The Inquiries Act
 

Once more our Government demonstrates its concern about human rights and Justice... :rolleyes:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/humanright...464430,00.html

Re: The Inquiries Act
 

Crap, but to be expected of Blair & co.


Some Judges speak out...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianpo...470198,00.html

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All I can say is I hope the tories and lib dems win enough seats to erode labour's majority if they can't oust them from power.

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one of the judges quoted in that article is my uncle :D

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Just another example that this government have manifested themselves into Orwells Pigs.

You need no more evidence that this is not a Labour government. I don't know what they should call themselves but they are not Labour.

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Is he a monkeys uncle then:D

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Quite right, Pierre. Throw in the CCA and the anti-terrorism legislation and it all looks part of a very unpleasant pattern.

What's interesting is that this didn't start until the second Labour administration - the first (1997) lot with Straw in the Home Office and Irvine as Lord Chancellor actuallsy swung the other way, in favour of human rights, the rule of law and judicial independence. Falconer and Blunkett are therefore the bad boys here, particularly Blunkett, who has deeply authoritarian instincts akin to those in Burma or Belarus.

Blunkett was on Radio 5 again yesterday afternoon with that smarmy spurs supporting git Simon Mayo - he's been on there about three times since he was forced to resign in disgrace, and always gets a worryingly easy ride (particularly on ID cards, which he blatantly lies about every time I hear him). I'm not sure it's in the BBC's charter to rehabilitate Tony Blair's friends.

According to Private Eye, Blunkett has earned £70,000 since resigning from these appearances and other media work. Coincidentally that's the rental he hasn't paid on his ministerial house, which he's allowed to live in rent-free by Mr. Tony. Didn't see that one in the Labour manifesto - get caught breaking the rules and get a free house. I must try fiddling my expenses and see if it works for me.

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Once again our government proves that it considers the words open, honest and fair to be meaningless buzz words.

This is bad.

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Yeah lets get the tories in....hahahaha the same set of idiots who gave you the poll tax, who introduced you to the word reccesion, who closed all our manufacturing output, yay! lets get them in.......get real.

Re: The Inquiries Act
 

As opposed to the party that carried on Tory traditions (ie, new Labour), changed the employment laws to make outsourcing easier, reduced disability living allowance (or at least made it harder for the disabled to claim) and increased council tax?

Actually, this thread isn't about those policies. It's about the government hiding it's own procedures from the public (thereby reducing the chance the public will catch them doing something dodgy, like, say, going to war illegally) while making noise about being open, honest and transparent about how it works.

What do you think of these changes?

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That was a Party Election Broadcast by the Labour Party.

Hmm. Manufacturing isn't exactly a sparkling success story under Labour, for that matter. From today's Guardian.

Face it, Labour's economic policy is lifted straight from the Tories, so 'vote Labour, get Thatcher' is still the slogan.

The Tories are indeed idiots, but they aren't going to win, and besides the existence of muppets in opposition isn't a reason not to point out the disturbing trend towards erosion of civil liberties under Labour, which is what this thread is about.

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:notopic:

There are *plenty* of other threads to go to if you want to wave the red flag. :nono:

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Wonder how long this will take to get here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asi...ic/4510521.stm

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Well, every new born baby does have the potential to become a criminal, although if their plan works (heck even if it doesn't really!) the thought of being instantly detected would be enough to put most off :D

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Personally, I've never been introduced to the word 'reccesion'

However, I've been aware of the work 'recession' for quite a while but, to be fair, that's mostly with regarsd to the state of my hairline ;)

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Or Word?

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Labour=Communists at heart...........this is exactly how communists operate....... :shrug:

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Communists wouldn't come up with PFI or support rail privatisation, though, so that's a bit simplistic. It's how any totalitarian state operates, in a more general sense.

John Reid was a communist, wasn't he?

Presumably the Malaysians haven't discovered the advanced technological concept of 'gloves'.

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Don't you watch columbo? they just tell the suspect they can turn the gloves inside out and get fingerprints from the inside, then he confesses :)

DNA would be a better sample to take, most people find it very hard not to shed skin or hairs.

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You don't have to be communist to introduce laws like this, plenty of right wing authoritarian regimes would be happy to do the same.

