An Excuse to Photograph a Police Officer?
In response to the growing (see previous post) restrictions on photography in the UK, a petition was placed on the Number 10 website saying:
On the 16th of February, the Government passed a law (in the Counter Terrorism Act) making it illegal to take a photograph of a police office, military personnel or member of the intelligence services – or a photograph which “may be of use for terrorism”. This definition is vague at best, and open to interpretation by the police – who under Home Secretary guidelines can “restrict photography in public places”. We call for these vague restrictions to be lifted, as they can easily be mis-used by the police.
Basheera Khan from the Telegraph reports the government’s response:
Photography and Section 58A of the Terrorism Act 2000
The offence concerns information about persons who are or have been at the front line of counter-terrorism operations, namely the police, the armed forces and members of the security and intelligence agencies.
An officer making an arrest under section 58A must reasonably suspect that the information is of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism. An example might be gathering information about the person’s house, car, routes to work and other movements.
Reasonable excuse under section 58A
It is a statutory defence for a person to prove that they had a reasonable excuse for eliciting, publishing or communicating the relevant information. Legitimate journalistic activity (such as covering a demonstration for a newspaper) is likely to constitute such an excuse. Similarly, an innocent tourist or other sight-seer taking a photograph of a police officer is likely to have a reasonable excuse.
The key element of the petition for me is ‘can easily be mis-used by the police’; the key element absent in the response is any acknowledgment of that issue. Narrowly defining ‘legitimate journalism’ as the domestic activity exempt from the legislation leaves out situations like Gemma Atkinson’s attempt to hold the Metropolitan Police to account for a wrongful search on her boyfriend, and fails to address the reality that the police are frequently misusing this legislation to get away with unlawful behaviour. Why should you have to be employed as a photographer in order to be allowed to take photographs of the police? The Met’s current guidance says:
Members of the public and the media do not need a permit to film or photograph in public places and police have no power to stop them filming or photographing incidents or police personnel.
But it’s notable that they and the Home Office differ in their offical interpretation of this stupid legislation.
Illegal to Take Photos on a Beach
Impossible you say? Not in the Borough of Poole:
Steve Cook of Seeker Photography was doing a PR shoot on Sandbanks beach on Monday morning when he was approached by a beach warden. ‘He told me I wasn’t allowed to take photos on the beach,’ Cook tells BJP. ‘But I answered that I could and showed him a Bureau of Freelance Photographers’ rights card.’
The card states that ‘there is no law in the UK preventing a photographer from taking photos in a public place. Thus a photographer is perfectly free to shoot buildings, people, etc without breaking any law and with perfect freedom to do so.’
However, the Borough of Poole disagrees. ‘We ask organisations that are using the land owned by the council for commercial purposes to ask for permission,’ a press officer tells BJP. ‘We do that because we want to make sure who the people are, and to ensure the privacy of local residents. We also want to make sure that these professionals have proper public liability insurance.’
Bananas. Absolutely bananas. As the article goes on to say, there are no legal restrictions on photography in public places. From the wording it’s pretty clear it’s another case of council jobsworths, trying to save the world from paedophiles. They’ll demand ISA compliance for people going to beaches next. I’ve half a mind to go down there and get arrested for taking an entirely legal photograph, just to kick up a stink. I wonder if the I’m a Photographer, Not a Terrorist campaign has anything in mind…
Teenage Mothers To Be Put Into Care
It’s almost like John Major’s government never left. Gordon Brown, in what might be his last Labour party conference speech as Prime Minister has repackaged ‘family values’:
Teenage parents on benefits will be forced to live in “supervised homes” instead of being given council houses, Gordon Brown declared today in a bid to cut the number of pregnancies.
The Prime Minister said it was not right that a 16-year-old girl could “get pregnant, be given the keys to a council flat and be left on her own”.
Instead, he told the Labour Party’s annual conference in Brighton, groups of young mothers and fathers would be taught responsibility and how to raise their children “properly”.
“It’s time to address a problem that for too long has gone unspoken: the number of children having children,” he declared.
“For it cannot be right for a girl of 16 to get pregnant, be given the keys to a council flat and be left on her own.
“From now on all 16- and 17-year-old parents who get support from the taxpayer will be placed in a network of supervised homes.
“These shared homes will offer not just a roof over their heads, but a new start in life where they learn responsibility and how to raise their children properly.
“That’s better for them, better for their babies and better for us all in the long run.”
