New Labour State Reclassifies Cannabis

It seems the New-Labour State has, in the face of it’s own advisors best advice, decided to reclassify cannabis as a class b drug.

Given that this decision is not based on the merits of the case, especially as having it de classified saw a 4% drop in its use, the immediate question that arises is, “What is their agenda?”

Interestingly, they effectively plan to record a persons details on the first “offence” and fine them on the second “offence”.

I don’t know what the percentage of the UK population is that at some time has tried cannabis but I suspect it is very significant. I would imagine thousands of essentially law abiding otherwise non criminal users are detected by the police every year.

To give an idea of the numbers, when surveyed 10% of people asked actually admitted they had used an illegal drug in the past year, that is around 3,100,000 people. Given that many of the repondants may not have admitted using drugs and that the majority of drug use involves cannabis that is a huge pool of potential cannabis users.

One effect of these new rules is likely to be a massive increase in the number and rate of additions to the New Labour State’s disguised National DNA Database.

Another effect is likely to be a considerable increase in revenue for the State in the form of fixed penalty or so-called “on the spot” fines.

Could either of these considerations influenced a cash strapped government anxious to push through a massively unpopular national DNA database?

Then there is the matter of pretending to be ”tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime”…

Issue of DNA records of the innocent reaches European Court

Did you wonder why Det Supt Stuart Cundy, who led the murder hunt which led to Mark Dixie's conviction, started going on about a compulsory national DNA database the other day? What his agenda might have been?

Unlike Scotland, where they take their civil liberties a wee bit more seriously, In England and Wales if the police arrest you, even if you have done nothing wrong, like the guy with the MP3 player, they will take your DNA and you will go into New Labour’s National DNA database, never to be removed.

This is unlike the tried and tested system with fingerprints where they only keep them if a person is convicted and people don’t mind giving them for elimination purposes because they know they will be destroyed afterwards.

Now the police’s practices with the DNA database is being challenged in the European Court of human rights as an infringement of an individuals right to privacy and anti-discrimination.

This database is scarily already the largest of it’s kind in the whole world.

If they win then the police will have to remove the DNA records from the system of those who have not been convicted and the system will have to work more like the fingerprint system or the Scottish system.

It is quite probable that a compulsory universal DNA database (that the police appear to be covertly working their way towards already) would indeed probably result in a few extra detections, or earlier detections of crimes.

Then again, so would electronically tagging every citizen, at their own expense, with a mini GPS system, camera and Microphone that relayed the info it recorded to a central database would too.

The question is, is the price paid in the loss of your civil liberties worth the benefits of the illusion of safety. DNA evidence can be spoofed, or compromised, by the savvy criminal and it is not always necessarily as reliable as it is imagined to be by the general public.

If they ever do manage to force a compulsory national DNA database on us by some devious means (Passports? ID Cards?). it will be great for the Authoritarians who want to check our every move.

Then there is the good old mission creep factor. What else would they get up to with the information? - One could do racial profiling in the name of medical research for instance…

One thing is certain - before long every junior civil servant and council worker in the country would have access and you could be sure they could not be trusted not to leave millions of records on a bus somewhere, or just loose them.

Best it is stopped. It comes to something when a UK citizen has to appeal to the European court to protect their civil rights from our own Government.

‘Most Wanted Fugitive’ actually innocent German holidaymaker

It just goes to show how much you can rely on facial recognition software.

A German couple on holiday in the Sicilian resort of Taormina last year were mis-identified as James J Bulger, alleged American crime boss, one of the FBI’s most wanted - and his girlfriend Catherine Grieg.

Fortunately the FBI appear to have adopted a more sensible approach since they had pensioner Derek Bond arrested at gunpoint and clapped in irons whilst on a wine tasting holiday in South Africa. They misidentified him as one Derek Sykes, on their most wanted list. It was days before they even bothered to go look at him. He had to agree to extradition to try and sort it out.

It could have been far worse, he could have been in real trouble as happened to a German businessman in 2005, whilst off on holiday going to Macedonia.

He was allegedly arrested, held captive, flown to Afghanistan and tortured - by U.S. government agents after being mistakenly identified as an associate of one of the 7/11 Hijackers.

Oops! Sorry…

Presumably this is the same vaunted biometric technology to be included in Passports and New Labour’s beloved ID card system and database. The same facial recognition software that was trialled last year as a part of a airport security and hailed as a success.

Knowing it’s going to be there ready to misidentify you as a dangerous gangster, or a terrorist should make you feel so much more secure – doesn’t it?

Something you should be worried about

Someone with an over active imagination managed to mistake the MP3 player a man on his way home from work was listening to for a gun. They reported it to the police.

We all know that tinny buzzing can be annoying ;-) and it must have been playing at least loudly enough to drown out police shouting at him , as proved to be the case.

It is fortunate whoever it was doesn’t regularly use the tube, or there would be armed police running round in droves all over the place.

