Lord Bingham, the former lord chief justice, Keith Ewing argues that far from being crusaders for the rule of law, our judges regularly fail to protect human rights. See also John Jackson on Tom Bingham in Lord Bingham’s Footsteps.

I.

In one of its first ever decisions, the new Supreme Court declared that the government's far-reaching provisions freezing the assets of terrorist suspects were ultra vires. The court did not, however, provide that these illegal measures were to be invalid with immediate effect. Rather, it gave the government 40 days and 40 nights to change the law to make lawful that which had been declared unlawful.

True to form, the government did just that. The short and little noticed Terrorist Asset-Freezing (Temporary Provisions) Act 2010 of only three sections declares retrospectively that the unlawful provisions of the asset freezing Orders "are deemed to have been validly made", and that "the prohibitions and obligations imposed by [them] have legal force".

So much then for the rule of law and parliamentary sovereignty, matters both addressed by Lord Bingham's new book. It is not clear who is most at fault here: the Supreme Court in failing to annul unlawful government action with immediate effect, or a craven Parliament willing to rush through unconstitutional legislation at high speed. Let's call it a draw, but ask also where was the press to comment on this constitutional outrage?

Roy Hattersley told a packed hall at the Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge that he had changed his mind on proportional representation. He was scornful about the term “electoral reform” - no one electoral system was better than the others - but he now believed that elections to the House of Commons should be proportional – and critically that the Labour Party’s underlying cause would be best served by such a shift.

Hattersley is a great one-man show. He was on stage for nigh on three hours, speaking first – without notes – and then answering a host of questions. His theme was that the Labour Party had to adopt a firm ideological position based on equality, arguing that it was only through equality that people would enjoy true freedom (he once wrote a book on this).

His argument was that Labour fudged its basic commitment to equality and other public goods because the party felt the need to appeal as widely as possible in its search for a parliamentary majority under first past the post. Hattersley illustrated this theme at one point with a pointed anecdote. He told us that he had received a memo from Patricia Hewitt when she was Neil Kinnock’s publicity chief congratulating him on the speeches he had been making (a brief contemptuous harrumph here), but saying that she noticed he had given continuous emphasis to equality. Could he instead say “fairness”?

‘He looks my age,’ says my nine-year-old son. ‘He looks sort of like me.’

There’s a picture on my screen: a small, slight boy who, for legal reasons, we’ll call M. He’s being cuddled by his 17 year old big brother Z. Both boys are smiling. They have been reunited after a long, hard separation.

Back home in war-torn Afghanistan their parents and a sister were killed. Big brother Z was first to come to Britain, traumatised, in November 2008. He has refugee status, studies for his GCSEs at school in Leicester.

This past October little brother M made his way here. Despite M’s size, his vulnerability, his boyish looks, officials said, you’re not 14, you’re an adult.

Instead of being taken into care, M was bounced around between three different adult hostels and a house-share with older men — and refused asylum.

Welsh Refugee Council staff were baffled and concerned. To them he looked every inch a traumatised boy.

Across the Afghani community and Red Cross networks, word rippled out: a boy called M badly needs to find his big brother Z.

An OurKingdom conversation: Michael Wills > John Jackson > this post > Stuart Weir

The circumstances in which Lord Ashcroft, deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, was secretly able to remain non-domiciled for the nine years in which he has been in the House of Lords, despite promising as a condition of his life peerage that he would become a full UK taxpayer, bring to light the hidden incentives and systemic problems involved in the format

Sunny Hundal has started to prepare Liberal Conspiracy for the Conservatives taking power (even if the leading Conservative in power should prove to be Mandelson). He wants to build the site with more political strategy, activism and news. But it is not just content that he is after. What Sunny is attempting is ambitious, important for British blogland and on-line publishing and for OurKingdom, as we prepare our new approach. He’s written three posts. I commented briefly on the first.

The current crisis of the British state, politics and democracy should be a golden moment for radicals, constitutional reformers and campaigners. It should also be an era in which left and liberal publications have the opportunity to engage and involve a wider audience about the state of the nation and democracy.

One of those publications is the London Review of Books, which sees itself as urbane, cosmopolitan, liberal minded, addressing British concerns and global issues in a challenging and open-minded way. In particular, LRB has made a name for itself addressing such issues as the nature of the Israeli state and power of the Israel lobby, which most mainstream media would not touch. It is all the more interesting that the one area in which it has consistently failed to find an authentic radical voice is in its coverage of contemporary British politics.

Michael Foot was a fine and inspiring man who stood for significant radical values throughout his life and whose personal qualities rightly won him wide affection and respect.  A far cry from the unsavoury New Labour politicians, their mealy-mouthed evasions and ‘attack dog’ tactics who have run the party he ‘saved’ for the past 20 years. 

Is an English Backlash emerging? the IPPR asked in a report out this week. The answer provided by Professor John Curtice was heavily qualified, but it suggests that the English question is moving up the political agenda:

In England public attitudes towards devolution may be beginning to be linked a little more to people’s sense of national identity and their views about how well Scotland is funded. Support for the idea of an English Parliament may be beginning to find some roots in English national identity and perceptions of England’s material interests. If  this trend continues too, then politicians may indeed no longer be able to assume that it is safe to ignore England in the devolution debate.

The party leaders had proclaimed it as a wake-up call. They were united in their calls for urgent and far-reaching reforms. Yet, until yesterday, the only reforms achieved in the wake of the MPs expenses crisis were those establishing new rules and regulations concerning MPs expenses.

So, the votes in the House of Commons on Thursday afternoon which pave the way for reforms to the Commons itself are a highly significant development. They arise from the work of the House of Commons Reform Select Committee, established by Gordon Brown at the height of the expenses crisis, and chaired by Dr Tony Wright, the long-standing MP for Cannock Chase.

I was interested to see this letter by Tory MEP Daniel Hannan, head of the UK's new anti-tax "Tea Party" campaign, in today's Guardian:

You describe me as "Daniel Hannan, the hard-right Conservative MEP". Well, OK. Just for the record, though, I opposed the invasion of Iraq, argued against section 28, supported civil partnerships, and backed Barack Obama. The context in which you mentioned me was my praise for Michael Foot, whom I liked and admired: we were both, I wrote, inspired by the radical-democratic tradition of the Levellers.

If the Levellers were around today, I doubt they'd be planning to vote Labour. They'd support withdrawal from the EU, an end to quangos ("Crown placemen") and democratic local control of the police and judiciary. I'm pretty sure they'd also want referendums. Michael Foot was, in many ways, their heir; Gordon Brown is not.

Daniel Hannan MEP

Con, South East England