He told delegates: “We won’t ever shy away from taking difficult decisions on tough social questions.”
A difficult decision or a lame decision? Yes there is a problem, yes the rate of teenage pregnancies in the UK has gone up again, but to suggest it’s because girls just want a council flat isn’t just ignorant, it’s stupid; I mean anyone would think there was an election under a year away. The reasons are complicated and interconnected, from British attitudes towards sex, to mixed messages about sex education provision in schools, through to various governments’ disinterest or inability to tackle child poverty. I’m sure there are many other reasons too, not to mention answers to the problem, but a ‘network of supervised homes’ is just insane. What exactly is likely to change the mentality of teenage parents by being in care? Will boys be put into ‘supervised homes’ as well as girls, or is this a staggeringly mysoginistic policy? For that matter where will the extra money which social services will need to enforce this policy come from? I can’t be the only one thinking these very simple thoughts, surely?
The Eight Stages of Genocide
How can we predict and prevent genocides? Greg Stanton outlines his groundbreaking theory on the eight stages of genocide: classification, symbolization, dehumanization, organization, polarization, preparation, extermination and denial.
Genocide in Darfur, he argues, has proceeded through these stages before our eyes. Genocide could have been prevented by means of intervention at any one of a number of critical points in the past, but the international response has amounted to too little, too late.
This has always been the case and I don’t see this changing anytime soon, despite the best efforts of fantastic groups like Avaaz though groups like them remain our best hope, as does the work of people like Stanton who help people understand that – yes – things can be done and that genocide is not some ‘natural, unstoppable force’ like an earthquake or a tornado.
One starting point would be for those responsible for doing nothing to be seen to learn lessons and admit their errors. For ‘never again!’ to mean anything, it’s essential. This is why the campaign around Belgium, for example, to own up to its horrific history in the Congo is so important, as important as for Serbia to own up to its role in the Balkan’s genocides in the 90s.
It’s also close very close, to home. This is from a post if mine last year about Hillary Clinton’s claim that she tried to stop the Rwandan genocide.
Rewriting history over Rwanda
The Americans weren’t alone. The British, the French, the Belgians and much of the rest of Africa all either didn’t do anything or actively stopped aid. They all looked for their own interests and none had any interest in stopping genocide.
It was Britain’s ambassador to the UN, Sir David Hannay, who proposed that the UN reduce its force. A year after the slaughter, the Foreign Office sent a letter to an international inquiry saying that it still did not accept the term genocide, seeing discussion on whether the massacres constituted genocide as “sterile”. Then Ministers John Major, Douglas Hurd, Malcolm Rifkind and Lynda Chalker have never even been asked about their role.
Virtually no-one emerges heroically (Canadian peacekeeper Roméo Dallaire is one and his view on Clinton’s claims would be interesting to hear). In fact I would urge anyone to make themselves read the harrowing background as an object lesson in international power politics and its victims – a million of them in Rwanda. There’s a blog which covers the 100 days before and during the slaughter in detail. ‘A People Betrayed’ by Linda Melvern is very good.
For Hillary to now try to adopt that heroic mantle is, as commentators have noted, worse than ‘monstrous’.
Almost – almost – as monstrous as this comment from Gordon Brown:
Hat Tip: Domino
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Will the ISA Bar Sam Handley?
Newsflash: a PE teacher had a life before he was a teacher, and did some nude modelling. Now because those photos have surfaced on a porn site, he faces the sack:
A teacher at an all-boys grammar school has been suspended after naked pictures of him surfaced on a gay porn website.
Internet links to images of Sam Handley, 25, were spread around Harvey Grammar School in Folkestone, Kent.
Using the pseudonym ‘Mike’, the PE teacher posed naked in one picture sprawled on a bed with his legs apart, and in another he is captured resting against some furniture.
Does it appear he did this shoot whilst a teacher? No. In fact someone in the HateMail’s comments claims to be a former student who knows that for sure, and stands by him as a good teacher. Why was he suspended? Why is he at risk of dismissal? The same person rightly points out that they weren’t even accidentally accessed by pupils – someone had to trawl whichever porn site was hosting them at the time and then choose to circulate them. Should Handley be held responsible for that? The Sun reports:
He was hauled in by the deputy head and sent home.
Last night he was facing the sack – as pupils at prestigious Harvey Grammar School, in Folkestone, Kent, told how a gleeful classmate stumbled on the pictures.
