That Bloke In The Big Smoke

There are different ways to achieve political ends. Violence is a time-tested method to disrupt and divide peaceful societies anywhere and everywhere in the world. The scale of the tragedy may differ from place to place, but the intent and outcome are always the same. It matters not who the perpetrators are or what they claim to be fighting for. Throughout history, groups of people are prepared to use force to sow seeds of distrust. They want us to cower in fear. They want us to blame the other. They want us to target refugees. They want us to question everything. We must not succumb, now more than ever. Dozens of innocent civilians have been murdered. We know them, for they belong to our human family. Political boundaries and cultural distinctions are irrelevant at times like this. Toute notre solidarité avec le peuple de Paris et Beirut en ce moment de douleur. May the souls of the victims rest in peace, and may their families and friends find strength to overcome this calamity.

"The ISI has been working for supporting proxies for an extended period of time. It's a strategy in the country and I think that strategic approach has to shift in the future." -Admiral Mike Mullen, America's outgoing Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman (Link)
India's been saying exactly that for decades but it fell on deaf ears. Now that America is facing the brunt of Pakistani foreign policy hypocrisy and double-standards in Afghanistan, the global media networks are lapping it up. Well, we told you so!

Uninspiring. Let me stick my neck out on the line. Labour (cough: the unions) have made a mistake in electing the wrong Miliband brother as their leader. Worse still, it seems more likely than not that David will officially end his mainstream political career tomorrow. He has yet to fill in his nomination papers for the shadow cabinet and has already come down to London from Manchester. The Labour frontbench will suffer from his loss greatly. But today was about Ed. He praised the positive achievements of New Labour, Blair and Brown for challenging conventional wisdoms and his brother's graciousness in defeat. But he also tore into New Labour's attack on civil liberties, said the Iraq War was wrong and admitted a Labour government would also have imposed tough public sector cuts halving the deficit within four years. And in a bid to distance himself from the right-wing media imposed "Red Ed" tag, he took a swipe at irresponsible strike action. But he also played to the gallery by promising a bigger levy on bankers' bonuses and denouncing a system in which a banker earns more in a day than a caretaker does in a year. He called Cameron a pessimist while cleverly reworking the Tory's own description of Blair by calling him an optimist once.

It was not the greatest of speeches but there is scope for improvement. He is somewhat between Gordon Brown and Tony Blair in front of the camera; not wholly uncomfortable nor quite yet a natural. As one commentator put it, his speech seemed choppy and felt like it had been put together with a cut-and-paste method. It also seemed like he added words at the end of sentences to grab applause. An orator he is not but at least in comparison with his brother he comes in with a clean slate. Or does he? He talked about Labour grabbing back the mantle of leading on civil liberties. In particular he referred to Labour's disastrous attempt to extend the detention of terrorist suspects without charge from 28 days to 90 days in the wake of 7/7. But guess what? He voted in favour of it. He also decided to come off the fence by describing the Iraq War as wrong. Fair enough you might think. Finally a senior Labour politician admitting fault. But hang on a second. Just a few months ago (in May) he made it clear in an interview with the Guardian that while the weapons inspectors should've been given more time, "what I am not saying is that the war was undertaken for the wrong motives". Well, which is it? You can't have it both ways!

So he might not be Red Ed but perhaps Flip-Flopper Ed? Almost everybody in the Party seems to be in agreement with his speech. The only prominent voice of discontent was that of every Londoner's favourite Bob Crow, the head of the Railway and Maritime Transport Union:

"Ed Miliband has to decide whose side he is on – the working class on the streets and on the picket lines or the Condems and their corporate supporters. All the signs are that he is already caving in to pressure from the rightwing press and as a consequence he will alienate millions of voters who are right at the sharp end of the cuts programme."

The trade union bosses didn't clap when Ed said nobody should have any truck with "overblown rhetoric about waves of irresponsible strikes", while his brother and other New Labour cabinet ministers remained stony faced and didn't clap when he spoke about the Iraq War. However the media went overboard in discovering that his brother asked Harriet Harman (the deputy Labour leader) why she was clapping when she voted for the War. It was odd that she clapped but the media have to take their share of the blame for playing up the psychodrama between the two brothers. I feel sorry for David. What a torrid week it's been for him. I don't blame him if he leaves politics.

In the midst of the hysteria about turning a site into a community center, Anne Barnard offers us a timely reminder via the NY Times:

"...what the two mosques have in common [...] is that both have existed for decades, largely unnoticed, blocks from the World Trade Center site. Masjid Manhattan, on Warren Street, four blocks from ground zero, was founded in 1970. Masjid al-Farah, formerly on Mercer Street, moved to its present location on West Broadway, about 12 blocks from ground zero, in 1985."