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Can we have an independent inquiry into whether New Labour is a left-wing or right-wing authoritarian regime? Not any more!*

:cool:

* there's a serious point here - if a Government can effectively hide the way it goes about its business from the people, the people won't really know what they're voting for, which is bad for democracy.

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It pretty much started as soon as they got in power actually. Remember the RIP act (now Bill and law)? That was Straw's baby (the whipping around was done by none other than the then unelected Labour Chairman Charles "Big Ears" Clarke).

When Blunkett became Home secretary he initially seemed to me to be the type that might be firm but very respectful to both the people and the judiciary but almost immediately he turned out to be agenda led as well as being a just generally thick and gittish.
Maybe it is just the very nature of the post of Home Secretary itself that so easily turns weak flawed characters into ar$eholes who then see it as their big chance to make their mark by virtue of not listening to a damn thing that anyone outside his own fan club tells him.
It seems to me that Labour are changing/creating laws that have a sort of side effect of making it easier for them to stay in power. It will bite them in the bum in the end.

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How? Since it's hard to explain the intricacies of poor legislation to people who think Big Brother is 10 weeks of sofa-bound vegetative behaviour in the summer, the only way Labour will lose is when people get bored with them, which will probably be at the next election.

What will bite them in the mean time is the new unofficial opposition of the judiciary (the point about Straw and Irvine is that they *increased* the power of the judiciary with things like the Human Rights Act which allows all other legislation to be struck down if incompatible, as happened with Blunkett's original anti-terror rubbish).

Judges and the executive are therefore having a lot of tussles at the moment (if there's a judge who likes Clarke and Blunkett I haven't met him, my contacts tell me that most judges would speed up if either man were observed crossing the road ahead of them, confident that the beak in the subsequent murder trial would look very favourably on it).

Now, ideally you don't have to rely on unelected legal experts to hold the Government to account, because in Parliament you have a proper, functioning opposition. We have Michael's Muppet Squad, which really isn't good enough, hence it's important to watch what the Government does to the judges and vice versa - including the Inquiries Act, which is a definite land-grab from the judiciary.

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Hur hur - busted :D

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In a general sense, yes...........but we are discussing labour atm..........and they are, at heart, communists. :D

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I was disagreeing with you, saying that they are, at heart, Thatcherite on economic policy, with authoritarian tendencies everywhere else. Don't look at the labels or the history, look at the actions.

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You are talking about new labour......but new labour will eventually revert back to old labour -- who, deep down, are communists.

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And equalyy totalitarian in their way ... we're screwed whatever happens. :disturbd: :(

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Pretty much! :(

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Er, aren't Labour's roots in democratic Socialism, not Communism?


EDIT: And hope not to have offended Nug with talk of 'roots' as sounds like that's all that's left of his hairline.

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Technically different, but they are so closely related, most of the definining charactistics overlap.. certainly for this case.

From wikipedia: "As a political movement, communism is a more radical branch of the broader socialist movement. "

Rather than get caught up in the hysteria of it all, I would be interested to know what the government doesn't want us to know, first. I am sure there are plenty of things we shouldn't be told for our own protection, but wouldn't these be covered under the Official Secrets Act anyway?

I guess this is to help stop another 'David Kelly' happening, where a report comes out that is so dangerous, someone will commit suicide over it, or cause some sort of deaths or mayhem through social unrest. The only other thing is, if someone says something, and he isn't part of the government, then can that be covered under the Official Secrets Act? Can the government just designate whatever they want to the OSA? I don't think so which is probably why they wanted to come up with this. Still, i'd like to try and find out more about it before automatically labelling the government as some oppressive censoring, BB styled regime for implementing this, or wether it works out to be common sense.

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About as likely as the Tories reverting to their roots, which professed the old-style The-King-Is-Boss idea that worked so well in keeping the US colonies on-side in the 1770s.

Incidentally, Tory is derived from the Irish word for outlaw or robber. Apt, really (That's why there's a Tory Island off the north coast of Donegal).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tory_Party

Well, we don't know what the government might not want us to know in future, that's the point. The objection to the Inquiries Act is that it effectively allows the government to intervene *directly* in an inquiry that is supposed to be independent. I'm leafing through it at the moment, and here are a couple of things that seem odd:

7 1 (b) - the Minister (who seems to do everything) can appoint new people to the panel during the inquiry (with the consent of the chairman or through some nebulous declaration at the start that seems rather unclear)

10 1 - if the Minister wants to appoint a judge of any description as chairman or member of the inquiry he has to 'consult' the judge's boss. Whether he has to take any notice of what the boss says is unclear, as is why he has to consult in the first place.