A ‘gleeful classmate’ eh? In that case I hope that this pupil will be held entirely responsible for malicious behaviour against a man who is allowed to have a life in the internet age (and who has harmed noone), and duly be expelled. It’s absurd that Handley might lose his job, and might be barred anyway by the Independent Safeguarding Authority from working with children (because they’re allowed to make barring decisions based on material such as this) – take a look at the photos on the Sun hyperlink to see just how harmless they are. Then ask yourself what sort of people we will end up with as teachers (not to mention how few of them) if we continue down the path of expecting them to have had flawless lives before their careers started. Sam Handley’s photos may be embarrassing, but they’re not harmful, and his continued employment should only be determined by his merits as a teacher.
Independent Safeguarding Authority Head Patronises His Opponents
Sir Roger Singleton, the government-appointed head of the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA) has decided that rather than giving a reason why the ISA should exist, he’d rather just patronise the scheme’s opponents:
Sir Roger, whose agency will run the vetting scheme, said: “We need to calm down and consider carefully and rationally what this scheme is and is not about.
“It is not about interfering with the sensible arrangements which parents make with each other to take their children to schools and clubs.
“It is not about subjecting a quarter of the population to intensive scrutiny of their personal lives and it is not about creating mistrust between adults and children or discouraging volunteering.”
He added: “It is about ensuring that those people who have already been dismissed by their employers for inappropriate behaviour with children do not simply up sticks and move elsewhere in the country to continue their abuse.
“And it is about bringing an end to the need for repeated CRB checks which so many people have found irritating. ISA registration is a one-off process for a single fee.”
Except he’s wrong on all counts, and for the record Sir Roger I am calm, I have considered your scheme carefully and rationally and know exactly what it’s about. It’s about presuming that everyone in the country is a paedophile unless they can prove (at their cost) otherwise. It’s about discouraging children from risk-assessing on their own, and teaching them to believe that a giant, unmanageable bureaucracy can protect them from harm. It’s about undermining the rule of law, using heresay, supposition, guesswork and a graph matrix to quantify ‘unsuitability’ by people who are themselves unaccountable for their decisions. The ISA makes all the wrong presumptions about relationships in society, breaks down trust and quite simply isn’t necessary. Oh and it doesn’t supplant the CRB…
There are people who would have you believe that the ISA or even CRB would have prevented Ian Huntley’s Soham murders, but it’s already been determined that even the most basic (and pre-CRB) checks would have stopped him in his tracks; they were never done. As Esther Rantzen rightly said, the vast majority of abuse is committed by people whom the victim already knows – the ISA is yet another scheme aimed at giving the illusion that the government is doing something, when the people already tasked with protection aren’t (for a variety of reasons). All risk can never be eliminated and certainly won’t be by a bureaucracy.
The Independent Safeguarding Authority must be abolished (calmly and rationally).
The Independent Safeguarding Authority ‘Puts Children at Risk’
Childline founder Esther Rantzen has attacked the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA), saying it was damaging to the national psyche, which puts children at risk. This isn’t an argument from an activist, a blogger or an opposition politician – this is from a woman whose credentials in child protection are beyond reproach.
“Most abused children suffer at home, at the hands of people very close to them; the risk provided by strangers is minimal.”
And she’s right – blanketing the entire population with the suspicion that they might be paedophiles is damaging the national psyche, and is already putting children at risk. Wes Cuell, director of services for children and young people for the NSPCC, added:
“The warning signs are now out there that this scheme will stop people doing things that are perfectly safe and normal, things that they shouldn’t be prevented from doing.
“When you get this degree of public outcry there is generally a good reason for it. I think we are getting a bit too close to crossing the line about what is acceptable in the court of public opinion. We don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.”
Mr Cuell said that while it was important to strengthen rules to protect children from potential sex offenders, over zealous interpretation of such rules could threaten the civil liberties of thousands.
When leading child protection charities themselves start calling for an end to this madness of trying to use a bureaucracy to obliterate all risk for children and ‘vulnerable adults’, it suggests something really needs to be done. Interestingly Iain Dale has discovered that the likely next Home Secretary Chris Grayling is already reviewing the possibility of abolishing the ISA. How sickening a legacy it would be for Alan Johnson, Jack Straw and Gordon Brown – all progressive politicians once – to leave behind next summer. We shouldn’t have to wait for the Tories – the ISA must be abolished now – there is no time to waste.
