October 26, 2017

"Schedule 7": Drawn into the UK anti-terror net...

Owen Jones, The Guardian

My twin sister, Eleanor, is not a terrorist. It is absurd to have to write this. Three months ago – after travelling to Scotland to attend our grandfather’s funeral – she was detained at Edinburgh airport under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000. She was forced to hand over her passwords for her mobile phone and computer; she was interrogated about the political beliefs of her relatives (myself included); and then was driven from the airport to a police station to have her DNA sample and fingerprints taken. After being detained for four hours, she missed her flight back to Berlin, where she lives: the police refused to even pay the cost of a ticket for a new flight.

Here’s the background. My sister took part in July’s protests at the G20 summit in Hamburg. She was sprayed by water cannon and tear gas, witnessed police brutality and, in the melee, fell and injured her legs. She was later arrested on suspicion of being in the anarchist black bloc (she wasn’t), detained for 36 hours and released without charge.

Her first arrest itself represented an attack on the civil liberties of a peaceful protester. The second detention can hardly be construed as anything other than an attempt to intimidate and harass someone exercising their fundamental democratic rights – using legislation supposedly designed to prevent would-be murderers committing atrocities. The Labour MSP Neil Findlay has written to Scotland’s justice minister with a series of questions about my sister’s case: including whether the detention was fair, justified or proportionate; about the tactics Police Scotland used against “a wholly innocent UK citizen”; and asking who authorised the action.

No one rational disputes the need for laws to protect people from the threat of terror. It is not unreasonable, after all, to expect anti-terrorism legislation to be used to target terrorists. When such laws were introduced, critics suggested they would threaten civil liberties and infringe on the rights of the innocent. They were smeared as scaremongers, and yet they were vindicated...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/26/schedule-7-terrorism-act-2000-activism-civil-rights-ethnic-minorities

October 17, 2017

Malta car bomb kills Panama Papers journalist

Monday 16 October 2017 18.33 BST First published on Monday 16 October 2017 18.09 BST
The journalist who led the Panama Papers investigation into corruption in Malta was killed on Monday in a car bomb near her home.

Daphne Caruana Galizia died on Monday afternoon when her car, a Peugeot 108, was destroyed by a powerful explosive device which blew the vehicle into several pieces and threw the debris into a nearby field.

A blogger whose posts often attracted more readers than the combined circulation of the country’s newspapers, Caruana Galizia was recently described by the Politico website as a “one-woman WikiLeaks”. Her blogs were a thorn in the side of both the establishment and underworld figures that hold sway in Europe’s smallest member state...

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/16/malta-car-bomb-kills-panama-papers-journalist

October 1, 2017

Capitalist? Socialist? Meaningless labels.

... (S)hould we describe the Netherlands as socialist because its rail system is state-owned? Is France socialist because it has a national energy company? Is Germany socialist because it has rent controls?

In fact all these countries are social democracies – a variety of developed-world market-based economy. Britain has another variety. So does Japan. So do the Scandinavian nations. These are all mixed economies, where markets coexist with some degree of state ownership and intervention. Even America, with its state-funded scientific research programmes and New Deal-era social security system, is really a mixed economy.

The idea that Theresa May and the Conservatives are offering a set of policies that can be usefully summed up as “capitalism” and Labour are offering something entirely distinct called “socialism”, is fatuous. There are certainly differences between the two major parties in their view of the proper borders between market and state within our mixed economy (bigger differences than there have been for several decades) – but their positions plainly still lie on a recognisable continuum.

Theresa May herself says she wants a louder voice for workers in company board rooms, and stresses that markets must operate “with the right rules and regulations”. And Jeremy Corbyn, for all the attempts by the right-wing press to portray him as a bloodthirsty revolutionary, is not calling for the nationalisation of supermarkets and car manufacturers...

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/capitalism-socialism-jeremy-corbyn-theresa-may-meaningless-labels-a7976456.html