The police did what they are supposed to, given the circumstances (Hurrah!), fortunately they were not quite so ‘enthusiastic’ as those who dealt with poor Jean Charles de Menezes and the music lover survived the experience.

The poor guy only realised something was up when passers by and traffic reacted weirdly staring at him. He took out the earpieces and realised he had lots of policemen behind him pointing guns at him and shouting not to move. Fortunately for him he didn’t try to change tracks before he realised…

On discovering he was armed with nothing more deadly than music they still – get this – arrested him and carted him off in hand cuffs anyway.

Now in days of yore, say 30 years ago, even 15 years ago, they would have thought twice about that. But that was before New Labour - and here it all starts to become an example of a dawning fascist state at work.

They could have verified who he was and all this could have been done on the street where they stopped him, or in a police car. At worse he could have ‘assisted them with their enquiries’ at the station and sorted the matter out easily there.

Here is the bit you should really be concerned about though. By now they must have known pretty well the guy was guilty of nothing more than going home from work on the bus, speaking to the witness should have easily confirmed this.

What happened to the discretion that British police officers used to be so famous for using. All gone now under a flurry of ‘Policies’ and ‘Targets’ and ‘Initiatives’. Stuff just serving the public, serve the State. I bet it showed up as at least one extra detection, probably several.

No they had to arrest him, like a clueless call centre operator running through their script - and worst still they took his DNA and fingerprints – and the State will keep them.

Support on the Left for Compulsory DNA Registration

In the Guardian's 'Comment is free', Conor Gearty, makes it clear that he thinks Judge Dread’s Sedley’s plans to force compulsory DNA collection and registration on every man woman and child who lives, or sets foot, however briefly, in the UK "deserve to be debated and not dismissed out of hand as heretical.".

He suggests, setting up a straw man, that supporters of civil liberties and the right not to be interfered with by the state are the sort that ” regularly break CCTV cameras and are affronted by being asked to stop smoking in public places.”

He goes onto say that this kind of libertarianism is “often quite reactionary and in its absolute form it is always being overridden - and rightly overridden - by government in the name of the public good.

So he sets up his ‘Straw’ Libertarians as ‘bad’.

Bad because ‘reactionary’ is ‘bad’, in his and many of his readers lexicon. Bad, because those libertarian civil liberties freaks - all, every one of them, smoke.
Bad because they are rude and anti social (because they smoke & won’t put their cigarettes out) and antisocial criminals (because they regularly destroy CCTV cameras put there by a beneficent Nu-Lab state for your protection).

So because they are so very very nasty, they and their antisocial so-called rights need to be stamped on by the (by comparison) ‘good’ state. It is virtually the state's duty to protect the populous from them.

Conor, seems to feel “that the exact extent of the damage we do to personal freedom has to be warranted by the goal we are seeking to achieve. Advances in technology are always throwing up fresh opportunities for public good via new invasions of this kind of liberty. Sedley's proposals fit within this tradition”

Public Good?

So, to roughly translate: The end justifies the means then. This guy is possibly even more scary than Sedley.

Senior UK appeal court judge advocates compulsory national DNA Database

According to the BBC a senior appeal court judge Lord Justice Stephen Sedley is advocating compulsory registration for all on Nu-Labs police DNA database. This would even include visitors to the country.

He conceded it was an authoritarian measure, but said he felt that the only way to go was to expand the database to cover the whole population and all visitors to the UK.

"Going forwards has very serious but manageable implications. It means that everybody, guilty or innocent, should expect their DNA to be on file for the absolutely rigorously restricted purpose of crime detection and prevention."

Good of him to acknowledge that it was authoritarian.

Frankly the question that now needs answering is that of his fitness to be a judge.

He went on to try to justify such a totalitarian move, because as things are: "It means where there is ethnic profiling going on disproportionate numbers of ethnic minorities get onto the database.”

So his solution is that everyone should have to be on it.

How are disproportionate numbers of ethnic minorities getting onto the database? Because they are being arrested in disproportionate numbers. What's more, if the whole population were forced to give samples, they would still be being arrested in disproportionate numbers - it would just be less visible. Very Nu-Lab.

This can surely not have been lost on the Judge and leads one to wonder why he felt it would be a good idea to disingenuously raise the issue of race to attempt to justify his authoritarianism.

He went on to complain "It also means that a great many people who are walking the streets and whose DNA would show them guilty of crimes, go free.".

The enlightened view would be “So what?” Some prices are too heavy to pay.

Good old Judge Sedley is clearly not a close follower of the English Jurist William Blackstone, who said; “Better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer”. Judge Sedley is apparently perfectly happy for the whole population to suffer the loss of one more liberty to ensure one or two less guilty persons escape.

The same arguments could probably have been used to attempt to attempt to justify compulsory fingerprinting of the entire population - but wasn’t was it?

Budding Stalins didn’t particularly complain about that. If system worked acceptably with finger prints, why can the same system with the same checks and balances not be used with DNA – including the removal from the system of innocent parties and those mistakenly, or wrongfully arrested.