Child Protection Minister Justifies ISA With Propaganda
Baroness Morgan, Britain’s Child Protection Minister, when interviewed on Channel 4 News, fails to put forward a single argument about why the Independent Safeguarding Authority is necessary:
When pushed by Krishnan Guru-Murthy that the ISA isn’t needed because most abuse does not happen with total strangers, she agrees with him, before returning on-Home-Office-message with the crack that ‘you need to know’ that people in positions of trust ‘have been properly vetted’. If most abuse takes place in private, invariably by people who would not be on a ‘barring’ list old or new anyway, then I fail to understand where the need for vetting comes at all. Morgan then resorts to the familiar Home Office tactic of presenting the ISA as a solution to a serious problem (even though there isn’t one), and hammers home her rationale for the ISA (even though there isn’t one), in the hope that her relentless propaganda will gain public support for it. But the rationale for this £170 million scheme simply isn’t evidence-based: she insists that it’s a step on from the simple ‘snapshot’ of a CRB check, but conveniently again fails to admit that it really does provide no additional, meaningful information. The extra intelligence the ISA uses to bar people from working with children and/or ‘vulnerable adults’ is heresay – evidence which would not be admissible in a court of law, and is used in the most meaningless and arbitrary way in order to come up with barring decisions.
With its presumption that everyone is a paedophile unless they prove otherwise (at their cost), the ISA undermines the rule of law, will have the most pernicious effects on adult and adult-child relationships and won’t provide any meaningful protection for children or ‘vulnerable adults’. Sir Michael Bichard, the man whose report into the Soham murders led to the formation of the ISA, has expressed surprise and dismay at the scale of the ISA’s remit, but essentially writes that and the rest of its collateral damage off as ‘irrelevant’ as long as children were protected; in other words the ends justify the means – that damaging the lives of adults is worth it if it succeeds in safeguarding children or ‘vulnerable adults’ (which can’t be proven). And Morgan implicitly says exactly the same thing when in response to Guru-Murthy’s statement that most abuse happens in the home she says, ‘we must take all steps that we can’ (in protecting children). In other words, even though there’s no need for it and it will have disastrous repercussions, we’re going to do it anyway. Well when the ISA fails in its remit, and ends up causing significant social damage, I hope those words come back to bite them both.
The Independent Safeguarding Authority must be abolished.
The ISA Fails Before It Starts
The Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA) was set up following the murders in 2002 of Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells. It is supposed to offer an additional level of protection for children, and work in conjunction with the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB). From October 2009 for entire swathes of work involving contact with what the legislation refers to as ‘vulnerable people’ (not just children) it will run its Vetting and Barring Scheme (VBS), which will require job applicants or existing job holders to be registered (at their own cost) with the ISA. The ISA in contrast has absolute power to force people onto its vetted and barred lists, as well as the ability to prosecute employers and employees for non-registered employment in areas the ISA considers under its remit. Terrifyingly, unlike the CRB though they’re allowed to use hearsay – they can play judge, jury and executioner towards people’s entire livelihoods on the basis of material which wouldn’t stand up in a court of law, with no meaningful comeback. Authors attending school assemblies will be presumed to be paedophiles if they refuse to register. Children’s parents will be presumed paedophiles if they refuse to register for summer exchange visits; the entire basis of the ISA is a universal presumption of paedophilia and an operating manual which subverts the rule of law.
One of the initial aims of Cosmodaddy.com is to bring about the abolition of the ISA.
This is not because any of the authors disagree with child protection – quite the opposite. We simply do not believe that the ISA by its very nature has a hope in hell of actually protecting children. Instead the bureaucracy will use an arcane ‘matrix’ to determine risk (whatever happened to assessing individual cases on their merits?), which will breach the human rights of vulnerable adults, will disincentivise social services and the police from old fashioned evidence collection and analysis, and instead make the detection of people who pose a real risk for children and other vulnerable groups that much harder. The ISA however accepts none of these points. Even when recently suffering an information security breach its response was to say:
“There has been one security incident in respect of information handling in the current year when an email containing confidential data was issued to the incorrect email address.
“A full investigation was carried out into this incident which concluded that there were no systematic failures in procedure and that the incident was due to human error. The incident did not result in any risk to safeguarding.”
A separate section on the “management and control of information risk” states: “While all staff are made continuously aware of information assurance issues, the lack of ISA policies to direct staff could have an impact on the confidentiality, integrity or availability of information. Policies are close to being finalised.”
