Gordon Brown does it again

Sent to the local Shields Gazette

"Immigrants should be required to do community service as a condition of becoming British citizens", Gordon Brown said yesterday

This follows his proposal that we should all display a coloured rag on the end of an idiot stick, also known as the Union Jack, on the Monarch's Birthday or some special "National" day he has hinted he would like to introduce (as long as it's not a working day -- the business interests he has catered for as Chancellor of the Exchequer wouldn't like that).

"Britishness" has become something of an obsession with him. Psychologists have suggested that it might have something to do with, being from Scotland, him being unsure of his "Britishness" and so over-compensating in the same sort of what that Hitler, an Austrian, did with "Germanness". More probably, his spin-doctors have detected that voters in England might not be too keen to vote for a party led by a dour Scotsman whose father was a Presbyterian Minister and so have told him to play up his Britishness. In other words, usual political opportunism. Or maybe he wants to steal votes as well as policies from the British National Party.

But it also serves a purpose. The capitalist class rules in the end only with the consent of the ruled class and nationalism is one of the means they use to try to con us that we have a common interest with them as against the inhabitants of other capitalist states. Brown perhaps feels that liberal and cynical attitudes have gone too far and that we need an increased dose of nationalism to keep us ideologically bound to our masters.

Whatever the reason, he has now come up with the outrageous proposal that workers who come to Britain and want to settle here should first have to undergo a spell of forced labour before being entitled to the "privileges" of being a legal subject of the British State. The Labour Party used to pose as a champion of civil liberties and the like. Not any more. They are now an openly authoritarian as well as an openly capitalist party.

Penal Profits

Since 1997, the Labour government has passed over 120,000 pages of legislation. ‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crme," has become a favourite Blairite battlecry.

The vast bulk of this legislation comes via the Home Office, which has fashioned a total of 59 bills since 1997. Not content with the fact that 10 years in office has led Labour to introduce over 3,000 new offences, The recent Queen’s speech informed us that the Home Office believes there is not enough legislation. Five more bills were announced.

Where the hell is all of this leading?

The answer comes from this morning’s Guardian. At the moment British prisons are full like never before – the highest in Europe in fact – 80,000 this week and rising! Some 8,000 new prison places are needed we are told. Will the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, cough up the requisite sum needed to incarcerate these scallywags? Not on your nelly! He obstinately refuses.

To the rescue comes the Home Office with a brilliant idea. ‘Let’s offer the public shares in prisons’, they say. ‘Get the public to invest in a company that can build jails and then rent them out!’

As the Guardian reports:

‘One incentive for small investors is that the government's punitive penal policy has seen prison numbers rise relentlessly over the past 10 years and would appear to guarantee a steady stream of rental income with no apparent shortage of prison "tenants".’Who says crime doesn’t pay?

AIRPORT PARANOIA

From what I’m reading lately I can only assume there is some covert state plot to prepare the public mind for an all out Middle East war. It’s as if people are being psyched up to be distrustful of anyone of Middle Eastern origin.

Not a day goes by when I’m not reading, in the press, stories about suspected Arab terrorists being arrested or about the growing fear of terrorists. I well remember, shortly after 7/7 last year, sitting on Platform 4 of Newcastle’s Central Station waiting for a train to London. A Moslem family walked up the platform just yards in front of me – husband and wife and two sons, and dragging those cases with the elongated handles and awkward little wheels. You could literally feel the suspicious looks they were getting - the unease on passengers’ faces was quite visible. Undoubtedly the same has happened a million times around Britain in the past year.

Yesterday, this growing anti-Arab phenomenon took a new twist. Two Arab gentlemen were kicked off a flight from Malaga to Manchester airport, quite literally because their faces did not fit. Seemingly, fellow passengers feared they were terrorists. Apparently they were heard communicating in Arabic and were observed to be repeatedly checking their watches. So cabin crew called the Spanish police and had the poor sods carted away for interrogation. Thankfully, they were later released.

The Independent reported: “Similar incidents in which people of Asian or Middle Eastern appearances have been targeted by fellow passengers have been reported on pilots' and cabin crews' websites, including one in which two British women with young children on a flight from Spain apparently complained about a bearded Muslim man - even though he was security checked twice before boarding the plane.”

The Sunday Times yesterday reported: “Elite teams of security officers are to be trained to monitor passenger behaviour at airports in a new attempt to combat terrorism. The ‘behaviour detection squads’ will patrol terminals to monitor the gestures, conversations and facial expressions of passengers. One of their aims will be to spot those who may be concealing fear or anxiety…. The Spot teams, who are in uniform and work in pairs at US airports, use a list of more than 30 unusual behaviours against which to check passengers.”