9/11 was the world's worst terrorist atrocity and a lot of Americans are still angry about it, but the opposition to the community center goes against everything the American constitution stands for. Which ironically is what many of the protesters use to defend antiquated gun laws and environmentally unsustainable lifestyles. Frankly, it's a response comparing favourably only with what is de rigueur in the third-world.

It is exactly 63 years since the Raj ended and exactly 23 years since my family set foot in Muscat for the first time. Fittingly perhaps I have chosen today to return to the land of my birth. And to mark the former occasion, something different, naturally from The Guardian:

"India's racist visa rule is an irrational response to the tragic attacks in Mumbai in November 2008 [...] Under UK, European and international human rights law, suspicion of potential to commit a crime must be based on an individual's own conduct, not on their racial or ethnic origin. India should apply the same security check to all British citizens applying for visas. If the check reveals no cause for concern, the visa should be issued. Being born in Pakistan, or the child of a person born in Pakistan, is not a crime, nor evidence of predisposition to commit terrorist acts in India."

Robert Wintemute is Professor of Human Rights Law at King's College. 171 comments and counting. No surprise there, really! Jai Hind?

The alleged sole surviving gunman from the 2008 Mumbai attacks has been convicted for murder and waging war with India. The Pakistani national is likely to be sentenced to death. Although executions are legal in India, they are rarely used. In 1983, the Supreme Court of India ruled that the death penalty should be imposed only in "the rarest of rare cases". The last execution was in 2004 when a security guard was hanged in Kolkata for the rape and murder of a schoolgirl fourteen years earlier. However, it appears the last trained hangman in India has retired, leaving the country with no executioners! And even if Mohammed Ajmal Amir Kasab is sentenced to death, it will merely result in "a lengthy series of appeals and an indeterminate wait on death row". Ninety-five countries have abolished capital punishment. But what do you think? Are there exceptional crimes that deserve punishment beyond a lifetime of incarceration? Share your thoughts!

[Poll #1559687]

It's a victory for civil liberties but it's a sad indictment of the state of affairs in this country, that but-for the intervention of the Strasbourg court, we would certainly be living in an elected dictatorship. Stop-and-search powers, enacted under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, have been abused by British police, particularly in London. This case involved two people who were detained by police outside the Defence Systems and Equipment International exhibition in London Docklands in 2003. One of the claimants was detained for about twenty minutes as he was cycling to join a protest outside the arms fair. The other claimant, a journalist from London, had come to film the protests and was detained for what she felt was about thirty minutes, though police records claimed it was just five minutes. The Strasbourg court were not impressed and said the pair's rights under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (the right to respect for a private and family's life) had been violated. This was because stop-and-search powers were "not sufficiently circumscribed" and there were not "adequate legal safeguards against abuse". It also concluded that "the risks of the discriminatory use of the powers" were "a very real consideration". The pair were awarded £30,400 ($49,400) to cover legal costs.

Naturally the British government are disappointed with the result and the Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, has said the government will appeal against the decision. The police are also disappointed and according to Chief Constable Craig Mackay of the Associaion of Chief Police Officers, officers will continue using the powers while the appeal was pending. Though perhaps most disappointingly of all is the fact, as pointed out by Policing and Security Minister David Hanson, that the government had won all previous challenges in the UK courts. This included a High Court ruling in 2003, subsequently upheld by the Court of Appeal and the House of Lords, that the powers, and any consequent violation of human rights, was proportionate under the European Convention on Human Rights and justified in the light of the threat of terrorism. For the sake of the future of civil liberties in this country and a potential ejection out of the EU* (if the Eurosceptics had their way!), let's hope this was just a minor blip on the part of our highly esteemed and liberty-friendly judiciary.

* IMPORTANT NOTE: Many Brits often complain that decisions like these illustrate the deplorable extent to which the UK has had its powers usurped by the EU. But it is worth remembering that the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in Strasbourg that decided the above case, has absolutely no connection with the European Union. It is in fact an institution belonging to the Council of Europe, of which the UK is a member along with forty-six other countries, including Russia, Armenia and Norway who are not members of the EU. The main court of the EU is the European Court of Justice (ECJ) located in Luxembourg. Its role is to decide on matters affecting EU Law, (ie: disputes between Member States or involving other legal entities only within Member States). The ECJ does not concern itself with human rights issues, which is the sole purview of the ECtHR. I wonder how many people are actually aware of this.

Since August last year I have made three trips to India (via Bahrain, Dubai and Mumbai) and two trips to Oman (via Bahrain and Doha). I started each journey from four different airports (Heathrow Terminal's 3 & 4, Gatwick, Muscat and Chennai). In all those journeys the thing that stood out the most was the sharp contrast in security checks in each airport. It stood out for three main reasons.