Safeguarding is not a one-way process and in saying ‘risk to safeguarding’ it clearly doesn’t see those it considers caught in its remit (vetted or barred) as worthy of protection at all. I’m reminded of the government saying it sees the ISA as a ‘club’ to which ‘decent adults’ should want to be part of. Quite frankly considering the damage which it is already causing to the social fabric and the rule of law, should decency not really be determined by different criteria? We at Cosmodaddy.com will be campaigning in the months to come to convince ever more of you that an unaccountable bureaucracy which makes insidious presumptions, and which is guaranteed to make numerous errors (as the CRB has) is not the solution to child protection. There are existing services and procedures which are already responsible for child protection - local public services must communicate between one another as they are required to but rarely effectively do, protection agencies need better funding and managing, and there needs to be a national conversation started that running society from databases, and ignoring local communities entirely, doesn’t protect anyone. Subscribe to this site, join us and tell us your stories if you’ve already been affected by the ISA.
Reforming the Lords – Just not Right Now
Reform of Britain’s upper house might have been a priority for New Labour in 1997, but as with many other important issues, they’re only just getting around to it. Justice Secretary Jack Straw now appears to acknowledge it’s time to elect our senators-in-all-but-name, but wants it to take a generation to happen:
Straw said: “All the parties are agreed that moving to an 80% or 100% elected house will take three parliaments. By definition you need not do 100% before arriving at an 80% threshold. Therefore it follows that reformers do not need to tie themselves in knots about whether the final destination is 80% or 100%. If we get to 80% that would be a major achievement.”
Reformers, who will have a chance to question Straw at the seminar, may express disappointment that the government is not endorsing a wholly elected chamber from the outset. The government has faced criticism for the slow pace of reform after the expulsion of all but 92 hereditary peers in 1999.
The justice secretary will defend his decision to move at a measured pace for three reasons: it is right to try to build a consensus; his proposal keeps alive the prospect of a wholly elected upper house; and it will take time to introduce a complex electoral system.
Let me make this clear – I don’t believe 80% would be acceptable, and taking 15 years to do so would be beyond a joke. It sends out the message that the New Labour bigwigs who are about to lose their jobs want to feather their nests, and discredits the whole point of reform – democratising the political process. I believe the scrutinising chamber should be wholly elected by single transferable vote, but this brings up the other question – if it’s so important to reform the upper house of parliament, why is it then apparently unimportant once again to reform the House of Commons? The power of whips over the composition of select committees is still total, the executive is still using statutory instruments to get legislation passed over the heads of the legislature; there is next to no meaningful oversight over laws passed in our name. Oh and of course there’s the thorny issue of the voting system, which remains not at all representative, and forces confrontational politics to fight over a small pool of swing voters rather than actually offering the change the country needs.
Lords reform is important but nowhere near as important as reforming the voting system. Sign Vote for a Change’s referendum here if you want the chance to have your vote actually mean something.
ID Cards to Get a Job?!
The Register has noticed that the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) is looking into using biometric, ID card-based data for its disclosure process:
Proposals to use ID cards are being quietly developed alongside official “research” into how to incorporate fingerprint data into employment background checks, which was alluded to in the Criminal Records Bureau’s most recent business plan.
“This research is still in the early stages of feasibility and several options are being considered as part of this work, including options for the use of ID card data and fingerprints,” a CRB spokeswoman said.
“We really are in the very early stages of looking at the possibility of introducing biometrics into the Disclosure service. It would therefore be inappropriate to comment or speculate on any detail as yet.”
Forget for a moment the false dawn of biometrics, does anyone really think this won’t happen, considering how desperate the government is to find new, underhanded ways to compel people into having ID cards? Despite what Alan Johnson would have you believe, the government’s identity strategy is dependent on everyone having an ID card. And as the Register points out, the Independent Safeguarding Authority’s (ISA) impending Vetting and Barring Scheme (VBS) will put enormous extra pressure on the CRB, who will no doubt look for the most seductive solutions to reduce their already appalling error rate.
Don’t be lulled into a false sense of security – if you don’t want this nightmare scenario, then it’s time to join NO2ID.
Where is Twitter on the genocides happening right now in the DR of Congo? Or the slaughter of indigenous people in Peru? Where is Brown? Where is Sarah Brown!?
Here is a list of the genocides taking place now in the world.
The media doesn’t give a damn and, unfortunate but true, neither do most Twitter users.