Well, that’s me fucked. My bracket attracts the attention of cops like a steaming turd attracts flies. And I’m a bastard for looking at me watch. And when I'm anxious or pissed off I go through about 187 facial expressons.

So cops will be watching for people who look anxious? In a friggin’ airport where 5000 hungry and thirsty passengers have had flights delayed for hours, holding the hands of their children who are tired and fretty and crying to go to the toilet. And many of these will have deep tans, it being holiday time and looking non-white.

Training the officers in spotting the downright guilty is Paul Ekman, Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of California.

Said The Independent: “In particular, officers are trained to recognise concealed emotion, such as fear or anxiety. These so-called ‘micro-facial expressions’ appear on a person’s face for 1/25th of a second. ‘They are so fast, that unless you’ve been trained you don’t see them,’” said Ekman.

So now they can train dip-shits in uniform to recognise 1/25th of a second of anxiety? There are more than 30 ‘unusual behaviours’ to look out for? Thirty? They want to stick one of these ‘behaviour detection squads’ outside of the House of Commons. There’s some right shifty looking bastards entering that building. Maybe even on the London Underground during the morning rush hour, when everyone looks stressed and anxious and irritable; where everyone avoids eye contact and regularly look at their watches and where many people carry bags.

Expect a wave of paranoia in the coming weeks. There’s a big war coming and the public must be psyched up for one.

Big Prezza is watching you

Most of today's papers run with the story about John Prescott, the deputy prime minister, telling tax inspectors they can use satellites to spy on householders’ attempts to improve their homes. Prescott would have tax inspectors use satellite imagery to find out who has built garages and conservatories, or extended their kitchen, in order that the mendicants can have their council tax, inheritance tax or capital gains tax increased.

Prescott’s department will supervise the creation of a database which contains details of every house in the country to help tax inspectors calculate new charges. Not only can tax inspectors enter your home to take

photographs, they can use the latest technology to bring in a stealth tax on home improvements.

That such a move is proposed by a man who has three residences smacks of utter hypocrisy. Prescott has official residences at Admiralty House and Dorneywood as well as his constituency home in Hull, yet pays council tax on his Hull home only. The corrupt bastard is thus is let off paying £3,256 a year in council tax. When he was in charge of transport and presiding over a fuel crisis, Prescott got away without paying for his petrol too.

If you want similar perks – numerous houses, several cars, free petrol – it seems the best way to go about it is to shove your tongue as far as you can up Tony Blair’s arse. Undoubtedly, hundreds of other new Labourites can testify this works wonders.

Whatever you do, though, don’t complain to Prescott about it – you might get a smack in the mouth.

David Blunkett

Britain, under Home Secretary David Blunkett, is increasingly coming to resemble something from a Kafkaesque novel, where ordinary people can be arrested in the dead of nigh and locked up without trial and without being told the charges that have led to their imprisonment. Internment – trial and imprisonment without jury is Blunkett’s latest piece of legislation and awaits any ‘foreigner’ mildly suspected of links to a terrorist organisations.

Those lucky enough to be locked up, according to Blunkett’s plans, would be permitted an appeal to a special immigration tribunal, but would be denied access to the information that allegedly lead to their arrest. Moreover, the suspected terrorist could remain in prison indefinitely, subject only to six monthly reviews.

This new chunk of legislation, based on the threat Britain supposedly faces since September 11th – is a technical twist to allow Britain to opt out of Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which presently bands detention without trial.

Internment, however, is not new. During the Gulf War, 100 Iraqis and Palestinians were detained without trial in the UK – not one being charged or deported. Amongst them was the writer Abbas Shiblak, who had been an outspoken opponent of Saddam in the days when Britain was arming Iraq to the teeth.

It was more memorably reintroduced into Northern Ireland in 1971 by a Heath Government determined to smash the IRA. By March the following year 924 were interned – 98% of them released without charge. The mass and indiscriminate arrests of Catholics (only) led to widespread rioting and protests and 23 deaths. Indeed, more people were killed in the following week than had been killed in the previous six months. On one night alone, 3000 British troops descended on Catholic areas and arrested hundreds of men. Rather than crush the IRA, the manure swelled their ranks, with many seeing the IRA as legitimate defenders of their communities..

We can only ever be wary of such legislation – not welcome it with open arms. It has little to do with terrorism and far more to do with the state placing itself in a better position from which it can place more control over our lives.