Firstly, London's two biggest airports had been in a heightened state of alert since 9/11, 7/7 and particularly 10/8 (The August 2006 Transatlantic Aircraft Plot). Secondly, India had been victim to several terrorist attacks in recent years and were in the midst of an intelligence crisis involving a potential conspirator in the Mumbai Attacks of November 2008, who had allegedly made several trips to India, including one to Mumbai days before the attack. And thirdly, that the so-called police-state dictatorships of the Middle East had a more than passing interest in the current climate of the global terrorist threat and significantly, its implications on their security.

You'd think that most, if not all the airports I flew through would have had a fairly standardised (ie, stringent and thorough) system of security checks. Wrong. The gulf in security particularly that for hand-luggage, between the London airports and their Middle Eastern and Indian counterparts struck me as ironic. Here was a liberal democracy inconveniencing and invading the privacy of every passenger in the name of security, while in the authoritarian East there was a comparatively negligent and indifferent attitude to security.

In London, pat downs were performed on every single passenger, regardless of whether the metal checker detected anything or not. Rarely was one allowed to walk through the detector with their shoes and belt on. All liquids/sprays had to be in 100ml (or less) containers and scanned separately by the X-ray machine. Laptops and jacket-like clothings also had to be taken off/out and scanned separately by the X-ray machine. And following the alleged incident on Christmas Day, the authorities now want to rush in the body scanners. Civil liberty campaigners have challenged the government on whether the scans will contravene our child pornography laws.

In comparison, the security in the Middle East and India was almost non-existent. Few pat downs, hardly any of them as thorough as the ones in London. If the metal detector beeped and the security area was not teeming with passengers, the security guy would perform a token check with a handheld detector, but most of the time they seemed uninterested. None of the airports necessitated liquids/sprays to be held in transparent ziploc bags and not once did I see any container above 100ml disposed of. On every transit journey via Bahrain, Doha and Dubai, I was able to keep the 500ml+ bottle of water with me that I had picked up in either Mucat, Chennai or London Duty Free. And until Heathrow nabbed my 150ml deodorant on my latest trip last month, not even London's airports detected its illegitimate passage across the world and back in twelve separate journeys between August and November.

Unfortunately, I'm still not sure how strongly I feel about airport security. On the one hand I want air travel to be safe, especially as my family, friends and I frequently use it. On the other hand, I don't feel true to my liberal ideals by accepting these erosions into our personal spaces and civil liberties for the sake of protecting air travel. I'm not even sure the security in London's airports are as effective as they are made out to be necessary, especially when one considers that the more relaxed security regime in the Middle East and India has not resulted in any incident till date. Yet I get the distinct impression that the halcyon era of stress-free air travel has disappeared forever. Each new attack will erode the few existing liberties that remain and it could have a huge impact on global travel.

Last November, 80 Stoke City football fans were rounded up by Greater Manchester Police under Section 27 of the Violent Crime Reduction Act 2006. Their crime? A belief that they may cause trouble later. The fans were on their way to watch their team play Manchester United when they stopped at the Railway Inn in Irlam. Although there was no complaint from the landlord of the pub, the officers surrounded the fans and aggressively ordered them onto police buses and drove them back to Stoke. Some fans had not even traveled from Stoke. The fans were falsely imprisoned for four hours during which they were not allowed to take lavatory breaks.

"Deprived of toilet facilities on the coach, the supporters were instructed to urinate into cups, which spilled over the floor of the bus so that they had to sit with urine sloshing around their feet for the 40-mile journey back."

They also missed their football match. One of the fans made a complaint and his case was taken up by the Football Supporters' Federation and Liberty for judicial review. The courts held the police had acted unlawfully and awarded damages of £2,750 to the claimant. About twenty further complaints are outstanding and are expected to result in similar payments. It has also emerged that a similar operation carried out by South Yorkshire Police in early December also resulted in Plymouth Argyle football fans being prevented from legitimately attending a match at Doncaster. The fans were escorted halfway across the country to Plymouth, at great expense, using police cars and helicopters from several different forces. The fans are still negotiating compensation with the police.

These incidents highlight the abuse of the new Section 27 powers which allow police to:

"Direct individuals to leave a locality. This is where an individual's presence is likely to cause or contribute to the occurrence, repetition or continuance of alcohol-related crime or disorder in a locality and it is necessary to remove the individual from the locality for the purpose of removing or reducing the likelihood of there being such crime or disorder in the locality."

However to invoke Section 27 the officers must have a good reason (ie a complaint from the landlord or evidence of drunken behaviour). Moreover there is no requirement to sign Section 27 forms which the Stoke City fans were forced to do under threat of arrest and the powers only apply to individuals, not large groups. The court's decision is a positive outcome for all football fans.