9 - if a member of the panel discovers he's got an outside interest in the case he has to tell the Minister, not the inquiry chairman. Ditto if he wants to resign.

11 - the Minister can appoint assessors to help the inquiry, and only has to 'consult' the chairman about it. If the chairman doesn't want the assessor, however, he has to obtain the consent of the Minister to his removal. So while the chairman can also appoint them, he can't stop them being appointed by the Minister and can't sack them without the Minister's approval. This leads to the rather obvious abuse of the Minister putting his own plants inside the inquiry knowing they can't be removed.

12 - The Minister only has to 'consult' the chairman if he wants to remove any member of the inquiry panel, the decision is purely reserved for the Minister.

13 - The Minister can suspend the inquiry at any time - the usual 'consult' comes in, of course. Inquiry members can't do anything that would disqualify them while the inquiry is suspended, but the suspension can be indefinite, which could be interesting.

14 - Inquiries end either when the chairman says so, by reporting back, or, hilariously, when the Minister says so. Guess what, he has to 'consult' the chairman first.

18 - Some interesting stuff about exemptions from the Freedom of Information Act.

19 - the Minister can bar anyone from attending the inquiry or disclosing information about it *at any point*, even after the inquiry has started. The reason is 'public interest' and can include 'damage to the economic interests of any part of the United Kingdom' and 'commercially sensitive information', plus the usual national security stuff. Again, it's purely the Minister's decision, this time he doesn't even have to consult. Rather ominously one justification is that disclosure might 'inhibit the allaying of public concern'. So if it might frighten the public, you aren't going to hear about it, the point of inquiries is to stop us worrying about messy stuff, not get the truth out.

20 - Restrictions in section 19 continue *indefinitely* if the Minister wants it. This means that if in 20 years you want to write a book about it, you can't.

25 - the person responsible for publishing the report is the Minister, unless he chooses to delegate it to the chairman. The Minister can withhold bits if he thinks they might frighten people, as in section 19, subject to the FoA, for what that's worth.

35 - a whole bunch of new offences - not giving evidence, concealing evidence, distorting evidence. A year in jail is the maximum term. I'd be interested to know if you're allowed to protect journalistic sources. Disclose stuff you're not allowed to and the Minister can take you straight to court.

That's about it from a quick skim, apart from the interesting note that the Queen and Prince Charles (as the Duke of Cornwall) are exempt.

[that's enough Act. Ed.]
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Posted that cos it's taken me two hours to write and I didn't want to lose it. So what does all that mean?

Effectively the Government has total control over any inquiry - it can set the terms of reference, the personnel, appoint new people to it or remove existing ones, dictate what evidence can be disclosed, edit the report as far as it wants to and even ban you indefinitely from knowing what went on in the inquiry in case it frightens you. When you see the words 'Lord So-and-so has been appointed to hold an inquiry' look who appointed him. That's the guy who's really running the inquiry. He's also the only one who doesn't have an obligation on him to own up if he's got a conflict of interest with the terms of the inquiry.

Does this really help open government?

The first inquiry under these terms is likely to be into the murder of Pat Finucane, where there is strong suspicion that government agents (police, army or secret services) were involved either directly or indirectly. Clearly there's no conflict of interest in the main body being investigated having total control over the inquiry.

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What's this "if" business... :mad: :(

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Good post BBKing... reading the gumpf so we do have to :)

All except point 7 1 (b) do seem to relegate the chairman to a mere consultant's position rather than the leader, which is wrong. Like you said, it is supposed to be an independent report on the government, not the minister's intrepretation of what he thinks an independent report should be.

I would still like to know why the government feels this is necessary, as something must have triggered it. It should be standard practice as with any new law, examples of justification should be given.

If I may put my cynic hat on for a minute, would it actually make a real world difference? The last couple of independent reports have beeen labelled as whitewashes (proabbly because it doesn't say what people want to hear).

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The last couple of independant reports have effectively been whitewashes because the chairman has restricted them to a very narrow interpretation of the scope of the investigation.

What the reasons for this were are not entirely clear.